The Industrial Revolution

A first cut at explaining how historians do their job is that they find what they look for in that they tell the story they are prepared to tell by their overall viewpoint, whatever the facts may be that might lead to a contrary interpretation. But a deeper appreciation puts historians on firmer ground. They make reference to age old or even newly crafted emotions as the objective explanations for what people do, either individually or collectively. Anger, for example, is dangerous because it can take on any object, whether a political opponent, a minority group, or a nation. People came to hate Caesar; Hitler and the Nazis hated the Jews; and Americans actually considered whether, as a nation, it was better to be dead than Red. Historical explanations are therefore not mere matters of opinion or reducible to economic interests or moral beliefs. They are based on the particular emotion or combination of emotions that a historian thinks or feels drive human nature. To demonstrate that point, let us take a standard historical problem, that of the Industrial Revolution, which is indeed seen as a matter of economic interests and the conflicting moral interests of the capitalists and the working class, and see what historians usually make of it and what they make of it when they are at their best.

There are, at the least, three ways in which historians describe the Industrial Revolution. They can, first of all, provide a history of machines used in manufacture, which is the way it is usually done in high school textbooks. There was Newcomen’s steam engine, as that was modified by James Watt, and which became used first in mines, and then to power early locomotives. There was also the development of the telegraph and the telephone which enabled railroads to coordinate schedules and manpower over long distances, and then the Bessemer furnace, hot enough to make the steel cable that went into the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then refrigeration, which allowed New Zealand to become the meat farm for Great Britain, and what is at least by way of metaphor “a machine”: the assembly line, as that was pioneered by Eli Whitney and perfected by Henry Ford. This is not a simple minded approach to the development of the Industrial Revolution. Technological development is an autonomous process, later inventions building on earlier ones and not dependant on external influences such as politics or culture, at least once the process gets started. Automobiles were being simultaneously developed in the last third of the Nineteenth Century in Germany and in France with the Americans only a little bit behind. The question was how to create a small explosion inside a piston so that it would rotate a shaft rather than blow up the entire piston. Everyone was taking a try at it. This theory of autonomous development is the same one Whitehead applied to mathematics. What will happen next is plainly clear and a number of people will come up with the same solution, as when both Leibniz and Newton developed the calculus. That is why Whitehead thought mathematics the queen of the sciences: it got at truth rather than at the truths which were merely opinions generated in one or another culture.

A second approach to the development of the Industrial Revolution is to look at the invention not of machines but of those social institutions which are necessary for the Industrial Revolution to take place at all or for it to make substantial progress. We can begin with the stabilization of the currency, which occurred in England at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century when John Locke was Chancellor of the Mint. Another condition and stage of industrialism was the development of family capitalism, which resulted from the profits from agricultural surpluses being invested in breweries and profits from banking getting invested in factories. Another development was the creation by Parliament of individual charters for corporations such as the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company, and then, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, of general incorporation laws in places like Delaware that allowed family businesses, such as that of the Duponts, to raise great amounts of capital for their enterprises, and then for a business oriented United States Supreme Court to allow corporations to discipline their workers by paying poor wages, providing poor working conditions, and restricting the ability of workers to organize, a pattern that prevailed until a more mature capitalism was able to deal with labor unions. There had also been established every place where industry took root a free labor market, that exemplified by the English Poor Law of 1834 which required the unemployed in England to go to workhouses and thereby made of unemployment a crime. That set of developments has been very ably described in any number of books. Alfred Chandler’s “The Visible Hand” and John Davies’ “Corporations” are two that come readily to mind.

A third approach is to examine how the Industrial Revolution is part and parcel of the rearrangement of social groupings. It begins with capitalists handing out wool to be turned into cloth by peasants working at home in what were called “cottage industries”. It proceeds to peasants leaving their villages to work at factories set up in cities, the once peasants now an urban proletariat in that they work away from home rather than tend to their crops close to home. More important than that is the fact that the proletariat are dependant on cash payments for hours worked, every member of the family, women and children, trudging off to the factory so as to collectively earn enough to feed a family. Notable books reflecting that sociological approach are J. L. Hammond, “The Town Laborer” and Neil Smelser, “Social Change in the Industrial Revolution”.

So what does this add up to? Each style of history attends to its own concerns, which means looking at the process through the eyes of a different set of protagonists: the inventors, the capitalists, the workers. All of these interpretations are true in that they provide converging accounts of what happened even as the emotions which the participants feel seem quite distinctive. The inventors are innovators and so heroes; the capitalists are selfish in the way all economic rationalism is selfish, and so qualify as villains or as unappreciated heroes; the workers are victims in that they are batted around by the forces of history and so to be pitied and made into causes for outrage. Take your pick. There is no history, only points of view on history, the historian choosing a satisfying narrative frame whereby to introduce his information. You read the historian for his facts and maybe even for his take on his facts rather than to learn a true or full account of what happened because that, according to modern canons of historical investigation, is impossible in that every historian is a product of his times and so will notice the things he is likely to notice, like the injustice of slavery as that is demonstrated in floggings and the separation of families, and will use the concepts of his age to explain slavery, whether as an antiquated and purposeless institution now that wage labor had replaced it, which was the view of William Graham Sumner, or the contrary view, supplied half a century later by Eugene Genovese, that slavery was a form of capitalism in that the Southern plantations were a kind of factory, and that Jim Crow was worse than slavery had been because it did away with the traditional protections available under slavery as to food and shelter and replaced it with the callous exploitation available in the sharecropper system where inferior caste is even more powerful a force for the subordination of a group than was slavery.

The issue of historical objectivity is even more fraught if the historian is out to explain rather than to describe history. The problem for description is to decide which factors or variables are to be considered as well as to be judicious about the inferences which are drawn from the available facts. The problem of explanation has to do with establishing causation when you do not have significant comparable instances. Efforts at comparative history are no more than the drawing of analogies in that while American slavery has some similarities to South African Apartheid, they are very different in character and apply to very different stages of social and economic development. For one thing, the American Civil War was fought less than two generations after England had abolished slavery and at the same time that Russia abolished serfdom, while Apartheid was a system introduced only after World War Two and so was a retrogressive measure. It does make sense to use these two cases as examples of more general principles having to do with race relations, such as the fact that social barriers go along with residential and economic segregation. But that would then be the finding, one applicable as well to the ancient Hebrews in Egypt, and so an example of sociological rather than historical thinking, which aims to tell a story of a particular place with its own distinct set of circumstances. Indeed, Max Weber was caught up short in his attempt to demonstrate what he sensed to be true which was that the Protestant Ethic had played a very significant role in the development of capitalism in general and in the Industrial Revolution in particular. He had only one case to work with in that nowhere outside of Europe had capitalism developed independently of European influence. All he could come up with was circumstantial evidence, such as the fact that Catholics in Germany studied the humanities while Protestant students studied science, which is rather a weak basis for proclaiming he had discovered what had been the engine of the Western world.

Despite their best efforts, such as by David Landes in his “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations”, no historian has done a better job at explaining the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution than did Weber in that, Landes included, no one can do better than supply multiple causes for this singular event. There is, however, a general description of what happens under capitalism, which is to say, that provides a feel for life as it is lived in the industrial system. That is the theory propounded by Karl Marx, which is that labor had been turned into a commodity by the capitalist world, labor no longer a customary activity, like planting and harvesting grain, but something measured in units of time and compensated with money for time served. The worker might resent but almost certainly sensed that his time was not his own. Marx had, in effect, invented a new emotion, that of alienation, which borrowed from the Enlightenment idea that land could become alienated, which means sold, and the equally Enlightenment idea that rights were unalienable, and so not to be abridged, to describe the Romantic trope of a self sundered in two, one alienated from the other, the capacity of people to be engaged with their work subsumed to the sense that work was a waste of time, redeemed and put up with only to secure wages.

Marx’s invention is extraordinary, even for a theorist. He is resorting not to an emotion that is listed by Aristotle, whose list we might consider an exhaustive list of “usual” emotions, but coming up with something new whose invocation still creates incredulity among those who say you can’t explain things by inventing a new kind of emotion to serve as an ad hoc description but can only use the tried and true ones, the eternal ones. Marx knows well enough that he is on fresh ground and so he supplies an objective definition of the conditions under which this emotion occurs. People are dissociated from their work and so selves became split apart when the work is, among other things, repetitive and undemanding of intellectual skill. A file clerk does alienated work, while a doctor does not. Moreover, a person may feel alienated but may not even be self-conscious about this feeling. Alienation is therefore something not easily measured in public opinion polls or focus groups. Yet, alienation is such a profound psychological idea that it has ever since Marx been entered into the lexicon of everyday life.

Marx’s concept suggests that, in general, a satisfactory objective description of history resides in reducing it to the play of one or more of the emotions that have been around since people became people. Capitalists are motivated by greed as people in Machiavelli’s description of history are motivated by the struggle for power and the characters in Thucydides by the needs of the state and Macaulay's people motivated by the social customs and beliefs of their period. Not all historians are able to use the full range of colors on the palette of emotions. David Hume is exceptional in his multi-volume “History of England”. He is able to provide so many different emotions to the people who surround and cause the execution of Charles I that the characters seem to be acting out of their own free will than as instruments of history. But we prize historians for the emotions they do manage to deploy, Parkman notably good at portraying bravery, Schlesinger for the level of political ideas that his politicians are able to appreciate, Braudel having such comprehensive knowledge that the salt trade becomes for him a capitalist enterprise rather than a traditional activity.

Now Marx may have overplayed his hand as his followers further down the line certainly did, arguing that alienation led, eventually, to borrow Horkheimer's phrase, to “the eclipse of reason”. But that may be just the result of the fact that Marx, after all, was writing in the middle of Nineteenth Century and so did not have to keep up with later developments in capitalist structure. It was E. M. Forster who would show, at the turn of the new century, that social class was no longer a matter of just how you made your money but also of the customs and level of education with which people of different social classes pursued their lives. The Schlegel sisters in “Howards End” were not just outliers because they had some money but not all that much; they were outliers because they were far more educated than most people and so subject to the intellectual fads of the time, such as a concern for the poor or merely the lower middle class. That was their social psychology, and it is indeed our own, people voting not on the basis of their economic interests but on the basis for their fancies and their anger.

The Spirit of Totalitarianism

Polls say that only about one fifth of the nation is now aware of the Holocaust. This is probably just as well because it is just too awful an experience in human history to dwell upon and because the slogan of the survivors, “Never again!”, now appropriated for the worthy cause of gun control, had not deterred subsequent genocides. For my part, I cannot get away from the Holocaust and perhaps the Second World War will remain alive for as long as any in my generation, born in World War II, remain alive. I vividly remember as a five year old playing with my toys underneath a table while the adults (and me too) saw the British newsreels of bulldozers moving thousands of corpses that they deposited into deep trenches that would be covered with lime and then earth. The banquet was organized by those who had survived and those who had come over before the war from the Polish city of their birth, and a lot of people were in tears. Who needs such memories? But I am concerned with how quickly we lose a sense of the desperation of those outside the totalitarian regimes of the time and the sense of absolute horror that I  and so many Americans supposed permeated life within those regimes. In our time, when totalitarianism is restricted to North Korea, what with its slavish love of its leader, and China and Russia now just ordinary authoritarian regimes, concerned more with securing their leaders than making their entire populations miserable, how are we to get a sense of those times?

One try was the recent movie “The Death of Stalin”, which struck me as off the mark because it made its audience laugh at the terror even high ranking Kremlin leaders felt that a new development would put them in line for death. What if Stalin recovered? Who would take the fall for the leadership having made any preparation at all for a succession? They all hate Stalin but have gone along with him. That is played as farce but it is a cold porridge we are asked to swallow. Totalitarianism is not easily played as farce and that led me to think, for the first time, that Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” was a real accomplishment because it contextualized its satirization of the Third Reich with a stereotypical tale of Jewish swindlers out to take money away from aging widows just too happy to cooperate in exchange for sexual favors and by the use of a woman secretary straight out of an old time burlesque routine. But the takeoff on Hitler was so over the top that it had little bite, as was also the case with Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”, who treats Hitler as a clown. Lubitsch's “To Be Or Not To Be” is much superior in that Jack Benny and the other actors play the clowns and the Nazis are the sinister forces that they have to manipulate. How to grab hold of the sinister, to make it come alive?

A recent documentary, “Hitler’s Hollywood” also fails to do the job. It consists of very brief excerpts from many of the comedies, historical dramas, and musicals produced under Joseph Goebbels for the benefit of the Third Reich and claims that the films show a fascination with death and with surrender to the collective will that is characteristic of Naziism, this based on some quotes from Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag, as those authorities are backed up by critics of an earlier generation, such as Siegfried Kracauer. But the narrator does not look attentively at any of the films or seem to know much about film or literary history. The theme of the beautiful death is there in Wagner and, before that, in Goethe; it is a cliche of Romantic literature. The tango sequence in one film is very similar in choreography and staging to a scene in “Gold Diggers of 1936”, a Warner Brothers musical, and so may be a characteristic of filmmaking that decade rather than an expression of German or Nazi consciousness. The narrator says that the film industry was “a dream factory” for Naziism, when that is the exact term used by Hortense Powderhouse to describe what Hollywood, USA was doing at the same time.

Looking at even these brief excerpts allows drawing a very different conclusion from the one provided by the narrator. The Nazis were depicting what they thought was a conception of the wholesomeness of German life as that was threatened by the international Jewish-English conspiracy. Women are glorified as healthy and robust in their beauty, as are the young men who are seen washing up before donning their uniforms in Leni Richenfeld’s “Triumph of the Will” so that they can march to the stadium and listen to the Fuhrer’s oration. Politics grows from fitness and grace and morality, or so is the story to be told. Even there, the story is not far off the Hollywood tropes of the time, what with G. I. Joe conquering Nazi aristocrats and technology and skulduggery with common sense and practical intelligence as well as women who prove to be plucky and serious minded. It is the times, not the nation, at work here, everywhere in the Western world.

Then how can we get hold of the reality of totalitarian evil? My suggestion is that history and memoirs provide the best avenue into the heart of this darkness. Hannah Arendt, for all her virtues, was too apocalyptic in her pronouncements, claiming as she did that totalitarianism was a new thing under the sun, a form of evil different from what evil had been before, when it was just an intensification, an excess, of the evil that could also be found in Calvin’s Geneva or the Spanish Inquisition or the medieval war of Innocent III against the Albigensians. The Nazis adopted very pedestrian techniques to give them control over everything going on in their societies, and that provides the most satisfactory meaning for Arendt’s famous phrase “The banality of evil”: evil operates through simple rather than Wagnerian gestures, even if, collectively, those measures add up to a gotterdammerung.  

Victor Klemperer, in his memoirs of his time as a dispossessed professor in Germany from the beginning to the end of the Third Reich, always thinking even at the beginning that the regime did not have long to last, documents how society operated. As soon as the Nazis gained power, one of them had to be present at every departmental faculty meeting at every university. That was the effective end of academic freedom, right there at the beginning. The fear settled in very quickly. And the organization of German society remained to the very end. Klemperer was only able to get out of showing properly granted identity papers to the still functioning governmental bureaucracy when he could claim, with a good deal of plausibility, that his records had been lost because of the firebombing of Dresden. And we know from other sources that firing squads for deserters were still being carried out as the Soviet troops were entering Berlin. The determination to maintain social order is astonishing and even morally praiseworthy. There is no descent into anarchy but simply a change of who is in charge.

I remember reading as a teenager Eugen Kogon’s “The Theory and Practice of Hell”, published in 1950, which was an early spelling out of how extermination camps functioned, down to the most grisly details. It was far more shocking that either Elie Wiesel's “Night”, which is now considered suitable assigned reading for high school students, or Primo Levi’s “Death at Auschwitz”, which fulfills its author’s Dantesque ambition to report back what Hell was like. So we have two extremes: the Arendt view that the concentration camps were an epitome of what life was like in the Germany of the Third Reich, the concentration camps the true heart of the regime, and the view, as displayed in Goebbels's movies, that this was an authoritarian regime dedicated to truth, wholesome beauty and material progress, one supported by the vast majority of its population, that was brutal only towards its essential enemies. The Goebbels view remained plausible perhaps until the the first Thousand Bomber Raid by the RAF on Cologne in May of l942 or perhaps until the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 or perhaps until the landing in Normandy in 1944 had become secure, any of those events making clear that the defeat of Germany was unavoidable unless it developed an atomic bomb in time, which it could not, just having jet planes not enough to turn the tide of battle. That the society carried on even after these three dates is a tribute to the German people, given how difficult it was to work up a political resistance. Germans did what the British government would have advised its subjects to do if Britain were invaded: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. I wonder if the citizens of the United States would have acted in so organized a fashion under similar circumstances.

Some evidence that evil during the Third Reich was ordinary and everyday and absorbed into the ordinary round of life, that another meaning for that incisive phrase, “the banality of evil”, is supplied in Milton Mayer’s  “They Thought They Were Free”, first published in 1955. The author interviewed ten Germans soon after the war and expected to find the same surrender to evil that Theodor Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School who had by that time returned from their exile in America expected to find: brains so curdled by Nazi propaganda that they could no longer tell right from wrong. But what he finds, though I am not at all sure he realized this, was support of the opposite hypothesis. His Germans, all former Nazis, regarded themselves as anti-Semites still, but claimed that they had no social hatred for the Jews; it was just that you couldn’t trust them when it came to money and they felt sure that the Jews who had been deported had been compensated for their financial loses. Mayer thought the anti-Semitism was what held the Nazis together, in that the Nazis were action first and thought a long time later and so never had a well worked out ideology, which is a point with which I disagree, the classification and eugenics and theory of race very well worked out by Nazi theorists.

My reading of the interviews is that anti-Semitism was a side issue, even if recounting after the war what had happened to Jewish relatives or to their own sense of themselves as Christians was heart-wrenching. It was so easy to maintain a surface conformity. A high school literature teacher knew not to teach “Julius Caesar” or “Hamlet”, which were, after all, about rebellion against the state, but there was no trouble with “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”, and you could even act bravely by reminding the class that Mendelsohn was a Jew. “The German Spirit”, as it was called, did not need a list of censored books because teachers knew how to censor themselves by avoiding books that spoke in favor of rebellion against the state, and as one informant put it, that is banned in America too. So you could survive if you were careful, which meant guarded in the expression of opinion, so your personal defeat was only moral and psychological, to be reflected upon, years later, in the safety of a Nazi failure that had been forced on the German people from the outside. Life could be ordinary if you did not distance yourself from it with a moral compass.