THIRTY-TWO
Up Against the Wall
In The New Industrial State, published in 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith noted “an interesting and widely remarked phenomenon of recent years,” an “ill-defined discontent, especially among students and intellectuals, with the accepted and approved modalities of social thought.” These, wrote Galbraith, “whether espoused by professed liberals or conservatives, are held to be the views of ‘The Establishment.’”
Actually, by then, blacks, radicals, feminists, and just about everybody else who felt systematically cheated by organized society had taken to calling it and all its works the “establishment.” Often the word was used so loosely as to render it meaningless—shoplifting was called a blow to the establishment; the establishment was blamed for poor television programming—but some applications of it indicated a profound instinct for the workings of the system. This was never truer than on the memorable night of Tuesday, November 9, 1965, when antiestablishmentarians felt vindicated, and others dismayed, by the extraordinary failure of one of society’s essential services: electrical power.
The sun set over the eastern United States at 4:44 P.M. that afternoon, and the demand for electricity then began building toward its daily peak. Light switches were flipped on in homes and offices. Neon signs lit up. In places of business elevators came into maximum use as workers departed. Subways put on extra trains for commuters, farmers in the country beyond the skyline hitched cows to milking machines, and lighthouses commenced to flash. Children raced in from play and turned on TV sets, while their mothers started supper. The day being autumnal and the temperature 46, thermostats triggered millions of furnaces into operation. Greenhouse heating systems became more active, and reptile houses in zoos were provided with that extra margin of heat without which their vipers and crocodiles would perish. In bars, ice machines began hatching cubes for office workers pausing for that daily drink before setting out for home. On parkways and highways electrically powered gasoline pumps filled the tanks of homeward-bound cars.
All this was a matter of routine to Edward J. Nellis, a slender, balding man of sixty-two and a forty-one year veteran employee of the Consolidated Edison Company of New York. Nellis was seated in the controller’s chair of Con Ed’s Energy Control Center at 128 West End Avenue, Manhattan, near Sixty-fifth Street. The center, the hub of the company’s electronic universe, is a high-ceilinged, antiseptic, rather Orwellian room whose dials and switches, bathed in brilliant fluorescent light, were all visible to Nellis. By vigilantly scanning them, he could be sure that Con Ed was fulfilling its role not only here in the metropolis, but also as chief member of the Ontario, New York, and New England electric power pool, an area of 80,000 square miles inhabited by 30 million people. At any rate, that was the theory. It entered the realm of intense controversy at about 5:16 P.M., when Nellis, starting from his chair, saw that the needles on all the dials had begun to oscillate wildly.
At the time neither he nor anyone else knew what was happening, though Con Ed’s senior engineers had often discussed the possibility of a massive electric failure. They predicted—correctly—what they called a “cascade effect,” in which an enormous, unexpected demand for power by one member of the pool would suck up the electricity of all the others. If that occurred, every generator in the pool, also known as the Northeast Power Grid, would automatically shut off to avoid damaging the equipment. All 80,000 square miles would be plunged into instant darkness.
The swinging needles at 128 West End Avenue were the consequence of such a cascade. The trouble lay 315 miles north of Manhattan and four miles west of Niagara Falls, in a Canadian hydrogenerating installation called the Sir Adam Beck Station No. 2. A relay—a device no larger than a breadbox—had been set for 1963 requirements and never readjusted, though power loads had been expanding steadily ever since. At 5 P.M. that afternoon electricity for Toronto was flowing north over six of the Adam Beck plant’s lines. At 5:16:11, instruments showed later, the load increased slightly—just enough to trip the incorrectly set relay. That in turn set a circuit breaker in motion, putting one of the six lines out of action. Its load was instantly picked up by the other five, but they couldn’t handle it. Overloaded, they were then cut off by their own relays. Two disasters followed almost simultaneously. About 1.6 million kilowatts of energy, destined for Toronto but unable to get through the invalided Adam Beck station, surged southward on the grid’s great electric superhighway into upper New York State and New England, knocking out generating plants as it went. That created a power vacuum. The areas stricken by it demanded current from Manhattan—more than Manhattan had. The second calamity swiftly followed. Protective devices were activated all over the Northeast Power Grid. The cascade, or “falling domino” effect as some called it, was taking areas out of the pool automatically. It was complete at 5:38 P.M., when Vermont and southern New Hampshire joined the states to the south. Except for hospitals and other institutions, with their own generators, scarcely a light shone between Niagara and the Hudson. The great blackout had begun.
New York City went out at 5:27 P.M. Nellis had just decided to push the eight buttons which would have cut the metropolis free of the grid, but he was too late. It was a forgivable error: one of the few things unchanged about the consumption of electricity since Thomas Edison invented the first practical incandescent lamp in 1879 is that it still travels at the speed of light. But the consequences were stupefying. Except for Staten Island and one small Brooklyn neighborhood, the power was gone—all of it: illumination, appliances, subways; the works. In unaffected Montclair, New Jersey, a woman looking out her picture window had been admiring the fairylike spectacle of Manhattan alight. She called her teen-age son to share it with him, and when she turned back to the window the city had disappeared. Above Kennedy International Airport, Captain Ron George of Air Canada was entering his glide pattern. He looked down at the runway, glanced at his instruments, glanced back—and saw only Stygian blackness. The airport, too, had vanished.
Reactions in those first moments of the blackout varied, and to a certain extent they reflected individual fears. “The Chinese,” thought a woman on Manhattan’s East Side. “An attack from outer space!” cried a small boy in an apartment twenty stories above the East River. Two newspaper reporters were struck by the same thought—that the antiwar movement had scored a real coup. Others were too preoccupied with unexpected crises to wonder who was responsible. In hospitals awaiting the ninety-second shift to emergency power, surgeons were continuing to operate by flashlight. The management of Schrafft’s was worrying about $200,000 worth of ice cream. (It all melted.) Governor Rockefeller was climbing fifteen stories of stairs to his apartment. Over 800,000 people were trapped underground in the subways. Sixty of them would spend a harrowing night in an Astoria line BMT train in the Sixtieth Street tunnel under the East River. Far above them, on the Williamsburg Bridge over the river, 1,700 commuters were stranded on four trains. After five hours they would be led to safety.
In department stores, floorwalkers either led their customers out by flashlight or put them to bed in the home furnishing departments. Farmers reacquired the skill of milking cows by hand. Children, deprived of television, were learning to play on their own. Zoo keepers kept mammals alive with blankets and warmed their reptile houses with portable propane gas heaters. Not much could be done for motorists in need of fuel from the electrically operated gas pumps or housewives with cold electric stoves, however. Many who were suddenly idle were calling friends or relatives. The phones were working, and there was an 800 percent increase in local calls that evening. Others were doing other things. Nine months later to the day, all hospitals reported a sharp increase in births.
Thanks to transistors, radio broadcasts were getting through, but they cannot be said to have been much help to their bewildered audience. Breathless commentators spoke of “Canada in darkness… Cause unknown… worst power failure in the history of the world… President Johnson has summoned his
emergency planning board… immediate investigation… sabotage feared.” There were hints at war and nuclear holocaust until the Strategic Air Command in Colorado Springs reported “Condition Green,” meaning normal. There were some local disturbances—looting in Springfield, Massachusetts, and a major riot at the Massachusetts state prison in Walpole—and a few tragic accidents. The body of one man was found at the bottom of a New York hotel elevator shaft, a burned-out candle in his hand.
In the early hours of that evening, virtually the only light in the grid was provided by candles, flashlights, automobile lights, and a full moon. Then the lights began returning, one area at a time. Vermont and southern New Hampshire came back after blackouts of thirty minutes to two hours. Connecticut had gone black at 5:30 and was slow to recover, but by 11:30 all but twelve of its towns were alight. Greater New York was the slowest of all. Brooklyn was back by 2 A.M. Wednesday, and thousands of sleepers there learned of it in a manner which would be repeated elsewhere; they had turned in leaving wall and lamp switches on, and were awakened when their bedrooms were suddenly flooded with light. Power returned to Queens at 4:20 A.M., to Manhattan and Westchester by 6:58 A.M., and to the Bronx at 7 A.M. Here and there stubborn pockets resisted the restoration of power. Pelham Manor in exclusive Westchester County didn’t rejoin the grid until early Thursday. One Pelham Manor woman said afterward that she “burned a lot of candles,” “kept the fireplace going,” and “kept thinking about how people must have lived in Pelham Manor in the primitive days when there was no electricity.”
The following Monday, November 15, 1965, six days after the power had failed, electrical engineers traced the blackout to the Beck plant. The Canadians were embarrassed; they had been insisting that the fault couldn’t have been on their side of the border. American utilities spokesmen felt this proved that they had been blameless. But most of the public did not discriminate. They blamed the whole lot, Canadians and Americans alike. At the same time, the tales of their adventures during the blackout were improving in the telling. Eventually many forgot their anxieties at the time and were rejoicing in memories of the freedom from routine. Said a team of New York Times reporters:
In every man there is a corner of rebellion against the machine. We were all delighted at the rediscovery of things that were not plugged into walls—things that were almost forgotten by us—most of all, the wonderful, wonderful candle. What a moment of triumph to know that the huge computers we really did not like and that we suspected really did not like us were lying massively idle and useless, but the old pencil sharpener still worked.
It was all illusion, as the Times men conceded. In the end all were “recaptured and brought back submissively to the prison farm of modern technology.” The candle and the pencil sharpener were all very well for a hiatus of a few hours, but they would not have seemed wonderful much longer. They could not have transported commuters, or warmed homes, or provided light for reading, or provided any one of the countless services and necessities for which men had come to rely upon technology. The way of life in Pelham Manor in the primitive days when there was no electricity would have come as a savage shock to them. Many would have been unable to survive it. Some thought of what the Times writers called “the plugged-in society” as a prison farm, and some had worse names for it, but not many were so vehement about the huge computers that they were prepared to scrap them. There were, however, a few.
***
Taking their name from a half-witted Leicestershire worker who had attacked a machine a generation earlier, British handcraftsmen thrown out of work by the industrial revolution declared war on shearing frames and power looms in 1811. From a mythical retreat in Sherwood Forest they issued a nonnegotiable demand:
We will never lay down Arms [till] The House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality, and repeal that to hang Frame Breakers…. We petition no more—that won’t do—fighting must.
Signed by the General of the Army of Redressers
NED LUDD Clerk
Soreheads standing in the way of laborsaving devices have been known as Luddites ever since, and critics of America’s increasingly technocratic society during the Johnson years were frequently accused of Luddism. In instances of rioting students this was sometimes justified. Professors’ notes were destroyed, equipment was damaged, and a sign plastered on one Cambridge computer accused it of drawing high wages and fringe benefits at the expense of American workmen. That was as absurd as Ned at his most futile, but the case against technocracy was not entirely preposterous. Intelligent men and women were tired of receiving punch-card mail, riding on push-button elevators, standing in check-out lines, reading about a war being judged by body counts, listening to recorded voices over telephones, and being treated during political campaigns as pollster percentages. As Nicholas von Hoffman pointed out, the demonstrating students were rebellious at being “admitted, tested, and flunked by computers.” There was something chilling about Human Inventory, Inc., the Los Angeles matchmaking service which had 6,000 clients and was headed by a former executive in an aerospace company. Everyone had his computer horror stories, and some were choice. An Albany hospital sent a woman a bill for “ritual circumcision.” And in 1966 Mayor John F. Collins of Boston was favored to win reelection until, three days before the primary, the city computer, all by itself, prepared, addressed, and mailed 30,000 delinquent sewer tax bills. The mayor was defeated.
Erich Fromm warned: “A specter is stalking in our midst…. It is a new specter: a completely mechanized society… directed by computers; and in this social process, man himself is being transformed into a part of the total machine.” Millions of Americans by the late 1960s were carrying as many as twenty multiple numbers in their wallets, some indicating their various identities, some necessary for daily business, and all tending to reduce them to random particles—zip codes, area codes, blood types, drivers’ licenses, automobile licenses, social security numbers, army serial numbers, and numbers of charge accounts, checking accounts, book club memberships, insurance policies, passports, birth and marriage certificates, mortgages, and Veterans Administration claims. The author of The Beast of Business recommended playing “computer-card roulette” by closing holes with tape, cutting new holes with a razor blade, and exposing the code number to an electromagnet. When a California janitor received a $5,000 check for two weeks’ work, everyone cheered except the aeroelasticity investigators, inertial systems engineers, superconductivity research specialists, and digital circuit design specialists—those, in short, whose great age this was.
John Mauchly, the builder of the first U.S. commercial computers, had predicted that “only four or five giant firms will be able to employ these machines usefully.” He underestimated his prodigies. There were 1,000 computers in the United States in 1955. In 1960 government engineers suggested that 15,000 might be in use within five years. The time arrived and 25,000 were in use. By 1967 there were 40,000—some 2,000 for the federal government alone.
All this was disquieting to American humanists. Liberals in politics, they had become more and more traditional in their social attitudes. In the late 1940s they had been alarmed by Nineteen Eighty-Four. During the Eisenhower years a genteel shabbiness had acquired a certain cachet among them, for they were especially disturbed by the thing-oriented culture that had ridden in on the wave of technological advances. It appeared to them that the nation was becoming enslaved by manipulators of consumer appetites. Among the figures disgorged by the pullulating computers were analyses of what manipulation of the public was doing to consumer debt. Between 1956 and 1967 it increased 133 percent, to 99.1 billion dollars. Motor car paper alone was up 117 percent, to 31.2 billion dollars. It looked as though Will Rogers had been right; the country was going to the poorhouse in an automobile.
Autos would have been bad enough—thoughtful Americans were just beginning to learn what Detroit was doing to their environment—but the dismay of intellectuals over what was coming to
be regarded as the blight of mass opulence went far beyond that. The voracity of the national vending machine seemed insatiable. Disposable personal income had almost doubled since the Eisenhower years, but the faith, so strong in the 1930s, that men would spend wisely if they just had the money, was in shreds. Then Edmund Wilson had written scornfully of “foods that do not nourish, disinfectants that do not disinfect,” of “cosmetics that poison the face, lubricants that corrode your car,” and “insecticides that kill your trees.” But it was precisely these brands which were flourishing in the booming 1960s. At least in the Depression you hadn’t been compelled to look at them in your own living room. Television commercials now spewed them forth in all their vulgarity—and in nauseous color to boot—until one wondered what the country was going to do with all the junk. An inspired Mobil commercial provided the answer during the 1969 American League baseball play-offs. With each $3 purchase it offered customers a plastic bag which would hold “22 pounds, four cubic feet” of trash. “You’ll be glad you threw it away,” said the commercial, and it was true.
Televised sport was a grievance in itself. It turned millions of men who ought to have been active outdoors—for their own health, if nothing else—into beer-drinking, flatulent spectators watching young athletes romp joyously in gilded playpens. The gaudiest pen of all was Houston’s 32-million-dollar, air-conditioned Astrodome, with its 46,000 upholstered seats, 30,000-car parking lot, and a steel dome which eliminated the need to issue rain checks. So intent were the superstadium’s designers upon making it playable in fog, rain, or darkness that they overlooked one possibility: the sun might shine. When that happened, they discovered to their horror, outfielders lost fly balls in the dazzling dome. Early games were played only on cloudy days, and even so the outfielders had to wear batting helmets. Then the skylights were painted gray—meaning that all games there would require lights, whatever the weather.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 163