America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism

by David F. Noble

Hailed a “significant contribution” by The New York Times , David Noble’s book America by Design describes the factors that have shaped the history of scientific technology in the United States. Since the beginning, technology and industry have been undeniably intertwined, and Noble demonstrates how corporate capitalism has not only become the driving force behind the development of technology in this country but also how scientific research—particularly within universities—has been dominated by the corporations who fund it, who go so far as to influence the education of the engineers that will one day create the technology to be used for capitalist gain.  Noble reveals that technology, often thought to be an independent science, has always been a means to an end for the men pulling the strings of Corporate America—and it was these men that laid down the plans for the design of the modern nation today.

Genres: Technology, History, Economics, Science, Nonfiction, Business, Politics

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

David Franklin Noble was a critical historian of technology, science and education.

Reviews

[Mark Bowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A. Synopsis: This book is concerned with the 2nd industrial revolution phase when the capitalists became masters of production. Noble focuses on the interaction between science, technology, business, and education between 1880 and 1930. His main thesis is that what began as “truth” seeking science was turned into “modern technology” by a capitalist system seeking a means to a corporate end. In other words, business controlled technology. Engineers were the main corporate reformers who sought to design both technology and society. Thus, technology is not autonomous. It is the product of a set of human choices (society).
B. Historical Materialism: What is it and where does it fit within Marxism? Definitions from Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean in Materialist Feminisms
1. Materialism describes two philosophical tendencies: (1) All forms of existence, including human activity can be explained in terms of physical being and (2) the critique of idealism or that ideas underlie reality
2. Mechanical materialism: Reduces human agency to a very passive level of material self-interest.
3. Historical materialism: Retains human activity as a positive force. There is more to human agency than a self-interest with goods and money.
4. Dialectical materialism: The economic base of society determines the superstructure (all aspects of culture, legal and political institutions, and social life.) This was most strongly developed by Engles yet is often called Orthodox Marxism.
C. Part 1: Technology as social production: Industry, education engineers: This section discusses modern industry pressuring science into the service of capital in three ways;
1. The wedding of science to the useful art 1; the rise of science based industry
a) Modern science based industry emerged in the late 19th (1880-1920)
b) Only the electrical and chemical industries did not emerge from traditional craft industries
c) Examples of these industries
(1) Electrical was the leader; General Electric who acquired power through the patent rights of individual inventors
(2) Electrical communications: Bell
(3) Chemical industries: DuPont, Monsanto
d) The result was a new mode of production--the transformation of science into capital
e) These industries are important for the rapidity in which they adopted the scientific approach
2. Wedding #2: The development of technical education
a) Early 19th century technical education struggled against the classical liberal arts colleges
(1) Yet technical education grew within these colleges because of the reorientation of natural philosophy towards empirical and practical studies
(2) The other cause for growth was due to the response to internal improvement projects (canals, RR, science based industry)
b) The biggest gain in technical education was the Morrill Act (1862) granting general support for all states in agricultural and mechanical arts
3. Wedding #3: The Emergence of the professional engineer
a) The engineer became the link between the scientist and the manufacturer
b) By 1900 the profession of engineering was the largest professional occupation in America (except for teachers)
c) This was driven by processes of professionalism and industrial demand
d) The identity of the engineer was often in conflict: he/she was required to be a business leader, scientist and skilled laborer
4. Through this coalition of corporation, engineers, and professional societies, modern technology emerged
D. Part 2: Corporate reform as conscious social production
1. Laying the foundation; scientific and industrial standardization
a) The uncontrolled growth of industry resulted in great diversity of manufacturing techniques
b) The corporate reformers were unhappy with this situation and they set out to standardize
c) This reform reached all aspects of the corporation; accounting, distribution, personnel
d) Taylor’s Scientific Management standardized tools and employees
2. The corporation as inventor; Patent law reform and patent monopoly
a) The patent system, instead of protecting the inventor, had come to protect the monopolizer of inventions--the industrial corporation
b) The individual policies of AT&T and GE were designed to gain and prolong monopolies over patents vital to their industry
c) These maneuverings completely overwhelmed the independent inventor
d) From 1900-29 reforms of the patent system brought it more in line with the needs of corporate reformers
e) The intricacies of the new reforms made the system almost impossible for the independent inventor to comprehend without a team of lawyers
3. Science for industry: The organization of industrial and university research
a) By the 20th the scientific engineers put an effort into scientific discovery to further enhance industry
b) During 1900-30 the corporate engineers attempted to harness science to industry in 3 ways
(1) Establishment of research laboratories in the corporations (GE, AT&T)
(2) Support and cooperation with research agencies outside the corporation: Foundations (RF), universities “Technology Plan”
(3) Governmental support: National Research Council
4. Technology as People: The Industrial Process of Higher Education
a) To the corporate engineers education was the critical process by which the human parts of industry could be fashioned
b) Engineering education became the recruiting mechanism for the corporate engineer
c) Thus the training had to become useful to the graduates when they got their job
d) The transformation of higher learning occurred in 3 phases
(1) Corporate in-house training. Trained college graduates with special courses at the job
(2) Cooperative programs between industry and education: began with the Cincinnati Plan to put Freshmen into industry to gain on-site experience
(3) New professional agencies were created to organize these activities: SPEE’s study of engineering education
5. A Technology of Social Production: Modern management and the expansion of engineering
a) The engineers began to manage scientifically
b) Modern management arose
(1) Engineering theory and practice takes on social organization and human behavior
(2) The use of engineering to overcome social and psychological barriers to work
c) Four factors in the emergence of modern management
(1) Capitalist mode of production: This demanded capital accumulation and efficiency (according to Babbage men and machines should both be studied--not just machines)
(2) The new trend was in corporate “giantism.” This was the integrating of various corporations under one roof so that one huge conglomerate could control all aspects of production.
(3) This resulted in a “man problem.” The need to discipline, motivate, and neutralize labor disputes
(4) A flow of engineering into management resulted in social and human engineering
6. Epilogue
a) The task of designing America is an ongoing social process
b) It was not a once and for all decision made from the engineers drawing board

[Mark Golden · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is hardly the objective, neutral, “draw your own conclusions” examination of engineering’s development in the United States that the foreword describes it to be. It is, from first page to last, a one-sided analysis through a purely and orthodox Marxist paradigm.

It attempts to make the case for the history of engineering as the co-opting of (particularly) education and (more broadly) economic development by industry exclusively for exploitive corporate/capitalist purposes:

“Education thus became an integral mechanism of the corporate production process, geared, like all others, toward efficiency and stability, and hardly reflecting the humanity of the material that was routinely processed.”

“The corporate reformers never viewed privately financed agencies [corporate-financed schools] as the final solution to their labor problems. While they depended upon such activities in the short run, they sought at the same time to gear existing public [education] institutions to provide the necessary service at public expense.”

The case is made with the strong implication that this was not only an a priori negative thing (an arguable, but to my mind at least, unproven thesis) but that engineering is the factor that prevented (and continues to prevent) the inevitable and socially desirable collapse of capitalism (classic Marxist dialectic materialism). Engineering is the culprit that thwarted the revolution that Marx predicted, dooming society to capitalist evils.

“Has the most potent revolution in social production since the invention of agriculture become merely a means to corporate ends, a vehicle of capitalist domination?”

“The massive expansion of military and government participation in the technological enterprise since World War II and the tremendous growth in the number of engineers since Sputnik—have only advanced their ends by providing for the wholesale public subsidization of private enterprise and the increasing proletarianization of technical workers”

“However firmly the protagonists of this story (or their contemporary successors) convinced themselves that they served the interests of society as a whole, they in reality served only the dominant class in society, that class which, in order to survive, must forever struggle to extract labor from, and thus to control the lives of, the class beneath it”

A plausible case is made for the argument that the science of management emerged as a branch of engineering, and is to this day the dominant field within engineering.

“The corporation-school educators sought to reduce education to a scientific procedure, much as they had sought to reduce the problems of management in general to engineering design”

The role and evolution of engineering (and engineers, in particular, ASME) in industrial policy and management sciences is exhaustively covered.

But the book views engineering exclusively through the filter (blinders) of industrial engineering and engineers in industry.

It ignores entirely any aspects of engineering that do not fall in to the category of the expansion of engineering into human engineering for specifically capitalist industrial purposes.

E.g.; there is no discussion of licensure, civil engineering either through government programs or public/private partnership, consulting engineering, etc.

If you are sympathetic to its doctrinaire political posture, you will find much to validate that bias. If you are seeking a presentation that might support an honest consideration from a perspective you never considered before, you will be frustrated and disappointed.

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot of great history written in the 1970s. In the academic world at least, much of it involved detailed examinations of the social and institutional background of our modern economy, and the writers who conducted it, like David Noble here, were often rapacious researchers who compiled many fascinating facts and anecdotes. The problem was they were often also orthodox Marxists, like Noble again, who clung to increasingly unrealistic beliefs about the revolutionary potentials inherent in capitalist development.

Noble states that his book was written to understand why the revolutionary tendencies of science, as identified by Marx, did not lead inexorably to a great proletarian revolution. Now, most of us, confronted with overwhelming evidence that history was not progressing as Marx planned, would have given up the ghost of the old German philosopher and found some sort of new theory, but Noble, like so many others of his time, tried to fit the tale of fin-de-siecle development into the threadbare Marxist suit. In his case, it is engineers across America who unconsciously carried out their capitalist marching orders by standardizing production and education and thus suppressing revolution.

There are too many contradictions here to warrant extended discussion, but one problem with his thesis is that many engineers, from Henry Gantt to Charles Steinmetz to their resident theorist Thorstein Veblen, were staunch socialists themselves, whose mathematical minds often lurched for clear, crisp governmental solutions to complex social problems. Another is that many non-socialist engineers differed on exactly how they should reform corporations, government, etc. There was no strict "capitalist" or "corporatist" position.

Still, there's some good stuff in this book. The discussions of patent reform are great(WWI caused the government to create numerous "patent pools," like for all airplanes or radio technology; the experience led to a taste for more stability in the patent system, and so the Lampert Patent Office Bill of 1922 created a separate patent court and raised Patent Office requirements), as are those on the creation of uniform industrial standards (Congressmen Southard tried unsuccessfully to have all government contracts in the metric system way back in the 1890s, and, despite support from Carnegie, Ford and others, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers denounced him as a socialist and helped defeat his bill; in 1902 Southard introduced a more acceptable version which created a "Bureau of Standards" in the Department of the Interior and received near universal support). Unfortunately the majority of the book, despite the author's claim at comprehensiveness, is taken up with a byzantine discussion of the history of engineers in higher education, a story with so many characters and organizations and colleges it seems impossible for even the author to understand how it all develops.

So this book relates some interesting facts and stories on the rise of the engineering profession and of engineers' importance in shapng the modern economy. Noble's use of those facts, however, leaves much to be desired.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very detailed, in depth study of the rise of engineering education in America between the 1880's and 1920's and how it completely transformed both big business and the educational system. This book gets into the nuts and bolts of how the U.S. industrial revolution developed into the hierarchical corporate capitalism that exists today by applying scientific engineering to the workforce starting in the college classroom. The early leaders of companies like GE, AT&T, DuPont, Westinghouse, Eastman Kodak, etc. changed college and public school curricula to produce the workers they needed, like machines, made to their specifications. They also used the latest (for the time) in psychology for "human engineering" to combat the "labor problem" and create workers content to simply do as they were told and follow orders. It was the birth of modern management and personnel relations and it's shaped U.S. society, business, and government for the past 100 years.

It's a bit of a long, dry read, but worth it for the really interesting bits every few pages.

[Lilly Irani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is blowing my mind. It's about how engineering as a field emerged alongside corporate capitalism as a way of deskilling craftwork, making it cheaper, more menial, and replaceable, while creating a new class of people who could act as expert knowers/managers -- idea people. Good reading for any engineer or designer who wants to know the historical conditions to which they owe their profession, as well as the academic studying design or high-technology cultures.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

mind-blowing