Abstract
Machines have not fared particularly well in assessments of American culture. Moreover, their seemingly inherent intrusiveness routinely excludes them from any discussion of beauty. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64), in the midst of a solitary exaltation of nature’s bounty, loses his muse to the clatter of an approaching locomotive. It is certainly not the same engine upon which John Muir perches so gleefully during his trip through Wisconsin, for this particular machine “brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumberous peace” (Hawthorne 1885, vol. 1, p. 503). In his seminal The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx exploits Hawthorne’s personal irritation as symptomatic of a wider American anxiety regarding a mechanized assault upon the pastoral. Hawthorne’s Sleepy Hollow will never be the same, and Marx contends that American culture thereafter is defined by its response to the disaster of machines.
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Notes
- 1.
T.J. Jackson Lears coins the term “evasive banality” to describe the target of Adams’s trepidations (Lears 1981).
- 2.
Stickley agrees with Adams that Americans retain insufficient piety to sustain the enchantment of Chartres. But he is not prepared to surrender to the dynamo, instead recommending a more salutary alternative to the Virgin in the form of democratic ideals, and to the “plain living and high thinking” expected of democratic citizens (Stickley 1904, p. 53). Democracy, like the Virgin, is the visible and laudatory “structure” under which Americans can prosper. So beauty resonates with the structure that it adorns. In America, it is the product of free thinking, autonomous citizen-artists: “Beauty is not something added to an object, it is a quality of the work. It comes into evidence whenever a man takes pleasure in his work, whenever his hands are permitted to do what his own desires determine and his own will directs” (Triggs 1902, p. 27). Factory labor, like the dynamos it produces, is ornament—disconnected from meaningful participation in the structure of its reception. Thus Stickley seeks to resist machines with the elevation of skilled craft.
Unfortunately, his politics are more primitive than his furniture. Industrialization in America is more concentrated and less grotesque than in Britain. Whereas a romantic yearning for past economies might resonate with English Victorians, America has far less history on which to base any such retreat. But even more problematic is the prospect of reversing the course of economic development. Stickley may reflect socialist sympathies regarding alienated labor, but his facile indifference to the irresistibility of complex, interdependent economies draws him to utopians like Robert Owen (Stickley 1906) and thereby disqualifies him from any serious attachment to the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels.
- 3.
Unlike Stickley, Pound abandons all semblance of nostalgia in his quest to recapture beauty. As a result he discovers in the American survival orientation itself, more particularly in the American dedication to industry and technology, a new sense of beauty, an alternative to the European predisposition for Debussy. Pound embraces the dynamo, Adams’s nemesis, as the vector of American beauty because machines in America are common and thus less likely to provoke any consideration of distracting contexts. The inventor of the internal combustion engine remains anonymous, allowing one to concentrate fully on the mechanism itself. Ironically, it is in utility that Pound discovers disinterest.
Pound is discriminating in his evaluation of machines. Mechanized farm implements are unsatisfactory to his new aesthetics, as the transience and independence of their machine parts are mostly overwhelmed by the antique context of the wagons and plows upon which they are jury-rigged: “People who have come from the open air, and have suffered from the vile working conditions are naturally fed up with machines, machinery, industry; all of which things tend to bias a judgment of machinery as form, to say nothing of the less explored field of sonority” (Pound 1996, p. 69). Not surprisingly, then, he prefers to dismantle machinery and focus on individual parts in the belief that the spectator is better served when observing a machine or part “whose function he does not know” (Pound 1996, p. 70).
Indeed, although machine parts may not likely provoke moral debates, it is rather difficult to parse, as Pound aspires to do, the fitness to function from function itself. Peter Behrens and Buckminster Fuller celebrate exposed machine elements in their creations, but do not pretend to obscure their architectural or functional context. Le Corbusier may reconfigure furniture, but he does not deny that “an armchair is a machine for sitting in” (1970, p. 89). Pound claims it is the modern inclination to “usury” that sacrifices the appreciation of specifics to the abstract vacuousness of exchange value (1954, p. 211). This is where we encounter his infamous anti-Semitism, perceptively depicted by Sartre as a rejection of “reason related to the abstract intelligence of the Semite” (Sartre 1995, p. 16). Rather than admit an inherent attachment of machines to the tasks for which they are manufactured, Pound instead condemns Jews for contaminating machinery with considerations of usefulness. The tenacious attachment of machinery to the liberal “context” of survival is overlooked in favor of a more convenient indictment of Judaism.
- 4.
Fellow streamliner Norman Bel Geddes candidly admits the limitations of streamlined trains even as he continues to design them (Bel Geddes 1932, p. 70).
- 5.
“Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:28).
- 6.
Adams is impressed by changes to the rules of chess, due to which the queen, alternatively known as the Virgin, goes from enjoying only limited mobility and accompaniment by a minister to becoming “the most arbitrary and formidable champion on the board” (1928, p. 205). Yet this particular association of the Virgin with power occurs later than what is implied by Adams: the reign of Isabella the Catholic (1474–1504) and beyond (Yalom 2004, p. xxiii).
- 7.
The Luke passage recounts the words of the angel Gabriel.
- 8.
“Handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38).
- 9.
Her special proximity to humanity is substantiated in “Lumen Gentium”: “Those opinions therefore may be lawfully retained which are propounded in Catholic schools concerning her, who occupies a place in the Church which is the highest after Christ and yet very close to us” (Paul VI, Pope 1964 [8.1.54]).
- 10.
Adams argues that the Virgin’s beauty activates a sexual sensitivity in her disciples, whereas the dynamo only reinforces a puritanical frigidity. That Adams himself is so taken with the Virgin’s sexual components that he distinguishes her sexuality as constitutive of her beauty is, ironically, instructive in terms of his own liberal inclinations. Adams mistakes the absence of sex in American art (along with “education and language”) as indicating its absence in society in general. In fact, the Puritans are not concerned about a mere specter. Sex, in the liberal American context, is less tolerant of transubstantiation in cultural proxies. Sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens may have preferred horses to women and tribute to Eros, but the liberal confidence in the survival realm encourages not the elimination of sensuality, but rather its relocation in the quotidian.
- 11.
Of course this discomfort persists in lingering depictions of fins and chrome (Furman 2004).
- 12.
For example: “Earl’s dramatic qualities are dramatically evident in his stature. Tall, forceful, he looks like a man who knows where he is going and will have little trouble in getting there. He has the stature of a man who has no choice but to be a leader” (Mitarachi 1955, p. 50).
- 13.
GM energetically promotes Earl’s recruitment of women, who are “acclaimed by the men for their artistic ingenuity” (see GM promotional video, “Damsels of Design,” available on YouTube).
- 14.
“Promotional literature boasted that the Guild had the largest membership of any young men’s organization in the United States except for the Boy Scouts of America (established 1910), and claimed that by 1960 over eight million male teenagers between the ages of 12 and 20 had participated in the guild through national, state, and local contests and clubs” (Oldenziel 1997, p. 66).
- 15.
In what is to date the most exhaustive study of the Guild, Earl is considered to be the exclusive instigator of its change in focus (Jacobus 2012, p. 45).
- 16.
- 17.
It is widely reported that NASCAR, due in part to its corporatization, high ticket prices, and driver peccadillos, may be in decline (Berkowitz 2011). And my intuition is that the academic community is predisposed to the depiction. However, the sport retains a dedicated base whose social media presence is second only to that of the National Football League (Leone 2012). And the arrival of Danica Patrick to the sport, with beauty claims not unlike those of Jenny Lind, is reviving the sport’s popularity. Furthermore, the South remains fervently attached to this enhancement of raw machinery with whimsy. Resigned to the inevitability of liberal hegemony, it is understandable that a more robust aesthetic accompaniment to machinery obtains there.
- 18.
- 19.
Many versions are available on YouTube.
- 20.
Franklin Hershey, who worked as a chief designer at most of the large American car companies, seems to have succumbed to Earl’s dream motif: “I can’t believe the things that—I just can’t believe—but I dream about one company only, and I dream about that maybe once a week or twice a month or so, and I dream of General Motors, but I never dream of being with Ford or anywhere else” (Automotive Design Oral History Project 1986a, vol. 2, p. 163).
- 21.
Here I am obviously channeling Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud 2010).
- 22.
That American manufacturers intentionally shortened the life of products is a myth. The singular instance that persists in the cultural memory is a proposal by General Electric, never implemented, to shorten the lives of flashlight bulbs (Slade 2006, p. 5).
- 23.
Moore’s law refers literally to the rapid pace at which transistors are miniaturized, but has come to refer generically to the rapidity with which electronic devices evolve.
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Lukes, T.J. (2016). Turbulent and Laminar Flow: From Henry Adams to Harley Earl. In: Politics and Beauty in America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-02090-1_7
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