Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America (review)

Language is the unit of analysis for Stephen Rice, a professor of American studies, in his book on the "making of the American middle class" (p. 145). Early-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans used language, specifically metaphors inspired by mechanization, to distinguish themselves from the working class, to stifle dissent, and to assert authority. Language defined sets of oppositions that demarcated class. Hence the middle class was the "head" and "mind," the working class the "hand" and "body" (pp. 45, 71). According to Rice, it was a conciliatory language that neutralized workers' confrontational language. It appeased anxieties over the new relations of production by shifting the public discourse from inequities to abstractions.

Rice develops his thesis in five chapters. In the first, he uses an automaton chess player as signifier of mechanization. In 1826 the showman Johann Maelzel displayed the automaton to packed halls of savvy New Yorkers who disagreed on what they saw. Some writers exploited the confusion by reconstructing the chess player as a metaphor of the social order. A benevolent "head," Maelzel's hidden partner, controlled a compliant "hand," the automaton. Enslaved and free laborers had long been called "hands" but this was a novel disaggregation that reinforced middle-class authority and undermined working-class aspirations. Other writers suggested that engineers should develop mechanical slave substitutes for human slaves, offering a technological solution to sectional conflict. "Labor leaders" saw in mechanization no end of slavery but rather its extension, with themselves as new "white slaves" (p. 29). Spokesmen for the middle class defused confrontations like these with linguistic sleights aimed at unifying the classes in a mutually beneficial modernizing endeavor.

Rice's most convincing chapters examine the mechanics' institute movement and the steam-boiler controversy, demonstrating how reformers paradoxically tried but predictably failed to reconcile "heads" and "hands." By favoring a topical rather than a chronological order for the mechanics' institute movement, Rice challenges conventional interpretations. He suggests that working-class subordination, not reconciliation, was an articulated goal almost from its inception. The many lurid descriptions of boiler explosions effectively conveyed fears that uncontrolled steam engines threatened civil society—like hands without heads. These rare but dramatic events precipitated research at the Franklin Institute, regulatory action by state and federal legislatures, and moralizing in the popular press. The solution, ironically, lay not in improved technology but in "professionalization" of the engineer, another rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

Rice's chapters on the manual-labor school and physical-education movements examine how reformers attempted to remedy perceived weaknesses in the middle class. Schoolmasters educated students in mental and manual disciplines, expecting the combination to instill respect for the working class. It instilled contempt instead, and artisans retaliated when students' poorly made goods disrupted local markets. The physical-education movement constructed dyspepsia as a disease of "mental laborers." As a remedy, it prescribed a hygiene practiced according to "natural law," unfathomable by mere "hands" (pp. 107, 111).

Rice's epilogue carries his themes to 1870. The principles of mechanics' institutes and the manual-labor school movement persisted in land-grant colleges established with the Morrill Act. Dyspepsia became neurasthenia, the new disease of the "head worker" and the new focus of physical education, which Rice ingeniously links to the later scientific-management movement. The popularization of thermodynamics continued the public fascination with steam engines. By then, Rice concludes, languages that made explicit "claims to social authority" had replaced "implicit languages of class" that had exerted a "more subtle rhetorical power" (p. 155).

Subtle or not, these are middle-class languages. Rice articulates the perspectives of the working class but for the most part omits its languages. Although he includes Seth Luther's powerful 1832 counterpoint to an elitist North American Review essay and asserts that middle-class "ascent did not go unchallenged" (p. 145), his narrative seems to insist that workers capitulated. One imagines that Irish Catholics, free blacks, working women, and members of the radical working...