 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the second day of the 21st Annual Nobel Conference, The Impact of Science on Society. We're pleased that we could provide you with such a sunny morning to come out and hear the second round of talks today. Let me remind you of our participants, J. Robert Nelson, Director of the Institute of Religion at Texas Medical Center and Clinical Professor of Community Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine. Merritt Rowe Smith, Professor of the History of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston Brill, Vice President of Research and Development, Agrisetus Corporation. Daniel Kevles, Professor of History of Science, California Institute of Technology. Salvador Luria, Director, Center for Cancer Research, Sedgwick Professor of Microbiology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's my pleasure this morning to have the opportunity to introduce to you our first speaker. When we invited Merritt Rowe Smith to address the Nobel Conference, I thought our choice to be very appropriate. After all, for a conference on the impact of science on society, it was fitting to look for a member of the program in science, technology, and society at MIT. Not only that, but his first book, entitled Harper's Ferry Armory and the New Technology, The Challenge of Change, was hailed by critics as a veritable tour de force. In this volume, Professor Smith explored the social impact of technology in 19th century America. And in the process, exploded a number of long cherished myths about American attitudes towards technological change. The book won the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History, a warm reception by any standard. I subsequently discovered that Rowe Smith's accomplishments did not end here. This graduate of Georgetown, incidentally, he can probably tell us what a Hoya is. End of Pennsylvania State University has been a Regents Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, a National Science Foundation Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Harvard Newcomen Fellow at Harvard, quite a fellow. While teaching at Ohio State University, furthermore, he won the Distinguished Teaching Award. Articles of his have appeared in the journal Technology and Culture, the Virginia Magazine of History, and a number of edited books, including his own recently published Military Enterprise and Technological Change, Perspectives on the American Experience. We have then an accomplished teacher and scholar whose expertise concerns societal attitudes and technological change. Perfect for this conference. Well, little did I realize just how perfect. The first clue I had appeared when Rowe asked me about an acquaintance of mine from graduate school with whom he had taught at Ohio State and who had become a very close friend of his. That acquaintance, I reminded Rowe, was a graduate of Gustavus Adolphus College. Rowe subsequently informed me that his wife, Bronwyn, who's accompanied him to the conference, first had attended a Nobel conference when she was an undergraduate at Sioux Falls College. Then I discovered that Rowe was a Fulbright scholar in 1983, where else but in Sweden, at the University of Lindschoping. By that point, it was clear to me that Rowe Smith was destined to speak at Gustavus Adolphus College sooner or later. We had simply arranged for it to be sooner. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure now to introduce to you Merritt Rowe Smith, who will address the topic on technology and progress, Perspective on the American Experience. Rowe? After that introduction, I think I should just say thank you and go home. Maybe some of the students are saying, why doesn't he do that? It'd be a shorter day. Kevin mentioned that I won a teaching award at Ohio State. And I thought to myself when he said that, that if he only knew what the circumstances were, he wouldn't have mentioned that. Because I'm convinced that the reason I won that award was it was the year that I happened to be in a big lecture auditorium like this. And I tried to talk to students, not to try to lecture to them. And I had the tendency to go around to the front of this platform and sort of sit on it and talk casually with them with a microphone around my neck. And one day I got going on, I think was on the abolitionist movement or something like that. And I got excited and I jumped off the desk. And I didn't realize that beneath me was a waste paper basket. And I got my foot caught in the waste paper basket and started jumping around trying to pull the thing off. And of course, the class went, thought it was the best thing that happened the entire term. And I'm sure that's why I got nominated for that teaching award. I had nothing to do with the content of the class. My topic today is about technology and progress. And it's limited to the American experience. Science finds, industry applies, man conforms. Science finds, industry applies, man conforms. Though little noticed at the time, these bold words epitomized the main theme of Chicago's Century of Progress International Exposition in 1933. Everywhere in artwork, architecture, exhibits, lighting, overall symbolism, the fair's promoters underscored the idea that progress rested on technology. Reflecting on the same theme in a book that was written to commemorate the Chicago fair, the noted historian Charles Austin Beard observed that, quote, technology is the fundamental basis of modern civilization, the supreme instrument of modern progress. Of all the ideas pertinent to the concept of progress he emphasized, none is more relevant than technology. Well, that was 50 years ago, or about 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago. In view of recent events, like Bipole Institute, West Virginia, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, and current events, like The Arms Race today's, audience is likely to consider such pronouncements overstated, even naive. Have public attitudes changed or do the Promethean implications of the Chicago ethos continue to hole sway in our society? How have Americans viewed technology historically? What legacies live on in the American mind and how have these experiences, with reference to technology, how have these experiences shaped our present perceptions of technological change? Indeed, what is the relationship between technology and the idea of progress in America? Now, these are big questions, and they obviously have no easy answers. But what follows is my effort to address the promises and pitfalls of viewing technology as the primary vehicle of social progress in the American experience. Now, the idea of progress is deeply rooted in American culture. Briefly defined, it consists of the belief that things are getting better and better, and that eventually the good life will be achieved across the entire range of human endeavor primarily through advances in science and technology. Although the concept can be dated back to classical times, its modern origin dates to the 17th century, the age of the great scientific revolution, and is associated with thinkers like Sir Francis Bacon and Renee Descartes. In its American form, the idea of progress initially drew more vitality from religion and the frontier experience than from science or technology. Though that relationship changed appreciably as the United States achieved independence and entered a period of sustained economic growth, beginning around in the early 19th century. It is often remarked that the frontier experience fostered an aggressive go ahead mentality among Americans while evangelical Protestantism encouraged a strain of millennial optimism, which blended very nicely with earlier Calvinistic beliefs about individual predestination and indeed national destiny. Clearly, the idea of progress and the idea of destiny are closely associated in American history, and together they form our culture's dominant conception of history, much of which is mythological to be sure, but nonetheless one which permeates our perspective, both as individuals and as a nation. The quasi-religious character of the idea of progress needs to be underscored here. In this context, because it helps us to understand why the concept is so deeply rooted in American culture and why, as my colleague Leo Marx once put it, a causal nexus exists between progress within science and technology and the general progress of humanity. Now, what constitutes progress? Intellectual, material, moral, political improvement? Given the definition I've just provided, these categories seem adequate. However, complications arise when one discovers that meaning shift and emphases change over time. What we mean by progress today is markedly different from what 18th century people thought about progress. Take, for example, Thomas Jefferson's thoughts on the topic. No one of Jefferson's generation held science and technology in greater esteem. Yet, as much as he revered discovery and invention, he always kept them in perspective and considered them means to achieving a larger social end. For Jefferson, progress ultimately meant the realization of a Republican polity with its emphasis on liberty and virtue in a predominantly agrarian society. Now, I want to stop here for a minute and say, when I say the word Republican polity, I don't mean large R Republican party. I'm referring to small R notion of republicanism as a form of government and as a frame of belief, deeply infused with moral ideas that held sway in the late 18th century. Jefferson and his writings emphasized republic is a great deal. And at one point, he talks about how the manners in the spirit of a people counted most because they helped to preserve a republic in vigor. As for urban factories and large-scale industrial enterprises, Jefferson feared that if left to themselves, they would eat like a cancer into the social fabric and destroy the laws and constitution of the United States. Quote, let our workshops remain in Europe. He admonished his readers and his notes in the state of Virginia in 1787. Let our workshops remain in Europe. While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench or twirling at this staff. Now, to leave it, Jefferson at this point might convey the impression that he was unalterably opposed to industrialization. Wrong. In fact, he had a lot to do with it, even though he seemed a reluctant participant. To him, credit is due, for example, for calling attention to interchangeable manufacturing methods and European armories and urging their adoption in the United States. A development that subsequently, during the 1830s and 40s, became one of the primary arteries of innovation and certainly of the Industrial Revolution in America. Later in life, Jefferson wrote a number of friends that he had actually admitted the need for industrialization in the United States. But what deserves special emphasis here is that his reservations about large-scale manufacturing reflected a more general concern about the implications of progress. Like many of his countrymen, Jefferson worried that progress in some areas could mean backsliding in others. As one of the primary architects of the American governmental system, he realized how precarious the equilibrium was between liberty, power, and virtue and how easily republics could be corrupted and fall. In the minds of late 18th century Americans, thin lines separated virtue from vice, prosperity from decadence, civilization from savagery. If carried to extremes, the civilizing process of technology and industrialization, it was thought, could easily be corrupted and bring down the moral and political economy that Jefferson and his contemporaries had worked so hard to erect. Given the seriousness of this threat, Jeffersonians, as well as many other Americans, they didn't necessarily have to vote for Jefferson to believe this, could never completely shed their misgivings about industrialization, even though they allowed it, and in many cases, actively participated in it. One of the best examples I can think of who were firm believers in the Jeffersonian theory of progress was the DuPont family of Delaware, who, as we all know, eventually became one of the premier industrial firms and later corporations of the United States. Well, the pursuit of science and the development of technology doubtlessly occupied an important place in this scheme of things. It was without betterment, without, well, when people spoke of progress as they often did, they constantly gave great weight to human betterment, intellectual, moral, spiritual betterment, as well as material progress. Without betterment, prosperity was meaningless in their eyes. This was important. As a means to a larger end, they assumed a lesser order of magnitude, and this business of science and technology assumed a lesser order of magnitude in the Jeffersonian scale of values. Now, when Jefferson died in 1826, appropriately on July 4th, 1826, the United States had already entered the Industrial Revolution. It's often argued that we industrialized after the Civil War. We were well on our way by the 1820s. By that time, the Boston Manufacturing Company's famous integrated textile mill at Waltham, Massachusetts had been in operation over a decade, and scores of mechanized factories dotted the eastern landscape of the United States. In the same year, 1826, a little-known Yankee mechanic by the name of John H. Hall unveiled a complete set of wood and metalworking machinery capable of manufacturing firearms with interchangeable parts and actually demonstrated the practibility of this concept to an astonished group of government officials. Only a year earlier, in 1825, the Erie Canal had successfully linked the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, thus opening an enormous hinterland trade with New York City and inaugurating what historians came to call the Transportation Revolution that would culminate decades later with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad System across the country. Clearly, a new era had dawned by the 1820s, and with it, and I want to, this is a critical part of my talk, with it emerged a different set of attitudes about progress in general and the role that technology would play in it. Slowly but perceptively, the belief in progress began to shift away from the moral and spiritual anchors of the revolutionary era toward a more utilitarian, hard-headed, business-oriented emphasis on profit, order, and prosperity. Now it's difficult to pinpoint exactly when and where these new attitudes first appeared. No doubt they had resided in the culture all along, only to become manifest as the pace of technological change quickened during the early national period, that is, during the years between the 1780s and the 1820s. In any case, one finds ample evidence of the new viewpoint among Jefferson's contemporaries, particularly those merchants and politicians who supported Alexander Hamilton's controversial programs for national economic development during the 1790s. A case in point is Tench Cox, probably a person who, well, some of you probably heard about him, born in 1755, dies in 1824, contemporary of Jefferson's. Cox was a prickly Philadelphia aristocrat who eventually ended up as a middle-level civil servant. But during his lifetime, he emerged as the United States foremost political economist and exponent of industrial development during the years that spanned the administrations of five presidents from Washington up through the administration of James Monroe in the mid-1820s. Like many of his contemporaries, Cox believed that America's political independence depended on the establishment of economic independence. Given the country's lowly economic status, he emphasized the need for machine-based manufacturers as the prime solution to the country's problems. Manufacturing represented the means of what he called our political salvation. Interesting, note the words that are used here. Salvation will come back to words like virtue. They permeate the rhetoric of the period. Manufacturing represents the means of our political salvation, he told an audience of sympathetic listeners in the summer of 1787. He continued, he says it will consume our native productions, it will improve our agriculture, it will accelerate the improvement of internal navigation, it will lead us once more into the paths of virtue by restoring frugality and industry, those potent antidotes to the vices of mankind and will give us real independence by rescuing us from the tyranny of foreign fashions and the destructive torrent of luxury. Now contrary to those who viewed manufacturing as a threat to America's agrarian way of life, Cox, who actually was a Jeffersonian in politics, held that mechanized industry would stimulate agriculture by consuming its products and creating even larger markets for agricultural goods. Throughout his writings, he tactfully subordinated manufacturers to agriculture, referring to the latter as America's quote, great leading interest. But contrasted with Jefferson and other proponents of agrarian democracy, one cannot help but sense a change of priorities here in Cox's thought. For Jefferson, progress meant the pursuit of science and technology in the interest of spiritual and material needs of people and maintaining a proper balance between them. Jefferson was extremely interesting and complex person in that sense, maintaining balance. For Cox, the emphasis shifted away from individual human needs to more impersonal societal ends, particularly the establishment of law and order. Clearly, Cox's anxiety about the nation's shaky economy reflected an even deeper concern about the state of society. In his papers and addresses of the period, he repeatedly expresses his fear that quote, extreme poverty and idleness in the citizens of a free government will ever produce vicious habits and disobedience to the laws and must render the people fit instruments for the dangerous purposes of ambitious men, convinced that such behavior will ultimately destroy the country's liberty. Cox thus supported the establishment of a strong central government as well as policy measures aimed at shoring up the Republic against the excesses of democracy. In effect, he sought to substitute institutional for ideological constraints. One measure, certainly the one dearest to his heart, aimed at putting people to work in factories. Quote, a man oppressed by extreme want is prepared for all evil and the idler is ever prone to wickedness, Cox declared, while the habits of industry, filling the mind with honest thoughts, do not leave leisure from meditating or executing mischief. Early factory workers soon found out what the meaning of those words were. The factory promised to employ the poor and the indigent, particularly women and children, and deliver them from the curse of idleness. In a word, it would be more than a place of employment. It would be a moral gymnasium where correct habits of discipline, hard work, obedience, and punctuality were inculcated. Every establishment of any size had elaborate work rules which enjoined employees from drinking, gambling, swearing, and loitering around during working hours and prodded them even to attend church on Sunday. Let me read you a set of, just a few of these rules to give you the flavor of what they were like in the 19th century. This is a set of work rules that were drawn from the regulations of a mill called the Burley Cotton Mill, 1852. They deal primarily with clerical employees. Not people who are out in the mill but people who are working in the clerical office. But the mill rules are very similar. I have chosen these because they're they're a little flamboyant and interesting, I think. It starts out with a big notice at the top of this printed page and they were all these rules are always printed saying notice to employees. And then it would list, in this case, 13 rules that had to be obeyed by anyone who took employment in the mill. Rule one, godliness, cleanliness, and punctuality are the necessities of a good business. Sounds right to me. Two, this firm has reduced the hours of work and the clerical staff will now only have to be present between the hours of 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays. That includes Saturday. Three, daily prayers will be held each morning in the main office. The clerical staff will be present. Four, clothing must be of a sober nature. The clerical staff will not despot themselves in raiment of bright colors nor will they wear hoes unless in good repair. Then I skip to another one which says, a stove is provided for the benefit of the clerical staff. Coal and wood must be kept in the locker. It is recommended that each member of the clerical staff bring four pounds of coal each day during cold weather. Seven, no member of the clerical staff may leave the room without permission from Mr. Rogers. Eight, and this is always around, no talking during business hours. Nine, and this is another one that you see in any factory set of regulations. The craving of tobacco, wines or spirits is a human weakness and as such is forbidden to all members of the clerical staff. And then finally there are a number of other regulations but I don't want to read all of them. This is the last paragraph. The owners recognize the generosity of these new labor laws and will expect a great rise in output to compensate for these near utopian conditions. 1852. Well in the process of fostering a highly controlled paternalistic environment, factory masters established a wall between themselves and their employees that eventually led to better confrontations over wages, working hours, and general control of the shop floor. As industrialization proceeded to pace, class distinctions became more pronounced during the 19th century as the face-to-face relationships of the traditional craft shop in which the owner knew his employees and openly mixed with them gave way to far more bureaucratic and depersonalized methods of the factory. By the 1830s considerable tension existed beneath the surface of industrial achievement. What had begun as an admittedly honest effort to improve and stabilize society and I underscore honest effort. I don't see any conspiracy afoot here. These people were doing what they thought was right. What had begun as an honest effort to improve and stabilize society ended up fraught with ideological and class conflicts. Now in the midst of this strife, popular orders, you're gonna keep looking at me and saying, geez, that guy's shifting. He goes over here and says, it's wonderful and he's changing it bad and then it's, you know, the point, one of the points I'm trying to make in this talk is how complex society really is. That there is no straight answer for this stuff. There are people with differing opinions all over the place. Having told you something about the negative aspects of industrialization, now I want to say something about how did the popular press look at this? How did they see that and what were the difficulties that existed within this realm of experience? In the midst of this strife, popular orders and journalists waxed eloquently over the progress of the age. Reassuring their audiences that technological innovation not only exemplify but actually guarantee progress. The evidence seemed incontrovertible to them. Decade by decade, the pace of technological change quickened, railroad, steamships, telegraphy, machine tools, structures of iron and steel, electricity. And with each decade, popular enthusiasm grew for inventors, these quote, men of progress. You've probably seen some of the famous paintings that hang in the Smithsonian of the famous inventors of the 19th century grouped together in a room sitting around various models of their inventions and the title of the painting is called Men of Progress. It's a very big thing in the 19th century. Now owing to their efforts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, referring to industrialists, exclaimed that life seems made over new. Are not our inventors, ask another enthusiastic writer, absolutely ushering in the very dawn of the millennium? It certainly seems so to Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune. Upon visiting that city's Crystal Palace exhibition in 1853, Greeley pronounced that quote, we have universalized all the beautiful and glorious results of industry and skill. We have made them the common possession of the people. We have democratized the means and appliances of a higher life. In Greeley's opinion, technology had become democracy's greatest ally. Well, not everyone saw things the same way, however. Members of America's intellectual community, artists like Thomas Cole, George Ennis, you can go down the list of the famous Hudson River Valley painters of the time, writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Millville, Henry David Thoreau, expressed serious misgivings about the new technology and its social consequences. One thinks for example of Hawthorne's ingenious short story called The Celestial Railroad, which was published I believe in the 1840s, in which a steam locomotive in its cars are depicted as a satanic implement leading or following a path straight to hell. The people who boarded that train were going to end up in the Netherlands, the hell land or whatever you wanna call it. Well, others like Emerson felt more ambivalent about the changes taking place, at times hailing the mechanic arts as a great liberating force in society and at other times kind of drawing back from it, not knowing what quite to make of it and still at other times saying this is craziness, what are we doing, we're rejecting our past, what's happening here? Well, the answer for Emerson and others came out in an essay I think that was very interesting that Emerson published in the 1850s in which it was called Works and Days. And in it, Emerson asked the following questions, I think they were very perceptive questions. He asked, quote, what have these mechanic arts done for the character for the worth of mankind? Are men better? The answer unfortunately seemed clear to Emerson, quote, to his two plane he concluded that with the material power, the moral progress has not kept pace. That with the material power, the moral progress has not kept pace. It appears that we have not made a judicious investment he concluded, Works and Days were offered us and we took works. Perhaps more than any other writer of his time, Emerson came closest to capturing I think the tensions that confronted working people in the 19th century. Reflecting the powerful influence, Protestant theology and Republican ideology exercised on the popular imagination. This tension consisted of a bifurcated view of industrial progress. On the one hand, workers like other Americans were fascinated with the age's technical creativity as well as the ingenious products that issued from it. There's no question about that. On the other hand, they frequently became apprehensive when new techniques actually entered their working places and began to threaten and upset and rearrange accustomed methods of doing work. No one knows whether large numbers of workers actually read Emerson's writings about technology, let alone appreciated his complex double edged message. I suspect they didn't. Emerson the philosopher in the common factory hand had little in common. Emerson the philosopher lived in different social worlds and operated on quite different levels of experience and perception and understanding. Emerson sought to extrapolate to the highest level of human experience that worker had to cope with his immediate experience. Don't tell me about these highfalutin ideas and visible eyeballs and the transcendental oversole and stuff like that. What did that mean to somebody running a milling machine? Crazy, I've lost my place. Okay, Emerson blamed, he blamed the mechanic arts for the country's materialistic emphases and threatened spiritual bankruptcy while workers worried about more mundane issues such as design, deployment and management of new machines and the effect that these new machines would have on wages, working hours and working conditions. Those are the issues that workers are concerned about. As members of a rapidly expanding industrial society, working people tended to maintain a curious aluthness from innovations that impinged on their working ways. They could look at the new inventions at distance and things that didn't impinge on their working ways and that was a different question. But while they never completely repudiated the new technology, they did not fully embrace it either. Instead, they tended to vacillate between the old and the new, curious, even admiring at times, but always apprehensive. As citizens and consumers, however, their attitude toward technology often took a different twist, as I just said. Here, owing partly to patriotic pride and partly to personal predispositions, working class Americans seemed to embrace the idea of progress just as fervently as the next person. This is amply attested to by their eager acquisition of industrial products, their admiration of other things, and their strong support for public education. Clearly one's view of progress depended. It depended on whether he or she was at home or at work. It depended whether he or she was at the store or in the mill. It depended. The existence of this double-sided attitude toward technology helps us to grasp more firmly, more clearly, the complexities, as well as the paradoxes inherent in the idea of progress and how perceptions of this idea of progress varied among different segments of the population. Clearly, progress not only meant different things to different social classes, it meant different things to the same person. Was Emerson correct? Had the country, its people, its institutions sacrificed moral progress for material power? Had the critical balance between spiritual growth and worldly prosperity, a concern so central to Americans of Jefferson's era had it been lost? The answer, I believe, is yes. Or at least to a degree, this answer would need qualification. With rapid industrial growth, the population gradually gravitated away from its spiritual anchors toward a more secularized material frame of belief, it did so more by default than by conscious choice. To be sure, the old Republican creed that emphasized things like virtue and corruption and things like that persisted. It could be heard occasionally in the July 4th speeches that were offered at county fairs and in other celebratory occasions, but its purpose by the 1850s and 60s and 70s, its purpose and its message was growing fainter and fainter. It seemed as if it was more rhetoric, its effect more nostalgic than real. In its place, a new creed, which glorified the march of invention and the products of industry could be seen. Now, if any of you've done any local history, you've probably looked at some of these county histories that were so popular in the late 19th century. Many of these books talk about the march of invention, the progress of the age, and it's a good example of the sort of frame of belief that I'm pointing to in this argument. Henry Adams, one of the most astute observers of 19th century America, witnessed these changes and wrote movingly about them in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. Undergraduates, if you ever read a book, this is one you ought to read. It's one of those classics that I don't think anyone can claim a liberal education without having read The Education of Henry Adams. It's a marvelous piece of work, written in 1907. At the outset, Adams recognized the impact that technology had exerted on his personal life through railroads, steamboats, and telegraphy. But the capstone came when he attended the Paris Exposition in 1900 and witnessed the tremendous invisible power generated by electric dynamos. And the invisibility of this was an important aspect of the reaction that Adams had. Odd by the experience, Adams reported that he, quote, began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force much as early Christians had felt the cross. Moreover, he sensed that the dynamo had replaced the cross as the primary force in American civilization. Indeed, he found himself praying to it. For Adams, the contrast between the dynamo and the cross, sometimes he used the expression, the virgin. There's a famous title called the dynamo and the virgin, but the cross and the virgin are similar. For Adams, the contrast between the dynamo and the cross symbolized an enormous shift of faith away from the great principles of Christianity toward those of science and utility. The former stood for love, the latter for power. For Adams, as for Emerson, the contrast between these two kingdoms of force spoke volumes about what had been lost through industrialization. Nearly 40 years earlier in 1862, Henry Adams had written to his brother, Charles, that, quote, man has mounted science and is now run away with. By 1900, the truth of that statement seemed even clearer in Adams' mind. Now, take a drink. This brief reconnaissance into the 19th century reveals that prior to the Civil War, Americans turned away from an essential part of the Republican ethos and in doing so lost touch with basic human and moral sentiments that had originally informed the idea of progress. Bolstered by a seemingly endless stream of triumphs in science and technology, social leaders became increasingly arrogant about what could be achieved through rationalization and standardization and began to discount and even disparage other beliefs that accentuated the unrational or the irrational that Professor Luria was speaking about yesterday, beliefs that accentuated mystery, emotion, variability in human affairs. With the spiritual element effectively removed from the idea of progress, its material aspects became dominant. The old parity between moral and material progress disappeared, effectively disappeared, and with it emerged one of the central dilemmas, I believe, of our present age, namely an unbridled enthusiasm for technological innovation and the ascendancy of profit over tradition in the rush to rationalize all aspects of industrial life. Enthusiasm for the technical, the sweet technical problem is another important element in this. Now, our attachment to the idea of progress and its modern utilitarian form has often caused us to overlook the human and environmental implications of technological change. This is not the place to rehearse all the pitfalls of progress. Suffice it to say that the evidence is plentiful. Take my word for it, I'm a doctor, I know what I'm doing, right? If you've seen the movie, Love at First Bite, you'll know what I'm referring to there. Maybe you shouldn't take my word for it as the answer to that. Well, this isn't the place to rehearse all of that information. Instead, let's look briefly at one industry, the automobile industry, an area of enterprise that became emblematic of American technological leadership in the 20th century. Unlike virtually all new technologies, the introduction of the automobile had a number of unintended consequences. On the positive side, it extended one's freedom of choice, power and mobility in ways that had never been dreamed of. It was an extremely powerful force in American society. There's no doubt about it. On the other hand, its widespread use led to serious traffic and environmental problems. And according to some observers, bore responsibility for increased sexual promiscuity, decreased church attendance, and the breakdown of family and neighborhood solidarity. If you've read the famous book on Middletown by The Lens, you'll recall their discussion of the automobile and they're one of the observers of the business about sexual promiscuity. I have to admit that as a young teenager, I recall the uses of automobiles. They're very vague and fading in my memory, though. I was before I became a serious scholar. Well, all these factors are sufficient to warn us of the ambiguities and doubts that complicate popular perceptions of the idea of progress. For the moment, I've got to even limit myself further and single out a more subtle problem, indigenous to industrialization, that initially affected a relatively small segment of the population, but had significant long-term consequences for everyone. I refer, of course, to mass production and the standardization of work. Now, the person who popularized the concept of mass production, as we all know, is Henry Ford. Between 1908 and 1914, his company introduced the famous Model T and developed manufacturing methods that completely transformed the automobile industry and rapidly diffused that technology throughout the American and world technological communities. From the outset, Ford's disarming candor and hard-headed practicality captivated Americans. He was an interesting person. No doubt, people saw a bit of themselves in the so-called Fliver King and they evidently liked what they saw, tough, reliable, practical, and above all, economical. The car aptly reflected Henry Ford's personality. With the tremendous success of the Model T, there were 15 million Model T's produced between 1908 and 1927. With the tremendous success of this vehicle, Ford assumed the mantle of a national folk hero. His opinion was sought on everything from politics to religion, and he seemed to have ready answers for most of the questions that were put to him. Disarming answers most of the time. When asked, for example, what he thought about the debilitating environment of the city retorted, well, we shall solve the city problem by leaving the city. No, why are you guys asking these stupid questions? Ford's pronouncements always seemed so candid and simple, but embedded in them were deeply imbued values and attitudes that reflected a rural upbringing and a Protestant culture from which he came. Now, to be sure, Henry Ford was a man with a mission. At one point he said, I am going to democratize the automobile, told this to a friend in 1909. When I'm through, everyone will be able to afford one and about everyone will have one. However, when it actually came to building Model T's, Ford's mass production for the people, as it would often refer to mass production for the people, the democratization of industrial products. This mass production of the people took a singularly perverse turn away from democratic values toward autocracy. Ford the factory master and Ford the popular hero turned out to be quite different people. While he enthusiastically promoted his car for the masses, he adamantly rejected any notion of socioeconomic equality on the shop floor. Most certainly, he said in his autobiography, most certainly all men are not equal. And any democratic conception that strives to make men equal is only an effort to block progress. In Ford's utilitarian mind, democracy was inherently wasteful and there was nothing he detested more than waste. Thus, even though he viewed himself as a benefactor of mankind, a businessman who worked not just for personal profit, but thought that he was working for the social welfare. Again, an honest man here. He adopted a quasi military approach to production and steadfastly refused to acknowledge the equality of people on the shop floor. In Ford's hierarchical world, just like Huxley's Brave New World, another book that should be on every undergraduate's reading agenda, everything had its assigned place. Hired labor's place was to stand at command and submit to the rules of the employer. Nothing more, nothing less. I should pour ice into the glass when Professor Luria did that yesterday. Everyone was going, oh, sounds so good. Ford's manufacturing approach, popularly known as Fordism, emphasized principles of rationality, continuity, and speed. Specifically, it consisted of a highly integrated and closely managed system of single-purpose machine tools, specialized fixtures and gauges, moving assembly lines and absolute interchangeability of parts. The key words here are system and rationality. Compared with earlier industrial methods, what is most noteworthy about Ford's system is the degree to which it subordinated workers to machines. Prior to the advent of mass production, workers had pretty much controlled the pace of their work by virtue of their monopolization of essential skills. Under Fordism, this changed. Ford and his engineer associates, men like Cast Iron Charlie Sorenson and Pete Martin, made no bones about their desire to simplify individual work tasks, and if possible, replace skilled workers with machinery. Such thinking had been around a long time. It was certainly a central premise of the industrial engineer by the early 1900s, but it had been around since the early 1800s. But Ford was the first to carry this move out on a massive scale. It's the massiveness of this that is important. Not that Ford invented much. He brought a lot of things together, but it's the massive scale that's innovative. The idea was to simplify individual work assignments so that they could be performed by virtually anyone with a few days of training. In doing so, the Ford management team eliminated the need for large numbers of skilled molders and machinists, the two most independent and intractable factory employees. Their places would be filled by what were called de-skilled specialists or machine tenders, all of whom performed basically the same tasks of inserting a piece of work in a preset machine, throwing a switch and pulling the work out after it had been machined. Such work, which reached its logical extreme on the assembly line, was highly repetitive and routinized with no opportunity for employees to exercise individual judgment. I'll never forget working in one of those plants just as a summer job as a college student in and out and in and out, you felt like a monkey or something putting stuff in and out. And I thought to myself, boy, I'm gonna go back to school and work hard because I sure don't wanna end up in this job. And that was sort of the lesson I learned from that job. It was very monotonous. Well, Fordism required and demanded a new degree of conformity. Instead of setting their own pace, workers found themselves increasingly being paced by the machine. Now, the response to Ford's methods was predictable. Workers complained about the relentless pressure and deadly monotony of the assembly line and likened the company's New Highland Park factory to a lunatic asylum. You probably have viewed the comic scene in the movie Modern Times where Charlie Chaplin's little tramp goes berserk after experiencing the speed and pressure of work on an assembly line. Well, Chaplin's inspiration for that classic satire came after visiting Ford's Highland Park plan in 1923. Clearly serious labor problems existed at Highland Park. In 1913, the year Ford introduced the assembly line, daily absentee rates averaged about 10% of the total workforce while labor turnovers reached an amazing, 370%. This meant that on any given day from 1300 to 1400 workers stayed home from the job and that Ford managers had to hire more than 52,000 workers to maintain a workforce of 13,600 workers, 52,000 for 136. Needless to say, such problems seriously jeopardized the efficiency of Ford's operations. The company's solution was to institute the famous $5 day in January 1914. An action which signaled an important trade-off, and underline the word trade-off here because this is a thing that has continued into the present, a trade-off in labor management relations. In return for higher wages and shorter hours, Ford's employees submitted to a highly paternalistic welfare plan which imposed rigid controls on both their home life as well as their work day. In addition to condemning idleness as a disgrace and exalting the gospel of hard work, members of Ford's personnel department, often called the sociological department, never called it the personnel department, actually entered the homes of workers, questioned them about personal habits and affairs, instructed them in such manners as personal hygiene, social behavior, and especially thrifting us. The company had a very clear idea of what thrift entailed. By this, a company official stated in January 1914, we mean that the employee shall not be addicted to the excessive use of liquor, nor gamble, nor engage in any malicious practice, derogatory to good physical manhood or moral character. Moreover, he added, every Ford employee was expected to, quote, conserve his resources and make the most of his opportunities that are afforded him in his work. Thrift thus had important moral connotations, but it mainly aimed at ensuring that employees would come to the plant fully prepared to work attentively and to give their best to the company. In the short run, money talked, and Ford's paternalistic program got results. Within the space of a year, labor turnovers fell from the phenomenally high levels of 1913 down from 370% down to around 54%, still high, but fell dramatically. During the same period, absenteeism decreased from 10 to around 2.5% of the workforce. But in the long run, the program for social control failed. High wages simply could not compensate for the absence of humane working conditions. Although the Ford company paid the highest wages in the automobile industry, workers found the system oppressive. Labor turnovers continued to be high because thousands of people simply could not stand the unrelenting pace and its accompanying pressures. Those who stayed on the job quickly learned how to slow the machine down through various forms of sabotage and subterfuge. I remember doing it myself. There are all sorts of tricks you can do. You know, on a assembly line, one way to slow the line down is at the end of the line, lock the keys in the car, and everything stops. You get a break, take a cigarette, and things lessen a little bit. It happened a lot. Those who stayed on the job quickly learned these things, these little tricks. Such practices allowed them to cope, to cope with their labor rather than necessarily enjoy it. Although the trade-off between labor and management continued, it operated to neither side satisfaction. Managers complained about labor's lack of commitment and loyalty to the firm, while labor complained about harsh working conditions, and a fundamental lack of respect on the part of their employers. At best, the high-wage, hard-work trade-off was a tenuous accommodation. Now, a glance at recent events in the auto industry reveals that the same old problems persist. Numerous investigators have documented the dissatisfaction that exists among workers, even though their wages and benefits remain among the highest in the land. Writing about the so-called blue-collar blues of the 1970s, for example, a journalist named Judson Gooding observed that, quote, high absenteeism and quit rates, excessive rework and scrap, deliberate acts of soil age and vandalism, hostile resistance to supervision, and an increased willingness to strike pervaded the workforce. Other writers detect the same symptoms while attributing them to deep-seated psychological and social problems inherent in mass production. Most everyone agrees that high wages and excellent benefits have not generated the incentive, loyalty, and high-quality work manufacturers initially expected. In this respect, money did not talk. The promise of material comfort did not produce widespread feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment. Indeed, by the 1970s, the high-wage trade-off had become a distinct economical liability to manufacturers, especially after foreign competitors began to capture long-held American markets for mass-produced goods who began to feel a lot then. Instead of directly confronting and resolving the inherent social tensions of mass production, industry leaders tended to do what they had always done, namely look for technological fixes, technological solutions. For them, progress meant designing the human element out of the production system. And to a significant degree, they succeeded with critical input from military-funded research projects, something that oftentimes we blink at in a supposedly free enterprise economy is the fact that a lot of these new technologies are funded under the auspices of the military. With military support, large resources were channeled into the development of automated production systems. The earliest of these, numerically controlled machine tools, appeared in the 1950s under Air Force sponsorship, although widespread applications of this new technology did not take place for nearly two decades. That's a story in itself, and I can't get into that here. Today, mass production industries, led by automakers, have moved well beyond the specialized applications of automated machines toward the deployment of highly integrated computer-controlled design and production systems for entire factories. We're not talking about just a machine or two, we're talking about the whole works automated. The most noteworthy examples are computer-aided manufacturing, computer-integrated manufacturing, direct numerical control, programmable controllers, and of course robots like Puma, General Motors' programmable universal machine for assembly. Collectively, these innovations and others like them form the core of what is now being called the second industrial revolution. I'm gaining, almost done. From a purely economic perspective, the results are impressive. Even critics acknowledged the potential flexibility, productivity, and profitability of these new systems. Perhaps most important in the eyes of managers, computer program machinery neither tires nor talks back. Like the mechanical slaves, so often depicted in 19th century literature, they perform their tasks efficiently and without complaint. In this respect, the new technology presents an ideal solution to the perceived labor problem by solidifying management's control of the shop floor and lessening labor's influence. This is possible because managers now have direct access to computer programs that direct the machinery. They no longer have to rely as much on workers at the point of production. Having been purposely designed to minimize the skills, the need for skills, and to diminish worker decision making, the new technology holds the promise of effectively establishing management's long sought authority over labor. This has been going, I mean, this is not something that happened since the Second World War. This has been going on since the early 19th century. That's one of the interesting parts of all of this. Presented with the prospect of cheaper goods, of comparable, perhaps even better quality, it's not surprising that most Americans, including working people, generally view computer automation as a positive force in society. That is, they see it as progress. So long as it doesn't threaten their earning power or rootenize and downgrade their work, to say this, of course, is to acknowledge the paradoxical behavior Americans exhibit toward technological innovations. A machine operator may think nothing of buying a TV set made in an automated factory, but bring a centrally controlled automatic production unit into his shop, that's another question. Certain boundaries thus separate what people accept as progress or condemn as exploitation. The way people respond to change depends on what they do, how long they've been doing it, and where they stand in the organizational and social hierarchy. Questions of status, tradition, and control, thus loom large in any discussion of technology and progress. By and large, American workers are no more antagonistic toward technological innovation than the next person. But when change threatens to undo certain valued rights and traditions, they quite naturally resist, as anyone would. There's no question that automation, as currently practiced in the United States, poses a serious threat to working people. Even setting aside the hotly debated issues of de-skilling, dislocation, and structural unemployment, all of which are attributed to automation, there are plenty of other reasons for concern. For one thing, workers consider employment and automated plants to be dead-end jobs with little or no opportunity for skill enhancement or advancement. At the same time, stress levels on the shop floor remain as high or even higher as they were at Ford's Highland Park Factory in the 1910s. And even more ominous feature of the new technology is management's ability to monitor more closely, much more tightly, through computer controls to monitor the work process. Indeed, the technology has now advanced to the point that a supervisor can sit at a console with a CRT screen and keep track of scores of machines on the production floor. Formerly, machine operators could pace themselves or take a break by putting in already finished work and in effect cutting air. It's another way of soldiering on the job, as Frederick Taylor called it, but that's been going on for a long time. Now, by detecting the amount of electric power being used at each machine through these various devices, supervisors can even tell when a machinist is goofing off. Employers no longer have to hire spies on the shop floor like Henry Ford did to tell them what's going on. Computer systems do it for them. Finally, the leverage, the mechanics used to exercise over their employers by virtue of their possession of special skills and knowledge of the shop floor is rapidly eroding. Given the tremendous flexibility of the new computer technology, managers can now use it as a way of disciplining labor by threatening either to move production to somewhere in the locality or, well, primarily to move production somewhere else. This happened in 1973, for example, when General Motors, faced with a strike at its Cadillac Civil Body plant in Detroit, moved, simply picked up the tapes, moved these tapes containing all the information necessary to machine body dyes to a non-striking plant in Flint, Michigan. This is the ultimate advantage of automation to employers. It can be used to ward off and even break strikes. As the failure of the highly publicized PAPCO or Air Traffic Controller Strike in 1981 well illustrates, the advent of computerized automation has fundamentally altered the balance of economic power and collective bargaining and management's favor. Now, it might be argued that the internal problems of automated mass production touch a relatively small segment of the population and that, after all, far more people benefit from its products than are degraded by its processes. Shouldn't the fears and grievances of working people be submerged in the interest of the, quote, larger good? To be sure, there's some validity to this argument. Our society has achieved one of the highest standards of living in the world and we have already noted how Fordist methods help to democratize the ownership of automobiles as well as all sorts of other consumer products in America. But there's another deeper cultural dimension to mass production that is more problematic. The concern here is about its authoritarian character and the effects that this authoritarian character can have on a democratic society. Several writers, most notably Louis Mumford and more recently, Harley-Shakin, have pointed to the fundamental incompatibility that exists between authoritarian techniques and democratic values. Quote, when work is electronically demeaned in the office or the factory-shakin' rights, the repercussions carry far beyond the workplace. There is no question that artifacts have politics as products of particular segments of society technologies reflect the values of their creators and thus are loaded with all sorts of ideological implications. How far dare we go before the authoritarian character of our leading technologies spill over and erode our political and social system? How far do we go? Are we playing roulette here? Have we reached that point already? Well now, what, okay, what does all of this mean for the idea of progress in America? Should the belief in progress be jettisoned as largely a misguided dream? Frankly, I think not. Although a number of intellectuals have predicted its early demise in the 20th century, it continues to exercise considerable sway among all segments of the population. There are times when the belief in progress seems to be receding in American culture, the 1930s, the 1970s, only to reemerge evidently as strong as it ever was before. This remarkable resilience testifies to the doctrine of centrality in American culture. Indeed, it's so deeply rooted in the culture that I doubt if it could be extricated without paying an unacceptably high psychological and economic price. I for one worry that we might throw the baby out with the bathwater by rejecting the notion. Now the idea of progress has its positive and negative sides to be sure. Although I didn't have time to provide close documentation, we have seen how appeals to progress have been used to condone profoundly anti-democratic practices in our society. We have also seen how modernization in the form of sophisticated productivity-enhancing technologies and highly-rationalized management controls are justified in the name of progress and often at the expense of working people. But we also need to remind ourselves, and this is my main point, we need to remind ourselves that in its early formulations the idea of progress stood for something more than just material goods. It stood for high moral principles and human betterment. In addition to fostering a go-ahead, get-ahead mentality among Americans, it aimed at strengthening our commitment to ecolitarian as well as individual rights. Equally important, the belief in progress encourages hope. Hope for the human race. Hope for the improvement of its condition. Hope that history will have a happy ending. These are tall orders to be sure, but they're commendable ones in my view. I'm not ready to throw them over. As an undergraduate, I remember reading an article entitled What is Still Living in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson? I'm not a contemporary of Jefferson, so this is 20 years ago, not 200. What is Still Living in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson? In respect to particular forms and policies, the author concluded much of Jefferson's philosophy was outmoded. But in respect to fundamentals, particularly the place of human rights and the form of government best suited to secure these rights, he found Jefferson's philosophy still valid. That historian's name was Carl Becker, one of the premier American historians of the 20th century, next to Beard, who I quoted earlier in my talk. Now my message today is that there is much that is still living in the idea of progress in America, and not all of it is for the better, to be sure. In our rush to pursue sweet technical problems, to accumulate fortunes, to exercise power, we have often substituted technocratic means for humanitarian ends, and in the process, lost sight of the priorities that people of Jefferson's day assigned to the idea of progress. To them, progress meant material prosperity to be sure, but it also meant growth of the human spirit and the abolition of inequalities in society. There is no denying that today's society is far more complex than that of Jefferson's era. Having discovered that rationality splinters our lives as rapidly as it orders them, we are far less sanguine about the inevitability of progress, certainly far less sanguine than people in the 19th century were about it. We have learned the hard way that not everyone profits from progress. We have also learned the hard way that technological progress does not necessarily mean social progress, and that there are winners and losers in the process of technological change. The arms race, environmental deterioration, structural unemployment, all press upon us ever harder, faced with these dilemmas, perhaps it's time to get back to fundamentals. We need to rekindle the Jeffersonian ideal of the middle landscape with its sensitivity to the necessity for balance between the spiritual and material aspects of life, for balance between nature and civilization. In the process, we have to be willing to ask, we have to be willing to debate, we have to be willing to repeat, we have to be willing to hopefully resolve without recrimination and reprisal the hard questions. Progress for whom? Progress for what? What kind of progress do we as a society really need? Thank you. If you would like to stand and stretch for a few moments, we'll take a break before the other panelists come forward and discuss this paper. Thank you, Ro. I'm not widely read in the year. He's both a professor of physics. I don't know. Well, I believe the campus systems have been a lot better. In fact, there's several first grade colleges here, in McAllister, and so forth. I don't know much about them. I'm just wondering. Yeah, yeah. I have a little one. You know, even my college would fall in India. Nationally considered, we are seventh in the proportion of graduates who get to the doctor's degree. Ladies and gentlemen. Surprise. All the studies have done so well. Call the meeting to order here. We'd like to take this opportunity to have our panelists respond to the provocative paper, which Ro Smith just read us, raising, again, some hard questions about societal attitudes and technological change. I'd like to direct attention first to Dan Kevelis, who has a comment to make. Ro, I thought your lecture was excellent, first of all. And I couldn't agree with it more. But it seems to me that it raises an issue which is fundamental to the functioning of the American economy and also the quality of life in the United States. On the one hand, we have the goals and the values of efficiency, competitiveness, technological progress, and so on. Before the altar of which human values in the workplace have tended to be sacrificed, and about which there has been an enormous number of battles extending back well over a century involving labor and management, formation of labor unions, and eventually the passage of state and federal laws to ameliorate the situation and install some greater balance in the work environment. On the other hand, the cost of making the workplace more humane, it is claimed in any case, has been a reduction in efficiency, a reduction in competitiveness, a threat to the pace of technological progress, and so on. For example, we see in the automobile industry, and I can testify to this as a California resident where every third or fourth car is made in Japan, that there has seemed to be a diminishment of American technological innovation and competitiveness. Now, do you have any thoughts then on how we should balance or what sort of trade-offs it seems that we can possibly make between the values of technological progress, economic competitiveness, and so on, on the one hand, and humanness in the workplace on the other, given the fact that we are really no longer living in a domestic economy but in an international economy and in which we have to worry about technological progress, competitiveness, et cetera, coming from abroad. And a corollary to that is, for example, how do the Japanese do it? Well, one of the things that's very interesting about early American history is that there were certain choices that were made as early as 1800 about what types or what shape would the industrial system take. The United States developed a style of technology and of industrialization that emphasized a large-scale centralization, speed, continuity, and it sort of evolved into the mass production we talked about today. The other option at that time was to have built an industrial system around smaller shops, more flexible technologies, that could have employed smaller shops in the sense that they would have employed fewer or smaller workforces. And it's been argued today by a number of political economists, one of whom is a colleague of mine at MIT, so this is not really my idea, but it is one of the options that's being considered is that what needs to be done today is that with the development of these new computer guided and controlled devices and machine tools and things like that to restructure the industrial base in a way that would make things more flexible and bring control down into a smaller shop framework than you see in these mills and employ 600, 700, 1,000, 1,500 workers. And the people argue, people like Charles Sable argue that by doing that, you improve the communications between owners and workers. And fighting out battles over the question of shop floor control, which is obviously one of the key questions in all of these debates, that in fighting out those battles, that they're less tense, they're less bitter than they are in the large scale industrial style that we have today. So the one possibility is to restructure the industry, not to copy the Japanese, but really to restructure industry in a way that makes use of the flexibility that's brought to us by these new technologies. Can you be as efficient and competitive, though, in the small manufacturing environments? It's argued that you have to wait and see, but part of the argument is yes. They think it would be as efficient. And again, there is historical precedent for that. We know very well that the United States pioneered the development of interchangeable manufacturing, the mass production of firearms in the 19th century. We also know that in Great Britain that that system was not developed, and yet British manufacturers were out producing American manufacturers using hand production techniques on this flexible scale. So there's plenty of evidence that even though you go to a smaller level of scale, doesn't necessarily be less efficient. Scale is not, that correlation doesn't necessarily exist all the time. But it is not only a matter of scale, the size of the thing. It seems to me that what has happened is that after the Second World War, American industry being without competition for a sort of purposes of maximizing profits and wages. The unions and manufacturers more or less cooperated in getting, not worrying about the quality of the products and so on, satisfying a certain market and not preparing factories that could not modernizing factories was not as bad as in the steel industry, but it was almost as bad in the auto industry. So that when competition started again, coming especially from Japan, the American industry was found in that condition. And it had really been a collaboration between the manufacturers and the workers to have high wages and rather old fashioned manufacturing. So I'm not sure the size of the operation is critical. The important thing is whether there is a true application of the most modern in order not only to maximize profit and wages in the short range, but to create an American industry which is competitive and satisfactory. Certainly in the steel industry, we are desperate in that condition, much more so than in auto. And it's interesting that in the steel industry, some of the areas in which the United States remain most competitive would be in these small specialty areas. I forget one of the MIT graduates has a firm in Texas. It's supposed to be a very profitable operation, primarily because he's taken it in a different direction, making use of the latest technologies. And it's very competitive in especially steels. Roe, I have a question here from the floor, which directs us back to one of yesterday's lectures. From your historical perspective, would you please comment on Dr. Winston Brill's Tuesday lecture, particularly the optimism in that Tuesday lecture? First of all, let me say that Winston Brill is one hell of a good guy. Now. It's not an area that I possess special expertise in, but it seems to me one of the interesting things about that talk was it brought home to me how important the notion of enthusiasm for change is when people are looking for new ways of doing things, whether or not the development of these new technologies. I asked a question about how would this affect the small farmer, because I personally feel that that's a part of life. Like Jefferson, I feel that a lot of our strength has been in small rural areas of America. And I hate to see that aspect of America disappear as it is disappearing today. I do worry about the development of these new technologies. And I hope that people like Dr. Brill are attuned to these concerns and will try to work them to the advantage of not just large agribusinesses, but to the interests of small producers. Winston, would you like to comment on that? Well, it's really a different comment. But the first time I've heard a talk like that, and I was fascinated with it and saw many, many themes going through your talk. But I was thinking that it's a definition of progress I have troubles with. Progress is the way I'm seeing it as time, and we can't alter time. And China, for instance, stopped, People's Republic of China, stopped technological progress for a number of years, but they progressed, I guess, in a political fashion in a very different way. And how much have they benefited from that? Clearly now, they're jumping into technological process with as much vigor as they possibly can. And I wonder if there's some things to be learned from that, as it really is an opposition to what's occurred in the United States. It's very interesting that you asked that question, because last summer I was at a conference at Ehrlich House in Virginia. And it was a conference that brought together a group of about 70 graduate students in the social sciences and sciences that were in the United States from the People's Republic studying for their graduate degrees. And inevitably, that question came up about what was it like during the Cultural Revolution? And I didn't ask the question, but in listening to it, the thing that was interesting was I didn't hear one of these students say that they had, again, it was a sort of ambivalent answer. They said, on the one hand, of course, when you're sent out to the countryside and you're taken from your families and sent out a kid that had been raised, say, his parents and several of them, in China as in other areas, if your father or mother are likely to be professors or bureaucrats, you're likely to be training in that same mode. So if you were living in Beijing and you were told to go to the countryside and you were the daughter of a professor of music at one of the institutes there, that was a dramatic change in your life. And yet, in the students that I talked to, they said, you know, when I experienced it, I was very sad, I was shaken, I didn't like it, but when I reflect on it, it has given me a feeling for China and the need to make my country better that I would never have if I hadn't experienced that Cultural Revolution. So even in those dark times, there seems to have been a learning process going on among the Chinese literati that was a positive force. And yet, on the other hand, I think most of them would have said, well, if you had your choice, would you condone this Cultural Revolution or would you wish that it had never come? I think the answer to that is that they wish it would never have come and yet they learned from it. So it's still, as a historian, I see people out there might think, well, that guy's hedging on all these things and he's so damn ambiguous. But as a historian, I think one of the things you learn about history, about human affairs is the inherent complexity and ambiguity of how people live together. And if you don't understand that, I don't know what you can know. A small footnote to that, which is in total contradiction to what you just said, bro. Go right ahead. This is an interpretive discipline. It's just a matter of fact, it's not a matter. It means that you sample opinion and you find that there's a distribution of it. And many Chinese who have come through Caltech since the Cultural Revolution, including doctoral students, professors, and so on, they were sent out to the countryside mid-career to work the rice paddies. And they say it was not a waste of time and they hated it and they resented it and they think it was simply a pit in their lives. But you have to understand that the people that I was talking to were people who were under the age of 28 or 30. We're not talking about middle-aged people who were already in career lines. We were talking about kids that were 13 and 14 years old and this is going on. And I think it does make a difference. What age the person is is to how it affected them. Not necessarily a contradiction. No, I would say, I mean, it's just a... Touche. It's an enlargement on your sample population as well. Dr. Nelson, would you like to comment? Well, just ruminating on the discussion, I've had some thoughts as all of us have. I think a sense of quandary and confusion over ways by which our country as a whole can realize a potential economically and technologically as well as culturally and in terms of basic human good. You know, it's a rather complex way of putting my thought but I'm concerned with the fact that we do not have generally in our country anymore, whether we used to but I think anymore, a real sense of industrious responsibility. Now we can laugh as we did and there's no doubt we always will at the rules put up on the wall of the cotton mills in New England in 1850. They were, we'd say, oppressive, restrictive, impersonal and all the rest. And certainly they are vulnerable to much criticism but as also Dr. Kublis has said, that we don't laugh anymore at similar policies in Japanese industries because if we hear anything true about the mode of production in Japanese industries, they are rest upon a strong sense of a virtually regimented loyalty of the workers to their company and the most beautiful expression of what has now become the object of laughing and scoffing, namely the submax vapor's Protestant ethic. Now my concern is how it's possible without resorting to government regimentation or other kinds of restrictions upon human freedom to recover some of the sense of industriousness and of collective purpose which will produce not only goods of quality, a restoration of craftsmanship and quality rather than the built in obsolescence of much of our production but also the better kind of social life that we are looking for. I just posed a great question. I think it's a massive problem before us in the United States and I'm conscious of the fact that many of us, like myself, who tend to become preoccupied with rather abstract and theoretical questions of science and technology tend to ignore these economic and managerial and productive problems which are everywhere around us. I don't know whether Professor Smith has greater wisdom to give me on this. I'd like to know if he has some thoughts because he's ended his very fine lecture with a rhetorical question, progress for whom, progress for what and that is what we have to answer. Again, when I look at the big picture of American history and I ask myself, well, where were the real creative acts of innovation and invention? Where did they take place? The answer oftentimes is that they didn't happen in large-scale operations. They happened in small shops in which there was considerable interchange between workers, managers and owners going on, considerable movement and interaction. The problems often arose once the new technologies were developed and began to be expanded and extrapolated in much larger-scale ways. That's when the problems began to appear. You never heard of anyone say, one of the most creative inventors of American machine tools in the 19th century is a guy named Simeon North from Middletown, Connecticut. He had a shop of about 60 people. He's well known to have invented what is known as the plain milling machine. It's a basic machine tool in any shop, even today. Never had a strike. Never had, from reading the correspondence, never had any serious labor problems in the way that, say, a Lowell mill that employed 600 did. It seems to me that the question of scale in that regard is important, that so much depends on who's running the shop and how they get along with the people that they employ. And it sounds so commonsensical, but it makes a difference. And I've studied, one of my research specialties is to study the history of firms, industrial firms. And over and over again, when people ask me, why do some communities enter the industrial revolution more easily than others? Why do we have, say, an area like Rockdale, Pennsylvania, where evidently people sort of enter the industrial revolution with a minimal amount of disruption, or why do we have a place like Philadelphia where all hell breaks loose in certain areas? The answer oftentimes is a lot dependent on who was there managing the operations, that the force of personality and the scale of operations within which that personality operates is very, very important. And so the idea that political economists are putting forward now about trying to restructure around smaller scale operations and taking advantage of the new technologies is one that has a possibility. I think it's one that really ought to be considered and brought into this debate about progress for what progress for whom. Because in doing so, it gives workers a greater sense of participation in what's going on in the shop. That's very important. I think your comment, Roe, has spurred a thought in Dan's mind. Right, I have an observation for everybody. It's not so much a question to Roe. What I'd like to hear is a response to it. As I listened to the remarks of Dr. Nelson and Professor Smith, my mind runs back to a comment that a journalist obtained from a blue collar worker back in the 1930s. He said, sir, why is it that you like Franklin Roosevelt so much? And the worker responded, that man, Mr. Roosevelt, understands that my boss is a son of a bitch. Well, what he meant by that is not only that he's a son of a bitch in the way he is personally a son of a bitch, but that he had an interest. The boss has an interest in running the company for the sake of the company and not for the sake of the worker. Now, you started your talk with our friend, Mr. Jefferson. And I think that Mr. Jefferson remains a living presence in our lives and the life of this country because while he had much to say that was specific to his time, much of what he said transcended his time and is reinterpretable in the language and problems of our own time. It's true that Jefferson opposed industrialization because he was afraid that that would lead to the alienation of the worker from his work and that it would lead also to the taking people away from the land and place them in cities where they would be propertyless. He said if our people become piled high in cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as they are in Europe. And what he meant by that was there was a certain unexamined idea of virtue on his part in working the land, but more important than that, there was an important connection between working the land, which was your land, owning property and so on. In short, the agrarian vision of Jefferson at its base was important to him because he understood that an agrarian society believed that an agrarian society in which people worked their own land and gave them a stake in their work and a stake in society. And therefore, democracy could work because people would have a stake in stability. Well, what we have to do, it seems to me, is to reinterpret Mr. Jefferson's, I think, very insightful perception about the relationship of people, not only to their work, but also to the system in which they live, the political and the social system in which they live. If people have a sense of a stake in their work and in their society, then they will be industrious and responsible toward it. If, however, they are alienated from it, then they will be rebellious about it and not care. They will not only say that my boss is a son of a bitch, they will say my president is a son of a bitch, my society is a son of a bitch and so on. The challenge, it seems to me, and perhaps the small scale mode of work that you are suggesting, the challenge that we face is not only one in which we can provide environments in which technological innovation will occur, and environments in which work environments and social arrangements in which we can be confident that people will feel that they are achieving or receiving a humane stake, that they have a stake in the work, they have a stake in the society. So I think we should go back to Mr. Jefferson and recognize the fundamental human truth that he pointed to in his vision and attempt to reinterpret it, however, for a contemporary, very complex, industrial and technological society in which people feel they have a stake in what they do and a stake in the social system. Oh, it's well put. I guess the only, it's not a rejoinder as much as an add-on or an addendum to what you've just said is that the culture of this country is unlike that of Japan. And I think that one of the reasons that it would be a mistake for us to try to emulate the Japanese and think that we're going to regiment our workforce like the Japanese workforce's regiment or seems to be regimented would be a big mistake that the notion of individualism in this country is part of the problem. It's a very deeply held belief in our country. It's responsible for a lot of the country's creativity and dynamism and it's responsible for a lot of the country's labor problems. And it seems to me that any sort of attempt on the part of a person who is confronted with trying to restructure the industrial system so that it moderates or lessens labor management conflicts is going to have to be of the worth. I'm sure they're aware of the fact that conflict never disappears. You moderate it, you try to reduce tensions as much as you can, but you'll never get one of these so antiseptic sort of environments that there's not going to be somebody wanting to take a cigarette break at a certain point of the day when the boss doesn't want them to or something like that. That's not going to happen. And it seems to me that when we talk about restructuring work, we have to remember that there's certain elements within this culture that are at strengths. And at the same time, it's weaknesses. There are two sides to that story in a way. I think it's, when you look at the overall picture though, the United States has been a very creative and dynamic industrial economy and it needs some tuning. Let me interject here. We have a couple of questions that run in this vein and I think it's appropriate to look at them right now. For instance, with the vast automation that's occurring in American industry, some people have asked here, what is going to be the fate of the American worker? What recourse is left for the labor unions? There are a couple of questions that are looking toward the future of unionized labor. The future for organized labor in this country doesn't look very good right now. Especially in industries that are being automated. Look at these printer unions in New York and Washington and the various strikes that they've faced in the last five years, they've been losers and they're big losers and they've been drastically weakened in the sort of clout that they have against people who are introducing the automated systems. It varies from industry to industry but now it looks as if the same thing is going to happen in the automobile industry and certainly leaders of the UAW are very well aware of the problems that they face and in fact, one of the people that I cited in my talk today, Harley Shakin, has just written a book called Work Transformed. If you wanna read a book that really talks about the issues that confront organized labor today and the serious condition that it's in, I would recommend that you take a look at that book. Again, his name is Shakin, S-H-A-K-E-N and the names of the book is called Labor or Work Transformed. I have a longer question here that you might enjoy commenting on. It has a few parts. Let me try to put it in short here. Comment on the probability of a future such as that imagined by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel, Player Piano, which describes a two-class society, an elite who control computerized production and a mass of persons who do meaningless labor. And then, if you would, please relate this to the fact that rural America is being desettled by agribusiness policies. Where will people find work that means a livelihood of service to society and creative activity? That for me? Yeah. When you're reading that, the thing that comes to mind is the famous interview that Edward R. Murrow had with Waller Ruther in the 1950s and he said, Mr. Ruther, what do you think of all this automation? It's really taking over jobs and everything like that and Ruther looked at him and said, well, you know, there are gonna have to be people out there to buy those automobiles and people will have to have jobs in order to have the income to buy the automobiles. So when you talk about displacement in society, it's a hard question to answer about where will people go? They're gonna go in a lot of different directions, I suspect, since I can't say much more. I think just to say something about what has happened, this technological displacement has been going on for a long time. I don't know very well the history of what happened in the 19th century, but I do know something about the 20th century. In the 1920s, there was enormous technological displacement from manufacturing industries, but there was also a growth of new industries fostered by technology, for example, radio and the automobile. There is, at that time, tremendous migration from the farms into the cities and the slack at that time seems to have been taken up by the growth of these new industries and also the creation of service industries that went along with them. For example, the automobile industry even now employs one out of seven people in the United States, not simply, of course, for manufacturing, but also for repair, for servicing, for gas stations and so on, as well as all the supplier parts that are necessary for automobiles. The worth observing, in addition, that at the end of the 1930s, something like 25% of the American population lived and worked in agriculturally related businesses. The fraction now is something like 3%, 3% of the people in the United States supply all the food we consume, and then some, as you know, especially in this region of the United States. There are problems of agricultural surplus even today with such a small number of people. Obviously, the ability of so few people in the United States that's a small percentage of the population to supply the food needs of a population that is considerably larger now than it was at the end of the 1930s is strongly a function of the development of agricultural technology. I include in that not only machinery, but also the agricultural chemical industry. What's been happening in the last 25 to 30 years, as I understand it, has been that there has been continuing displacement from production in the workforce and manufacturing. That's one of the reasons that blue collar labor unions are less powerful now than they used to be. Into high tech industries and also into service industries. Again, what happened in the 20s has been repeated and continues to go on here in the United States in the last 25 years or so. I don't see any reason why those service industries shouldn't continue to grow among them, however. And also at the same time, why there shouldn't continue to be some kind of diminution in the number of hours a week that everybody has to put in in earning a living. That is the minimum number required. Some people work many, many more. I'm sure everybody at this panel up here and many of you out there are putting in more than the canonical 35 or 40 hours a week in earning your livings or getting an education. One of the interesting things and challenges that we face is not only the distribution of work, but how will leisure be employed? We know how it's being employed these days. There is a growth of the entertainment industry, the sports industry, as well as the book industry, the movie industry and the television industry, the VCR industry, et cetera, et cetera. How people want to use their time is up to them. Clearly though, the creation of leisure creates a demand for economic functions that fill leisure. And so one can see these trends from manufacturing to service to entertainment and so on. I suspect that they will continue. How each of us chooses to take advantage of them, however, is a question about how each of us chooses his or her own destiny. Well, I sit in the talk that there are winners and losers in technological change. And part of the meaning of that expression is that when change comes, there will be people displaced. It's happened, it happened 200 years ago, it's happening now, it'll continue to happen. One of the questions that continually comes up, and I don't know whether I agree with it or not, but it's certainly, it's a question that's being asked, particularly by people who are on the receiving end of that change, is well, what happens when a person has spent say 20 or 25 years of his or her life in a particular mill and all of a sudden they're told that new machinery are being introduced and their services are no longer needed, that they have to go down the road, look for something else. The position of the person being displaced, not all the time, some people say, fine, I'll go down the road, audios. But there are others who say, I've invested 25 years of my life in this. I'm 48 years old, I don't wanna change jobs now, this is all I know, where am I gonna go now? Those are the sorts of questions that are being asked and they're not being answered very well in our society, certainly not as well as they're being answered in places like Scandinavia, or there seems to be a much, well, the ability of people to maintain livelihoods and work at things that they seem to enjoy seems to be better than here, brief experience there. That's a serious question. And displacement is, there are no easy answers for it, isn't it? No, one shouldn't be pollyannish about them. On the other hand, does that mean that you should stop innovation, you stop engineering work along certain lines because it might threaten to displace people? Professor Luria, I mean, this is an area that you've worked in? Well, I would say it seems to me that we are talking about questions. The question is to find answers. And one for your colleague, our colleague, less thorough. He thinks that the only solution is a national industrial planning, instead of having chaos and anarchy in our national industrial life in which manufacturers get together somewhere in the 19th or 74th floor of some New York building and decide how they are going to do it, to have our government elected people to make a national policy in the same way as they created in the 60s, this is called Great Society which at least provided the security for all the agents. And now we have to provide security for work and opportunity. And it can only be done, I think, and I think thorough is a much more qualified than I as an economist feel that unless there is a national planning which you may, after all, call it a step for socialism, I remember once we were talking about Emerson in after during a seminar and one of the students came to me and said, is this Mr. Emerson was he a socialist? Well, I think the work we have to stop being afraid of words and decide to use like and to have fetishes like free enterprise. Free enterprise is the right or certain a few people to do what they want. A lot of the others can be thrown out of a job after, as you say, the 25 or 30 years. What we need is to begin to think of national planning. Seems to me that one of the themes that's run through the conference beginning with your talk yesterday, Professor Luria, is the issue of what use a society will make of the technology it has at its command. And once again, I think Professor Smith has raised that issue today and the questions with which he left us at the end of his paper. I suggest it would be a good idea at this point if we express our thanks to Professor Smith for his paper to the panelists for their responses and we return here at 1.30 for the next.