Automation and the Meaning of Work in the Postwar United States
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The Misanthropic Sublime: Automation and the Meaning of Work in the Postwar United States Jason Resnikoff Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Jason Zachary Resnikoff All rights reserved Abstract “The Misanthropic Sublime: Automation and the Meaning of Work in the Postwar United States” Jason Resnikoff In the United States of America after World War II, Americans from across the political spectrum adopted the technological optimism of the postwar period to resolve one of the central contradictions of industrial society—the opposition between work and freedom. Although classical American liberalism held that freedom for citizens meant owning property they worked for themselves, many Americans in the postwar period believed that work had come to mean the act of maintaining mere survival. The broad acceptance of this degraded meaning of work found expression in a word coined by managers in the immediate postwar period: “automation.” Between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, the word “automation” stood for a revolutionary development, even though few could agree as to precisely what kind of technology it described. Rather than a specific technology, however, this dissertation argues that “automation” was a discourse that defined work as mere biological survival and saw the end of human labor as the the inevitable result of technological progress. In premising liberation on the end of work, those who subscribed to the automation discourse made political freedom contingent not on the distribution of power, but on escape from the limits of the human body itself. Abandoning the workplace as a site of political contest, managers in the postwar period sped up workers, broke unions, and sent jobs where non-unionized labor could be had more cheaply—all of which managers, lawmakers, and even union officials called “progress.” While existing scholarship on “automation” presumes that the word describes a clear-cut technology or industrial process, this dissertation returns the concept to its ideological roots. What most called “automation” often created more human labor or intensified labor already present—in particular in the automobile and computer industries where the word was coined. The accounts of workers in these industries show that “automation” often meant the intensification of labor. The dissertation considers how different constituencies deployed the automation discourse to advance a reformist or even radical politics that sought the abolition of work. It shows how under the sign of the automation discourse “leisure” became a synonym for liberation. It explores how “automation” and the meaning of work it conveyed influenced the development of the welfare programs of the Great Society, as well as the politics of the New Left and black liberation. The automation discourse likewise influenced the postwar conception of reproductive labor and the development of second wave feminism. The dissertation ends in the mid-1970s when a national, militant, rank-and-file workers’ movement coincided with increasing distrust of industrial society, leading unions, managers, and lawmakers—after decades of calling for the abolition of human labor—to demand the “humanization” of work. Table of Contents List of Figures ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Machine Tells the Body How to Work 22 Chapter 2: The Electronic Brain’s Tired Hands 69 Chapter 3: The Liberation of the Leisure Class 114 Chapter 4: Anticipating Oblivion 152 Chapter 5: Machines of Loving Grace 195 Chapter 6: Slaves in Tomorrowland 232 Chapter 7: Where Have All the Robots Gone? 275 Epilogue 332 Bibliography 339 i List of Figures Figure 1. Workers filing. 98 Figures 2 and 3. Pure thought becomes mechanical reality in The Information Machine. 98 Figure 4. Keypunch operators at work in the insurance industry in the 1960s. 103 Figure 5. Hand feeding punch cards. 104 Figure 6. A snapshot of the Earth from the nose of an Aerobee rocket, 1949. 114 Figure 7. Striking sanitation workers in Memphis, 1968. 232 Figure 8. Ginny Heinlein in her kitchen, 1952. 234 Figure 9. Robby the Robot spruces up a vase of flowers on Altair IV. 247 ii Acknowledgments I owe much to many. I must thank the archivists who offered invaluable assistance at the Harvard Business School’s Baker Library, the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, New York University’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, and the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University. The Baker Library’s Alfred D. Chandler Travel Fellowship, an Exploratory Research Grant from the Hagley Museum and Library, and a travel grant from Columbia University’s American Studies Department provided research support. I am grateful to Todd Gitlin who granted me an interview and allowed me the extraordinary privilege of taking home files from his personal papers. I am likewise thankful for the opportunity to recognize here the generosity of Karen Nussbaum and Margery Davies, both of whom took time from their busy schedules to sit for interviews. My colleagues, my peers, and my friends. Many people read portions of this dissertation or took time to speak with me about the work. All provided helpful feedback. It is my privilege to name here: Charles Halvorson, Allison Powers, Mary Freeman, George Aumoithe, Manuel Bautista Gonzalez, Pollyanna Rhee, Ben Serby, Stephen Koeth, Scott McFarlane, Rebecca Lossin, Mookie Kideckel, Ignacio Mujica Torres, Aline Voldoire, Sebastian Munoz-Najar Galvez, Andrea Crow, Alyssa Greene, Kristina Moore, and Patrick Barrett. My comrades. As many have before me, much of what I have learned about history I discovered by trying to make a little bit of it myself. There is no teacher like experience, and my years as an organizer for the GWC-UAW and CPW-UAW in Local 2110 taught me as much if not more than any graduate program could have. Ken Lang, Maida Rosenstein, Lindsey Dayton, and Tiffany Yee-Vo have been my leads and my teachers, as have Michael Belt, Paul Katz, Olga iii Brudastova, Joy Winkler, Leslie Fine, Luca Provenzano, Andrea Crow, Alyssa Greene, Alex Hastings, Corin Coetzee, and Ana Keilson. I owe a special word of gratitude to the crew of organizers on Columbia University’s medical campus, both graduate workers and postdocs— Chandler Walker-Manuel, Lyuda Kovalchuke, Anthony Romer, Cora Bergantinos, Sam Galindo, Casey Fulmer, Whitney Cowell, Bradley Gorski, and Lale Alpar. From all these people I learned that the fight for justice and democracy is long and hard, sometimes boring, sometimes sublime, and always collective. My students. As a teacher I have, selfishly perhaps, made a habit of bringing my own questions into the classroom. My students have helped me to answer these questions. For that I am grateful. It is a privilege to teach, and I have been fortunate in my students. My teachers. Mae Ngai, Matthew Jones, Eric Foner, Robert Amdur, Anders Stephanson, Herbert Sloan, Barbara J. Fields, and Richard John all have had a hand in making both me and this dissertation more rigorous and more honest than it otherwise could have been. Nelson Lichtenstein was kind enough to serve on my defense committee and provided invaluable criticism. Elizabeth Blackmar lent this project the gift of her acuity and me the benefit of her wisdom. Alice Kessler-Harris has been my Doktormutter—I do not know how I will ever thank her adequately for everything she has done for me. I suspect I cannot. My advisor Casey Nelson Blake provided intellectual guidance and material support. For every page that appears in this dissertation I wrote three more. Casey read all of them, often more than once. He shepherded this project from the beginning and has saved me from many infelicities of thought, fact, and style. My family. As always, my family has been a source of material, moral, and intellectual sustenance—my father Robert, my mother Sandra, my sister Amanda, and my brother-in-law Philip. Finally, Lindsey Dayton has been my comrade, my teacher, (my student?), my colleague, iv my peer, my best friend, and my family. I cannot imagine what either this dissertation or my life would look like if it had not been for her. v Introduction “It is not from machines that we learn the purpose of machines.” —Lewis Mumford 1 “The great question will forever remain, who shall work?” —John Adams 2 This dissertation is about the meaning of work in the United States of America after the Second World War. It did not start out that way. It began, rather, as an attempt to pin down the precise definition of the word “automation,” a term coined in the American automobile industry in the years immediately following World War II. I had noticed that some historians of the period grant “automation” a degree of historical agency. Whatever it was, it made things happen. “Although automation’s advocates exaggerated its utility and underestimated its costs,” writes Thomas Sugrue, “automation sometimes did have dramatic effects.”3 Another has written of “automation’s role in labor’s decline” in the postwar period.4 I wanted to know what precisely had achieved these results and how. Yet, surprisingly, while the positive and negative effects of widespread “automation” have been the subjects of intense debate since the middle of the twentieth century, the origins of the word have received little attention from historians. This is all the more remarkable considering that at the time “automation” supposedly achieved its most impressive results in the middle of the twentieth century, its definition was notoriously controversial. “There is much 1 Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944), p. 412.