American Technological Sublime, David Nye, 1994Since antiquity, philosophers have proposed concepts of the sublime, to explain the human capacity for awe and transcendence. A first century writer asserted that fine oratory and writing offered contact with the sublime to a comprehending listener or reader. Appreciation of the natural world was not important in European thought until after the Reformation, when Protestants began to see nature as a reflection of God's works. By the eighteenth century, philosophers had renewed their interest in the sublime, and in 1756 Edmund Burke published his influential Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The book became esteemed enough in the U. S. to appear in at least ten editions before the Civil War.
David Nye reviews concepts of the sublime that are particular to the U. S., and have evolved over the course of the country's history and technological development. It's a book that ranges widely, from natural wonders that for centuries have inspired awe (and a tourism industry), to the technological feats that prompted atomic tourism and NASA launch pilgrimages.
Pursuit of the sublime in nature is the earliest, and still powerful. Visiting the Grand Canyon is a classic example: something millions want to experience directly, as descriptions and images can't adequately convey its wonder.
"To seek the sublime is, in effect, to step out of historical time into the eternal now," writes Nye. By the early nineteenth century this urge had prompted organized tourism to the country's abundant natural wonders, and the visits began to have special meanings—
As Americans became tourists in their own country, interest in sublime landscapes became not an idle diversion but an act of self-definition.... Lacking the usual rallying points (a royal family, a national church, a long history memorialized at the sites of important events), Americans turned to the landscape as the source of national character. So marked was this tendency that few monuments were built before the civil war…. Bunker Hill Monument, one of the earliest large monuments, was completed in 1843, and George Washington's home, Mount Vernon, was only rescued and restored in the 1850s. Until 1856, when a statue of Washington was erected, New York City contained no monuments of any kind to the Revolution. In short, during the antebellum period natural monuments such as Niagara became repositories and representations of the national spirit.The classic philosophy of the natural sublime suggested "solitary contemplation in unspoiled surroundings," but a newer American version had emerged. The emotion became something experienced in a crowd; development and promotion of attractions grew into a tourism industry.
Journeys to natural wonders began to take on the character of pilgrimages in the Jacksonian period, broadening to include the trans-Mississippi west after 1865. Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon were added to the ideal itinerary...[pp 24-5]
Organized religion made use of this "popular sublime" that derived from the feelings of contact with the sacred that natural wonders inspired. Baptists built a church near Natural Bridge (the earliest recorded tourist site), and baptized believers in a pool beneath the bridge's arch; the Niagara Falls area became a center for revivalism.
By the 1830s, technological achievements were seen as forces for democracy—
This is exemplified by popular enthusiasm for the Erie Canal [opened October 1825]. Built in only eight years over the 300 miles from Albany to Buffalo, this canal more than doubled the volume of west-east trade in its first year of operation, stimulating urban development along its banks, speeding up westward migration, and making western agricultural products available to eastern cities. In addition, the canal was immediately perceived as a powerful link binding the Great Lakes region to the East. Just as important, the canal became a tourist site, a demonstration of American engineering skill, and one of the first icons of the technological sublime. [pp 33-4]The Jeffersonian ideal had been not the wild, but the agrarian: "the rural township with a free public school in the middle," and "land as a commodity to be divided into uniform squares and then made available to independent farmers." (pp 36-7) Nye writes that—
The sublime was inseparable from a peculiar double action of the imagination by which the land was appropriated as a natural symbol of the nation while, at the same time, it was being transformed into a man-made landscape. [p 37]By the 1830s, pioneering and settlement of the land were being replaced by new visions—
The Jacksonian version of the sublime focused as easily on the "victory of the mechanical philosophy" as on nature, and enfolded both in the larger scenario of Manifest Destiny.... Nature was understood to have authored the script sanctioning its own transformation in the service of an inevitable destiny. History was to be President Jackson's story of the creative subjugation of "a country covered with forests" to produce "cities...embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute." [pp 38-9]The active citizenship required by political republicanism became linked with celebration of inventions, and the belief that appreciation of natural and technological wonders elevated moral character.
...Republicanism was suspicious of capitalism because the entrepreneur was motivated by short-term self-interest. Republicanism was not entirely comfortable with a laissez-faire economic system, but it could embrace the useful arts…. The inventor of a new device... rendered humanity a service in perpetuity. If the initial republican heroes were revolutionary statesmen and generals, by the 1820s inventors—Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Robert Fulton—seemed ideal republican heroes, because their new machines benefitted all of society....In the Jacksonian age...engineers, builders, and inventors began to occupy important places in [the] pantheon of republicanism. These new heroes and the machines they created were often celebrated on Independence Day, technology and republicanism thus being merged in one event. The participation of ordinary citizens in these occasions, an innovation of the late eighteenth century, helped to articulate the role of the individual in the new democratic state.Celebration of mechanical achievements on the Fourth of July further linked nationalism and technology in an American sense of the sublime. Because of its powerful symbolism, July 4 was chosen as the start of work on the Erie Canal (1817), the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (1828), and other large such endeavors.
By the 1820s... the Fourth…became an occasion for bombastic rhetoric not only celebrating the revolution but also tracing the progress of the nation and predicting its future greatness. By the time of the Civil War the celebration had become a fixture in most communities. [pp 40-41]
An evolution from water, to steam, to electrical power marked the country's industrialization. Initial reliance on water power caused factories to be dispersed through the countryside, unlike the steam-powered factories built in English cities. The early water mills seemed integrated into the landscape; their settings lent them qualities of the natural sublime, while their intricate machinery enabling production in great quantity made them part of the technological sublime.
The textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts were the first large factories. The architecture and settings of New England mills were greatly admired, a perspective very different from the English vision of "dark satanic mills."
Echoing other visitors,
Charles Dickens found Lowell a stunning contrast to English working towns; he declared that the young women were "healthy of appearance, many of them remarkably so, and had the manners and deportment of young women, not of degraded beasts of burden." Dickens went so far as to "solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression," not one that "I would have removed from those works if I had had the power." Many other visitors to Lowell agreed with such assessments, with hardly a dissenting voice among foreign observers. [pp 112-113]The birth of corporate PR?
In the first years of Lowell's existence the corporations attempted to shape perceptions of the new environment—notably through the publication of the Lowell Offering, a magazine written by mill girls but uniformly complimentary to the owners who financed it. [p 116]By the mid-1840s severe health problems had become evident, and workers had begun to organize. One activist in 1845
...attacked the conditions in the mills, the lengthening hours, and the danger of "eternal slavery" for operatives, who had no time for education. Just as important, she charged that the Lowell Offering had refused to print articles critical of the mills, and that it was "controlled by the manufacturing interest to give a gloss to their inhumanity." Her address touched off a public debate about working conditions and did much to discredit the Offering. [p 117]In one generation, "factory work was fast becoming a permanent condition and formal class lines had become more pronounced."
[p 118] Nevertheless,
... most nineteenth century writers depicted factories as harbingers of progress and tended to ignore the workers....The improvement of machines in precision and reliability became a metaphor for social improvement. [p 119]
By the early 20th century, public fascination with production offered large companies the PR opportunity of opening their factories for tours. Workplaces had been evolving from some level of craft autonomy to top-down control; tours became one reflection of this, as they "made workers into minor actors in the drama of production, which focused on systems of machines and the cornucopia of goods produced." [p 129]
The first great suspension bridges, soon followed by the first skyscrapers, permanently altered the landscape. Although European architects had access to the same technology, it was American cities that expanded upward. Tall buildings were seen as a triumph of man—and were an opportunity for large companies to outdo each other in having higher and more elaborate structures built. The landscape of cities became man-made panoramas—
An unintended outcome of skyscraper building was a new view of Manhattan from the harbor, from the East river, or from the Hudson. ...By the late 1890s 'skyline' was in general use, and... the silhouette of Manhattan visible from the surrounding shores had a new symbolic quality that was not a conscious intent of architects but a concatenation of the whole... the creation of an artificial horizon, a completely man-made substitute for the geology of mountains, cliffs, and canyons. New York, Chicago, and later other cities had begun to make their distinctive mark on the sky. [p 91]Early skyscrapers were designed to be seen from the ground, looking up. By the 1920s, observation areas at or near the top were design features. The "master of all one surveys" cityscape view became part of popular consciousness: a matter of fascination for visitors, and a marker of power—
...it was the social ascendancy of the businessmen, who employed architects to transform the urban landscape. As they ascended higher into the city, two new visions emerged. The view of the skyline... was an unintended outcome... But the new vista of the city glimpsed from the upper floors of these buildings was intentional, and it quickly became an important perquisite for executives. By the 1920s the olympian perspective from their offices was immediately recognized as a visualization of their power. [p 96]Electric power was a wonder on display in the illuminations of expositions and fairs, electricity itself serving as the theme of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.
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Before the end of the 19th century, theaters began to imitate the lighting effects of fairs, and other businesses began installing electric lights and signage. Typically, electric street lights were installed not by municipalities, but by merchants' groups seeking advantage over shops in darker areas (whose owners were then forced to follow suit).
Elaborate electric signs, a striking new way for corporations to keep their brands before the public, would become part of the night cityscape.
Nye writes of the history of world's fairs—
The fairs of the late nineteenth century had emphasized the products of industrialization In the first decades of the twentieth century, massive working exhibits had brought the factory to the fairgrounds. But during the Great Depression, companies emphasized their research laboratories and used vast miniature landscapes to show how their latest inventions could transform the world. The miniaturized landscape… suggest[ed] the view from an airplane on a day with perfect visibility; the research laboratory replaced earlier displays of hardware and production techniques with nearly magical displays of scientific prowess. These displays suggested that private corporations could solve the economic crisis and create a better world….As Roland Marchand notes, corporations first tried only to sell products, then tried to educate the public about their business, and finally turned to marketing visions of the future. [p 199-200]The 1939 New York World's Fair
...represented a detailed response to the Great Depression. Americans were uneasy about the present and profoundly worried about the future. Since 1929 nothing had seemed capable of restoring prosperity, except perhaps another unwanted war. To catch the public imagination, the fair had to address this uneasiness. It could not do so by mere appeals to patriotism, by displays of goods that many people had no money to buy, or by nostalgic evocation of golden yesterdays. It had to offer temporary transcendence. [p 205]Scientific phenomena were presented as magic tricks, and several corporations displayed robots that "talked" with the audience. General Motors' Futurama, the Fair's most popular exhibit, offered a vision of an ideal future: of "technology and nature merged under the control of experts." [p 220]
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Sound-equipped chairs moved visitors past a miniature landscape, where the “World of Tomorrow” was seen as from the window of a plane. The soundtrack intoned that, "Behind this visible America of 1960, hidden in the laboratories, are the inventors and engineers. By the spring of 1939 they had cracked nearly every frontier of progress." (p 219)
The ride ended with visitors "landing" in a series of close-up scenes, as if transported to the designer’s world of 1960. Then they were handed a button—
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It was clever marketing, and a perfect expression of an inexorable march of progress that such exhibits promoted.
Like Futurama, the fair itself presented a "quasi-religious experience of escape into an ideal future equally accessible to all." (223) A 1940 GM film, New Horizons, climaxes with a tour of Futurama, while the narrator recites its promises of "a better world that always will go forward."
As post-war technological feats grew more complex, the public could view spectacles ranging from atom bomb tests...
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...Metropolitan Edison hired a large staff of full-time public relations people and opened a visitor center. ...Visitors are told a reassuring story of a Three Mile Island where nuclear power is fully under control, where technological systems worked, and where the cleanup was flawless. The visit culminates in a trip around the plant in a minibus. Tourists might expect only to ride by the closed reactor—but as Sharon O'Brien found, "the unexpected happens: the guide stops the bus by the disused cooling tower and tells us that you can enter. This is an extraordinary and seemingly spontaneous moment on the tour, the moment when the cooling tower—symbol of Three Mile Island, of nuclear power, and after 1979, of the dangers of nuclear accidents—becomes invested with religious meaning as awed tourists enter..." [p 237]Patriotic spectacle staged for the camera reached a new standard in the July 4, 1986 re-dedication of the Statue of Liberty: a made-for TV event starring Ronald Reagan.
In the postwar period, the theme park served as a "new form of permanent exposition," where any conceivable attraction was available. Nye sees a contemporary "consumer's sublime" exemplified by the casino/theme park milieu, in which—
The billions of dollars spent in Las Vegas represent a financial and psychic investment in play for its own sake. The epiphany [of the sublime] has been reduced to a rush of stimulations, in an escape from the very work, rationality, and domination that once were embodied in the American technological sublime. [p 296]Of course, time (and stage-managed spectacle) have marched on since this book's publication. If American factories have been off-shored—and labor treated as invisible—well, we still get to see manufacture: of "celebrities," on "reality" TV.
And we have our own pilgrimages, like this—
—and this, via BagNewsNotes—
—or just to be near this.
