Inert America: Crossroads to the Future

by Gary Griffin

  All work must contribute to this object called American society, whether it’s the work of the doctor, lawyer, teacher, truck driver, restaurant owner, or manager. Remember, power is the rate of application of energy to the accomplishment of work in a system. Right now, America is inert because the power to build and maintain the system doesn’t exist. It won’t exist until we drastically change. That change must come from the American people.

  THE CAUSE AND EFFECT OF CHANGE

  People who create new things have the power to change in that they can move from something that didn’t exist to something that now does exist. In essence, they have changed the world around them. This power to create is an absolute power given to each human being on the face of the planet. If allowed to use our power to make changes driven only by our passions and whims, this power is not channeled toward productive uses. If left unchecked, the potential to do harm is immeasurable. However, when this power is directed toward building and creating something constructive, it can have positive results and a positive influence on our society.

  Joseph Schumpeter described this process as creative destructionism.42 In his book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Dr. Schumpeter popularized this term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation. In his view of capitalism, innovation by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power. He states that “the essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process. It may seem strange that anyone can fail to see so obvious a fact which moreover was long ago emphasized by Karl Marx.”43 Capitalism as an economic system of production “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structures from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one [such as in American society]. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”44

  While the power to create would seem to be a positive desired thing, especially within a capitalistic society such as America, it is not something that everyone wants to see happen. Such structures, the economic structures for example, have millions of people with vested interests in those very same structures. As is true with all human beings, the tendency is to protect one’s own interest. Companies have the same tendency when threatened with competition. Such a threat doesn’t come from the entrepreneurial endeavor until it results in the destruction part where individual and corporate interests are threatened with their survival at issue. It is in this scenario that those in power to do so will use that same power to resist making the changes they should make. As Machiavelli observed in 1515, “there is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things, for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies.”45

  Choices as a basis of action, when these are based on false beliefs, can be disastrous. When these choices are based on knowledge, it means that it is based on truth. If a person knows something, then that knowledge must also be true. Actions based on belief, when false, can lead to dire, unintended consequences. This is the reason that the creative power of the human spirit cannot be left unchecked. This creative power is based on an idea and/or an ideal. Ideals are simply a means for organizing people to perform work toward a common goal. When such ideals are used to inform belief systems, and these ideals are based on false assumptions, the result is disastrous. In this respect, America is held captive by its set of ideals that are used as drivers for the construction and ongoing production of our society.

  Ideals are illusions. They are used as magician’s tricks to control masses of people. In the hand of leaders who abuse and misuse their position, this power is dangerous and leads us down a road toward self-destruction. So often, our leaders fail to understand the dire consequence of such misuse and abuse. Power is limited and controlled by dividing people through our social, economic, political and philosophical systems. However, the power should actually reside with each individual person; it is the people who have the power to make changes to existing structures through choices. It is not government, not religious leaders, not business leaders, or captains of industry who are forces of change.

  For America and Americans to return to prosperity, our power must be restored to its rightful owners. The human spirit has the power to create. In order for this to happen, an individual must have knowledge; that same person must have wisdom to direct the power of that knowledge; he or she must be under authority—the power to create cannot be unchecked. At the same time, no individual must be unlimited in their freedom of choice.46

  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  AMERICAN INDUSTRIALIZATION: A BRIEF HISTORY

  The process of industrialization describes the change from an agricultural society to one based on industry and a shift from home to factory production. Although no specific date can be given as to its beginnings, the industrial society started to rise sometime in the latter part of the eighteenth century in Britain. It was there that new production methods invaded several key industries, and the result was a dramatic shift in industry operations. These new methods included different machines, fresh sources of power and energy, and novel forms of organizing business and labor. For the first time technical and scientific knowledge was applied to business practices on a large scale. Humankind had begun to develop mass production. The result was an increase in material goods that could be used for consumption by the mass population.

  The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain because social, political, and legal conditions encouraged changes in several key industries. A government policy of hands off industry facilitated Britain’s industrialization in areas such as iron and steel, steam engine production, and textiles. Fresh methods and ideas created a new machine-building sector that quickly spread mechanization to throughout the economy. Skilled laborers often were replaced with new machines.

  One of the most obvious changes to people’s lives was that more people moved into the urban areas where factories were located. Migration provided a ready work force for new industries in urbanized centers. The movement into industrial cities created stresses for many people in the labor force. In the factories, long hours, harsh conditions, and often few rewards were the norm. The Industrial Revolution divided the production process into basic, individual tasks rather than a single worker doing the entire job.47 Such division of labor greatly improved productivity, but reduced factory life to repetitive, boring work. Factory work hours were long, often more than twelve hours a day, six days a week. Strict rules and close supervision by managers and overseers were common; the clock ruled a worker’s life in the industrial society.

  Although it began in Great Britain, by the nineteenth-century America was fully engaged in the industrialization process. The United States enjoyed many advantages that made it fertile ground for an Industrial Revolution. A rich, sparsely inhabited continent lay open to exploitation and development. It proved relatively easy for the United States government to buy or seize vast lands across North America from Native Americans, from European nations, and from Mexico. In addition, the American population was highly literate and most felt that economic growth was desirable. With settlement stretched across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, the United States enjoyed a huge internal market. Within its distant borders there was remarkably free movement of goods, people, capital, and ideas.

  The young nation also inherited many advantages from Great Britain. One initial American advantage was the fact that the United States shared the language and much of the culture of Great Britain, the pioneering industrial nation. This helped Americans transfer technology to the United States. As descriptions of new machines and processes appeared in print, Americans read about them eagerly and tried their own versions of the inventions sweepi
ng Britain. Machines and knowledgeable people were essential for furthering industrialization in the United States. It quickly adopted many of the technologies, forms of organization, and attitudes shaping the new industrial world, and then proceeded to generate its own advances.

  Soon the United States was pioneering its own innovations. Because local circumstances and conditions in the United States were somewhat different than those in Britain, industrialization developed somewhat differently. America had many plentiful natural resources. For example the abundance of wood led Americans to use that material much more than Europeans did. They burned wood widely as fuel and also made use of it in machinery and in construction. Taking advantage of the vast forest resources in their country, Americans built the world’s best woodworking machines.

  Industrialization brought deep and often distressing shifts to American society. The influence of rural life declined, and the relative economic importance of agriculture dwindled. Although the amount of land under cultivation and the number of people earning a living from agriculture expanded, the growth of commerce, manufacturing, and the service industries steadily eclipsed farming’s significance. The proportion of the work force dependent on agriculture shrank constantly from the time of the first federal census in 1790. From that time until the end of the nineteenth century, farm workers dropped from about 75 percent of the work force to about 40 percent.48

  New technology was introduced in agriculture. The scarcity of labor and the growth of markets for agricultural products encouraged the introduction of machinery to the farms. Machinery increased productivity so that fewer hands could produce more food per acre. New plows, seed drills, cultivators, mowers, and threshers, as well as the reaper, all appeared by 1860. After that, better harvesters and binding machines came into use, as did the harvester-threshers known as combines. Farmers also used limited steam power in the late nineteenth century, and by about 1905, they began using gasoline-powered tractors. At about the same time, Americans began to apply science systematically to agriculture, such as by using genetics as a basis for plant breeding. These techniques, plus fertilizers and pesticides, helped to increase farm productivity.

  Transportation and communication were special challenges in a nation that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. Economic growth depended on tying together the resources, markets, and people of this large area. Despite the general conviction that private enterprise was best, the government played an active role in uniting the country, particularly by building roads. From 1815 to 1860, state and local governments also provided almost three-quarters of the financing for canal construction and related improvements to waterways. By 1860 more than half the railroad tracks in the world were in the United States.

  The most critical nineteenth-century improvement in communication was the telegraph invented by Samuel Morse. The telegraph allowed messages to be sent long distances almost instantly by using a code of electronic pulses passing over a wire. The railroad and the telegraph spread across North America and helped create a national market that in turn encouraged additional improvements in transportation and communication.

  Another challenge in the United States was a relative shortage of labor. Much more than in continental Europe or in Britain, labor was in chronically short supply in the United States. This led industrialists to develop machinery to replace human labor.

  Along this line, continuous-process manufacturing was invented in America. This process involved making large quantities of the same product in a nonstop operation. In a closely related development, American manufacturers shaped a set of techniques later known as the American system of production. This system involved using special-purpose machines to produce large quantities of similar, sometimes interchangeable, parts that would then be assembled into a finished product. The American system extended the idea of division of labor from workers to specialized machines. Instead of a worker making a small part of a finished product, a machine made the part, speeding the process and allowing manufacturers to produce goods more quickly. This method also yielded goods of much more uniform quality than those made by hand labor.

  As American manufacturing technology spread to new industries, it ushered in technical and organizational advances that carried industrial society to new levels. Factories and their production output became much larger than they had been in the earlier years of the Industrial Revolution. Some industries concentrated production in fewer but bigger and more productive facilities. In addition, some industries boosted production in existing (not necessarily larger) factories. This growth was enabled by a variety of factors, including technological and scientific progress; improved management; and expanding markets due to larger populations, rising incomes, and better transportation and communications.

  American industrialist Andrew Carnegie built a giant iron and steel empire using huge new plants. John D. Rockefeller, another American industrialist, did the same in petroleum refining. Soon there were enormous advances in science-based industries—for example, chemicals, electrical power, and electrical machinery. Just as in the first revolution, these changes prompted further innovations that led to further economic growth.

  It was in the automobile industry that continuous-process methods and the American system combined to greatest effect. In 1903 American industrialist Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company. His production innovation was the moving assembly line, which brought together many mass-produced parts to create automobiles. Ford’s moving assembly line gave the world the fullest expression yet of industrialization, and his production triumphs in the second decade of the twentieth century signaled the crest of the industrial society wave.

  Just as important as advances in manufacturing technology were a wave of changes in how business was structured and work was organized. Beginning with the large railroad companies, business leaders learned how to operate and coordinate many different economic activities across broad geographic areas. During the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, many factories had grown into large organizations, but even by 1875, few firms coordinated production and marketing across many business units. Leaders such as Carnegie and Rockefeller changed this, and firms grew much larger in numerous industries, giving birth to the modern corporation.

  Within the business unit, Americans pioneered novel ways of organizing work. Engineers studied and modified production in search of the most efficient ways to lay out a factory, move materials, route jobs, and control work through precise scheduling. Industrial engineer Frederick W. Taylor and his followers sought both efficiency and contented workers. They believed that they could achieve those results through precise measurement and analysis of each aspect of a job. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientifc Management (1911) became the most influential book of the Industrial Revolution. By the early twentieth century, Ford’s mass production techniques and Taylor’s scientific management principles had come to symbolize America’s place as the leading industrial nation.

  Industrialization in the United States led to major social changes. With its negative aspects and its benefits, the Industrial Revolution has been one of the most influential movements in America. Urban population grew, rural population declined, and the nature of labor changed dramatically. The nature of work became worse for some people, as industrialization placed great pressures on traditional family structures with work outside the home. But industrialization also brought economic improvement for many Americans in terms of increased material well-being. The industrial way of life provided a constant flow of new goods and services that gave consumers more choices. A rising middle class, increased prosperity, improved health, better education, and a general better standard of living of all are just a few of the many significant social changes of the industrial society.

  POSTINDUSTRIALISM: A TIME OF CHANGE

  As is true of previous epochs of human history, it’s impossible to assign a specific date to mark when different phases of a society begin and end. For example, when did A
merica move from an agricultural society to an industrial society? No specific dates can be given, but major components of industrialization began in the early to middle nineteen hundreds. This is true also with the transition to the postindustrial society. At best, we can only surmise that the beginning of the postindustrial society was sometime shortly after World War II, and it continues to some degree even today, in the early part of the twenty-first century.

  When things start to change around us, we, as human beings, begin to take notice. Eager for some explanation of those changes, it’s common to see commentators express interest and begin to pontificate an explanation of those changes. Where did these changes come from and what do they mean? The last fifty years of the twentieth century were no different. As new social changes emerged such as those experienced in the latter part of the twentieth century, Daniel Bell’s Post-Industrial Society in 1973 was the first to identify the postindus-trial society.

  Although Daniel Bell coined the term postindustrialism in the late 1950s,49 he himself began substituting information and knowledge for the prefix postindus-trial around 1980, when a tidal wave of enthusiasm for futurology was swelled by interest in developments in computer and communication technologies. The term information society became the frequent language of postindustrial society writers. At first, the differentiator between the postindustrial and information society seems to be the fact that postindustrial society is traditionally a sociological term and information society is a lay term used by writers and futurists. However, these lines of distinction began to blur over the course of time, as the two terms began to be used interchangeably throughout the literature. Although considerable overlap, the postindustrial society and the information society are two different phases of societal development within the United States of America.