Yesterday I was writing about Carroll Purcell’s social history of technology in the United States, and I mentioned the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the Chicago Century of Progress Fair. I went online to see if I could find the photography book he cites, and was rewarded with this link:
http://www.chicagohistory.org/history/century.html
GM Building, 1933 Chicago Fair
The fair was truly modern/modernist in several ways. It was branded well. The art deco posters asserted that even in the midst of the Great depression, a cleaner, easier, happier, more scientific and modern life for all was just around the corner. The spaces were massive, epic odes to what modern humans can build; we can reproduce the streets of Paris, the temples of Asia and South America. The towering ultramodern structures were both daunting and inspiring; look what kinds of thing are possible if only “we” work together on a common vision! Of course, the we in this case was mostly corporate America; the Jetsons-like buildings veer uncomfortably close (in hindsight perhaps) to the Brutalist architecture of Mussolini and pals. And yet this architecture was built as a fair, a place with a familiar midway, so that the average Joe and Jane could see in miniature what Science was capable of. Live babies in incubators! Synthetic rubber tires cast in front of a throng of admirers!
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When Henry Adams wrote his masterpiece The Dynamo and The Virgin, about seeing a huge electricity-producing machine for the first time at the great Paris, he was, as Michael Steiner has written, both appalled and fascinated:
During the last days of the 1900 Paris Exposition, an aging American re- turned time and again to the great Gallery of Machines. Like a moth to a candle, 62-year old Henry Adams was lured to the exhibit, mesmerized by the titanic power of its pulsating pistons. It was here that the historian experienced a shock of recognition, a dark epiphany that had been stewing in his soul. After spending his life searching for a sense of purpose in human affairs, Adams was stunned to realize as he stood beneath these implacable behemoths, that blind mechanical forces controlled history. Prostrate before the forty-foot dynamos as an early Christian "trembling before the Cross," Adams recognized that he and others had become helpless "creatures of force, massed about central power-houses" and that modern science had unleashed uncontrollable forces of mass destruction.
I want to connect Adams’ epiphany, which is often connected with the Age of the Atomic Bomb, to the institutions behind the Virgin and the Dynamo. Adams loved the Virgin and saw the great cathedrals as the apex of medieval and human greatness. All that human labor, that capital, that stone, that grandeur of design and vision, brought together as a monument to a culture’s greatest achievement! And yet: what institution lay behind these monuments and this nexus of labor and material and art? A holy and wholly Roman church, whose combination of Roman imperial organization and Christian absolutist claims to knowledge and power in this world and the next as well. A church that was catholic in its claims to domination, and apostolic in its will to impose and subject the rest of humanity to this claim. It is easy to oversimplify the medieval world, and to demonize it as opposed to the supposedly more open Renaissance (which after all carried its own forms of political terror and organization). And yet, when I think of the damage done in the world in the name of my religion of origin, Roman Catholicism, I honestly shudder.
The Ford Building, 1933 Chicago Fair
And what institutions were behind Adams’ dynamo, and the great scientific machines of the 1933 Chicago fair? By 1933, it was clear: though the federal government in the United States was funding a great deal of scientific research, and was on the verge of massing science and technology and industry and the military in one huge project called World War 2, the institutions behind the Dynamos of the 20th Century were corporate. The huge futurist buildings of the Chicago midway were ads for corporate America writ in stone and steel: GM, Ford, Chrysler, Sears. And as Purcell and others show, the U.S. government, even under the worst moments of the Depression and currently in the face of ecological devastation, has never shown much real interest in regulating the corporate interests that now control much of what counts as scientific “progress.” World War 2 brought what had never been before: governmental coordination and regulation of industry in the service of a larger goal. That that supra-corporate goal happened to be war is nontrivial; the government continued this overarching coordination with a permanent war economy, one that (as in World War 2 and the wars that followed) lined the pockets of private corporate interests, even as other forms of technological innovation were more or less run by private interests for private gain to the detriment of public good and public say. Genetic engineering, radio and later telecommunications, energy resources, transportation, all have followed the model that terrified Adams and seduced the fairgoers of Chicago.
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What happened to this overarching belief in Progress, a belief and a hope that was maintained in the face of 20th century horrorshows of economic collapse, unrestrained urbanization and suburbanization, the paving of the country, and the development of weapons of mass destruction? Steiner writes,
Since the last Chicago World's Fair, fewer and fewer people would will- ingly surrender to the machine, and few would see anything other than crude satire in such statues. Since World War II, according to Leo Marx, a spectacular string of mishaps has given birth to widespread "technological pessimism." The ghastly efficiency of Auschwitz and the devastation of Hiroshima in 1945 were swiftly followed by the arms race, Vietnam, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon oil spill, the Space Shuttle explosion, acid rain, global warming, and ozone depletion. Ironically enough, the American West, with its pock- marked, tear-stained terrain of testing sites and dumping grounds, remains a prime setting for technological ecocide. Such tragedies of science run amok have eroded the long-held hope that technology will create a perfect world, though Marx wisely observes that the rise of "a new, dematerialized kind of power" through electronic technologies may keep more subtle forms of the progressive faith alive.
Steiner’s list is missing one example, of course: Fukushima. The Dynamo as Die-namo. Big Science, big as the corporate temples of the Chicago fair, merged with corporate and governmental cooperation to produce cheap-oil levels of power where oil is not cheap.
If hope for many lies in visions of a progress-enhancing Internet, personal computers, Twitter social revolutions and cell phone directed democracy marches, then the old material forms of progress – big dams, big dynamos, rural and universal electrification, washing machines for all – have over time become things we both imagine to be natural (many have not ever lived without any of these things) and at the same time tainted (the mass push to consumerism begun in the early 20th Century and continuing along each successive wave of technological innovation turns out to have a dark side).
I imagine a realistic Century of Progress fair now, 1911 – 2011. The Ford building shows the human effects of Taylorism and mass production lines; the great banks all have massive Brutalist facades that show the two murals: one the official line on Progress, the other the series of frauds, corruptions, Ponzi schemes, and their human results, along with the political influence of the banks that allow them to lie cheat steal and then get bailed out by the same people they robbed.
And alongside the brutalist facades, alternative images of science, of technology, of the things that have made life much better for most people, of the unintended consequences of well intended technologies and most importantly, of the striving to learn from these consequences. And thousands of photos of those, now and in the recent past, who tried and are trying to take leadership roles in learning these lessons, and changing what we – we humans, and the corporate and governmental we who wield power over technological change – will do tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
Works Cited:
Steiner, Michael. "Parables of Stone and Steel: Architectural Images of Nostalgia and Progress at the Columbian Exposition and Disneyland," American Studies 42 (Spring 2001): 39-67.
