Displacement and Equilibrium: a Cultural History of Engineering in America Before Its “Golden Age”

Displacement and Equilibrium: A Cultural History of Engineering in America Before Its “Golden Age” A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY David M. Kmiec IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Bernadette Longo, Adviser August 2012 Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 1 Using historical context to contextualize history: The ideology of cultural history ........................................................................... 12 Motivation and methodology for a cultural history of American engineering ......................................................................................... 16 2 National service and public work: Military education and civilian engineering ......................................................... 23 Early modern France and the origins of military engineering ................................ 24 Military engineering and the American Revolution ................................................ 30 Civilian engineering as rationale for maintaining a military in peacetime .............................................................................................. 37 Engineering union in sectionalist America .............................................................. 51 3 The self-made engineer goes to school: Institutionalized education(s) for engineers ......................................................... 59 Colleges at the turn of the century: National initiatives to broaden education and the conservative response of colleges ............................. 60 Supplementing “self-made”: Popular organizations and media as sources of scientific and mechanical education ...................................... 67 Academies: Publicly-supported commercial institutions that educate for “living” .......................................................................................... 72 The polytechnic institute: The pedagogy of antebellum technical education begins to converge ................................................................. 77 i 4 Manufacturing and the American System: Agriculture, industrialization, and the control of work ....................................... 101 Industrial production in Britain and her plantations ............................................ 102 The constitution of agrarian republic .................................................................... 113 Manufacture and the American System (of economy) ......................................... 135 The socialization of labor (and the labor-ization of society) ................................. 148 Mechanics, machinists, armorers, engineers, and managing an American System of manufactures ................................................. 164 Engineers are facilitators of specialization ........................................................... 188 5 Identification and the identity of engineering: From useful art to applied science ..................................................................... 195 References ................................................................................................................... 208 ii Introduction At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the United States, as in Europe, the label “engineer” was reserved largely for military officers who specialized in the construction and operation of war machines and strategic defenses. By the end of that century in the United States, one hundred and twenty-six colleges—forty-six of which had been endowed by the federal government—graduated around two thousand non-military engineering students per year in specialized branches including civil, mechanical, mining, electrical, and chemical engineering, supplying the American labor market with what, by the time of the 1890 census, had become a politically-recognized sector of quasi-managerial technical experts. In the decades following the American Civil War, even as the expectations about the parameters and responsibilities of engineering work were being codified, the presence of civil professionals calling themselves engineers was obvious. In the milieu of the first large-scale corporations and international expositions, men administering and designing urban and regional infrastructure projects and factories not only claimed a new and ambiguous engineering identity but also formed societies to debate the best ways to control membership and increase social leverage. Between the end of the American Civil War and the first World War, these societies discussed and presented (usually only within their own bodies) various competing codes of ethics, epistemic schemes and pedagogical philosophies, and opinions about the social and political power and responsibilities of engineers in industry, in government, and in, for lack of a better term, the field. The multiplicity of competitive societies (especially given their nonexclusive membership), the lack of hierarchy or regulation of the societies, and the haphazardness with which their memberships devoted attention to their causes created a tumultuous churning of unfocused repetitive rehashings of arguments ranging from the political (what role do engineers as experts have in shaping government policy?) to the pedagogical (how well do or do not the tenants of a liberal education satisfy the needs of the young engineer?) to the existential (who is an engineer and what is it that makes him so?). 1 Documented attempts to answer these questions—at least those still in existence—range from transcripts of the cross-talking speeches delivered before meetings and cantankerous letters to the editors of trade magazines mundanely scattered amongst the details of local projects and field experiments in society periodicals to the ceremonial (and celebratory) addresses published in the proceedings of the conferences of societies’ “great minds” planned to coincide with large political gatherings or at sites like international expositions.1 The written, often published, fragments of these arguments that exist today take a variety of forms, including polemical addresses, authoritative documents (like policy tracts and collections of rules and creeds), and, perhaps most interestingly, value-laden histories of engineering. These early histories of engineering often consisted of episodic biographies of great men and greater feats, relying on resemblance to trace the provenance of engineering not only to respectable early modern builders but to classical icons—baptizing posthumously the builders of every ancient lighthouse, aqueduct, road, and pyramid as an engineer. Hero tales, they typically situated men and machines in the context of the rise of science and the betterment of man, rarely treating the social and political contexts within which they existed as more than a matte backdrop to contrast with their unique brilliance or as an antagonistic anti-technological force full of primitives and petty bureaucrats. By contrast, economic histories of Industrial Revolutions in Europe and America written at the same time rarely make note of the engineer, tending instead to feature either the political forces which directed capitalists to create and destroy or the capitalists who leveraged their intuition and innovation to shape political institutions. When historians did address early engineers (whether self-identified or claimed after the fact by the profession), they eulogized them as mythological figures—self-made and singularly-inspired inventors—and, more often, detailed the miraculousness of the machines they created. 1 The United States hosted 8 international expositions between the Centennial in 1876 and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915. 2 As professional societies developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the histories written by their members became position statements, providing authoritative background for the political, pedagogical, and existential questions under debate. These histories of engineering (and, often, of engineering societies, colleges, or even firms) asserted that canal and railroad megaprojects, industrialization and the development of a mass production market system, and the increasingly public view of science as applicable to everyday life generated demand for a class of technological agent who, equipped with both the new scientific knowledge of nature and the artisanal mechanical sense appreciated in past centuries, could subdue nature, labor, and even man for the general betterment of the community and the individual. In these accounts, engineering arose organically as science made its way from the gentlemanly circles of Europe to the practical American man, as the builder and the blacksmith, the minter and the miner each in turn abandoned his noble but savage tools (the rule of thumb and other traditional work practices) for empirical ones (machines, mensurations, and manuals). When mentioned at all in these narratives, the colleges and universities that pre-existed engineering degree programs are featured as conservative institutions eventually overwhelmed by practical men and public outcry; bastions of the arcane (most obviously in their insistence on teaching dead languages), they gave way at first to physics and natural science and then, inevitably (and, in America, at the demand of the public), to practical education in chemistry, civil engineering, and the like. Having achieved mass cultural recognition as

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