March of the Iron Men

[Scribners, $3.75]

WHAT has been the decisive factor in uniting the States called United? There are nearly as many answers as there are social historians; but few of the answers are so concrete, so broadly suggestive, or so cogently defensible as that supplied by Mr. Burlingame, who believes that the most tremendous single agent of unification has been technology. His thesis is disclosed in the subtitle of this substantial, well-documented, generously illustrated volume: ‘A Social History of Union through Invention.’ The story that it tells is of human contrivance applied to the creation and adaptation of mechanical aids to living.

As the Preface announces: ‘ I have tried to show first a picture of the groups of people whose every gregarious effort was thwarted by the savage continent which confronted them; next of the demand of these people for whatever inventions would aid them in the conquest of that continent; and then of how those inventions bred others of such force and magnitude that they established a pattern of union to which the people must finally conform.’ Mr. Burlingame’s Iron Men are, then, the motley of mechanical servants that we Americans have gradually recruited in the course of our long, slow progress from chaos through variance to indivisibility.

An obvious danger of making mechanics central to an interpretation of history is that the interpretation itself may become mechanical, which is to say untrue. Mr. Burlingame has stockaded his thesis in safeguards against this risk. The Iron Men of his title receive, to begin with, a non-literal and adequately broad interpretation. For example, the log house is treated as a significant early invention. (Its momentousness, by the way, is not lessened by the circumstance that it seems to have been neither conceived nor used by the early colonists, whether of Virginia or Massachusetts.) Other non-metallic devices were forms of organization evolved to meet new economic and social needs; e.g., the curious colonial institution of the indentured servant, or voluntary slave-pro-tem. One almost incalculably portentous invention falls into the class of basic mechanical generalizations: to wit, Eli Whitney’s late-eighteenth-century achievement of interchangeable parts and hence of what we have learned to call mass production.

Furthermore, Mr. Burlingame is not trying to show that the immediate effect of every invention was to annihilate disparities and integrate life. He shows with great trenchancy, among other things, that the improvisation of the cotton gin (which merely happened to be Whitney’s: it, if any device in history, was bound shortly to appear) was a prime cause of the war of 1861. for the reason that it put the languishing institution of slavery back on to an irresistibly economic basis. The pageant is, almost throughout, a brilliant exhibition of tyrannic necessities giving birth to socially inevitable inventions that in their turn gave birth to new, unforeseen, equally tyrannic, sometimes revolutionary necessities.

At only one point does Mr. Burlingame perhaps descend into specious formula, and that is in the chapter that connects the creation of a practicable sewing machine with the emancipation of women through enhanced leisure. That outcome may seem logically predestined, but was not the actual outcome what it often is with ‘labor-saving’ machinery: that is, the diversion of the saving, not into reduction of toil, but simply into the multiplication of output?

The more we contemplate Mr. Burlingame’s: data, the more persuaded we become that by 1860 the technological framework of a nation had indeed been erected and that the completion of the structure was predestined. The very years of secession and war brought forth not only the Gatling gun, but also the structural I-beam, the curved stereotype plate, the torpedo for oil drilling. Lamb’s knitting machine, the block-signal system, the web printing press, and other mechanical denials of disintegration. Although ‘Americans in 1860 did not see the social pattern that machines had made,’ it was the pattern into which they had already been fitted beyond extrication. ‘The United States, from being a league of small, separate, self-sufficient entities, had grown into a whole . . . no longer dissoluble because none of those parts was longer self-sufficient, because the operation of economics through technology had rendered each dependent upon the others so that, divorced from the whole, neither the seceding part nor the part from which it had seceded could survive.’

Mr. Burlingame’s text is trivially marred by lapses from reasonable editorial care. The word ‘by-products’ appears spelled in four ways, and there are too many sentences comparable to this one: ‘But like another American painter whom we shall meet presently, the scientific lure dominated the artistic.’ His chapters deserve a thorough proofreading against later printings.

WILSON FOLLETT