The Quest For Arcadia
The great mistake is to dismiss too hastily the inducements offered by industrial utopia. Defense of it on strictly humanistic grounds is usually discarded as hypocrisy, but after some reflection, I don’t think it is. Remember that many philosophical and scientific minds were fellow travelers in the industrial procession. Like Adam Smith, they predicted that just beyond the grim factory smoke and the foul pits where men mined coal, a neo-Arcadian utopia beckoned—we have already witnessed its evanescent, premature embodiment in Chautauqua. Thus was the stage set for institutional schooling as it eventually emerged. This Arcadia would be possible only if men of great vision had the nerve and iron discipline to follow where rationality and science led. The crucial obstacle was this: an unknown number of generations would have to be sacrificed to industrial slavery before mankind could progress to its comfortable destiny.1 On the other side of that immoral divide, paradise might lie.
How to get there? Though Malthus and Darwin had shown the way to intellectually devalue human life and to do with protoplasm whatever needed to be done, the force of Western tradition, particularly Judeo-Christian tradition, was still too strong to be brushed aside. Into this paradox stepped socialism. It was a happy coincidence that while one aspect of industrial imagination, the capitalist lobe, was doing the necessary dirty work of breaking the old order and reorganizing its parts, another, softer aspect of the same industrial mind could sing the identical song, but in a different key and to a different audience.
What socialists helped capitalism to teach was that the industrial promise was true. The road to riches could be followed through coal smoke to an eventual paradise on earth. Only the masters had to be changed. In place of bosses would sit workers. Meanwhile, both sides agreed (Marx is particularly eloquent on this point) that many would have to suffer a great while, until predictable advances in social reordering would ultimately relieve their descendants.
- [Hazard]
I'm going to take a moment to highlight and argue against a part of Gatto's thesis that I think he understands to be central but doesn't do a good enough job of making explicit.
In Gatto's view, industrial wage labor is inherently degrading, and it's degrading enough that there was a short supply of people who would subject themselves to it in 19th century America. So for industrialists to get what they wanted (industrial revolution go brrrrrrrrr), they needed a bigger supply of people willing to put up with that shit, which is why they funded and lobbied for a compulsory schooling system that pumped out more docile less entrepreneurial workers.
This is almost true, but gets some key things mixed up. I do think it was a common sentiment among native born white Americans that industrial wage labor was degrading and beneath them (see Orestes Brownson's The Laboring Classes for an example), I do think that the school system was shaped to make people more docile and less entrepreneurial, and I do think that many reformers intended for most kids going through it to end up doing industrial wage labor, but I don't think it was done to solve a labor shortage. The waves of mass immigration that occurred between 1830 and 1920 meant that despite the common view that wage labor was antithetical to the American way of life embodied by the autonomous farmer, American industry was never in short supply of labor.
The underlying societal re-ogranization which the school systems were a part of was more about trying to reduce competition in various privileged sectors, as described in The Domestic Product by Ben Hoffman. It was more about excluding people from various domains; funneling them towards industrial wage labor was simply a "safe" place for them to go, not an essential one.↩