Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (American History) by Jackson Lears

Author:Jackson Lears [Lears, Jackson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-06-01T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Liberation and Limitation

Henry Adams was a brooder. He hadn’t always been one, though he long had harbored some reservations about his countrymen’s faith in progress. A historian of the early American republic and fourth-generation scion of a family that included two presidents, he felt there was no place for republican virtue in the corrupt politics of the Gilded Age. He took up the stance of skeptical observer, keeping an eye on the White House from his house across the street, on Lafayette Square. When his wife committed suicide in 1885, he plunged into a prolonged depression and eventually embraced a second career as a speculative artist of ideas. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 marked a key moment in Adams’s midlife transition. While his fellow patricians stood on the edge of the Court of Honor, rhapsodizing about the redemptive powers of art, he went inside Machinery Hall and contemplated the dynamos. Revisiting them repeatedly, he wondered why they fascinated him.

He decided that it was because “the dynamos were new, and they gave to history a new phase,” as he recalled in his autobiography. They underwrote the new force—“capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical”—of the corporations whose displays crowded Machinery Hall. The concentration of impersonal power carried personal weight for Adams. To him, the dynamo stood for “the whole mechanical consolidation of force, which ruthlessly stamped out the life of the class to which Adams was born, but created monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that Americans adored.”

Adams’s reverie was a blend of sense and nonsense. The “class to which he had been born” was not “ruthlessly stamped out” by the concentration of force in monopoly capital. On the contrary: during and after the crisis of the 1890s, established Anglo-Saxon elites embraced leadership roles in the megacorporations that were coming to dominate the economy—as well as in the Wall Street investment banks and law firms that were servicing corporate growth. To take just two of many possible examples, trivial but telling: Adams’s brother Charles was president of the Union Pacific Railroad, and his fellow Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge was a charter stockholder in the General Electric Company. These people were hardly being left behind by corporate capitalism, and Adams was hardly an accurate guide to the political history of his own time.

Yet in fixating on the dynamo, Adams located an apt symbol for the transition from republic to empire. By transforming mechanical energy into the invisible force of electricity, and by placing that force in the service of concentrated capital, the dynamo epitomized the imperial reach of the new corporate economy. Adams recognized that the appeal of monopolies lay in their capacity to harness “the new energies that Americans adored,” that sent locomotives speeding across the prairie and skyscrapers soaring heavenward. Which Americans actually “adored” those energies remained an open question, but some (including Adams) felt magnetically drawn to them. Like many of his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, Adams was obsessed with “Force.”

At the same historical moment when

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