American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  A thirty-seven-year-old worker, interviewed at home, described what real life was like “on the line.” His job was to spot-weld the front cowling onto an automobile underbody.

  “I take a jig off the bench, put it in place and weld the parts together.” The jig was all made up in advance. “Takes me one minute and fifty-two seconds for each job. I walk along the line as it moves. Then I snap the jig off, walk back down the line, throw it on the bench, grab another just in time to start on the next car.”

  He did this eight hours a day, with a breather in the morning and afternoon and a half-hour for lunch. “Sometimes the line breaks down. When it does we all yell ‘Whoopee!’ ”

  He hated his work. “I like a job where you feel like you’re accomplishing something and doing it right.” But everything was laid out for him. “The big thing is that steady push of the conveyor—a gigantic machine which I can’t control.” He had ideas for improvements but no one asked him. “You go by the bible.”

  Why not quit? “I’ll tell you honest. I’m scared to leave.” He was getting good pay, was on the pension plan, the lighting and ventilation were good, he could use the plant hospital. “Sorta trapped—you get what I mean?”

  So how did he cope? By sharing the “misery” with his partner. “We gripe about the job 90 percent of the time.” By walking out with the others when something intolerable happened—like when a guy was “bounced” because he was slow on the line. By snapping at his family when he got home, his wife added. The people who ran the plant, the worker said finally, were “pretty good guys themselves.” But “you’re just a number to them. They number the stock and they number you.” He was just so much horsepower. “You’re just a cog in the wheel.”

  His wife often wished he’d get another job. “He comes home at night, plops down in a chair and just sits.…”

  If workers were not happy with their machines, applied scientists could invent a new machine that had less need of workers. This was automation. Mushrooming during the 1950s, the automatic equipment industry reached annual sales of over $6 billion by the end of the decade. World War II needs had hastened the development of electrical servomechanisms that operated on the principle of input-output flow and feedback in a continuously self-correcting control loop. Stimulated by such advances, the industry took off after the war and was soon integrating digital computers, sophisticated programming techniques, and vast data and memory banks into elaborate remote-control systems, including the automation of whole factories. By 1951 a Ford engine plant was feeding castings, already produced in an automated foundry, into precision broachers that machined the top and bottom of a cylinder block in thirteen seconds. Exclaimed an observer, “It just goes ‘whoosh’ and it is done.”

  “Automation is a magical key of creation,” proclaimed the National Association of Manufacturers. “Guided by electronics, powered by atomic energy, geared to the smooth, effortless workings of automation, the magic carpet of our free economy heads for distant and undreamed of horizons.” Others were less euphoric but argued that automation would shrink the number of boring and degrading repetitive tasks, raise educable workers to higher levels of skill and pay, lessen worker fatigue, depression, and unrest.

  Still others were not at all enchanted by the “whoosh.” Union leaders stood en garde. The problem was not whether unions were for or against automation, said James B. Carey, president of the International Union of Electrical Workers. “The problem is whether or not the American people and our free society will be subjected to vast dislocations during the coming ten to twenty years, when the automatic operation of many industrial and clerical processes will be introduced.” Fortune had published a photograph of the “old production line”—a vast room full of workers individually tending their machines—followed by drawings of the proposed “automatic factory.” Not a worker was to be seen in the drawings—not even the ornery old “parts inspector.” A photoelectric scanning device would do his job.

  At a congressional hearing late in 1955 President Walter Reuther of the Automobile Workers roundly denounced the NAM’s portrayal of automation as part of industrialization’s “Second American Revolution.” Had the NAM forgotten the misery that accompanied the first? Reuther asked. Displaced workers would not give up family ties, local roots, and neighborhood belongingness to go off to new jobs, even if they could find them and were young enough to take them. “Will automation mean the creation of whole new communities in some areas, while others are turned into ghost towns? How can we increase the market for goods and services sufficiently, and quickly enough, to match greatly accelerated increases in productivity?” Industry replied that displaced workers could find better jobs under automation, indeed that automation would create a bigger pie and “everybody’s slice will be larger.”

  While the argument waxed, so did automation. Ford helped lead the way, with its partially automated cylinder-block line and automated production of crankshafts and small parts. As the number of workers “on the line” increased and the number doing more skilled “bench work” on parts and subassemblies dropped, auto worker militancy fell. It had been the more skilled workers, such as metal trimmers and torch welders, with their comradeship and critical production role, who had sparked the great strikes and demonstrations. “Automated” workers appeared to be psychologically atomized.

  It was this wider impact of automation and of the tendencies that accompanied it—toward bigness, bureaucratization, even bondage—that concerned a wide array of social observers. Deep concern over such tendencies was almost as old as the trends themselves. From the rampaging machine wreckers at the dawn of the industrial revolution to the latest walkout in protest against automation, human beings had feared the machine as a threat to their status, income, security, and pride. Marx had seen that productive forces rising from technological-social change both reinforced the social order and undermined it. A century before Ford’s automation William Morris fought to preserve handicrafts against the ravaging advance of the machine.

  The Englishman Samuel Butler wrote in his 1872 anti-utopian novel, Erewhon, that man is supposed to be the master and the machine the servant, but “the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master,” and now man is overly dependent on his “servant,” and his very soul is becoming a machine-made thing. Man is in bondage; he can only “hope that the machines will use us kindly.”

  By the 1950s there was less concern over the economic and industrial effects of automation and other technological developments than over the psychological and social. Sociologists feared that the obsessive focus on production, combined with the fragmentation of workers’ lives into numbing pressure on the job and emptiness outside it, in the long run would impair both efficiency and the health of the whole culture. Daniel Bell noted Freud’s observation that work was the chief means of binding an individual to reality. “What will happen, then, when not only the worker but work itself is displaced by the machine?” Many social scientists were influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford, who in Technics and Civilization and other writings had graphically pictured the machine as part of a system of power, superfluous production as “purposeless materialism,” and technology as increasingly the master of man. Two technologies existed side by side, Mumford wrote in the wake of the 1950s, “one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” It was time for human interventions in behalf of human alternatives.

  The human use of human beings—this was the particular concern of Norbert Wiener, who published a book with this title at the start of the 1950s. A professor of mathematics at MIT and author of Cybernetics, which examined the dynamic role and implications of feedback in purposeful machines and animals, Wiener shared with a wide public his fears that “thinking machines” would render the human brain obsolete, especially in an era of mammoth war technology.

  But what precisely was t
he impact of the machine, especially automation—and what could be done about it? During the 1950s the social scientists’ diagnosis was twofold: alienation and anomie. Definitions of these phenomena varied widely, and hence diagnosis and prescriptions did as well. Alienation—from work, from family and community, from self? The standard answer was: all of the above. Specialization, compartmentalization, and routine left workers with little sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, or creativity on the job, and this emptiness carried over into life outside the workplace. But was the essential problem—both on the job and off it—the kind of powerlessness that Marx had analyzed, or the kind of “meaninglessness” that Karl Mannheim had seen as robbing persons of the capacity to make decisions, or the kind of normlessness that Emile Durkheim long since had analyzed in studies of anomie, or the sense of isolation and self-estrangement that was becoming the focus of social psychologists in the 1950s? Great disputes arose about these questions, with the social analysts themselves divided by discipline, specialization, and ideology.

  The diagnosis of anomie aroused the sharpest concern, for it applied to a person’s whole life. Defined broadly as the collapse of social norms that regulate social attitudes, expectations, and behavior, a condition of anomie could have a variety of effects: a normlessness marked by the feeling that “anything goes”; a hunger for direction and authority that might lead to a turning toward autocratic leaders; a craving for reassurance from peers and superiors; a proclivity to manipulate others in a culture lacking standards of more benign human interaction; even a tendency to rely on what Robert K. Merton called mysticism—“the workings of Fortune, Chance, Luck.” But anomie remained a somewhat amorphous concept, overly extended, as Melvin Seeman complained, to a variety of social conditions and psychic states such as personal disorganization and cultural breakdown.

  Inescapably the cardinal question arose—by what standard, what principle, what central value was the impact of technology being measured? Social observers were remarkably agreed: the test was freedom in all its dimensions and in all its equivalents such as liberty, liberation, individuality. Virtually every idea and program was advanced and defended by reference to this overriding value. “In the present situation of material and intellectual culture,” wrote Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher of the émigré Frankfurt school, “the problem of values is, in the last analysis, identical with the problem of freedom.” That one idea covered all that is “good, right and admirable” in the world. “Freedom—and this is the profound result of Kant’s analysis—is the only ‘fact’ that ‘is’ only in its creation; it cannot be verified except by being exercised.”

  Marcuse had his own very definite idea, however, as to what freedom was or should be. Freedom was liberation from an increasingly impersonal, bureaucratic, oppressive technology, from the long and oppressive hours of work that drained people of their humanity, from the restrictions on human spontaneity, creativity, erotic fulfillment, and sensuous joy—restrictions of a Freudian as well as Calvinistic origin. The pursuit of happiness was the quest for freedom; indeed, freedom was happiness, in the fullest dimensions of both these noble concepts.

  But other acolytes of Freedom saw different dimensions. They were not only like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant; each was loudly touting his part of the elephant as the whole elephant. For over two centuries Americans had debated and squabbled and even warred over the definition of freedom. During the 1950s the quarrel turned into a cacophony.

  The Language of Freedom

  “We are children of freedom,” Dean Acheson had proclaimed. All agreed, though not all knew what he meant. During the 1950s American leaders proclaimed freedom throughout the world and for all the world. Conflict and confusion over the principles and practices of freedom did not deter the ideologues of freedom from prescribing it for all. Even before Pearl Harbor, Henry Luce, editor-in-chief of Time and Life and Fortune, had urged the British to follow “America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprises, America …as the Good Samaritan, really believing that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Justice and Freedom.” Though Luce had some second thoughts, at the end of the 1950s he struck the same note: “The founding purpose of the United States was to make men free, and to enable them to be free and to preach the gospel of freedom to themselves and to all men.”

  Not only pundits but philosophers sounded this theme. Sidney Hook spoke for many of his fellow intellectuals when he urged on them the duty to publicize the “elementary truth” that what divided the world was “the issue of political freedom versus despotism.” Politicians long before had climbed aboard the Freedom bandwagon with alacrity. If Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms appeared a bit tattered and weather-beaten by now, many Americans remembered that his so-called “Economic Bill of Rights” had spelled out those freedoms in a most specific way, that Truman had sought to implement them, and that even Eisenhower was paying more than lip service to them.

  To celebrate Freedom was to celebrate America, and vice versa. When Luce proclaimed in 1941 the belief—shared, he said, by “most men living”—that “the 20th Century must be to a significant degree an American Century,” he laid out the peculiarly American ideals and institutions that must be shared with others—“our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills.” The reaction was not wholly favorable. Reinhold Niebuhr found an “egotistic corruption” in the very title, a critic dubbed Luce the Cecil Rhodes of journalism, and Henry Wallace countered Luce with a proclamation of the century of the common man. Was this the new American imperialism? Luce later talked less about the American Century but still pushed the doctrine.

  Embarrassments occasionally marred this glowing portrait of Freedom versus Autocracy. Leading American intellectuals became furious over “party liners’ control” of a 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Sidney Hook himself had been denied the rostrum to offer a paper disputing the Marxist doctrine of “class truth.” In reply such European and American luminaries as André Malraux, John Dos Passos, Ignazio Silone, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Koestler, and Hook met in Berlin in June 1950 to inaugurate the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Supporting messages arrived from Eleanor Roosevelt and Niebuhr. After properly flaying totalitarian thought control, a number of participants proclaimed that the West must take its stand on communism—it was “either-or.” Condemning those who preferred “neither-nor,” the Congress set up a nucleus of internationally known writers who would have no truck with “neutrality” in the struggle for freedom. It would later develop that the activities of the Congress in the 1950s and 1960s were subsidized in part by the CIA, which disbursed funds through fake foundations.

  Still, the American intellectuals did not need Washington gold to stiffen their resolve. Their views sprang from the very core of their belief in individual liberty and human rights. And they gained immeasurably both in their self-confidence and in their influence from their conviction that while the other side was ideological, their own position was not. They contended that after the passions of the New Deal era, the struggle with Hitlerism, and the polemics of the cold war, Americans were spurning ideology as the “opium of the intellectuals,” in Raymond Aron’s words, or coming to the “end of ideology,” in Daniel Bell’s. “Looking back from the standpoint of a newly-achieved moderation,” wrote sociologist Edward Shils, “Western intellectuals view the ideological politics of Asia and Africa, and particularly nationalism and tribalism, as a sort of measles which afflicts a people in its childhood, but to which adults are practically immune.”

  Picturing ideology as a form of childhood measles was a curious indulgence on the part of intellectuals who themselves were acting as ideologists by any neutral definition of the term. If an ideology consists of a comprehensive set of goals or values, reflecting the mobilized attitudes of a large section of the p
ublic, expressed through institutions such as the press and the state, and legitimized by appropriate political, economic, and other establishments, then postwar Americans indeed possessed an ideology that was brilliantly expressed by its pundits and philosophers. It was an ideology of hazy, undefined ends and richly differentiated means—moderate and incremental policy-making machinery, a politics of bargaining and accommodation, a polity rich in voluntary associations and pluralistic groupings, all leading to a mixed economy and a stable, balanced, consensual society.

  Ultimately this kind of society reflected a political ideology of consensus and compromise. Men of ideas such as Hook, Bell, Schlesinger, and Daniel Boorstin often differed on specific issues and reforms, but they struck historian Richard Pells as tending “to elevate existing American customs and institutions to a set of normative ideals.” If they were more interested in analyzing society than in reforming it, however, their “retreat from ideology” did allow them to focus on current economic and political realities, Pells granted. “At the same time, their high regard for pragmatism and stability, together with their dread of fanaticism and upheaval, were reasonable and humane reactions to the catastrophic experiences of the twentieth century.”

  It was not that the social critics had wholly deserted their old vocation of judging their own culture. Even though their ideas had reflected the ideals of the European Enlightenment—but without passion, as Shils suggested—those ideas continued to arouse disputes within the still compelling trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Amid the relative affluence of the 1950s critics now appeared less troubled by the lack of real equality of opportunity for the less privileged, far more concerned about the meaning of freedom for the middle classes and the threat to that freedom from solidarity of a smothering suburban kind. Most of the critics deplored the vast disparities in income and welfare among Americans—who could not?—but many of them now focused on psychological and cultural trends within the middle class rather than economic and social deprivations within the working class and the poor. Even the anxiety over automation amounted to a worry over psychological deprivation rather than over bread-and-butter issues of take-home pay.