Jones, His Machines

I

‘AND what,’ says Mrs. Smith, turning to her dinner guest on the right, ‘would you say, Mr. Jones, is the outlook for Love in the Machine Age?’

Poor Mr. Jones, thus abruptly summoned from the lady on his other side and the subject of Havana in February, does what nearly all of us do in similar crises. Hard-beset folk whom you suddenly invite to express an opinion on the place of bacon and eggs in a well-balanced diet are apt to say, ‘Well, er, just what do you mean by bacon and eggs, Mrs. Smith?’ Or, invited without due warning to state whether they prefer the early hours of morning in the country to the peace that comes with the sunset, they may say, ‘But just what do you mean by a sunset?’

So in the present case Jones, thinking fast, says, ‘It depends on just what you mean by the Machine Age, Mrs. Smith.’

‘Why,’ says his hostess, and pauses just a moment to gather her ideas. She is a woman of intelligence, of wide reading and retentive memory, and given to thinking on what she has read and heard.

‘The Machine Age?’ she says. ‘Can we get away from it anywhere, Mr. Jones? In the adjacent room is the radio to which you listened only a little while ago, and you made a point of comparing the reception with the tone of our old mechanical piano for which we still have a liking, and the graphophone. In the kitchen, if you will take my word for it, we have our electropneumatic refrigerator, and the electric stove, and a variety of electric coffeepots, stewpans, chafing dishes, and toasters. Not far away is the vacuum cleaner which will pick up the bread crumbs that you are now dropping on the carpet, and near by is the laundry machine which will take care of the tablecloth on which you have let fall just a trace of the cranberry sauce; and the electric pressing irons. And of course you must not let me forget the dishwashing machine. Scattered through other rooms of our simple apartment, Mr. Jones, there must be an odd dozen of miscellaneous machines: electric curling irons, and a couple of electric pads which in certain contingencies are preferable to the old hot-water bottle, two lamps for baking my rheumatism, a clock that runs by electricity — My dear Mr. Jones, what do I mean by the Machine Age!’

Being under no compulsion, like Jones, to give attention to a hostess and simultaneously to improvise an opinion and an attitude on Love in the Machine Age, let us snatch just half a minute to frame for ourselves a brief definition of the essential terms in the problem which Mrs. Smith has raised. It is really only one term, since a definition of Love is either unnecessary or else beyond us in the very brief time at our disposal. But what is a machine? Well, shall we say that a machine is an inanimate tool? It is a something built out of any kind of rawmaterial other than living protoplasm, and composed of levers, wheels, pulleys, poles, aerials, wires, magnetos, fields of force, and so on. A machine has two essential traits. It is lifeless, — as when a man says indignantly, ‘Do you think I am a man or a machine?’ — and it is a tool. A machine may have any kind of spark except the vital spark, and it must perform a useful function. As to a Machine Age, it is presumably an age which is rich in machines, or rejoices in machines, or is dominated by machines, or all three together.

Now when Mrs. Smith speaks of Love in the Machine Age, or for that matter of almost anything else in the Machine Age, the chances are that she is thinking of the lifelessness, of the non-humanity of the machine, rather than of its instrumentalism. Her main interest is in a something that operates without consciousness, rather than in the specific nature of the operation or of the product. And what Mrs. Smith means by machines and Machine Ages, most of the books that she has read on the subject mean; and what she has overlooked or failed sufficiently to analyze, a good many books on the subject have overlooked or failed to take into account.

Thus, perhaps four fifths of Mrs. Smith’s machines, reckoned by money investment and the rôle which they play in her life, are not machines at all. They are mechanical contrivances, but they are not tools. She does not use them to produce things, but only satisfactions. They are not a means to an end, but an end in themselves. They are not producers’ goods, as the economists call tools and raw materials; they are consumers’ goods, as the economists call things ready to be enjoyed.

Let us take another look around Mrs. Smith’s apartment, and count the real machines and the things that only look like machines. You will find that the lady is not living in a Machine Age to anything like the extent she believes. The vacuum cleaner is a machine, because it is a tool for cleaning carpets; but the radio is not a machine, because it is not a tool — it is only a satisfaction, like a violin. The washing machine is a machine, because it is a tool; but the pianola is not a machine, because it is not a tool any more than a tenor voice is a tool. The electric iron, toaster, coffeepot, and rheumatism pad are machines, because they are tools. But the graphophone is not a machine, for all its humming and buzzing and whirring; it is no more a tool than Rosa Ponselle is a tool. The electric light, summary and symbol of the Machine Age, is perhaps 10 per cent tool; the rest is joy and amusement. Yes, this electric light, shield and blazon of a mechanical civilization which pushes buttons and throws switches, is, in our homes, not a machine; it is a commodity. The telephone — what shall we say of the telephone? It is a machine for Mrs. Smith’s husband down town, where he employs it as a tool in his business, as a substitute for secretaries’ fingers and messengers’ legs. The telephone is a machine — that is to say, a tool — in Mrs. Smith’s apartment when she employs it to call up the grocer and the butcher and the doctor. But it is not a machine during half of Mrs. Smith’s day, in her prolonged talks with her friends. The telephone then performs nothing useful. It is a recreation, a plaything.

After dinner Mrs. Smith is taking Mr. Jones and the others to that new Russian him in which the bourgeoisie turns out to be even worse than Mr. Stalin ever suspected. The trip is made in the two-thousand-dollar family car driven by Mr. Smith, and it lasts just long enough to permit the following observations.

When people speak of the Machine Age we may take it for granted that nine times out of ten they are thinking of the automobile and the moving pictures. How can it be otherwise? The turbines which grind out kilowatts for light, heat, and power are tucked away somewhere on the edge of the city where perhaps one consumer in ten thousand sees them. The machines which make steel girders for skyscrapers are off somewhere in Pittsburgh and Birmingham, where possibly one in every ten thousand American rent payers ever sees them. The machines that make shirtings and coatings and carpetings; the machines that make breakfast food and cook meats and vegetables, and seal them into cans; the machines that weld bathtubs and paint linoleum — these machines the average man seldom sees. The famous machine known as the Railroad the average man does see and hear, even though long acquaintance has dulled him to its presence. And in the city he knows the machines of Rapid Transit which snatch him up and carry him away in a storm of speed and glare and noise and heat and utter helplessness. But even the railroad, even the subway, hold a poor second place among the furnishings of the Machine Age. The thing that makes and marks the Machine Age is the Machine — the Car, the Automobile.

For three quarters of a century we had the railroad, for a century and a half the steam engine, and people were greatly concerned over the effects of machines and the future of machines. But only with the automobile did the Machine Age arrive for us, simply because it surrounded us with Machines. The automobile is in every rod of street and highway, moving, parking, congesting, flaring, back-firing, greenlighting, red-lighting, right-turning, left-turning, no-turning on red light, slaying forty thousand people a year, elbowing its way into the family budget ahead of food and drink, elbowing its way to the forefront of the conscious thought of the nation, recasting the morals of the nation, redistributing its population, reshaping its industrial structure, giving its name to an epoch, — the Age of the Automobile, — becoming for the outside world the very symbol of America: this machine called the Automobile, together with that other machine called the Movie.

Only — the automobile and the moving pictures are not machines. They are mechanical, but they are not tools. The moving picture is never a tool. The automobile is a tool when it becomes a taxi or a truck. But for the great majority of the people, and in the mass effect, it is not the taxi and the truck that count; it is the pleasure car. The automobile that dominates a nation’s thoughts is not a tool, but an end in itself. It is a toy. It is the hugest, costliest, most absorbing plaything that a nation ever treated itself to. It comes in useful, of course, but it is not bought for utility. It is bought for that rare enjoyment which in history has been reserved for the privileged few — the command of speed and space. It is bought for the purpose of enabling millions of Americans to burn up expensive concrete roads with hightaxed gasoline. The American automobile is a luxury. In the sense of being a tool, a device for producing or doing something useful, the average American’s automobile is no more a tool than the rich American’s polo pony is a tool.

This insistence on the distinction between machines that are tools and machines that are not tools will not, I trust, impress the reader as superrefined dialectic or pedantry. To stress the fact that the automobile is most often not a tool but a plaything is not logic-chopping, since the distinction leads to a profound difference in our view of the American people to-day. It obviously is of vital importance for our picture of American civilization whether 25,000,000 automobiles mean production or consumption, mean toil or recreation, enslavement or leisure, shoulders bent under the yoke or shoulders bent over a reluctant spark plug. It is a point which we shall be compelled to take up again after a brief return to Mrs. Smith, whom we shall not even bother to remind, lest we become tedious, that the ‘machines’ by which she finds herself surrounded in apartment and garage represent an investment of perhaps six hundred dollars in real machines and four thousand dollars in machines that are playthings, — radio, mechanical piano, graphophone, automobile, — that is to say, not machines.

II

When Mrs. Smith addresses herself to Mr. Jones for a statement on Love in the Machine Age she is likely to transgress against exact thinking in more ways than one. We have seen that a machine is an inanimate tool. And we have seen that people very frequently apply the term ‘machine’ to things that are not tools. But of greater ultimate significance is the habit of applying the term ‘machine’ to human beings.

In speaking of Love in the Machine Age, or Parenthood or Art or Literature or Marriage in the Machine Age, Mrs. Smith, together with most of the authors she has read on the Machine Age, is apt to slide into one of those easy and frequently unperceived transitions which so utterly transform the meaning of words and of things. Mrs. Smith, quite unconscious of how it happened, finds herself no longer thinking of the Machine Age as an era in which men use a great many machines. She is thinking of it as an age in which men have themselves become machines.

When Mrs. Smith wonders if romantic love is possible in a Machine Age, she is almost asking Mr. Jones what he thinks are the chances of romantic love ever inflaming the heart of a steam shovel or a thermostat. When she speaks of marriage in the Machine Age, she is almost thinking of the institution of wedlock as it flourishes among electric refrigerators. When she raises the question of the family in the Machine Age, almost she is asking what form the family will assume when compressed-air hammers mate with internal-combustion engines and produce offspring in the form of, let us say, sturdy oxyacetylene torches and beautiful streamline electric bread toasters. When Mrs. Smith and her authors and most of us say Machine Age, we are most often thinking of an age out of which sentient human existence has vanished, leaving only push buttons and wheels.

This is the celebrated idea of the Robot contributed by the Bohemian dramatist Čapek to the cause of loose thinking in the world. The author of R.U.R. did not himself think loosely. He set out to write an anti-capitalist satire. When he pictured Science inventing the all-metal Robot as an incomparably more efficient substitute for the human worker, Čapek was assailing an economic system in which the individual worker, as he saw the matter, was only a tool in the hands of the employers and rulers of society. He assailed a social scheme in which individual man served his purpose best when he was completely dehumanized by being reduced to a single mechanical function. The Czech playwright indicted a particular form of economic organization which robbed the ordinary man of his human initiative, his freedom, his human worth and dignity. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he indicted, not an economic system, but a political system. He assailed the idea of the omnipotent State which, as we see now under Communism even more than under Capitalism, dehumanizes its citizens in the interest of a final purpose, which essentially makes man into a tool for the creation of a particular product.

That cry of indignation in the Robot play was directed against the tyranny of men over men and not the tyranny of technology over men. But what most of us have done is to accept the Robot in the latter sense. We have come to feel that because of the multiplication of machines to-day men are actually turning into machines. In a Machine Age the iron is supposed to be actually entering into men’s souls, turning human beings first, presumably, into semi-ferrous products, and ultimately, I suppose, into something completely metallic. Forgetting the climax of the Čapek fable, which is not of men becoming iron Robots, but of the iron Robots becoming men, we find ourselves haunted by the dread of men turning into things of steel and chromium and manganese, their hearts into leather bellows, their thoughts into radio waves.

Obviously there is a very real problem in this question of Love in the Machine Age, and I am not denying that there are times when hostesses at dinner and authors at their desks grapple with that real problem. Love, Marriage, and the Family are bound to evolve with the evolution of machines. Love is apt to differ, though not in essentials, when the scene is a mediæval Balkan village and when it is 1931 New York. Marriage obviously is not quite the same institution when the husband drives the plough and the wife spins the flax as when the husband takes a flying machine to San Francisco on business and the wife takes the subway to her own arts and crafts studiosalesrooms near the Grand Central Terminal. The Family has obviously felt the impact of the machines which bake the bread somewhere twenty-five miles away and wash the linen perhaps a hundred and fifty miles away, and so provide the wife and mother with the leisure either for studying law or for bridge.

But these changes, more or less profound, wrought by the machines in the structure of society are not the things that people have in mind when they contemplate the horrors of life in a completely mechanized America. Foreigners and native sons alike speak of that American future as of a frozen existence. The landscape of American life is a lunar one. Human machines move about the scene, but without the capacity for love or laughter, and without freedom. They are men and women in whom organs and dimensions have attained or are approaching the inorganic condition of wheels, levers, pulleys, dynamos, currents, resistances. Is a machine capable of loving? Is a machine free to love? A machine may be more powerful than an army with banners, but it is never free. A thousand horsepower is under the compulsion to punch 14,567 round holes of 2.3 millimetres in diameter through 43 inches of steel in 51 seconds. Never is it within the power of that thousand horsepower to add just one hole so as to make the number 14,568, or to make the diameter 2.3015 millimetres or the time 51 1/2 seconds.

This is what troubles Mrs. Smith’s soul when she thinks of Love in a Machine Age, and what has troubled the souls of many good men when they think of America in the Machine Age. They are all under the terror of the Robot. They see machines doing something much more than making themselves the masters of men, as indeed they sometimes become. They see machines transforming mankind into machines after their own image — which the machine never does. Because the business of wheat growing is becoming mechanized we assume that the grower and the eater of the wheat are being transformed into machines; but this is not so. Because clothes are washed by machines in the laundry we assume that the girls who manipulate them are in danger of becoming mechanized : yes, this young laundry worker on an eight-hour schedule is a Robot when compared with the pre-industrial laundress who was also the pre-industrial cook, baker, seamstress, wife, and mother, operating on a sixteen-hour schedule.

Because, in short, America is so preeminently of the Machine Age, with ever so many more machines per capita than the rest of the world, it follows that American life has already gone far toward becoming, and in time must completely become, one vast mechanical action. Life in America will become inanimate, automatic, and, what is the same as automatic, unfree. Life in America will be one vast complex of machinery punching 14,567 holes of 2.3 millimetres in diameter through 43 inches of steel in 51 seconds — never more, never less, never thinking, never feeling, never purposing, never seeking, never wearying, never experimenting, but only and eternally moving up and down, up and down; up, down; up, down; up . . .

III

This is what is feared for America in the Machine Age; and this future is foreseen for a people that above all others denies, in its temper and its behavior, the essential definitions of the mechanical. We invoke a future of Robotism for a people essentially febrile, emotional, restless, impatient, foot-loose, free. We are speaking of a people that has been in motion for three hundred years and is still in motion. It is a pioneer people that continues to discover new frontiers when it has conquered the old ones. When the Pacific Ocean is reached and the free land is gone, it refuses to abide by the textbooks; it finds a new frontier in the oil of Kansas-Oklahoma-Texas, and another frontier in the sunshine and movies of Hollywood, and another in the automobiles of Detroit. We are predicting mechanization and fossilization for a people that tears down its skyscrapers every fifteen years and rebuilds its towns every twenty-five years. We are speaking of a people that has developed, beyond any other, a genius for discovering and surmounting new social frontiers; so that after the conquest of the Mississippi Valley, and the Far West, and the Coast, and the Northwest, and FloridaCalifornia, and Oklahoma-Detroit, the march goes on vertically — by the millions to the high-school frontier; by the hundreds of thousands to the college frontier; to the symphony-orchestra frontier, the Tourist Third Cabin frontier. . . .

The vital point about the American and his machines escapes us. It is this: in the very intensity with which he invents machines the American asserts his unmechanical, febrile, restless, searching nature. He is always inventing in order to do things differently. Of course he wants to do things more quickly, more cheaply, more quietly, more smoothly, more elegantly, but the compelling motive is to do things differently. He is always trying to increase the 14,567 holes and the 2.3 millimetres and the 43 inches of thickness, and reduce the 51 seconds. Far from being the slave of a machine rhythm, — of the unchanging up, down; up, down; up, down, — he refuses to accept the routine oscillation; he accelerates it, he alters it, he shock-absorbs it, he gives it a six-coat finish.

He is the eternal tinkerer, the engineer, the machinist, but not the machine. He is the man above all others who refuses to build his machines or his houses or his business offices for eternity, as the foolish English manufacturers do, or the Italian peasants. He builds deliberately with the design that it shall all be changed in another five, ten, twenty years.

Americans who dread the effects of the Machine Age, and Europeans who shudder over the ‘Americanization of Europe,’ are the terrorized victims of a theory. When they see on this continent the reduction of the free, spontaneous life to the clamp and vise and gear of the machine, they see things a priori. They see life in America becoming what the machine ought to make it. They do not stop to inquire what American life in this Machine Age has actually become. They do not ask whether America’s Machine Age may not really be more spontaneous, more unpredictable, more innovating, more experimental than life in the most machineless corner of the Balkans, or south of the Yangtze River.

The Yangtze River! Let us turn to Mrs. Smith — by a miracle of timespace Relativity she is now back in her place at the head of her dinner table — and ask whether she would mind subjecting her guests to a simple little experiment. Would Mrs. Smith mind asking her guests each to try to think of a machine at work, — up, down; up, down; up, down, — and then state what specific picture is evoked in his or her mind? Mrs. Smith would be only too delighted to put the question, and she is sure the others would love to do their part. Thank you very much, Mrs. Smith; you are so kind.

The question is put and the answers flash up rapidly around the table. Jones says he is thinking of the Ford conveyor belt where men spend the working day and their working life giving a half-twist to bolt number 345. The lady on Jones’s right says she can’t help thinking of Gastonia, where young girls spend ten hours a day feeding the spindles in a daze that is surely automatic. One gentleman says he may be old-fashioned, but he still thinks of Mrs. Browning’s ‘ Do ye hear the children weeping?’ His daughter, who has been on a world tour, thinks of the little girls she saw — a rather serious-minded tourist she must have been — in the cotton mills of Osaka and Shanghai and Bombay. Obviously there can be no quarreling with these answers.

But there is one guest present,— well, what is the use of beating about the bush?—the writer of these lines, as he tries to summon to his mind the perfect symbol for what is fixed, monotonous, unfree, mechanical, finds himself thinking, not of machines in factories, but of human beings in rice fields. This eternal up, down; up, down; up, down; never changing, never swerving, first this thing, then that thing, then this thing, then that thing, from day to day and year to year — what is this but the eternal peasant motion of history?

To the young girls in the Gastonia mills the factory life is, in the great majority of cases, an escape from monotony to excitement, from domestic confinement into the free life. The girl operatives in Shanghai are part of the new hope in China, and the girl mill hands of Bombay are part of the force behind Gandhi. They connote life and growth. But the bent back and bowed shoulders and slow arm swing of ten thousand years of European peasantry, the squat and crouch of twenty thousand years of Asiatic tillage — there you have the closest approach to the thing that good Mrs. Smith fears when she sees men turning into machines. Steam and electricity will never turn men into machines to the degree that 200,000,000 Chinese coolies are machines from before sunrise to long after sunset. The perfect type of the ‘mechanical’ motion, the lifeless motion, is in the ploughman; it is he who homeward plods his weary way. From the beginning of history the lively, foot-loose, free people have been in the cities; the city mob gets its name from its mobility. The countryside produces its clodhopper. Let us not be too greatly afraid, therefore, of our machines dehumanizing mankind into their own shape. Laboring mankind is really nearest to a machine in the peasant routine, when furrow comes after furrow, and sheaf after sheaf, and chore after chore, and one day after another, and the years, and the centuries, without change and without movement — as among the people of the Yangtze and the Ganges, whom the Machine Age has not touched.

IV

Compare with the fixity of the world’s non-machined peasant masses the obvious facts of the American tempo. Febrile, impulsive, experimental, crusading, censoring, prohibiting, nullifying, bootlegging, riding the surf of fortune with a fierce zest in its crests and troughs, amending, concurring, repealing, reducing four-year terms to two-year terms, expanding two-year terms to four-year terms, electing, appointing, recalling, scaling heaven by so many ladders, by anti-trust laws, by pro-trust laws, by mayors, by city managers, by city commissions, by municipal ownership, by municipal operation, by regulation, by farm boards, by tariffs, by tariff commissions, by Greenbackism in 1874, by Bryanism in 1896, by Brookhartism in 1930 — if this is what the Machine Age has done to mechanize the American people, why is Mrs. Smith so badly worried? She thinks of the machine which punches 14,567 holes of 2.3 millimetres diameter in 51 seconds, on and on into eternity, or as long as steel and lubricant will endure, and she fears that fate for the American who never does the same thing for any length of time, whose very nature it is always to live in feast or in famine, always to do things with all his might, to hit the line hard, to do things up brown — and you never quite know where you have him. He is Puck, but Mrs. Smith and her favorite authors in sociology have got into the habit of regarding him as a Robot.

Forty years ago a non-native author saw the American in a quite different light, saw him as one who ‘ turns a keen untroubled face home, to the instant need of things.’ To this foreign observer the American, far from being a machine, was a man perpetually on the alert. He is that still. He is not only essentially unmechanical in his restlessness and his foot-looseness, he is not even to be thought of as a man who is primarily absorbed by the business of the machine. Primarily his machines are playthings. This is literally true, as I hope I have shown, of so many of his machines which are designedly toys — his automobiles, radios, films, graphophones, airplanes, and soon television, no doubt. But it is true even of the American’s approach to the machines that are unmistakably tools — his power hammers and cranes and conveyors and giant shears and drills. Their primary appeal to him is not as tools but as novelties, as ends in themselves. They are esteemed greatly for the greater quantities of goods they can produce and the greater sums of money they can make, but more they are esteemed because they are a newer, cleverer way of doing things. They are different.

The next time you see a male American in the barber’s chair, having the back of his neck clipped by electric scissors, the scanty fuzz on the top of his head massaged by an electric vibrator, the stray hairs on his white sheet of penance sucked up by a miniature vacuum machine, the hot towel for his face cooking in a bright nickel electric oven, the skin on his face bathed by a violet-ray machine, the polish on his shoes dried by an electric drier — when you see all these things don’t feel too unhappy and say, ‘ Here is a man fast on the way toward being himself transformed into a machine.’ He is not. He is not even a man primarily concerned with a better way of having his hair trimmed, his towel boiled, his shoes dried, his trousers brushed. Essentially he is a child taking delight in the hum and buzz and glint and click of a lot of electric toys. He adores playing with them, and to save his self-respect and ward off comment he finds some use for them and calls them machines. But what he loves is not the use, but the buzz.

(In October, ‘Jones, His Opinions and His Politics’)