Millard, Andre. America on Record:  A History of Recorded Sound. 2 ed. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Andre Millard has three goals in this book:  To give a history of the technology of recorded sound, to discuss the social impact of recorded sound, and to discuss the economic impact and development of the business of recorded sound in terms of the history of American Business.

This book resonates with the ideas of Thomas F. Hughes, in American Genesis that the history of America is not a history of business, but a history of invention.  Millard wants to show that recorded sound is an American invention.  He says that, “[although] Europe provided much of the music, America provided the machines,” that kept that music as a cultural and historical resource.  The invention and innovation in recorded sound technology before and after WWII happened primarily in the United States.  After WWII, Millard says, much of the musical innovation also came from the United States, and the combination of content and machinery went far in disseminating American language, culture, and ideas.  So he says, the history of recorded sound is also a kind of globalized history of America – “America on Record.”  This is one source, then, of both the cultural imperialism and global outlook of the United States.

But, the importance of the United States in the history of recorded sound aside, what importance does recorded sound have in history?  Millard notes that the inventors of recorded sound, including Edison, had grand visions that included the possibility of recording important politicians, literary figures, and historical decision-making.  The technology has been used for those purposes, and sound recording can be more immediate in terms of recalling to us the past than written documents or even images can be, because voices can convey emotions, and background sounds give a context for events, etc.  Millard brings up recordings of the explosion of the Hindenburg for example.  But the problem here is that there is no continuous, and few unedited, recordings of this type exist.  Certainly not enough to provide a continuous historical record.  Music, however, because of its market appeal, cultural immediacy, and sentimental effects, does exist and can be used as historical references.

Millard then begins the history of recorded sound with the invention of the phonograph by Edison – the invention, he says, that provided Edison with his famous nickname The Wizard of Menlo Park.  Millard organizes America on Record beginning here and based on the eras of technological development he has identified.  The stages he gives start with the “acoustic era”,–defined by sound recording done without the assistance of electricity on mechanical phongraphs, the apex of which was the 78 RPM shellac disc, between 1877 and the 1920’s.  The acoustic era gave way in the 1920’s to the “electrical era” which hit its high point with the record player and transistor technology, and microgroove vinyl discs in the 1960’s.  The 1970’s saw the era of magnetic tape, which overtook records in sales in 1977, but was mostly replaced by digital technology as represented by the Compact Disc beginning in 1982.   Finally, Millard deals with the apex of digital technology as represented by MP3 players and advanced recording technology that became available in the Twenty-first Century.  In all, Millard wants to demonstrate that the short history of sound recording technology – a little over a century – has seen a great number of changes as, he says, technological improvements have overtaken each other in a stunning series of success-failure waves.

Edison’s invention of sound recording technology, Millard says, did not happen in a vacuum, but can be contextualized with other inventions of the Nineteenth Century that were a part of a communications revolution.  By the time Edison had invented the acoustic phonograph, all the recording technologies of the twentieth century had already gotten their starts – the telephone and the vacuum-sealed electric light provided the basis for electronic recording, and recording wire was already the foundation of taperecording technology.  The simplicity and efficiency of the phonograph was simply the most accessible and complete of the three technologies in the late nineteenth century.   All three would continue development throughout the next hundred years.

In America on Record, though, Millard is also interested in the way in which this recording technology, which he says Edison invented for what he calls “democratic purposes” – to bring music that in 1876 could only be heard in live performances that could only regularly be attended by the wealthy – into the homes and lives of common people.  Edison, he says, wanted to democratize music and sound – to bring sound to silent spaces in our world.  The degree of “democratization” was impossible to predict, however.  Discussing World War I, Millard shows the discovery that music made soldiers more effective by boosting their morale, then explains how workers in factories and offices were able to boost their productivity as well with the simple addition of music.  This added recorded sound to nearly every public and private space in the United States.  The subsequent narrowing of musical choice – corporations and factories chose music that had specific qualities that prevented melancholy but did not promote misbehavior, for example, also narrowed the range of music and the quality of music that people were exposed to in such places.  Recording and marketing of music also enforced a categorization system on music, setting musical genres within prescribed limits that were more useful for marketing than for producing and consuming art.  The effect of this technology, and of the dizzying speed with which it has changed, however, is the creation of what can only be described as a cacaphony in which there is much to be found that is good, but much that is little more than noise.  Recorded telephone messages, advertisements, white noise, and so-called “elevator music” described above meet us at every stage of the day and night.  We are inundated with sound.  Even Edison, Millard claims, might have been disappointed with the way sound recording technology has made our world a noisy, restless place.

Finally, Millard wants to show that the development of sound recording technology has followed a familiar American business pattern.  He shows that it has moved from small shops and low tech, from a wide base of small producers – an open market in which new participants can, relatively easily and cheaply, enter and succeed, to a closed market business oligopoly controlled by only a few very large firms with multidivisional structures organized as global conglomerates, whose business power gives them the ability to shape and direct what sounds are available for listening, and in many ways to control the market.  Millard argues that this change in the record industry is to a great extent a result of business and economic realities that faced all American businesses in the twentieth century.  Edison’s invention and manufacture of the phonograph, for example, was the opening round in an early Twentieth Century race to take advantage of the new invention, and entrepreneurs tried it in nearly any way it might conceivably be useful – as a dictation machine, a system for communicating messages, a telephone answering machine, and many more.  Most of these firms failed, but the application of recording technology to music seems to have been the biggest success, and phonographs, then record players, became primarily consumer goods.  Their newness meant that sales grew rapidly before WWI, and during the war, sales skyrocketed as uses for them in improving the morale of soldiers and the productivity of workers added to the market for the machines and the music.  The Great Depression, though, according to Millard, caused massive business failures in the music industry, leaving only a few giants standing, ready for the advent of new electronic technologies, including the jukebox, and a new marketing model in which prerecorded discs were used to provide programming content for the faster growing radio market.  The use of prerecorded discs reduced production costs, and made possible the founding of increasing numbers of radio stations, which no longer had to rely on house orchestras and live productions, and could also provide nation-wide advertising produced cheaply in a central location.  This kind of centralized distribution network, made production of recorded music less expensive, and increased the market both for the technology and the content, leading to a solid business model for the firms still standing after the Great Depression.  The change to large, multi-divisional corporate structures, though, combined with concerns after WWII that record sales might again lag led to conservative business practices and little innovation, until the need to continue to expand the market and technical innovations such as the use of vinyl resins to make better quality discs which could record more music. – in other words, a more productive process of manufacture and distribution, this time because of more efficient packaging of content.

Millard goes on to describe the power of movies and television to promote music, and the “Rock and Roll Revolution” which increased markets even while it leveled the economic and particularly the racial playing field for consumers of recorded sound products.  The key shift in the last half of the book that Millard wants to demonstrate, though, is the shift, noted above, from multiple and varied producers and products to centralized production and corporate dominance, but then back again, in the digital era, particularly with MP3 and computer music systems, to personal/private production and distribution of music and recorded products in a way that is less expensive and more effective than the centralized corporations.  This new ability to compete in virtual reality with corporate dominance will transform music and distribution again in the future.

Joseph A. Schumpeter begins his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy with a hard look at the work of Marx.  His analysis is sharp, and while he gives Marx credit both for the power of his overall theory and for his insight in describing the industrial system and the market relations of labor and capital, Schumpeter’s main point is that despite his brilliance, unmatched in his time, there are some serious flaws with Marx’s analysis of capitalism that deserve a closer look.  Schumpter, in a very dense analysis of his own, goes through some of these over the first four chapters.  He takes issue with Marxists who follow Marx as a prophet, refusing to accept any criticism as legitimate, and yet gives Marx his due as an intellectual whose theoretical system was so successfully all-encompassing as to make him seem a prophet.  He looks at Marx as a scientist, and while pointing out some basic problems – namely that Marx’s review of the actual conditions of labor in factories is papered over with sweeping statements of emotional power and beauty, recognizes that more than most in his time, Marx was a tremendous researcher who tried hard, and often successfully, to base his ideas in real observation, and to follow a careful investigative method.  When Schumpeter the economist looks at Marx the economist we get the most in-depth and sharp criticism.  As an economist himself, Shumpeter seems most interested in understanding Marx from the standpoint of economic theory.  Here, too, he give Marx points for his ground-breaking and high-quality work.  But here he also begins to tear down Marx, pointing out specific problems with the labor theory of value ( a critique I had not heard and was interested to read), which Schumpeter claims would lead to higher, rather than lower, wages.  He also critiques Marx for over-dependence on some of the work of David Ricardo, and for oversimplification of complex problems, such as Marx’s claim that the cycles of economic boom and bust, and the trend toward labor dissatisfaction, which Shumpeter sees as incomplete analyses with flawed conclusions.  Overall, this was an incisive critique of Marxist theory.

In Part II of the book, though, despite his criticisms of Marx’s theories, and his clear dismissal of the predictions for the fall of capitalism that Marx gives, Schumpeter himself predicts (provisionally) the failure of the capitalist system and its evolution into socialism (here I noticed unexpected echoes of the novel Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy).  Never the less, Schumpeter does this very specifically not because of the inherent inequality or weight of capitalism itself, but because of the very success of the capitalist system.  In his discussion of “The Rate of Increase of Total Output,” Schumpeter argues with both mathematical analysis, and through the analysis of social and industrial trends that capitalism works in long (30-50 years) waves of progress followed by recession, on the heels of which is once again growth.  In these long waves, the material wealth of humankind is deepened and widened, and the chief beneficiaries are common people, whose ever-increasing access to less expensive and better quality goods increases their prosperity in real terms relative to a wealthy upper class whose consumptive choices, ever-broad, can not easily be expanded.  His argument is that though new JP Morgans may always be around, the workers and administrators who live in the same society come ever closer to the ability to consume the same goods and services, and his ability to consume new or better goods and services rarely if ever broadens.

This success of capitalism is the result, according to Schumpeter, not of some static system of a capitalism that exists as a theoretical system, enclosed and encompassed by a set of ideas.  Instead, Schumpeter stresses his theory of Creative Destruction – the idea that capitalism is successful because it constantly remakes itself.  It is, he says, an organic process, and evolves, in his metaphor, like a living thing.  When capitalism confronts problems, or even potential problems, it is already in the process of change, and each change is a part of an overall change.  For this reason, Schumpeter says, we need to look at capitalism as a whole, and over time, with specific time references, rather than as a set of systems, models, or rules, because those synchronic views are never true.  It is impossible to take a “snapshot” of capitalism at any one moment, and the only reason to try is in order to date that moment and place it in a data set with other moments in order to identify patterns of change and development.  This idea is posited in what appears to be direct opposition to the synchronic, timeless view of Veblen, and Schumpeter even mentions the fact that the identification of the primary strategy of capitalism as the restriction of production is such a broad generalization that it cannot possibly be true of all periods, and so cannot be true of any single period.  In an odd way, this theory also reminds me of the work of Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, who looked at his cultural subjects as organisms subject primarily to change over time.  I would be interested to see if there were any connection between the two, as they were almost contemporaries.

In making this argument of Creative Destruction – i.e. the ever-changing nature of capitalism, Schumpeter goes even further, noting that while economists like Veblen who see the restriction of production, for example, as a practice that is anti-competitive and socially irresponsible miss the point.  Because the system is not in existence as-is forever, Schumpeter argues that rather than being fully productive at all points in time, capitalism provides for maximum profit and production – motivation and supply of the necessary goods to society – over the long run of time.  His argument is that while it may not be possible to sustain a maximally productive system over long periods, it is possible to maximize limited production so as to meet the majority of needs by adjustment to changing needs over the long term.  Since society is a long term, and ever-evolving entity, so must its productive mechanism be.  Capitalism is successful, Schumpeter wants to say, because of its ability to reform itself from within, and in response to evolution of social needs from without.  Thus the restriction of capital, and other monopolistic practices, far from being socially irresponsible, are part of the process of creative destruction.  When capitalism seems to be unable to move forward further, it reinvents itself.  This is often accompanied by the downward portion of the long-wave economic pattern that Schumpeter identified in the first chapter of section two.

Ultimately, Schumpeter’s argument is that capitalism is so successful, provides for the needs of society so well, that it will ultimately eliminate poverty and need from human society.  When that is accomplished, the need for entrepreneurs, owners and producers who are the creative part of capitalism will also vanish, as will the material inequality between classes.  This will entail the arrival, rather than the revolutionary imposition, of a socialist society, and a democracy in which equality is posited not on equality of opportunity, but on economic and social equality brought by the financial success of the capitalist system.  Capitalism’s end result, then, is socialism.

While I was unable to finish the entire book, I found it interesting in a number of ways.  Schumpeter’s critique of Marx was the most incisive, and deep-delving that I have read.  His position that the end of capitalism will come because of its success rather than failure I found at once hard to swallow, and intellectually very attractive.  The book turns conventional wisdom – that communism exists in opposition to capitalism – on its head, and I enjoyed the mental acrobatics necessary to get beyond my preconceptions.  There are a number of critiques that I would level at Schumpeter.  First, his critique of Marx takes on the idea of looking at Marx’s work as a whole, and instead emphasizes an analysis of its parts as the best way to understand its theoretical underpinnings, yet Schumpeter looks at Capitalism as a whole, rather than breaking it into parts.  His view of capitalism, socialism, and especially democracy are very narrowly economic, and take into account few of the other reasons for the existence of these ideas, or the societies that espouse them.  Still, the book is dense, and difficult.  It will continue to provide reading, and meaning, for a long time to come.

There is a line in Bob Dylan’s song “All Along the Watchtower” that goes, “Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,/None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”  Thorstein Veblen, in what amounts to a manifesto, The Engineers and the Price System is the first intellectual I have read whose ideas come close to approximating the sentiments demonstrated by Dylan in his song.

Veblen, an early Twentieth Century economist and creator of the thought stream known as Evolutionary Economics, makes a series of audacious claims in this book that are echoes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto.  Veblen starts out with a discussion of what he calls “Sabotage” – which he considers to be any systematic interruption, not necessarily violence, in the process of production.  Veblen says that such “restriction of production” is a common part of modern industrial life – in fact, it is the primary means by which corporations maintain profitable price levels.  Restriction of production to below market need tends to keep prices high, because it is a negative system of managing supply and demand. “Since prices have to meet the company’s obligations,” he says, “the company cannot reduce prices arbitrarily.  The only thing to do to maintain prices is to reduce production – to “withdraw efficiency”.”[1]

The problem with this strategy, or perhaps in Veblen’s mind the simple objective reality of it, is that it means that production is not meant to meet the needs of society.  Instead, business decisions are made with regard to the largest obtainable profit.[2]

In his second chapter, Veblen builds on this first idea, that prices are maintained by corporations restricting production, by discussing the evolution of business management.  The chapter, titled “Captains of Industry,” makes the argument that in preindustrial and early industrial economies, the standardization of products has not reached the point where industry is able to manufacture goods in the amounts necessary to come close to the demands of the market.  This means that there is room for other manufacturers, and competition is the normal state of the market.  As the process of production became standardized, and mechanized, however, the capacity of manufacturers to produce goods rose to the point where far more could be produced than could be absorbed by the market.  At this point, competition became pointless, from a business sense.  Here is where Veblen introduces the main character of the chapter – captains of industry, he says, started in the smaller competition-oriented firms as jacks-of-all-trades, responsible for the manufacturing and the financial sides of the company.  However, as the firms became larger, the financial wherewithal to compete, and the alliance with other firms to limit competition meant that those captains of industry became more and more involved in financial activities, and less involved in the productive side of the business.  Veblen gives the example of a coalition of steel firms, and a figure that is unnamed but whose activities read very much along the lines of Andrew Carnegie, and the dates he gives – the 1890’s – seem to match up with this character.

In any case, according to Veblen, what happened in all industry, with the steel industry as an example, is that people like Andrew Carnegie eventually became so involved in finance – in the cobbling together of massive companies with huge financial resources and control in market share – that they lost touch with the manufacturing side of the business – the “Industrial Arts” as Veblen calls them.[3] With little understanding of the newest technology, and little understanding of what was now going on in their shop floors, these factory owners had to rely for productive decisions on a class of specialists whom Veblen calls “production engineers”.  These production engineers, increasingly separate and distant from the owner managers of industry, were responsible for the process of manufacturing.  The low level of understanding among the Captains of Industry of the production process then combined with increasing responsibility to maintain a price structure that guaranteed profits.  Veblen says these managers found it intellectually and organizationally far easier to restrict production in response to financial downturns, rather than improve manufacturing systems and technology in order to reduce costs in order to keep profit high.

The so-called Captains of Industry eventually failed, by refusing to update manufacturing processes, and focusing only on the financial end of the business, their failure to reduce costs and increase efficiency led to waste of material resources and ever-increasing costs.  This failure opened the door for investment bankers, and, concentrating once again on the steel industry, and once again in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Veblen identifies without naming him the great JP Morgan.  The key point here is that investment bankers like Morgan had the resources to buy and pool these companies, and they employed another group of specialists, whom Veblen calls “Consulting Engineers” to help them evaluate both the physical technology and the financial realities of the companies they were investing in.

Ultimately, Veblen makes the point in his third chapter, “The Captains of Finance and the Engineers,” that the owners of the factories were becoming more and more absent from the scene and act of production.  A specialized class of engineers, far more knowledgeable about the production process than anyone else, became managers separate from the owners of the machines.  The financial side of large businesses came to be controlled by bureaucrats – clerical staffers working for the investment bankers who operated according to formulae and standard channels of activity (replacing the former Captains of Industry).  The concentration of capital in the hands of a few investment banks also meant that industry was by and large a single monolithic unit sharing money through an artificial system called credit, and that the manufacturing processes and financial processes of industry were an interlocking system, all one, though each was working for itself.

Then Veblen returns to his original point – that the capitalist system in the age of mechanized big business works not by producing what society needs, but by restricting production so that society is in a state of constant want.  Industry and business do not work for society, but for profit.  The ever-widening gap between those who know manufacturing and could solve the problems of supplying the material needs of society are restricted by the financiers, for whom restricting production is the easiest and most understandable method to maintain profitable prices.  Manufacturing and Finance, though dependent upon one another, are also at odds with each other.[4]

Going back to the system of interlocking industrial concerns – the global reality that every business depends on every other business to survive.  What Veblen appears to see here is the beginnings of a global economy.  He also sees clearly that this global economy works on regular acts of sabotage.  Firms consciously limit their own production to maintain price levels.  Government limits production through policy, taxation and other means.  Veblen contends that it is these times, when they work at cross purposes, or directly in detriment to each other, that you have a dislocation – an economic downturn.  He all but predicts the Great Depression (Veblen wrote The Engineers and the Price System in the spring of 1929, and he died only a few months before the Black Thursday stock market crash of October, 1929) and blames “businesslike sabotage” for it.

At the end of the third chapter, and in the fourth, “On The Danger of a Revolutionary Overturn,” Veblen makes what I thought was his most shocking point.  He claims that the Wealthy class, what Marx would have called the Bourgeoisie, and the laboring class have always been at odds, and are forever negotiating with each other, but that they have missed the emergence of a new class – the engineers.  Veblen claims that the engineers, though small in numbers, are critical.  They are a kind of neo-craftsman, aware of the devil’s bargain of labor and industry, but educated, technologically capable, and necessary to industry.  These neo-craftsmen know the value of the productive process and of management and labor, but, he says, they will become aware that they hold the means to solve the material problems of society, and may hold a revolution.  Their necessity to factory owners will mean that they are successful in getting rid of the system of what Veblen comes to call, at this stage, “absentee ownership” and capitalism in general.

In his fifth chapter, “On The Circumstances Which Make for a Change,” Veblen prescribes a way to prevent this revolution of engineers, and to preserve capitalism.  His prescription really has two pieces – he advises the so-called “Vested Interests” – the Captains of Industry and the Financiers, to sit tight, avoid the use of violence, and provide the engineers some sense of importance in the system (this seemed to me a bit of a weak prescription for what Veblen has made out to be such a serious potential problem).  The other prescription is the elimination of wasteful practices through which unintentional restriction of production occurs, and obstructs the needs of society.[5]

Finally, Veblen says that while the only group both discontented enough, and organized in the right way to conduct a revolution is the technicians of the United States, they do not appear to be in any way preparing for such a move.  However, to correct the problems that may lead to any potential move toward rebellion, Veblen prescribes centralized coordination of production, removing the so-called Vested Interests from the equation by creating a production directorate, and putting productive control in the hands of the technicians and engineers.  Ultimately, it seems Veblen is espousing what amounts to a revolution, but a bloodless one, done by design – an idea almost poetic in the way it reflects the theory and development he presents in the book.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Engineers and the Price System. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Reprint, 1948.

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[1] Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963; reprint, 1948), 12.

[2] Ibid., 11.

[3] Ibid., 67-69.

[4] Ibid., 72.

[5] Ibid., 127.

Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt’s Little Labels, Big Sound: Small Record Labels and the Rise of American Music is a beguiling book whose almost fan-like approach to the history of independent music labels veils an important set of academically useful studies in the history of American business.  Kennedy and McNutt, acknowledging that they could not possibly cover all record labels, or even all independent labels in a single volume have opted to consider ten of the most critical in the development of American music – rhythm and blues, hillbilly/country, jazz, rockabilly, and rock-n-roll.  These crucial companies include the Gennett, Paramount, Dial, King, Duke-Peacock, Sun, Riverside, Ace, Monument, and Delmark labels.

At its core, this book is about entrepreneurs in the Schumpeterian sense of an innovator who brings new ideas to an industry that shake up strategy, marketing, and business practices and products.  The entrepreneurs in this set of ten stories about early independent record labels include  Fred Gennett of Gennett Records; J. Mayo Williams of Paramount; Ross Russell of Dial; Syd Nathan of King Records; Don Robey, founder of the Duke-Peacock label; the legendary Sam Phillips, creator of Sun Records; Orrin Keepnews of the Riverside label; John Vincent, founder of Ace; Fred Foster of Monument Records, and Bob Koester of the Delmark label.  These are unknown names outside of collectors’ circles today, but their vision, ability to operate studios on a shoestring budget, skills at finding niche markets, and at recruiting and selling artists from those markets back to the people from whence they came, along with their ability to develop ties with distributors and retailers that provided them with accurate information on the next big thing made them able to beat the big labels in the record game, and ultimately led to the creation of American music as the amalgam of local and cultural styles from across the nation that it is.

Business strategy has always been important in the record industry.  Before 1914, the technology of recording was dominated by three major American record companies:  Columbia, Victor Talking Machine Co., and Edison, the three of which also controlled the top artists in the American music scene.  The dominance of the “big three” in the mainstream record markets forced the independent label entrepreneurs (by 1920 there were more than 150 new independent labels) to search out niche markets in which they could sell their records.  Successful labels like Gennett and Paramount, and most of the other labels discussed in the book searched out artists from underserved communities who could record music that would be purchased by others from the same communities.  This led to the creation of ‘race records’ – recordings by black Americans for black Americans – and of ‘hilbilly’ music – recordings of songs from Appalachia to be sold to people in, and from, Appalachia, as well as, eventually, rhythm and blues/Delta blues, and rockabilly.  The entrepreneurial spirit was found in the makeshift nature of the labels themselves.  Gennett was created by a furniture factory owner who could appreciate the existence of record markets, even if he could not appreciate the ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ music that sold in them.  Paramount used its distributors as talent scouts.  Dial’s founder Russell created the label to satisfy the hunger of his Los Angeles area record store customers for the new bebop jazz style invented by Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker.  King Records found, and gave artistic license to artists such as James Brown.  Same Phillips at Sun spent time, money, and talent to develop stars like Elvis Presley from the rough into regional sensations whose creativity was clear for the world to see.

The ability of entrepreneurs to enter any market depends upon the power of those firms already in that market to control it.  The market status of the record industry in the United States has been cyclical since the invention of the phonograph by Edison in 1877.The market for records was closed.  Between 1914 and 1917, the patents on much recording technology expired, and the way was open for entrepreneurs to get into the record game at relatively low prices. In 1929, the great depression, and the 1920’s advent of radio as a cheap alternative to the phonograph ended the first cycle of easy market entry for independent record labels.  As sales of records dropped by half after 1930, even the well-established independents like Gennett and Paramount, which had large catalogs of famous artists to draw on, found it hard to survive the drying up of purchasing power in their economically borderline niche market communities.

The next open market phase began to arrive during the period of the Second World War, but really took off after the war ended, and materials, money, and artists flowed more freely in the United States.  Music collectors became entrepreneurs, as in the case of Ross Russel of Dial Records, and entrepreneurs became collectors, as did Sydney Nathan, founder of King Records.  In this period, electronic recording and playback technology made studios somewhat more expensive, and less makeshift, than they had been during the 1920’s, but the entry fee was still low.  Russell started Dial with only sixteen hundred dollars – admittedly quite a price for the time, but still within the reach of middle class investors.  Nathan began King Records, according to his own story, with eighteen dollars he made selling records he’d purchased at a discount from his friends.  Following the end of the King and Dial labels in the mid 1950’s, another extraordinarily open period in the record market began with the 1956 opening of Sun Records, and the combining there of white hillbilly (by now ‘country’) music with the popular rhythm and blues of the black community in Memphis, Tennessee.  This new rockabilly sound, a direct precursor to rock-n-roll, came from artists on Sun such as Jerry Lee Lewis, and the ever popular Elvis Presley.  The frequent changes in recording technology, and the variety of music available in America provided niche market after niche market – ways to keep the market open by going under the radar of the dominant companies in the business.

These three factors – that independent labels have been the creatures of extraordinary, and not always successful, entrepreneurs; that those entrepreneurs used a business strategy of direct connection with retail outlets to gain information that kept them ahead of the game and allowed them to sign artists that were not yet famous, but were likely to become stars, and that the owners of these labels were not afraid to sign over artistic control to the artists themselves, give huge amounts of studio time, and provide means of talent development – meant that independent labels not only found ways to stay in the game, but that they found the music that consumers wanted to hear, and played it back for them.

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Tedlow, Richard S. New and Improved : The Story of Mass Marketing in America. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

If the business of America is business, Richard S. Tedlow would add that it is mass production, the pursuit of profit through volume, that defines American business. Tedlow organizes the book around six propositions, and proposes that American manufacturing developed this unique approach to profit over the course of three phases of business strategy development.

The six propositions include the first, above, that the unique contribution to business made by American manufacturers was the pursuit of profit through volume. Second, that successful mass marketing was always possible only through the guiding vision of an entrepreneur who could bend the firm to his vision. Third, that implementing a strategy of mass marketing required a company to achieve complete vertical integration, from control of basic raw materials through manufacturing, to marketing and distribution, and retail sales to the consumer. Fourth, that the ‘first mover,” the first company in an industry to achieve mass marketing success, was able to gain high profits, and while those high profits encouraged new entrants to the business, they also provided the first mover with the ability to block competitors’ access to the business. Fifth, that competitors’ key strategic choice was then how to attack those barriers to entrance, thus encouraging competitors to change the rules of the game. Sixth, and last, that sustained success or failure in a market was most dependent upon how a firm managed change over the course of the three phases of business development that Tedlow uses to organize the book.

The first phase was a kind of economic “state of nature” which was characterized by what Tedlow calls a multi-local, fragmented market, made so by the absence of trans-continental transportation and communication. This phase was characterized by the existence of few nationally recognized or distributed brands, and lack of vertical or horizontal integration of manufacturing concerns. During this phase, barriers to entry by firms were low. The second phase was what Tedlow calls the unification phase. As railroads and telegraph lines crossed the nation, national distribution and marketing became possible. This phase was characterized by mass production, and sales appeals based on price. The key drive of American companies such as Ford and Coca-cola, was to minimize the cost of production, and maximize product output so as to drive the price of the product as low as possible, and to use price to sell as much as possible of it, making profit on the volume. This phase included a kind of mass-produced sameness in product lines most closely associated with the Ford automobile. During this phase, Tedlow’s second through fifth propositions came into play, as entrepreneurs directed their “first mover” firms toward massive profits and control of their respective markets, and built integrated vertical structures to make and distribute their products. Smaller, less vertically integrated competitors attempting to gain access to these markets then had to find strategies for entry that made them competitive, which led to new business models that changed the rules of the mass marketing game. The Third phase was the segmentation phase, when the primary focus of marketing changed to division of the market, and products tended to attack the mass marketing approach of the second phase. Consumer choice became the key component of mass marketing as firms began to use methods of demographic and psychographic analysis to define and target specific market segments with specialized products and experiences.

Tedlow supports his thesis with four case studies of business success in mass marketing: Coca-cola was very much the product of Asa G. Candler’s personality and faith in his product, and the success of Pepsi as a competitor beginning in the 1930’s was largely due to the ability of Pepsi to create a similar organization and compete on price; Henry Ford’s systematic domination of the mass-produced car and the challenge presented to it by Alfred P. Sloan and General Motor’s Phase III style segmentation of the auto market in order to successfully compete; the story of A&P mass retailing and the competition presented to it by the advent of supermarkets and a legal challenge to its Phase II competitive power; and finally the story of Sears’s general merchandise retailing and the challenge to that company by Montgomery Ward and others who forced Sears to understand and effectively manage change at every part of its vertically integrated network.

Tedlow’s thesis, that marketing in the United States has gone through three major phases of development, and that mass production, entrepreneurship, vertical integration, the challenge presented by competitors changing the game to overcome the barriers presented by first movers’ profit and market strength, and the ability of a firm to manage change have governed the movement of companies, product lines, and even the entire economy of the United States through these phases is compelling, complex, and builds on the organizational ideas of Alfred D. Chandler, the technological histories of Thomas P. Hughes, and the histories of business development provided by others. This work is a powerful achievement. It does rely more than many are comfortable with on a sense of the power of an individual to influence history, but Tedlow argues that the individual has been the missing link in economists’ and business historians explanations of change in American consumption and production patterns over the past century. The addition that the book makes to the field is well worth the time it takes to read.

Edwards, Richard. Contested Terrain : The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Richard Edwards’ 1979 book Contested Terrain argues that there have been three stages of development in capitalists’ systems of control over labor, and that these go along with the developments in American business practices over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These three stages, so-called simple control, technical control, and bureaucratic control, still define the range of control methods available to capitalists today.

According to the Marxist labor theory of value, profit comes from the transformation of labor power to actual labor. In order to maximize production, and therefore profit, capitalists needed some means of control of the labor they had purchased. Therefore, the job of management in American industry has always been about controlling the labor process, rather than simply coordinating it. Over the history of the development of business from the small, individually- or family-owned shop to the monopoly corporation, different forms of control have developed to suit the changing needs of firms.

In the nineteenth century, small shops with fewer than one thousand laborers made up the vast majority of business in the United States. Those firms were privately owned, geographically consolidated, and subject to the charisma of the owner entrepreneur, who inspired and demanded loyalty. The small number of laborers in these firms and their location in a limited geographic area meant that the owner could observe their work directly and had a personal relationship with most workers. Control in this environment tended to be arbitrary and personal.

As firms got bigger after 1898, the number of employees increased to the point where the simple style of control became impracticable. Capitalists established control over workers through a hierarchal system in which laborers were supervised by foremen, who were part of a hierarchy of managers. Employees no longer had direct connection with the owners of companies. The greater organizational distance between capitalists and laborers, and the wider lifestyle gap between them led to the attenuation of personal ties to the firm and emphasized class differences. The change was not in the nature of control, but the organization of that control. In many cases, the arbitrary and personal nature of rewards and punishments distributed by the foremen meant that this hierarchical system was one of the primary causes of strikes, including the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the US Steel Strike of 1919.

The clear failure of the hierarchical system led capitalists to try other forms of control in the early twentieth century. Using welfare capitalism after 1900, firms provided specific benefits, including company subsidized housing, some health care, and pension funds to workers who broke with unions and promised not to strike. From the turn of the century to the 1920’s many firms also deployed Scientific Management, which involved time and motion studies in the attempt to design control directly into the definition of each job. Workers, though they valued corporate benefits, remained willing to slow down work or strike for many reasons, including the introduction of Scientific Management techniques, which they perceived as an attempt by management to exclude them from control of the production process.

In the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, American business conducted a process of unprecedented consolidation which led to monopolization in various industries after WWI. In order to control the even greater sized workforces now under their control, the great monopolies now turned to technical control of workers by designing production systems in which workers were only attendants at machines that were integrated into the production process. Reduced reliance upon skilled labor, meant a greater labor pool to draw from, making disciplinary threats such as dismissal very real. However, this also generalized the workforce, and encouraged the formation of industry-wide trade unions which could challenge the organization and power of the monopoly firms.

After 1920, the search for a system to replace technical control, and the growing number of nonproduction workers who also needed controlled led firms to develop bureaucratic control methods by applying institutional style policies to all employees of a firm, such that rules operated as functions of the firm, rather than of management. The establishment of bureaucratic control effectively subdivided workforces, and firms reinforced that subdivision with specialized training, an increase in supervisory jobs, and multiple pay grades and work locations. This made possible the eventual victory over mass unionism, as laborers within an industry no longer shared similar goals with regards to the firms they worked for.

The net result of bureaucratic control has been to remove the conflict between labor and capital from the shop floor to the political arena, where corporations have less control, and where they have to face what may be a decentralized opposition in the form of various social, cultural, issue-oriented and ethnic groups, but an opposition which does have a loose common interest in opposing capitalism. As in the other cases, the new method of control may have sewn the seeds of its own demise.

Jeffery Haydu of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkely stresses that what Edwards has provided is a potential new typology for methods of control in the workplace, but he says Edwards fails to provide convincing evidence, and gives an unclear chronological structure for his argument. Haydu also disputes some of Edwards’ facts, and says that he is missing the point of view of laborers themselves.

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Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Donald Worster’s book Rivers of Empire posits the idea of water as the currency of the American West, foregrounding control of water resources as the story that gave form to the region’s geographic, social, and economical development. Worster’s argument is that the American West is not the center of individualism that it is made out to be, but is a hydraulic society, dependent for its current existence on the ability of a complex and expensive network of irrigation systems for its production, and thus dependent upon the capital and the authority by which those irrigation systems were built and are maintained. In many ways, this type of society was similar to that of ancient Chinese civilization, which had based its success on the efficient use and control of water. China organized its social hierarchy around agriculture, which in turn was organized around the efficient use of water through the building of irrigation systems. Karl von Wittfogel called this a “hydraulic society,” and included Mesopotamia, Persia, and pre-Columbian America among the hydraulic civilizations. These ancient civilizations, though, developed as hydraulic societies from a need to feed growing populations, whereas the people of the American West migrated there not out of necessity, but due to boosterism, and for economic and social reasons. Beginning with surveyors in the 1840’s, Americans saw the West in two ways. Either the desert was an alien beauty, to be taken on its own terms or it was an abomination that required human development. Eventually the latter view won out, and developing the desert led to a long series of experiments with irrigation schemes and water rights.

The Mormon Church in Utah established a hydraulic a hydraulic society and the church itself held authority over rights to water in Mormon controlled territory. In Colorado, two legal doctrines regarding water rights developed in opposition to each other – the right of prior appropriation mixed with a corporatist system within which groups managed water by appointing a mutually recognized central authority. California developed a combination of legal doctrines in which large ranchers claimed control of whole rivers simply by owning the land on the banks, but smaller farmers depended for their water upon irrigation created by government authorities or by real-estate developers. In all three cases, conflicts between big ranchers and smaller farmers, and the involvement of government in surveying and building irrigation systems obscured the needs of individuals for the simple reason that no individual could manage to build or maintain irrigation systems alone. Farmers and ranchers alike required vast resources to build thousands of miles of canals and ditches, and so they established associations of private capital, and these wrestled with each other for control of water. As control of the canals also led to control of the wealth of the West, a new class hierarchy was built along with the building of the canals, and abetted by the federal government, whose financing and engineering made the canals possible. The actual builders of the canals and ditches were not the owners of the land that received benefit from the irrigation systems, however. Instead, the hydraulic society of the West was built on the backs of laborers who had no say in where or how the canals were built.

The development of diverse systems of water rights management was important in two ways. It demonstrated the difficulty in sharing inadequate water resources and it encouraged the United States government to step in as a central authority in water issues in order to protect the development of farming. Thus federal regulations tended to favor large concentrations of land over small, and economic development over the needs of the natural environment or of individuals. This solidified the class and economic divisions of the West, and made it less, not more, individualistic in its social structure. As the differing laws regarding water rights in different states began to come into conflict with each other at the turn of the Twentieth Century. California’s production capacity, and its close connection to national markets through railroads made it too big to deprive of water. Other states began to have to defer to California’s needs in a developing national hierarchy in water management. The greater need for water by arid California presented a a water trap to the nation as a whole – population and economic growth required development of California, and to a lesser extent other hydraulic states of the West, which required continued appropriation of water by the government and private interests for commercial purposes. Water came in the West to have the same importance that capital had in Marx’s analysis. Control of water meant wealth and power, while lack of control meant relegation to the lower classes, struggle for existence, and a lack of individual choice. The West is not a world of rugged individuals, then but a constructed space built around engineered irrigation resources for purposes of profit-making.

Lawrence Rakestraw, the late environmental historian from the Pacific Northwest, was very critical of Worster’s work, saying that the book covers California and Arizona, with only minimal attention paid to the rest of the Western states, and that it concentrates primarily on five major river systems, almost all of which are in California, leaving out or barely mentioning major systems such as that of the Columbia river. Rakestraw saw Rivers of Empire as little more than an attempt to turn Wittfogel and Marx into environmentalists. While I do think the book was more limited than its title leads a reader to believe, and certainly has a political point of view, I do not share Rakestraw’s sense that this book has little to redeem it. Rather, it needs to be read in a larger context of books about the West.

Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.

If there is a “New Labor History” that takes into account the lives of workers and their families and social class outside of factories in the United States, then Philip Scranton has written a book that would fit squarely within a “New Business History” that similarly takes previous narratives and seeks to contextualize them in the larger world of American business experience. In Endless Novelty, Scranton was determined to correct what he saw as a major shortcoming in American business history; namely, that it concentrated on the development of big business to the exclusion of all else. This concentration on the growth, business and organizational models, and attempts to control the market – the visible hand of management ala Alfred D. Chandler – was at its root only a part of the story, and yet historians such as Chandler had told it as the whole of the story, leading to the use of the criteria for evaluating business practices for such core firms as the de-facto criteria for the evaluation of all business – a fundamental analytical error.

In fact, Scranton named five different analytical problems with the familiar narrative of the history of big business, including the fact that such a narrative came from a fallacy of composition – that the questions and answers given within it did not come from a comprehensive review of all American business realities, and so could not hold for generalizations on American business history; that such a narrative was effectively teleological, circumscribing research efforts and conclusions through deterministic and functionalist views that privileged big business strategies as the goal of all; that it ascribed a fundamental rationality to the ways in which core firms emerged in the course of history, creating a an ever-deepening path of pseudo-analysis, or redescription, which disallowed other points of view, and finally, that this narrative limited analysis of the diversity of the processes of emergence even for core firms.

Instead of a single movement toward mass production, American business developed during the “Second Industrial Revolution” in four primary approaches, because not all products had similar end uses nor all customers identical needs. Those four different approaches to manufacturing included custom manufacturing, in which products whose market was not constant, predictable, or large were manufactured to specification by hand; batch manufacturing, or the making of various items in small groups to fit a certain market demand, and often involving some customization of the goods in question; bulk manufacturing, which was a process using general purpose machines to manufacture large amounts of various differing products for sale in a large quantity; and mass or flow production, the system that constituted the core industries’ use of economies of scale, and high levels of throughput and required a stable, consistent market. Each approach was different, and suited differing product and consumer needs. Each also had its own impact on the American economy, on solutions to manufacturing techniques, and even on the development of manufacturing within urban areas. One of the best examples of custom production is the building of railroad locomotives, which employed thousands of workers, but could not be undertaken on a mass production basis because the engines themselves were so large, because demand was unpredictable and stock was impossible keep.

The differences in size, manufacturing approach, product market, and numbers of employees meant that specialist companies employed different strategies from those of the core firms that have traditionally been the focus of business historians. Those strategies included differentiating products, the use of general purpose machines which could easily be re-purposed for the making of many different products, giving a manufacturer some product flexibility, a focus on quality of product or to meet complex specifications that allowed price to become a secondary consideration for customers, differentiating marketing strategies to help find a niche for specialty products, and the cultivating of skilled workers with shop floor problem-solving abilities that kept the manufacturing process nimble and maintained quality. As the specialist companies developed these business strategies, they also developed management techniques that helped to keep them profitable. These specialist companies often cultivated personal relations between management and employees, rather than the bureaucratic style of the large core firms. They also had to develop systems for tracking orders and itemizing costs because of the greater diversity of goods they manufactured. Marketing frequently required close contact with clients, and the process of manufacturing a final product might involve several smaller firms, making location within industrial districts preferable for reasons of communication and transportation.

Scranton looks at industries as diverse as book printing, engraving, locomotive manufacture, and machine tools. The geographical range of the study is impressive, too, taking into its view most of the American Northeast. This is an important book in the field of business history because it calls into question the dominant narrative in the field and elucidates a new set of strategies and structures for historians to consider while analyzing business history in the United States, opening the field for new and useful work.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.

Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was both the most difficult, and the most Marxist, book I have read this semester. As that reading list includes selections from Karl Marx’ Capital, Vol. I, I have to add that I do not think saying this is an exaggeration. Braverman, a laborer by experience with an intellectual and socialist bent, intends to document the decline of labor in a number of senses – the reduction of work to the lowest level of skill, and its reduction as much as possible to the status of automated mechanical activity. But Braverman is also interested in how these reductions tend to cause reduced wages, reduced job satisfaction, and the reintegration of lost craft skills within the machines that do the majority of work in twentieth century industry. The object of interest is the subjection of all facets of work to the needs of the capitalist. Braverman’s book in fact follows many of the key themes in Capital but expands upon them to include changes occurring in the 20^th century, and Braverman seems if anything more ardent than Marx about the need for workers to understand these changes and act upon them. He discusses the failure of unionism, and the concomitant failure of Marxism because it became tied up with unions. He is fascinated with the increasing use of the worker as automaton. He is also interested in the way that capital hides the deskilling of labor under a blanket, allowing only minimal glimpses at work and its meaning, even by those who perform it, by literally removing work as a meaningful part of a laborer’s life.

As Marx made so clear, one of the key problems with the relationship of labor to capital is that “[the] technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instrument of labour…gives rise to a barrack-like discipline…thereby dividing the workers into manual laborers and overseers, into the private soldiers and N.C.O.s of an industrial army,” and that while an individual craftsman makes use of tools, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”[1] Braverman takes this idea beyond Marx’s comments, claiming that the process of “deskilling” labor results not just from the use of machines, but from the nature of management in a large corporation. His primary target here is “Taylorism,” the theory of Scientific Management developed in the United States in the early 20^th Century in which even the movements of workers were scrutinized in order to find the one best system which minimized movement and time on task, but maximized the results – productive work.

Working off of Marx’s idea that work is purposeful, and conceptual as well as transformative of nature, Braverman says that “Labor that transcends mere instinctual activity is thus the force which created humankind, and the force by which humankind created the world as we know it.”[2] Work is the prime creative force that makes us human. Thus the reduction of work to mere process – the deskilling of work in the industrial factory and the modern corporation, which is what Taylorism aims to do, is also the process of dehumanization.

Braverman asserts that the conceptual function, as well as the coordination function, that belonged to skilled craft workers is transferred to management workers in industrial capitalism.[3] This is an interesting extension of the production process model of labor which is often discussed by Adam Smith and by Marx, and which is a fundamental component of Taylorism – namely that the separation of tasks in industrial capitalism not only separates workers according to function, but also adding managerial workers to the functional process by giving them a separate piece of the puzzle – the conceptual piece. This certainly would only add to the process of deskilling labor. Braverman shows this by giving a history of the development of management, and concentrating on the change in the goals of capital from, in line with Marx’s theories in Capital, the goal of purchasing and owning labor completely, “in the same way he bought his raw materials: as a definite quantity of work, completed and embodied in the product” to a preference for the purchase of labor power – the direct hiring of laborers, the control of which gives the ability to wring more value from the labor, particularly through the device of management – a further division of labor that provides a brain to operate the warm bodies on the production floor.[4]

Braverman goes further in his discussion of the division of labor, however, making another very Marxist argument that while a “social division of labor” is common and natural to human societies, the breakdown of specific industrial processes into constituent parts is not a natural process, but one unique to the capitalist mode of production. He illustrates this with Adam Smith’s famous pin-making example, showing how even simple manufacturing processes can be made more productive through a division of labor into its constituent parts. He then makes the point that Smith and others make about division of labor: “in a society based upon the purchase and sale of labor power, dividing the craft cheapens individual parts.” This is thus the goal of capitalism – as Marx outlines in Capital – to increase the value of the product through the creation of excess value by increasing the productivity of workers. Braverman calls this the “general law of the capitalist division of labor.”[5]

When he directly confronts Taylorism (or Scientific Management), Braverman makes the point that Scientific Management is not concerned with technology, nor is it really scientific, but is simply the application of the needs of capital to the process of controlling work. It takes as a given the idea that management and labor exist in opposition to each other, and does not attempt to resolve that tension, despite its claim to approach work from a humanistic point of view. Taylorism, according to Braverman, is only a new way to gain excess labor from the workforce. Taylor, he says, had two categories into which he slid management practices. The first he called “ordinary management” – the control of the general conditions of work, and the second, “scientific management” which was the control of every phase of the work process. Management should, he said, plan out each act in the work process precisely. One goal was to remove the thinking process from work. The job of management was to reduce craft knowledge to a set of tasks and rules and time tables, and return it to the worker as a decided plan which only needed to be carried out physically. This is the deskilling process that modern management in large industrial corporations carry out in the name of improving productivity by reducing the cost of labor.[6]

The results of this division of labor in capitalist society are a persistent and inexorable loss of skill among workers, and, moreover, Braverman says, the loss of craftsmanship and the place in society of the craftsman that went along with it. Braverman gives the example of the rise of the profession of engineering – engineers, who connect technology–and science in their work – came into existence, he says, because the deskilling of the labor force took that position, and capacity, away from craftsmen, who were in the past the group within society who bridged science and work through their intimate knowledge of their crafts. This contributes to an acute level of dissatisfaction for workers, and a great loss to society.

The dissatisfaction of workers, primarily because of the increasingly de-humanization of working conditions, has been ameliorated by modern industry, according to Braverman, by the manipulation of the labor force, both through modern personnel techniques that accept labor conditions as a given and profess to help workers adjust to “reality,” and through the use of pay, benefits, and other parts of work that make it desireable, (Braverman uses an example the institution of the $5 day at Ford Motor Co.) to help workers accept industrial conditions as reality and limit protests and strikes. This is the primary function of personnel and human resources departments in large corporations.[7]

Along with labor, science has become the most important item employed by capital to create excess value. Braverman makes some interesting observations while discussing how science began as what can essentially be called invention (the steam engine probably contributed more to science than science did to the steam engine, he says), but became systematically integrated into large industrial firms as a part of the means of production itself. Science and technology became a commodity that added value to the production process, and therefore were sought after by corporations attempting to increase the value of their capital and products.[8]

Combining his ideas about the tension between management and labor, and the increasing importance of automation and machinery, Braverman then moves into perhaps his most original and most important argument. Machinery, what Marx called the “instruments of production” are improved to the point where they are no longer controlled by the worker, but instead actually do the work of the worker, and control the worker as if he/she were part of the machine itself. Moreover, the machines in the twentieth century actually reintegrate the labor process, so that the division of labor, which cheapened work, and deskilled workers, created a mass of low-paid, low-skilled workers who come only to operate machines. This completes the dehumanization process, because it removes thinking, skills, and even production from the workers, and then reintegrates all of those things within machines, asking the workers only to operate the machines at the pace, and according to the rules, set by management. There is no more of the humanizing process of work that Marx, and Braverman, say is what defines us as human beings.

I found Braverman’s analysis to be very compelling. It updates Marx so that his theories, developed in the mid-nineteenth century, can be seen to be applicable to modern industry and work. His argument that clerks and office workers are new skilled workers, but that there work is being controlled, deskilled, and divided as well, and that the vast majority of workers are thus dissatisfied with their jobs, goes far toward the conclusion that de-humanization is a trend of modern industrial society. I found here a critique of a number of other works that I have read, including journalistic accounts of labor, and capitalism, that is compelling and useful.

Like Marx, though, I think that Braverman has a blind spot. He is a proletarian intellectual. He has no place in his analysis for intellectuals, however. At one point he mentions the profession of engineering, but really only in passing, and only as an example of the deskilling of crafts. Academic pursuits, and knowledge-based careers do seem to me to be on the rise over the late part of the Twentieth Century. However, as the introduction and the preface note, this may not – is probably not – enough to offset the loss of skills and satisfaction in industrial labor.

If Braverman were writing today, I think that he would find the growth of the service sector in the American economy, and the increased economic importance of the financial services industry in particular, to be further proof that the trends he identifies – deskilling of the labor force, increasing domination of the economy by capital, and increasing levels of job-dissatisfaction throughout the United States.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976. Reprint, 1976.

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Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004.

Thomas Hughes’ book American Genesis is a foundational work in the area of American Technological history. Hughes’ primary thesis is that the United States is a nation of inventors and system builders, rather than a nation of business. America is the original “modern technological nation.”[1] For Hughes, the business of America is not business, but invention of systems for control of the natural and human world. Hughes hopes to look at the work of inventors in three major stages of American History: the era of independent inventors, from 1870 to the First World War; the era of the scientists, from World War I to the Great Depression and World War II, and the era of government supported invention beginning in World War II and running to the counter-culture era of the 1960’s.[2] The goal, ultimately, is to take an academic approach to the history of American inventiveness and to dig deeper than the hagiography so commonly found in literature on the subject. Hughes wants to know what the inventors have in common with each other in terms of method, choice of problem, and sources of funding. To some degree, Hughes seems to hope to explain why, as he says, America has been the most inventive nation in history through this work.

The book is remarkably disciplined in its approach and organization. Hughes has given a relatively simple thesis, and supported it with numerous generalities about the state of science and invention in the industrializing West, in order to put American inventiveness in the context of world culture. His assertion that Americans are the most inventive nation on earth seems at first to be a very subjective statement, but he does provide some examples to support the idea. The distribution of chapters and their content is, though, well done, easy to read, and helps the reader to follow Hughes argument easily. The book is also written well, and is very interesting. It is one of the few academic books that seem well suited for the trade market as well.

The first two chapters are maybe the most fascinating of all for readers used to the vast collection of hagiography on American inventors. Hughes’ academic approach does not concentrate on the genius of these people, but rather looks for similarities in method, and in choice of problems to solve, and links those to the ever-present problem of finding funds to support their work. He sees this period as the “American genesis” – launching the United States on the trajectory of great inventiveness he wants to claim as its historical legacy. Still, he does not make that claim based on un-measurable claims of intellectual brilliance. Instead, he explains, and then takes on, the measure of success that most of these inventors used themselves – counting patents. Hughes provides some amazing statistics in this regard. Edison, for example, produced more than 1000 patents over his inventive lifespan.

In these first chapters Hughes delves into what these inventors did and finds patterns. They often worked in scientific style using experimentation. They uniformly conducted research into the problem and earlier attempted solutions. They rarely worked alone, but instead almost always had assistants who were craftsmen and could turn their ideas into models and real prototypes. Finally, most had private laboratories, libraries, and large inventories of equipment so that whatever might be needed in the heat of experiment was easily found.

Chapter two is specifically about the way in which the inventors chose the problems they were going to work on. Here, Hughes tries to make the point that they were always attempting to solve problems that were already identified and the subject of study by others. They also studied these problems intently, often combing through former patent applications, studying prior proposed solutions deeply to try to identify their weak points, then choosing to work on them. But, the problems were inevitably big ones. For the most part, independent inventors like Edison, Sperry, and Tesla were not interested in improving systems that already worked, but in creating new inventions that were generative of such systems. The first Hughes takes pains to identify as “innovation” – the improvement and distribution of a new solution to a problem, whereas the second Hughes calls “invention” and defines as the creation of a new solution to a major problem.

In Chapter three, Hughes identifies the military industrial complex as existing long before World War II. In fact, he pushes it back to the turn of the twentieth century, and notes that in the search for funding and practical use of their inventions, even such lionized inventors as the Wright Brothers hoped that the military might be the first and most important purchaser of airplanes. Others, such as Maxim, and even Edison and Tesla identified the U.S. Military as the most likely entity to be interested in the practical applications of many of their inventions, and often lobbied hard to get the military to see the utility of inventions. After 1911, this lobbying began to pay off as the Navy began to fund testing of inventions intended for its use.[3]

This leads Hughes into the era of World War I, and the beginning of the era of scientist inventors. Hughes paraphrases Raymond Aron in The Century of Total War in introducing this new era of inventions by remembering World War I as a war of technological surprises.[4] Concerns about American preparedness for war led the United States to look to its inventors to help with innovation as well.[5] To do this, Edison was recruited (he practically asked for the job) to head a “Naval Consulting Board.” Edison conceived of this board’s responsibilities as helping to modernize the United States military by preparing it to use labor saving machines in the “factory of death” that he conceived the modern battlefield to be.[6] In the end, the creation of this board, and Edison’s exclusion from it of academic scientists led to a wartime competition between the independent inventors and the scientists to determine who was more the source of innovation.[7]

In Chapter four, Hughes returns to his separation of “invention” from “innovation”, and makes the case that because the independents’ stock in trade was invention of new systems to solve new problems, they became less important in the postwar world, where the need of the government and manufacturers was for new designs to improve systems already in operation. This conservative approach to invention, what Hughes calls “innovation” was exactly what the academic scientists were good at. In addition, the profits brought by improvements in existing systems became the battleground for inventors claiming patents on their improvements, or control of patents that improved basic systems they had built. The legal and business implications of invention and patent became more byzantine, requiring more organization. In addition, often the improvement of a patented system brought more profit than the original system as invented. Thus inventors came to require more organization, and more capital.

Hughes locates the beginning of corporate invention in Bell Telephone’s establishment in 1894 of an engineering department, which was responsible for improving systems, but eventually became the company’s research and development arm.[8] Discussing AT&T, General Electric Corp., and du Pont, Hughes comes to the conclusion that the major changes in the invention landscape do not include the complete loss of place for the independent inventor. Instead, corporate laboratories prove to be good at “routinizing invention” – providing large sums of money, and large numbers of minds, for concentration on innovation in existing systems. Corporations like du Pont, found this when they attempted to develop new technologies in the dyestuffs industry internally, but overinvestment and lack of return eventually forced them to follow the AT&T pattern by acquiring smaller companies that already had the knowledge and patents to allow them to move forward with diversification plans.[9] The upshot of this chapter is evidence of the current assumption that while big business can and should do research and development, only the independent inventor (called, today, an ‘entrepreneur’, combining business and technological invention in a single term) is nimble enough to come up with the really new ideas.[10]

In his fifth and sixth chapters, Hughes elaborates on the idea, discussed in the introduction as a part of his thesis, that invention in the United States has not been limited to machines, or in mechanical and electrical solutions to problems. Instead, Hughes wants to think of invention as having to with the invention of systems that ultimately come to create and control a kind of built environment that is separate from and in control of nature. In other words, inventions are only parts of ever-larger systems, and the American genius has been to invent these systems. To show how this works, Hughes first discusses Taylorism, or “scientific management” – the idea that humans should be a part of the manufacturing process, rather than apart from it, making humans, in a way, part of the machinery. This is the source of the title of the chapter: “The System Must Come First” – the idea being that in the past, production and technology existed for the service of people, but in the modern invented world, the people exist for the system. These systems include manufacturing, such as the system for Midwestern power distribution created by Samuel Insull, including the systematic way of understanding load and profit maximization, and the system for automobile manufacture created by Henry Ford at his giant River Rouge plant.[11] This service of people to the system, and the ever-increasing size and integration of systems in society – is the essence of American modernism for Hughes. That essence of modernism is what, he claims, is of interest to the Soviet Union, and to Weimar Germany, when they began adopting, with mixed success, the manufacturing processes, scientific management, and integration of industrial systems of the United States after World War I.

In the seventh chapter, Hughes claims that the invention of systems, industrial, social, economic, and political, in the United States was a cultural transformation, and that this transformation was better recognized from outside the United States than by those taking part in it. Americans saw the transformation as technological and industrial, but Europeans came to see it as cultural.[12] Hughes supports this point by discussing the futurism of people like Louis Mumford, whose predictions of a “neotechnic” society where future technology and manufacturing processes would exist in small, de-centralized factories operated by highly skilled technicians amounted to a prediction in change of culture characterized by a retreat from the massive centralized factories and cities and an expansion into better lifestyles, less population congestion, and better, more efficient use of communications technology and natural resources.[13] Hughes also locates cultural change in the connection of art to the invented technology of the day, celebrating the order and precision of the systems, from mechanical to social, of inventive America. Art celebrated inventions, and inventions and innovations became art.[14]

In Chapter eight, Hughes takes on the third phase of his thesis, discussion the era of government supported invention. The key difference here from the support of government in the era of the two world wars is that, beginning with the Great Depression, government harnesses its support of invention and innovation not only to military technology, but also to civilian uses, and not only to mechanical innovation, but also to social engineering. The point of the entire chapter can be captured in the way Hughes uses the Tennessee Valley Authority to represent the New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority is shown to be a model of technical innovation, but at the same time an effort in social engineering, used to put people to work, re-build the economy of a large local area, and transform the political and social, as well as economic and technical, climate of the nation.[15] In many ways, this chapter gives us a microcosmic view of continuation of the cultural change Hughes discussed in his previous chapter.

As Chapter eight ends, appropriately, with the Manhattan project – the design and construction of the most destructive weapon ever made, Chapter nine begins with the assertion than since World War II, Americans have come to increasingly distrust technology, industry, and system-building.[16] Here, Hughes brings attention to the perception, exemplified by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring, for example, that over-enthusiasm for technological change and development has caused us to destroy, or lose touch with, many parts of the natural world and the past which we may not be able to reclaim. Returning to Mumford, this time Hughes tells us that he came to see the scientific and technical world as a “sterile wasteland.”[17] Jacques Ellul, says Hughes, came to see modern humans as selling themselves as slaves for a plethora of goods and services.[18] In the end, though, Hughes sees modern humans as unable to wean ourselves from technology, and perhaps at the edge of a new fascination with it.

I found this book fascinating, and Hughes’ organization lends itself well to his thesis. There are two weak points which I think deserve some attention, though. First is Hughes’ claim that the United States is the most inventive nation in history. By some of his criteria, including number of patents granted, and perhaps sheer number of inventors, this estimation may work. But it is such an un-provable proposition that it almost smacks of American exceptionalism. For such a well-organized and well-researched book, and one that claims to turn the discussion of inventors into an academic discourse, this seems a somewhat unhelpful claim to make. Second, it seems, looking over Hughes’ timeline, that the three stages he wants to claim in the history of American inventiveness really occurred almost simultaneously, or at least overlap each other to a degree that makes the claim that they are successive stages somewhat difficult to support.

In all, however, this book seems to me to rank with those of Thomas Kuhn, as seminal in the way it looks at the history of a society and at the history of a phenomenon – the process and effect of invention and inventiveness. The book is well worth reading, and the more one reads, I suspect, the more one will find.