into an international federation of technicians affiliated with the
standard organized labour movement of America. This group holds that
the engineer is a wage-earner like all other industrial workers, and
that his economic welfare in many instances is no better than that
of ordinary wage-earners. In addition, this group maintains that in
the last analysis it is flatly impossible for engineers to take an
impartial attitude in the struggle between capital and labour. Hence
they advocate the engineer affiliating with the organized labour
movement like other wage earners and, in times of crisis, throwing his
influence with the workers of industry.
The organized labour movement of America has indicated in clear terms
its estimate of the American engineer’s true value and opportunity. The
American Federation of Labour in 1919 issued the following statement:
“To promote further the production of an adequate supply of the
world’s needs for use and higher standards of life, we urge
that there be established co-operation between the scientist of
industry and the representatives of the organized workers.”
This conviction has also been expressed in the following terms:
“The trades-union movement of America understands fully the
necessity for adequate production of the necessities of life.
American labour understands, perhaps more fully than do
American statesmen, the needs of the world in this hour, and it
is exerting every effort to see that those needs are met with
intelligence and with promptness. The question of increased
productivity is not a question of putting upon the toilers
a more severe strain; it is a question of vast fundamental
changes in the management of industry; a question of the
elimination of outworn policies; a question of the introduction
of the very best in machinery and methods of management.”
The fundamental significance of these attitudes of the engineers and
the organized workers of the country will perhaps be better understood
when it is realized how indispensable the engineers have become in
the conduct of industrial affairs to-day. While virtually the product
of the last fifty years, they have already fallen heir to one of the
most strategic positions in society. To them are entrusted the real
“trade secrets” of industry. Only they understand how far the intricate
material processes of manufacture are interdependent, and how they can
be kept in harmony. The engineers have the skill and the understanding
which is absolutely necessary for industrial management. Without their
guidance the present highly complicated system of production would
quickly tumble into chaos.
The ownership of industry has frequently been suggested as the key
to the true emancipation of the great mass of workers of a nation.
Leastwise many theoretical arguments on the process of workers’
liberation have been premised on the necessity of eventually
liquidating the institution of private property. How futile such a
programme is without recognizing the indispensable part which technical
and managerial skill plays in any system of production has been
emphasized again and again by individuals, notably in Russia and Italy,
where the experiment of securing production without the assistance
of adequate technical control has been tried. In fact, the whole
question of property control is secondary when once the true value of
engineering management is understood. In so far as the American workers
see this, and make it possible for American engineers to co-operate
with them in their struggle for liberation, will they make the task
of the worker more easy and avoid the frequent recurrence of wasteful
and often tragic conflict. The burden, however, is equally upon the
shoulders of the engineer to meet labour half way in this enterprise.
It is very much to be doubted if most American engineers really have
a clear understanding of the position in which they find themselves,
beyond a general conception of their apparent impartiality. The
progressive economic concepts and activities which have been outlined,
while advanced by representatives of national associations of
engineers, are not necessarily the reflection of the great mass of
American engineers to-day, over 200,000 strong. Nevertheless, it is
fortunate that an otherwise conservative and socially timid body of
individuals, such as the engineers frequently have been in the past,
should now find itself represented by a few spokesmen at least who are
able to promulgate clear statements on fundamental issues. The rank and
file of engineers have a long road to travel before they will be in a
position to command adequate consideration for their basic ideals and
purposes as expressed in their new definition of engineering, and as
proposed by some of their leaders.
It is, indeed, seriously to be doubted if many engineers of America
have really had the training to grasp the relation of their position
to the economic developments of to-day. Conventional engineering
education has been entirely too narrow in its purpose. It has succeeded
in turning out good technical practitioners, not far-seeing economic
statesmen. In recent years many engineering schools have placed
emphasis on what has aptly been termed “The business features of
engineering practice.” This, while conceivably a good thing from the
standpoint of the limits within which engineering enterprise must
ordinarily function to-day, is bound to over-emphasize the _status
quo_, and so confine the vision of the engineer.
Engineers in this country have frequently taken a sort of pharisaic
attitude on the desirability--offhand--of delegating the entire running
of things human to technical experts. While such experts may usually
have been quite successful in operating engineering enterprises, it
hardly follows that this necessarily qualifies them for the wholesale
conduct of the affairs of society.
Yet the demand on the part of certain engineers for a more fundamental
participation in the conduct of the larger economic and political
affairs of society should be construed as a healthy sign. It is an
outgrowth of an intellectual unrest among the profession, precipitated
by the thwarting of a genuine desire to build and serve. This unrest,
in the absence of a constructive outlet combined with the past failure
of engineering education to provide a real intellectual background, has
resulted from time to time in some amusing phenomena. Thus not a few
engineers have developed a sort of symbolism or mysticism, expressed
in the terminology of their profession, with a view to building a
new heaven and a new earth whose directing head they propose to be.
From this they derive a peculiar satisfaction and perhaps temporary
inspiration, and incidentally they often seem to confound laymen who
do not understand the meaning of their terms. Instead of deriving
comfort from symbolic speculations and futurist engineering diagrams,
one would rather expect engineers to be realists, especially in the
larger affairs of their profession. The seriousness with which the
speculations concerning “space-binding” and “time-binding” have been
taken is an example of how engineers with their present one-sided
intellectual development may seize upon metaphysical cobwebs for
spiritual solace in their predicament.
Another aspect of the intellectual limitations of many American
engineers is revealed by some of the controversies which engage the
technical societies and the technical periodicals. A notable and
recurring instance is the debate concerning the relative merits of
steam and electrical operation of railways. The real question which
underlies replacing a going system with one which is better but more
costly in capital outlay is primarily economic in nature. Consequently
such a change is contingent upon a revised distribution of the national
surplus rather than on the comparative merits of detail parts. This
fact seldom seems to get home to the engineers. They have been arguing
for the last fifteen years the relative advantages of this or that
detail, failing all the while to understand that the best, in the
large, from an engineering standpoint, can be secured only when
unrestricted, free enterprise has given way to some form of enterprise
regulated principally in the interest of public service.
The profession of engineering, especially in America, is still young
enough not to have become ridden with tradition and convention. It has
developed rapidly along essentially pragmatic though perhaps narrow
lines. Certainly it is not bound and circumscribed by precedent and
convention like the legal profession, or even the medical profession.
Above all, it derives its inspiration from powerful physical realities,
and this constitutes its bulwark.
What the profession really lacks are two fundamentals, absolutely
necessary for any group strategically located and desirous of
leadership in society. These are: (1) an intellectual background based
squarely upon a comprehensive study of the economic and political
institutions of society, their history, growth, and function, together
with a study of the larger aspects of human behaviour and rights;
and, (2) the development of a facility for intelligent criticism,
especially of engineering and economic enterprises. A wholesome
intellectual background is necessary to interpret the new position and
its prerogatives which the application of science has created for the
engineer. A development of the critical faculty is desirable in order
to enable him to detect the blandishments of cult, the temptations of
formulas and systems expressed in indefinable abstractions, and the
pitfalls of the _status quo_.
The responsibility for the American engineer’s function in society
rests largely upon the schools which train him. Engineering education
in America has done its task relatively well considered from the simple
technical point of view. Of late, progressive engineering educators
have stressed the necessity for paying more attention to the humanistic
studies in the engineering curriculum. The beginning made in this
respect is, however, entirely too meagre to warrant much hope that
younger American engineers will soon acquire either that intellectual
background or genuine critical faculty which will entitle them to a
larger share of responsibility for the affairs of men.
The most hopeful sign in this direction is rather the fusion of the
engineers into a large federation of societies, with service to the
community, State, and Nation as their motto; a growing tendency,
collectively, at least, to investigate the conduct of national
industrial enterprises; and, finally, an attempt at a rapprochement,
in the interest of society, between labour and the engineers. Ere
long these developments will reflect themselves in the schools of
engineering, and then, it is reasonable to expect, will the process of
developing a truly worthy class of industrial leaders in this country
really make its beginning. In America to-day no such leadership exists.
O. S. BEYER, JR.
NERVES
Young as America is, she is nevertheless old enough to have known the
time when there were no such things as nerves. Our earliest settlers
and colonists, our proverbially hardy pioneers apparently managed to
get along with a very modest repertory of diseases. They died, if
not from malnutrition or exposure or from Indians, then from some
old-fashioned, heaven-sent seizure or sudden pain, not to mention
from “old age,” long a favourite diagnosis of a pious and not too
inquisitive school of medicine even where the patient’s age had to be
entered by the coroner as of forty or thereabouts. As for the various
forms of nervousness which belong to our age of indulgence and luxury,
they were unknown to those sturdier times, and would undoubtedly have
put their unhappy victims under the quick suspicion of having had
forbidden converse with the Devil.
If, nevertheless, we feel justified in assuming that this golden age
of health and disease probably hid beneath its tinsel a good many of
the nervous afflictions which had already made the Middle Ages so
interesting, we must bear in mind that the pioneer neurotic of those
days had at his command a number of disguises and evasions to which
his fellow-sufferer of to-day can no longer have recourse. One of his
favourite expedients for concealing his neurotic maladjustment was to
take refuge in some form of religion or rather in some new variation of
religious belief or practice, for it is, of course, not claimed here
that religion itself can be exhaustively explained as a manifestation
of nervous maladjustment. But the colonial period was an era when it
was still good form, so to speak, for a neurosis to express itself
in some religious peculiarity, and as this was a country without
monasteries (which had proved to be such a haven for the neurotically
afflicted during the Middle Ages), the neurotic was forced to exhibit
his neo-religionism in the open. Often he blossomed forth in some new
form of religious segregation, which allowed him to compensate for his
social defect and often gave him positive advantages.
The neurotic legacy which he thus bequeathed to the nation can still
be seen all around us to-day in the extraordinary multiplicity of
religious variations, not to say eccentricities, which dot the
theological heavens in America. For the neurotic as a religion
founder--or better, inventor--quickly gathered similarly inclined
adherents, formed a sect, and moved a little further West, so that
the country was rather plentifully sown with strange creeds. He was
thus freed from the criticism which would have overtaken him in a more
settled society and his neurotic disguise remained undetected to a
degree no longer possible to-day. For if nowadays we still occasionally
encounter a brand-new and crassly individual religion all registered
and patented like any temperance elixir, we usually discover that its
prophet is either a defective or even an illiterate person who has
distorted some biblical text in favour of a bizarre interpretation,
or else a psychopathic individual who already has highly systematized
ideas of the delusioned type. This class of neurotic has tended
to disappear by somewhat the same process through which the more
flamboyant type of hysteric such as flourished in the Middle Ages has
gradually succumbed to progressive exposure--an analogy to which I
refer with some diffidence in the face of one of the supreme ironies
of the 20th century, namely, the canonization of Joan of Arc. But that
lapse into the darkness of mediævalism is probably to be explained as a
by-product of the war mind.
The other great loophole for the early American neurotic was purely
geographical. He could always move on. In view of the tendency towards
social avoidance so characteristic of the neurotic, this was of
inestimable advantage. It is, of course, generally supposed that when
the embryonic American trekked Westward it was either in response to
some external pressure of political oppression or religious intolerance
or to the glad, free call of wider horizons and more alluring
opportunities, as was the case with the earliest colonists in their
flight from Europe. In both cases, however, the assumption may be
challenged as a sufficient explanation. For it is extremely probable
that a good many of these pioneers were, like Mr. Cohan’s “Vagabond,”
fugitives from their own thoughts quite as much as from the tyranny
of others. They felt an urge within them that made a further abidance
in their social environment intolerable. This geographical flight of
the neurotic has always been the most natural and the most obvious,
checked though it is to-day to a large extent by the disappearance of
further virgin territory and the sophistication born of the knowledge
wrought by a world-wide intercommunication which says that mankind is
everywhere much the same, a truth which can again be translated into an
internal realization that we cannot escape from ourselves.
Certainly our pioneers have been too much romanticized. The neurotic
legacy which they bequeathed to us can plainly be seen in many
characteristics of our uncouth Westerners with their alternate coldness
towards visitors and their undignified warmth towards the casual
stranger who really cannot mean anything to them. There is something
wrong about man as a social animal when he cannot live happily in a
valley where he sees more than the distant smoke of his neighbour’s
chimney. When at last the pressure of population forces him to live
socially his suspicion and distrust are likely to turn him into a
zealot and reformer and make possible the domination in American life
of such a sub-cultural type as Bryan or the beatitudes of a State
like Kansas. The favourite Western exhortation to be able to look a
man in the eye and tell him to go to Hell is worthy of an anti-social
community of ex-convicts, and the maxim about minding your own business
can only be understood as a defence against the prevalent tendency of
everybody to mind his neighbour’s business. Thus the self-isolating
neurotic ends by revenging himself upon society by making it
intolerable.
But this is to anticipate. It must be said that until after the Civil
War America remained singularly free from “nerves.” This is perhaps
largely due to the fact, as I have tried to show, that they were not
known as such. The only serious epidemic was the witchcraft hunting of
the 17th century. It is certainly most charitable towards a religion
which had so many other repellent features to characterize this as an
hysterical epidemic and let it go at that, though it also freshly
illustrates the time-worn truth that intolerance does not seem to
make its victims any more tolerant in their turn. The passing of this
epidemic also marked the last irruption of State intolerance towards
religion, with the exception of later incidents in connection with the
Mormon Church, though it has rarely been understood that especially
in this country State tolerance of religion was compensated for by
individual and social intolerance in matters that quite transcended the
religious sphere. The vast importance of this phenomenon in relation to
our modern nervous tension will be referred to again later on.
The first typical manifestation of American nerves on an imposing scale
began to develop in the sixties and seventies of the last century in
the form of neurasthenia. Until then the typical American, despite
his religious obsessions and his social deficiencies, had, to a large
extent, remained externally minded, a fact which is sufficiently
attested by his contempt for the arts and his glorification of his
purely material achievements. He had been on the make, an absorbing
process while it lasts, though rather dangerous in the long run because
it never comes to an end. Neurasthenia developed rapidly as soon as it
had been properly labelled, and claimed a notable number of victims
among our captains of industry and high-pressure men: indeed, the
number might easily lead to the perhaps rather unkindly conclusion that
business dishonesty, even though successful, is likely to result in
nervous breakdown in a generation piously reared on the unimpeachable
maxims of a Benjamin Franklin or a Herbert Smiley. More fundamentally
it was, of course, the logical penalty for cultivating the purely
energetic side of man at the expense of his contemplative nature. The
philosophy of hurry and hustle had begun to totter.
The discoverer, expounder, and popularizer of neurasthenia was Doctor
George M. Beard, under whose ægis neurasthenia came to be known as
“the American disease.” Dr. Beard was a sound neurologist within
the limits of his generation of medicine, but with a dangerous gift
of imagination. His conception of neurasthenia was truly grandiose.
According to him this fascinating disease was endemic in the United
States and was the result of our peculiar social conditions. Its
cause, he claimed, was “modern civilization, which has these five
characteristics--steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph,
the sciences, the mental activity of women.” Among the secondary
and tertiary causes of neurasthenia or nervousness he threw in such
things as climate, the dryness of our air and the extremes of heat
and cold, civil and religious liberty, our institutions as a whole,
inebriety, and the general indulgence of our appetites and passions.
In a remarkable chapter he also assigned as one of the causes of our
nervousness the remarkable beauty of American women, though he does
not clearly state whether this made only the men nervous or the women
as well. Such a diagnosis was to turn sociologist with a vengeance and
Doctor Beard lived up to his implications by saying that the cure of
neurasthenia would mean “to solve the problem of sociology itself.”
The inevitable result of such a broad and confident diagnosis was to
make of neurasthenia a kind of _omnium gatherum_ of all the ills of
mankind less obvious than a broken leg. To explain the affliction
in terms of America rather than in terms of the patient and his
symptoms had about the value of a foreigner’s book about America
written on his home-bound steamer after a six-weeks’ sojourn in
this country. In fact, the wildest diagnoses were made, and such
perfectly well-defined medical entities as tabes, arteriosclerosis,
parathyroidism, myasthenia, and incipient tumours of the brain were
frequently given the neurasthenic label. Various theories of exhaustion
and nervous strain were also advanced and the attempt was made to feed
and strengthen the nervous system directly on the analogy of Professor
Agassiz’s famous assumption that the phosphates in fish could be
directly absorbed as material for brain-cells, a theory which did not
account for the fact that comparatively few intellectual giants have
sprung from fisher-folk. This naturally opened up a wide field for
quackery and ushered in the era of “nerve tonics” which are still with
us to-day. The craze for sanitariums also started at about this time,
and with every doctor having a little sanitarium of his own the public
was pretty well fleeced both by its “medicine men” and its men of
medicine.
Of course no treatment could possibly be successful in curing such
a wide variety of diseases the very existence of many of which was
hidden from the physician under the blanket term of neurasthenia;
and in those cases where an actual neurasthenia was present the
treatment as developed by Beard and his followers made only superficial
progress. The S. Weir Mitchell formula, for instance, with its emphasis
upon quiet, diet, and rest, remained, in the majority of cases,
essentially a treatment of symptoms rather than of causes. The tired
and over-wrought business man was given a pacifying vacation from his
dubious labours and was then promptly sent back to them, like a dog to
his vomit. The American woman, grown nervous from being insufficiently
occupied, was initiated into a different form of doing nothing, whereat
she felt much relieved for a time. Neurasthenia was soon moving in a
vicious and ever-widening circle; the more it spread the more it had
to include and thus became less and less digested medically; it played
havoc especially among American women who exploited their “nervousness”
much as their European sisters had exploited their “migraine” or
their “vapours” in previous generations. By the nineties, however,
neurasthenia had run its course as a fashionable affliction, other
countries had succeeded in surviving without erecting a quarantine
against it, and medical circles had begun to debate whether there was
such a thing as neurasthenia at all.