The Unmaking of an American Working Class

Stephen P. Rice. Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xi + 230 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $49.95.

Was the effect of machinery on society "good or evil?" Such a question greeted readers of the North American Review in early 1832, drawing attention to a rapidly growing public debate about the progress of mechanization—the "genius of the age," to use early-nineteenth-century language. Predictably reflecting its upper-class point of view, the unsigned Review essay concluded that, while "labor-saving machinery" temporarily displaced workers and confounded their traditional expectations, it did not (as often charged) enslave or impoverish them or endanger their health. Toward the end of the same year, 1832, a radical carpenter named Seth Luther published a scathing Address to the Working-Men of New England, in which he blamed the "factory system of production" for tyrannizing "the bodies and minds of the producing classes, destroying the energies of both." Luther warned that the progress of machinery flatly contradicted the promises of liberty and equality set forth in the Revolution, and called for workmen to rebel: to "LIVE FREEMEN OR DIE FREEMEN" (pp. 1–2).

So begins Stephen P. Rice's fascinating new book, Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America; if what follows does not fully satisfy readers hungry for answers to this important question, it surely engages the right questions and a host of relevant material from a variety of perspectives. Rice brings into useful juxtaposition the latest tools of interpretation and analysis, the cultural sensitivity of American Studies (Leo Marx, John Kasson, et al.), and a working familiarity with at least some of the historiographical threads that feed his subject. To this he adds an appropriate dose of "butt-in-the-chair" research. He has produced a provocative, stimulating, very readable new look at questions we have cared about for easily three generations.

"This book is about the making of a class society in America," Rice writes and then asks specifically: "how did members of a nascent middle class manage to promote and defend their social authority in the face of troubling and divisive questions about work and mechanization" (ah, the linguistic turn). Rice steps over the Marxian preoccupation with workplace structures and the means of production and straight into the realm of cultural construction: "American men and women who were coming to perceive themselves (and be perceived by others) as middle class in the decades before 1860 consolidated their authority and minimized the potential for class conflict in part by representing the social relations of the industrial workplace as necessarily cooperative rather than oppositional." We are not to focus on whether machinery did (or did not) liberate (or degrade) the working man; instead, we are led into the popular discourse by which antebellum Americans set about assigning cultural valence to the palpable changes that washed over them. And frankly, since historians must essentially agree about the tangible results of mechanization—strict division of labor; deskilling of work; routinization of operations; interchangeability of parts (and workers); concentration of wealth, power, and authority in the owning/managing classes—Rice has led us in the right direction. We know pretty much what happened, but how do we assess it? That depends on who won the struggle for cultural definition: "Class formation in America, then, needs to be understood not only as a social struggle, but as a conceptual struggle . . . in which men and women elaborated and defended competing visions of class relations" (p. 4).

However modestly stated, this is quite an ambitiuous agenda. (Notice we are only up to page 4.) In the five chapters that follow this stimulating overture, Rice explores different kinds of sources that fed into his "conceptual struggle" before guiding us deftly into the postwar Gilded Age, where we meet, just coming onto the stage, Fred Taylor and the gurus of the "gospel of efficiency...