American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (review)

Historians are often described as falling into one of two camps: "lumpers," who tend to see connections and similarities between phenomena, processes, and periods, and "splitters," who instead tend to focus on discontinuities and dissimilarities. Daniel E. Bender's history of the "age of industry" in America might be described as a paean to lumping—or, put differently, to the value of "historical synthesis" (p. 12). According to Bender, most previous historians of early-twentieth-century industrial change have "eluci- dated the experience of industrial workers" to the neglect of "the larger intellectual and cultural history of industry" (p. 313). The failure to connect more fully studies of "industry, immigration, and empire" (p. 4) has resulted in a "patchwork vision" of early-twentieth-century life (p. 10). In contrast to these "impoverished" depictions (p. 3), Bender seeks to reveal "the organic connections" between different social movements (p. 10), and among "ideas of labor, empire, race, gender, family, and migration" (p. 12). Turn-of-the-century Americans, Bender asserts, engaged "industry, empire, civilization, and savagery" in "a single conversation" (p. 252).

The medium of this broad conversation was the potent language of evolution, widely and liberally deployed by Americans grappling with an emerging industrial and colonial order. Disparate struggles over immigration, imperial expansion, labor unrest, factory production, and gender roles routinely evoked the tropes of evolutionary theory—particularly race- and gender-laden assessments of biological "fitness." Over nine chapters, Bender pursues these tropes as they appear across diverse settings and sources: geographers' maps of climatic zones, missionaries' descriptions of tenement squalor, Eugenicists' photographs of "degenerate" families, socialists' satirical cartoons, and so on. Seemingly divergent concerns and interests, Bender shows, were all steeped in the distinctly racial terminology of "civilization."

Many of the characters (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Swallow Richards, Charles Davenport) and topics (craniometry, efficiency studies, better baby contests) in Bender's synthesis will be familiar to historians of U.S. science and technology. Indeed, further attention to existing scholarship might have strengthened the handling of several of the subjects briefly discussed here, such as the campaign for pure milk (see, for example, recent work by Kara Swanson), the advent of climate-control equipment (see Gail Cooper), or the role of steamship travel in shifting attitudes toward immigration (see Robert Barde). Yet American Abyss does turn over fertile soil for historians of technology in other respects. Most crucially, Bender's book provides an unusual perspective on concepts of technological change themselves—a matter of interest to historians in the wake of important studies by Leo Marx, Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Eric Schatzberg on the history of the word "technology."

As Bender makes clear, social scientists and popular observers alike assumed that the history of technology "began long before the development of the first factories" (p. 23). In the eyes of early-twentieth-century Americans, modern industry had its roots not in engineering or commerce but, "just like bird nests or beaver dams" (p. 18), in the prehistoric force of natural selection. This "evolutionary" conception of industrial change blurred boundaries between the studies of human, animal, plant, and insect development: in Bender's telling, entomology turns out to be of surprising importance to the history of American ideas about technology. It also established racial primitivism as the necessary twin of modern industrialism. Bender argues convincingly that the circulation of popular stories about Stone Age "cavemen" and the display of actual men and women of color as "living primitives" in museums, fairs, and sideshows helped define industrial progress for Americans "obsessed with measuring the distance between civilized and savage" (p. 24). Establishing the racial contours of fin-de-siècle Americans' fascination with technological prowess, Bender's study opens suggestive routes for further historical exploration.

In short, American Abyss exemplifies both the promise and peril of capacious historical syntheses. Despite its flaws (Bender's breezy dismissal of much crucial interdisciplinary scholarship seems particularly unfortunate), the...