Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America

by Cecelia Tichi

Shifting Gears is a richly illustrated exploration of the American era of gear-and-girder technology. From the 1890s to the 1920s, machines and structures shaped by this technology emerged in many forms, from automobiles and harvesting machines to bridges and skyscrapers.

The most casual onlooker to American life saw examples of the new technology on Main Street, on the local railway platform, and in the pages of popular magazines. A major consequence of this technology was its effect on the arts, in particular the literary arts.

Using images from magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal, as well as material from popular novels, movies, the toy industry, advertising, and the fine arts, Tichi portrays the consequences of technology for American popular culture and the work of the nation's major, enduring writers.

She demonstrates how turn-of-the-century technology pervaded every aspect of American culture and how this culture could be defined as a collaborative effort of the engineer, the architect, the fiction writer, and the poet. She demonstrates that a technological revolution is not a revolution only of science but of language as well.

Three prominent American writers of the time -- Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams -- became designer-engineers of the word. Tichi reveals their use of prefabricated, manufactured components in poems and prose. As designers, they enacted in style and structure the new technological values. The writers, according to Tichi, thought of words themselves as objects for assembly into a design.

310 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

A fresh start for every new book, and author Tichi's zest for America's Gilded Age and its boldface names draws this seasoned writer to a crime fiction series while uncorking the country's cocktail cultures on the printed (and ebook) page. Tichi digs deep into the Vanderbilt University research library to mine the late 1800-1900s history and customs of Society's "Four Hundred," its drinks, and the ways high-stakes crimes in its midst make for a gripping "Gilded" mystery series that rings true to the tumultuous era. The decades of America's industrial titans and "Queens" of Society have loomed large in Tichi's books for several years, and the titles track her recent projects:
• Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us)
• Jack London: A Writer's Fight for a Better America
• What Would Mrs. Astor Do? A Complete Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age
• Gilded Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from the Golden Age
• Jazz Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from the Roaring Twenties.
• A Gilded Death (crime fiction)
• Murder, Murder, Murder in Gilded Central Park (crime fiction)
• A Fatal Gilded High Note (crime fiction)
Cecelia is at work on a fourth in the series, “A Gilded Free Fall.” She enjoys membership and posting in Facebook’s The Gilded Age Society. You can read more about Cecelia by visiting her Wikipedia page at: https://bit.ly/Tichiwiki or her website: https://cecebooks.com.

Reviews

[Mark Bowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction
1. From the 1890s to the 1920s the main traits became visually and kinetics
2. Form is the key
3. The novel and poem like the bridge exhibited the form of technology
4. Fiction and poetry became assemblies of component parts
5. John Dos Passos calls himself an architect
B. Trees, animals, engines
1. William Carlos Williams said we are in a new era of trees, animals, and engines
2. The structural components of these phenomena were identical. All were integrated systems of component parts
3. Magazine machinescapes
a) American magazines brought images of technological values and accomplishments into middle class American living rooms
b) “Ladies Home Journal”, “Good Housekeeping”
4. Wolves, Wheels, Pistons, Petunias
a) Fiction also reflected the emphasis on technology
b) Ex. Jack London who was not a technological enthusiast even had a mixture of nature and technology in his writings
c) London’s White Fang is the chronicle of the accommodation of a wolf to civilized life
d) The perceptual boundary between nature and technology was disappearing
5. Natures mechanisms
a) Nature was then conceived of as component parts
b) Darwinism saw nature itself as an engineer
c) The body and the machine were alike in that they were both dynamic systems of interrelated parts
C. Instability, Waste, efficiency
1. Instability
a) The dialectical antithesis to nature was instability
b) Calculating instability was a major occupation of American writers (literature)
c) Journalism was another source of instability with the daily papers showing natural disasters
d) Upton Sinclaires , The Jungle portrays the workplace as an unstable environment “the beef boners hands are criss-crossed with cuts”
e) William James (founder of psychology) proclaimed that instability was the defining state of the human organism
f) Technology was turned to overcome the instability of nature--this encouraged everyone to become his or her engineer
2. The New Utilitarians
a) They rejected the notion of instability
b) Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward claimed that the U.S> could become a utopia by rejecting wasteful ways and embracing efficiency
c) Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class was an indictment of waste
d) Veblen and Bellamy were the 2 writers who introduced waste and efficiency as the cultural key words of the new utilitarians
3. Waste
a) Waste meant dysfunction and danger, exhaustion of finite resources, to fail to take advantage of, squandering or useless expenditure
b) With waste went the concept that redesign was always possible
c) In The Jungle there was the hope for redemption as the novel ends with a socialist polemic
4. Efficiency
a) Efficiency is the ratio of work done or energy developed by a machine according to the energy supplied to it
b) Taylor was the father of efficiency
c) Taylor brought in the importance of the ideas of productivity, economy, efficient motion, speed.
d) By 1900 these were important qualities for the arts
e) Efficiency societies were formed
D. The Engineer
1. Looking Backward, looking forward
a) Engineers began to show up in literature
b) Emerson saw him as the representative man of the era, a symbol of efficiency and stability
c) The Tom Swift books by Victor Appleton exemplified engineering for boys
d) The engineer became a hero in fiction by becoming the slayer of waste
2. Civilizer of our century
a) From the 1910s on the engineer entered fiction
b) The heroes were typically civil engineers living roughneck lives in the American outback
c) They were visionaries and idealists
d) There was a millennial fervor in all of this (1000 year period of harmony)
e) The key figure to bring about this millennium was no longer the statesmen, the poet, or the minister--it was the engineer
f) Power had passed from theology through politics to technology
g) The key in this was the apparent engineers imperviousness to corruption
h) This popular image diverges from historians findings who had bitter personal rivalries
3. Herbert Hoover
a) He was an example of the self made success of an engineer
E. Danger and opportunity
1. Wright’s Blocks, Alexander’s Bridge
a) The gear and girder world of the engineer affected artists (poets, novelists) in 1 of 2 ways--they saw it as a danger or an opportunity
b) Frank Lloyd Wright typifies those who were optimistic. Art could regain contemporary power by exploiting the potential of the machine
c) The danger was seen by Willa Cather’s Alexander’s Bridge. She felt excluded from the engineers world.
2. Victoriana
a) Some in the art world felt untouched by this opposition
b) They represented old Victorian dualism
c) The engineer was fit to mine but he had no legitimate place in the arts
3. Danger
a) The struggle between Wright’s blocks and Alexander’s bridge was one version of a larger struggle--literature and technology (the writers and the engineers)
b) Sherwood Anderson thought that technology was dangerous to literature
c) Anderson’s Poor White presents the dilemma of 20th century America between blocks and bridges
4. Opportunity
a) Dos Passos and Hemmingway found that the engineers machine and structures provided opportunities for innovation in form and style
b) Dos Passos invigorated the novel with engineering design. He used structures and machines as the organizational model for his novels
c) Hemmingway brought engineering values into prose style. The values of engineering were shown in his tight functional prose
F. Machines Made of Words
1. Kinetic Poetics
a) There was a new value on speed in the 20th century
b) From the quick lunch to the Kodak. From 1900 to 1920 speed was the defining characteristic for America
c) Santayana said that speed was a valuable trait because it demonstrated vitality in a modern age
d) Others criticized speed: Stuart Chase said that American’s were debilitated by the fast pace.
2. Rapid transit: The Commuter’s Imagination
a) Much of life was experienced in the passing glimpses from the train, from the elevated, or from the automobile
G. Skyscrapper
1. Visual, kinetic, static, soaring
2. It called to mind the literary style of a Hemmingway sentence