Writing Sample for Smithsonian MuseumSubmitted March 17,
2015Excerpts from: The Ford Man: Fordism, Art, and the Mechanical
Man During the Interwar Era
Whether mystical concept or not, individual identity was not
something Americans willingly surrendered. A vibrant discourse
pulsed throughout the interwar period that debated the conception
of humans as robots, despite any victories the Fordist-Behaviorist
side may have proclaimed. Because Fordism and Behaviorism rendered
industrial workers doubly robotic, the discourse over Fordisms
roboticizing effects on the industrial worker wielded the symbol of
the robot most potently of all. Central to Capeks invention was its
inability to assert and maintain a unique identity, and in R.U.R.
capitalists invented the robot to be manufactured en masse as a
standardized, Let-George-Do-It mechanism [that] is put in quantity
production like Fords.[footnoteRef:1] The scientists, engineers,
and employers determined the identities of their creations, imbuing
their mechanical men with only those characteristics that would
enable them to labor effectively. After having been created, Capeks
robots can do nothing but constantly reiterate their imposed
identity, forever following pre-programmed instructionsthat is, of
course, unless they discover ideals. Commentators quickly and
consistently cited the parallels not just between these robots and
Fords, but also between robots and Fords workers. Such industrial
production is a system of turning men into Robots, argued one man
in 1923; it is an exploitation of the robots who make the Fords,
claimed another that same year.[footnoteRef:2] This latter article
continued its critique, erecting a hierarchy of manhood in the
process: the history of the world is the biography of great men,
and the great man has never yet existed who was merely a robot, a
perfectly disciplined, marvelously efficient and soulless human
machineapparently the ideal of modern large-scale industrial
organization. [1: OLeary, Margaret. Plays from Bohemia. New York
Times 10 Sep. 1922: BRM4.] [2: System: Dooming the Twelve Hour Day.
Editorial. Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 Jun. 1923. Robots who make: Mr.
Ford as a CandidateIf He Is, Editorial. Chicago Daily Tribune, 27
Oct. 1923: 6]
Sixteen years later, the same anti-progressivist language was
still being leveled against Fordist industrial practices. At a 1939
symposium reported in the New York Times, the Reverend James J.
Tompkins, the widely-known founder of the Nova Scotia cooperative
movement, lectured his audience: Then take a man like Henry Fordno
reflections intendedand he gets hold of ideas and people and makes
robots and slaves of all of us so that the worker after punching
holes all day has to go out and get drunk. He isnt a worker; he has
a job. Work is a sacred thing. [footnoteRef:3] In the middle of the
interwar period, Frances Perkinssoon to become FDRs celebrated
Secretary of Laborhad become well aware during her tenure as New
York State Industrial Commissioner of the anxieties that Fordism
produced in American workers. She responded to these concerns at a
1929 luncheon in her honor, assuring the audience that [o]ne of the
duties of her officewas the prevention of the rearing of a race of
robots.[footnoteRef:4] [3: MacDonald, W. A. Action is Stressed In
Adult Education, New York Times, 17 May 1939: 3. ] [4: Capital and
Labor Honor Miss Perkins. New York Times, 1 Feb. 1929: 14]
Interestingly, Perkins luncheon saw [r]epresentatives of
capital, labor and the public united in her honora race of robots
concerned all parties, though for dissimilar reasons. Just as one
side bewailed workers as the unfortunate and unwitting victims of
Fordist robotism, another accused workers of actively engaging a
different form of mass-produced identity: unionizing. During the
era, pro-capital commentators frequently attacked labor unions as
hotbeds of robotism. The Pulitzer Prize-winning, syndicated
polemicist Westbrook Peglerwho finished third behind Roosevelt and
Stalin in Times 1941 Man of the Year
poll[footnoteRef:5]apotheosized this rhetorical tactic. In the
process of casting unions as havens of corruption, criminality, and
tyranny, Pegler repeatedly condemned union members as nominally
free Americans who had been reduced to the status of subhuman
robots by their union leaders. Union members were robots in the
ranks, controlled by budding Hitlers and Stalins, denuded of their
own ability to wield their respective labor power as free
individuals. Peglers attacks, and those like his, successfully
capitalized upon the potent and pervasive American discourse of
identity and robotism, adding another stain to the uniform of
collectivism and commonality.[footnoteRef:6] [5: Witwer, David.
Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-Union Movement, Journal of American
History, 92.2 (2005)] [6: ibid]
Peglers frequent and defamatory use of robot also brilliantly
capitalized upon the nationalist discourse of the period. Beginning
in the 1920s and peaking in the 1930s, the mainstream media
repeatedly invoked the term to describe the citizens of other
nations, adding additional menace to the concept. Now robots were
no longer simply thoughtless and faceless masses, but foreign to
boot. So here we see the last stage of the Fordist-robot discourse.
As shown above, both pro-labor and pro-capital advocates had kept
American workers continuously aware of their potential to become a
race of robots. Now such unsettling notions were projected abroad,
with these foreign robots allowing for a clear other against which
workers could assert their humanity. Ultimately though, this
humanity was circumscribed, defined specifically in opposition to
nations whose ideologies differed from that of Progressive Era
America. Unsurprisingly, Russia and Germany were the most common
recipients of the epithet. Immediately after the 1922-23 debut of
R.U.R., Russia became a country of robots. The Bolsheviki were
making robots of the people, went one 1923 New York Times article.
The Bolsheviki are the direct successors of the Czarist regime.
They have put the people in barracks and made robots of them
all.[footnoteRef:7] Eight years later, just as the second national
tour of R.U.R. began, the same language reverberated to denigrate
the Soviet Five-Year Plan. Had a sympathetic American workers hopes
been brightened by the promises of the Bolshevik government, they
may have dimmed upon hearing Matthew Woll, Vice President of the
American Federation of Labor, announce on the New York Times front
page that Soviet Russia is a nation of robots.[footnoteRef:8] Had
the Five-Year Plan stirred up renewed optimism about a utopian
socialist state, such dreams may have faded in the light of news
that the Plan reveals the blind acceptance by Russian
collectivismit reveals a strange insensitivity to the foreordained
creation of a race of robots.[footnoteRef:9] Communism made not
only robot workers but robot children, too, according to the
eye-witness account of Eve Garrette Grady, wife of U.S.
industrialist William H. Grady. Russian children were the most
uninteresting in the world, she was quoted in the New York Times as
saying, they were millions of little robots who had grown up under
the communist regime; in an article titled Making Little Robots in
Soviet Russia, the New York Times echoed these
sentiments.[footnoteRef:10] Russias new leader, Josef Stalin, was
allowed to be part human, but of course he was also some
robotsoulless.[footnoteRef:11] [7: Assails Education Under the
Soviet. New York Times, 8 Aug. 1923: 14] [8: Labor Moves to Bar All
Soviet Products From Nation by 1932. New York Times 28 Jul. 1930:
1] [9: Making Little Robots in Soviet Russia. Editorial. New York
Times, 17 May 1931: 66] [10: Says Hunger Cuts Russian Efficiency.
New York Times 14 Apr. 1931: 11] [11: Durant, Walter. Stalin: Man,
Mouthpiece, Machine. New York Times 18 Jan. 1931: 78]
Just after the U.S. press established socialism and collectivism
as inevitably birthing a robot race, it rapidly conflated robots
with the evils of German fascism. As one New York Times editorial
explained, through the lens of Capek and under the subheading The
New Robots;
Robot is a term that had a great vogue in the world several
years ago. Robots were the dehumanized automata into which
capitalism had presumably transformed the working massesThe Czech
author of R.U.R. aimed his satire against the capitalist system.
But it remained for Hitlers totalitarian State, professedly a
substitute for discredited capitalism, to carry the robot idea far
beyond anything charged up against the capitalist system by its
severest critics.
The rise of the National Socialists nullified critiques of the
dehumanizing effects of Fordist U.S capitalism. Germans were the
real robots, not Americans; Hitler turned Ford into a blessing. To
contest Fordist capitalism, to claim its abuses and roboticization
of the worker, is actually to invite true robotism into the United
States. Hitler molded Germans into puppets of the State twenty-four
hours in the day, and in every fiber of their physical life, and in
every nerve of their conscious life. Germany, however, was not the
only nation that had reached this point past which Robotism can go
no further. The editorial continues: [Robotism] is the scope of the
claims which the new anti-capitalist States, whether the Hitler
type or the Stalin type, make upon their subjects. In short, to be
anti-capitalism, or even just to argue the dehumanizing plight of
the working masses, is to align oneself with these new foreign
states. It is to be pro-robot.Dissent thus circumscribed, robots
thus hyper-demonized, what happened when workers naturally chose to
deny to their categorization as robots? To do so meant declaring
their basic identities as humans instead of as workers, a shift
that foreswore a class consciousness long-stigmatized as inhuman
and robotic. Workers human identities were by default also American
and industrial-capitalist; indeed, Fordist-robot and identity
discourses rendered human, American, and industrial-capitalist
inextricable from one another. Of course, I do not suggest that all
such individuals would have identified themselves this way. Rather,
the crucial point is the constricted rhetorical position in which
pro-labor entitiesworkers, unions, and sympathizersfound
themselves. Eager to confront the dehumanizing effects of
industrial labor, while also forced to counter claims of imposed
Fordist identities, robotism and groupthink, soullessness and
brainlessness, anti-Americanism, Bolshevism, and fascism, these
entities retreated to the rhetorical ground of All are
human,[footnoteRef:12] as a New York Times Article that Takes Issue
With Mr. Ford argued. Labor began to use phrases such as We are not
robots! and to refer to itself in humanizing terms, as exemplified
in this plea from a Detroit auto worker: [12: Feld, Rose C. Says
Big Industries Can Be Kept Human. New York Times, 6 Jul. 1924:
XX3]
One of the most priceless possessions still retained by modern
man is what is called manhoodWould you be a MANfree, proud,
independent, POWERFUL? Then get together with your fellow worker,
ORGANIZE YOURSELF, and you will be in a position to proudly look
into the eyes of foremen, straw bosses, and all the world and say:
I AM A MAN.[footnoteRef:13] [13: Auto Worker News (Oct. 1927), p.4.
Cited in Lewchuk, Wayne A. Men and Monotony: Fraternalism as a
Managerial Strategy at the Ford Motor Company, The Journal of
Economic History, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 824-856]
Here the employee is forced to remind his foreman I AM A MAN,
but in so doing severs himself from being first a worker. Through
such statements, the idea of the working class transformed from
being understood as a powerful monolith of purpose to being a
constellation of individual men, each of whom preserved the
capacity to be free and independent. Thus, one is no longer as
surprised to hear Norman Thomasthe Socialist Presidential candidate
decry Hoovers rugged individualism a myth, thereby implying
individualism as a worthy ideal. [footnoteRef:14] For Thomas, the
U.S. had become a country of economic dynasties, Babbitts, robots
and human televoxes from which he desired to distance himself and
the Socialist movement. Nor is one as surprised to hear someone
like Harold Rosenbergat the time a self-described communist
intellectualformulating a theory of individual identity that tries
to adapt to Behaviorism: [14: Thomas, Norman. Prosperity a Myth,
Says Norman Thomas. New York Times 27 Dec. 1928: 28]
In contrast with the person recognized by the continuity of his
being, we may designate the character defined by the coherence of
his acts as an identity. Representing the human individual as an
actor, the term stands against the biological or historical
organism-concept, which visualizes action as a mere attribute of,
and clue to, a being who can be known only through an intuition
[read: Introspection].[footnoteRef:15] [15: Rosenberg, Harold.
Character Change and the Drama, originally written in 1931,
reprinted in Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959)
132.]
Rosenberg continued on to urge the proletarian to control his
own identity, to lay claim to his actions, by naming himself
[original emphasis], in the model of Hamlets This is IHamlet the
Dane! Whatever one may think of Rosenbergs logic, the similarities
between Hamlets self-affirmation and that of the Detroit auto
workers I AM A MAN! are striking. Both Thomas and Rosenberg viewed
themselves as professional advocates of the working class, so their
calculated comments offer particularly clear insight to the power
that Fordist-Behaviorist ideology wielded. Clearly anathema in its
utopian form, inevitably prompting protest, this ideology operated
to determine and circumscribe reactions against it. Fordism
interpellated a servile, efficient, and controllable working
subject, one whose identity was standardized and imposed from
above. Individual identityespecially an intuited one beyond outside
controlwas eliminated, and the ideology left us, we recall, with
that strange creation that looks like a man but really is not a
man. Because of R.U.R., this vague formulation received concrete,
externalized form in the symbol of the robot. The robot mediated
Fordisms utopia to the public, functioning as a cultural
hyperboleit was a true prospect, one that had to be considered, but
simultaneously was so exaggerated as to seem impossible. For a
nation fundamentally opposed to Fordisms ideal robotic worker,
then, the robot served three functions: as an exaggeration, it
palliated fears of Fordisms realization; as a threat, it cued
reactions against it; as a stigma, it shaped and delimited these
reactions. In this last capacity, the robot primarily operated to
stigmatize collectivism and class consciousness, prompting workers
and leftist intellectuals to agitate for recognition as human
individuals. This was a compromise for Ford who, despite his
controversial beliefs, knew that his system of production offered
too many benefits for Americans to refuse it completely. So how to
coexist with society? Who would tend the machines? He wanted
robots, but not if they were going to be class-conscious ones.
Though imperfect, he could work with humans, especially human
individuals, especially someone declaring I AM A MAN. Such a person
positioned his human identity above a working one, and Ford was
confident he could mold this individual man into The Ford Man
outlined in the company pamphlet.[footnoteRef:16] [16: Ibid,
842]
[excerpt below is from later section of the essay]
Wonderfully illustrating the pervasiveness of Fords views on
mechanics, efficiency, and the body during the interwar period is
the often-overlooked culture of marionette theater. Beginning at
the end of World War I and extending through the 1930s, the United
States experienced a cultural phenomenon that is fascinatingly
self-contained within the interwar period, as marionette theater
took on a magnitude and cultural status that it had never before
enjoyed. Fordism produced this phenomenon, claims MIT historian
John Bell, who dates puppet modernism to 1919 and eagerly notes
that along with New York City, Detroit was the other great hub of
marionette theater during the era.[footnoteRef:17] Bells
correlation is anecdotal, but the sources from the period
repeatedly affirm a strong connection. Just while Fordism and
Behaviorism framed the body as an object be controlled, regulated,
and disciplined, marionette playsin their performance and
receptiondramatically addressed the relevance of the human body in
the Machine Age. The rise of puppetry in popular culture,
particularly its relationship with dance, created a realm of
discourse in which anxieties about the value and sovereignty of the
human body were voiced, palliated, and reinscribed. [17: Bell,
John. Strings, Hands, Shadows: a modern puppet history, (Detroit:
Detroit Institute of Arts, 2000) 72.]
At the peak of the 1928 holiday season, between Christmas and
New Years Day, two New York theaters were overrun by puppets and
mannequins, along with the childrenparents in towwho filed in to
see them perform. The first was the mid-town Martin Beck Theatre,
the new home of the well-reputed Theatre Guild company of recent
R.U.R. fame. Renditions of Peter Rabbitt, Raggedy Ann, and the
March of the Wooden Soldiers were among the acts by which the Sue
Hastings Marionnettes dazzled audiences at the Martin Beck. The
shows, one reviewer remarked, were as professional as any
production of ONeill or Shaw.[footnoteRef:18] [18: Marionettes Rule
at Two Theatres. New York Times 27 Dec. 1928: 30.]
Meanwhile, downtown at the Provincetown Playhouse, the young
Remo Bufano conducted his large manikins in performances of
Cinderella and Julius Caesars Circus. Bufanos show was considerably
less high-hat than Hastings, though its antics appealed to the
sensibility of his juvenile audience. Bufanos lukewarm critical
reception was a relatively inauspicious moment for the man who then
quickly became New Yorks most celebrated avant-garde
puppeteer.[footnoteRef:19] Over the succeeding years, Bufanos
trademark oversized puppets graced the theaters and opera houses of
New York, Philadelphia, and other major U.S. metropolises. He
lectured on puppetry, authored books on the subject, and was even
selected by WPA officials to head the Federal Theater Projects
Marionette Division. While Bufanos 1928 Christmas shows may not
have fully suggested this future success, the reviewer nonetheless
admitted that Bufanos puppets achieved a gusto seldom attained by
human actors.[footnoteRef:20] [19: Bell, John, p. 64] [20: Ibid,
64]
Human actors would face only increasing challenges, as just a
year later the New York Times declared a sea change in modern
taste: puppetry, once a part of the childrens kingdom, was now
proper adult entertainment.[footnoteRef:21] Two years later still,
in 1931, an event unprecedented in American theater swept through
the Metropolitan Opera Houses of New York and Philadelphia.
Together the New York League of Composers, the Philadelphia
Orchestra, and Remo Bufano combined to stage Prokofieffs Le Pas
dAcier (Dance of the Age of Steel) and Stravinksys Oedipus Rex, the
latter arranged by Jean Cocteau. The production was hailed as
sensational, filmed for distribution by R-K-Oone of the Big Five
movie studios of the eraand the sounds of Oedipus Rex were sent out
over the airwaves of the National Broadcasting Company. [21: Paris,
W.L. Middleton. Event The Puppets Meet in Convention. New York
Times 22 Sep. 1929: SM5]
Critics claimed the real protagonists of Oedipus Rex to be
Bufanos puppets, six awesome, fifteen-foot figures who levitated
high above the stage as they danced and gestured to the Stravinsky
score, while beneath them stood the Princeton Glee Club
impersonating the Greek populace. For an audience member to
overlook the dichotomies here would have been difficult, even if he
or she did not consciously register their implications. The
empyreal puppets above, god-like in their stature, uniqueness, and
graceful weightlessness; the Princeton Glee Club comprising the
impersonated masses, bound to the stage below. As with engineered
machines, Bufanos super-marionettesas one reviewer called them in a
reference to Gordon Craigwere human creations that in turn
emphasized the limits and insufficiencies of
humanity.[footnoteRef:22] [22: Oedipus Rex Gets American Premiere.
New York Times 11 Apr. 1931: 23.]
While audiences may or may not have flushed out all of the
lessons of marionette theater, critics, commentators, dancers and
actors eagerly voiced their opinions, creating a discourse in which
of puppet machines clashed publicly in newspapers, journals, books,
and film.[footnoteRef:23] New York Times dance critic John Martin,
documenting this New Interest in Puppets and Their Uses, wrote that
[t]he much-discussed marionettes which were employed in the League
of Composers production of Stravinskys Oedipus Rex were effective
arguments for the superiority of puppets over human
actors.[footnoteRef:24] Some avidly praised this new art form, some
flatly bewailed it, still othersand Martin is actually in this
campfell in between these opinions, seeing marionettes as
representing both a gain and a loss. Whatever the speakers
perspective, though, all of the responses to Oedipus Rex and to
marionettes in general centered upon establishing a new definition
of human that was distinguishable from the new anthropomorphic
puppet, and vice versa. [23: In journals such as Parnassus, for
example, one finds reviews of Max von Boehns book Dolls and Puppets
[see McMahon, A. Philip, Dolls and Puppets, Parnassus, Vol. 5, No.
2 (Feb., 1933), p. 25. Meanwhile, figures like Paul McPharlin and
Remo Bufano published works of their own, including the latters
Book of Puppetry in 1929. As noted above, the movie studio R-K-O
distributed a film version of Oedipus Rex. ] [24: Martin, John. The
Dance: Marionettes. New York Times 23 Aug. 1931: X7.]
Many argued that the relevance of marionettes actually depended
on their inhumanityif puppeteers aimed for naturalism in their
representations of body and movement, then marionettes would be
merely imitating human actors or dancers. Puppets should capitalize
upon their own natural state, which is static, as opposed to the
natural state of a human being [which] is dynamic.[footnoteRef:25]
Because of this natural state, puppets represented movement without
wasteadopting the rhetoric of Ford, Coolidge, and Hoover, critics
repeatedly praised their efficiency and their economical movements,
and criticized as too human those unstable and jiggling puppets
that ambled about.[footnoteRef:26] Other critics, attempting to
discount the cultural significance of the marionette, actually
dismissed it on similar grounds. Its woodenness of countenance, its
complete lack of passion disparaged one New York Times writer, who
relegated marionette theater to mere comedy. But whether through
praise or invective, puppets began to amass a rather stable and
rather familiar public definition: constructed, efficient,
passionless, and super-human, puppets unsurprisingly earned such
epithets as robots on strings and miniature robots.[footnoteRef:27]
That Remo Bufano, while head of the WPAs Marionette Division,
attempted to organize a production of R.U.R. and resigned when
blocked by superiors, somehow seems fitting. [25: Ibid] [26:
Martin, John. The Dance: Machine Age, New York Times 22 Mar. 1931:
X4.] [27: Robots on strings from Pope, Virginia. A Beaux Arts Ball
for Fiery Moderns. New York Times 18 Jan. 1931: 81. Miniature
robots from Designer of Puppets Has Exhibit in School. New York
Times 31 Mar. 1935: N2. On Remo Bufano resigning over R.U.R., see
Bufano Quits WPA Unit. New York Times 15 Nov. 1937: 8.]
The intersection of robot and marionette terminology did not
revolve as much around the human identity, as discussed in the
previous section, than it did around the human
body.[footnoteRef:28] In fact, both as cultural concepts and as
cultural realities, robots and marionettes were central elements
within a greater discourse that permeated the twenties and
thirties, one that concerned the relationship between the (dancing)
body, its labor power, and machines. The arrival of modern dance in
the U.S.often thanks to foreign dance troupesgalvanic or mechanical
music, and motion picture technology readily coalesced with
pre-existing anxieties about the Machine Age; this conjuncture
produced a vibrant public discourse in which definitions of the
human bodyits value, its capabilities, its material naturewere once
again debated, homogenized, and reinscribed. [28: With one
important exception being Gertrude Steins marionette play,
Identity, of 1935] 3. One of the images of Bauhaus dancers that
accompanied Scheffauers article, with caption.
NEWEST BALLETS SCORN THE MERELY HUMAN FORM read the headline of
Herman Scheffauers article, published in New York Times Magazine on
July 4, 1926. Dispatched from Germany, its Berlin byline likely
seemed particularly foreign in the magazines Independence Day
issue.[footnoteRef:29] One may also find it interesting to know
that Scheffauer, a former U.S. resident, had been indicted en
absentia by a Grand Jury for treason, convicted of disseminating
pro-German propaganda during World War I. Not quite war-time
propaganda, Scheffhauers magazine article hailed the latest
productions of the German Bauhausthe Triadic and mechanical
balletsand featured four photos of incredibly odd, quasi-robot
dancers alongside the text (fig. 3-4). In the article, Scheffauer
trumpets the advancements the Bauhaus had made by incorporating the
human body into modern art, particularly emphasizing the work of
Bauhaus theater director Oskar Schlemmer. Schlemmers analyses and
distillations of human form and movement give us the human body
seen and conceived as a purely technical organism; a machine, if
you will. Scheffauer continues on to describe the main
breakthroughs of first the mechanical and then the Triadic ballets:
[29: Scheffauer, Herman. Newest Ballets Scorn the Merely Human
Form. New York Times Magazine 4 Jul. 1926: SM22.] 4. Another of
Scheffauers Bauhaus dancers.
Now, a mere human dancer is confined to short steps, a yard or
so either way; to low leaps, at most a yard or more above the
ground. He is able to free himself from the law of gravity only for
a secondIt is here that the automaton and marionette come
triumphantly into their own. The artificial figure, when equipped
with all the subtleties of modern techniques, permits of every
possible movement; every possible position at any momentBut there
is another type of ballet. Contrary to the movement that embues
[sic] the marionette with human or superhuman capacities, we have
that which reduces (in some cases elevates) the unadorned or
abstract or neutral human being to the rank of a
puppet.[footnoteRef:30] [30: Ibid]
For Scheffauer and the Bauhaus art scientists, whose reliance
upon natural laws and almost mathematical deductions apparently
ensured their authority, the human body was doubly impotent: bound
to the ground and outperformed by its artificial counterpart, the
body was also vulnerable enough to be reducedor in an even more
derogatory reading, elevatedto the status of controllable, mindless
puppet. What one is witnessing in these ballets is, as Scheffauer
describes, the dematerialization of the corporeal into the
symbolical.[footnoteRef:31] If not devalued by superhuman puppets,
then the body becomes dematerialized in favor of a more precious
object, pure motion. Either way, both the contempt for and
irrelevance of the body is clear. The impact of this specific
article in the U.S. is difficult to gauge, but the stateside career
of an earlier 1926 news piece offers an idea of the salience such
issues had, at least with editors of major newspapers. This
Associated Press article highlighted the ideas of Enrico
Prampolini, an Italian futurist and esteemed intellectual. He
believed that the actor is a useless element in theatrical action
and dangerous to the future of the theatre, and that future
performances would feature only abstract forces. NO ACTORS IN
THEATRE OF FUTURE, HE PREDICTS, with a Rome byline, was picked up
by the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times,
and possibly others, on January 2.[footnoteRef:32] [31: Fans of
Lucy Lippard and Oscar Masotta, and especially those who attempt to
claim the idea of dematerialization as belonging to one or the
other, will be interested to note that Scheffauers usage appeared
fifty years before either of the two critics applied the term to
contemporary art.] [32: No Actors in Theatre of Future, He
Predicts. New York Times 2 Jan. 1926: 10]
Prampolinis magnetic theater may well have seemed fantastical to
U.S. readers, but the dissolving significance of the human actor he
predicted could also have appeared increasingly prophetic over the
following years. Bufanos super-human marionettesthe real
protagonistshovered as just one symbol of this devaluating process;
the robots on strings of Tony Sargs Modernistic Tragedy of the
Marionettes, dancing at the riotously modernistic 1931 Beaux-Arts
Ball, were another. Such simulacra began to emerge in Hollywood as
well. For the 1932 movie Dancers in the Dark, Paramount Studios
placed their starlet Miriam Hopkins in the arms of a mechanical
mate to film the climactic dance scenes. To promote the film,
Paramount ran newspaper ads imitating the format of real articles,
the headline reading: ROBOT USED AS DANCE PARTNER. The mechanical
dancer was rigged up to do a fancy fox-trot, waltz, or tango, and
lead [Hopkins] like any human dancing partner.[footnoteRef:33] The
male lead, Jack Oakie, was only called in for long shots. Just two
years later Oakie may have been out of a job completely, as
newspapers reported a vogue in the major movie studios for
robot-themed films.[footnoteRef:34] Examples abound of a threatreal
or imaginedto the relevance of the human protagonist during the
interwar era. For those opposed, the exuberance with which some
film studios, theater directors, and cultural critics praised this
process of human obsolescence would have made it seem all the more
real, all the more inevitable, all the more threatening. [33: Robot
Used as Dance Partner. Los Angeles Times 7 Feb. 1932: B12] [34:
Schallert, Edwin. Studios Lining Up Stories of Robots, Latest Idea
in Search for New Film Themes. Los Angeles Times 1 May 1934:
13.]
Hopkins robot partner represented not only the disappearance of
the (male) protagonistboth in theater and film, as actor and
dancerbut also showed the extent to which the advancements
Scheffauer touted in 1926 had been absorbed into, or were already
extant in American dance. Indeed, the mechanical dancer and the
human puppet were potent themes in dance and dance criticism in the
U.S., and functioned as symbols through which anxieties about the
relationship between humans, machines, and the modern work
environment could be expressed and alleviated. Some powerful
critics were optimistic about the intersection of dancer and
machine. A long New York Times feature, for example, expounded on
the benefits of machines to modern dance, as well as modern dances
redemption of the machine age. Efficiency may indeed be a fetish,
wrote John Martin in 1928, as some assert; mankind may be
degenerating into a race of robotsbut the fact nevertheless remains
that the dance has flourished in the regime of the grossly maligned
machine. Martin himself draws a direct line between the efficiency
gospel of Ford, Coolidge, and Hoover and the rise of modern dance,
writing, Under the impetus of a world movement toward efficiency
and the reclamation of waste, the dance was
revitalized.[footnoteRef:35] [35: Martin, John. The Dance is
Attuned to the Machine. New York Times, 24 Feb. 1929: 79.]
This revitalization, if true, created another hierarchy of
authority and knowledge for the period. Through scientific analysis
and techniques, expert practitioners of these new dance forms
created a bio-mechanical knowledge that could only be taught to
their hordes of pupils, not intuited by them. In fact, only medical
specialists could truly understand these processes of movement, as
it is actually to a physician no way concerned with art that
[modern dance] owes its origin. According to Martin, a Dr. Bess
Mensendieck of Germany actually invented this physical culture
while trying to create a system for physical efficiencyfor
attaining the greatest power and range with the last expenditure of
energy. The pervasive economic conceit culminates in the following
passage;
There has been nothing of sentiment, nothing of emotion, in the
growth of this new technical method. There mere fact that its
advocates have renounced old methods implies, it is true, a degree
of esthetic selectiveness and the existence of a creed, if only one
of negation. But the technique itself has not been prompted by any
urge of the soul or any irrepressible demand for self-expression.
It is a purely mechanistic development, bent on achieving the ends
of a soundly and wisely practical era: namely, to get the greatest
possibly healthy return on every investment, whether it be of
money, fuel or muscle.[footnoteRef:36] [36: Ibid]
The body was a motor, energy its fuel, motion its purpose; or
the body was robotic, divested of sentiment and emotion, moving
only according to the standardized instructions of more powerful,
more knowledgeable experts. The corporeal thus no longer had
meaning as an object in itself, but as a mere container of the two
most coveted, immaterial objects in the American economy, motion
and energy. Unsurprisingly, many objected to this view. These
dissenters believed that modern dance either symbolized or
contributed to the widespread dehumanization resulting from
Fordisms Machine Age. Decrying the dance of the city, one New York
Times author continued to proclaim that Tradition is Arcadianthe
tradition of the ballet remains the tradition of Arcadia, and the
human race is older than any of the machines it has so sedulously
invented. He yearned to resuscitate the space between the primitive
brute and the brute that machines have made. In short, there lies
all humanity and the humanities, there lies hints of nymphs,
shepherdesses, fauns, satyrs, and lads of the village. For this
author, machines and machine-inspired dance had banished humanity
to a mythic realm. Should the progress of machines continue
unimpeded, both in dance and industry, he envisioned a familiar
end: We Become RobotsIn this form of impersonal drama were are
supposed to see ourselves deprived of guiding personal
brainsreduced to the rank of the robots which the Capeks
invented.[footnoteRef:37] [37: Irving, Carter. Jazz Brings First
Dance of The City. New York Times 14 Jun. 1925: SM9.]
To avoid this robotic fate, to revitalize a now-mythic humanity,
many implored a revival of what had now become folk dance. Another
New York Times article documented these increased and reactionary
revival efforts, which included imitating the dances of American
Indians and English peasants. Written by the pro-Machine Age John
Martin, however, this piece offers two perspectives: first, it
shows the antiprogressivist protest that partially motivated this
revivalism; second, it reveals Martins power to elide this
opposition, reframing it as supplementaryand indeed indebtedto
modernization:
it has frequently been declared that the much-maligned machine
age is lethal to culture and destructive of everything simple and
human; yet this same age has made a special point of discovering of
discovering and to preserving the fine simplicity and rich humanity
of the peasant arts which preceding periods have been prone to pass
over as crude and uncouth.[footnoteRef:38] [38: Martin, John. The
Dance: Folk Art as Inspiration. New York Times 3 Jan. 1932:
X6.]
The dances of the simple man, Martin continues, are able to
convey to we who are less simple the very soil of past cultures.
Importantly, the reconciliatory tactic that Martin deploys is one
found in many of the commentaries on machines and modern dance,
from both sides of the debate. Compromises and middle grounds
emerge from avid modernists, who recognize a need to assimilate and
neutralize dissenting voices and traditional forms, and from
traditionalists, who often affect a tone of pragmatic resignation
to the grip that technology, industry, and efficiency have on U.S.
society. Thus even that propagandist of dematerialization, Herman
Scheffauer, concluded his article on a semi-comforting note,
claiming that the drama of tradition is not yet so dead that it
must abjectly surrender the boards to the inanimate.It is highly
probable that the vital will always triumph over the
mechanical.[footnoteRef:39] Alternatively, the author who so
polemically called for a return to Arcadia ultimately backs down,
certain that his lack of expertise undermines his beliefs. Perhaps
the new stuff only needs to be humanized, he relented. The fears of
antimoderns palliated, the dangers of progress minimized, what
remained was a mandate for modernists to proceed with their
dematerializing and devaluating of the body, so long as they stage
the occasional Folk Festival. [39: Scheffauer, Herman. Newest
Ballets Scorn the Merely Human Form. New York Times Magazine 4 Jul.
1926: SM22.]
Not incidentally, while the folk dance movement was gaining
public acceptance in New York, the Ford Museum opened in Detroit,
dedicated to memorializing the old craft traditions in the United
States. Describing the museum in Moving Forward, Henry Ford lays
out the logic behind the institution: The arts of the old craftsman
have not been lost and neither have his materials. If we do not
follow him in our work of to-day, it is not because we cannot, but
because in every respect we have improved mightily on what he did.
We can, if we so care, do anything that he did and do it
better.[footnoteRef:40] [40: Ford, Moving Forwad, p. 125.]
Because old traditions and materials have been preserved,
mummified behind museum glass or simulated on stage, they can be
abandoned in reality; Arcadia had become the therapeutic daytrip or
mythical daydream for the modern era. As with its quelling of
anxieties over robotism and identity, Fordism here revealed itself
as an entrenched and dominant ideology capable of absorbing and
appropriating critique. It is worth reemphasizing that dancers and
marionette artists often explicitly defined their work as in
dialoguecritical or celebratorywith the working body, as well as
the Machine Ages evisceration of it. As dance historian Mark Franko
conveniently summarizes:
The performance of work constituted a new direction in America
theatrical culture between 1929 and 1941. Works actual doing became
a subject worthy of attention and artistic treatment, and hence the
representation of work and workers by dancers could itself be
legitimately valued as labor. The coincidence of dance and work,
often a question of the collective rather than the singular body,
was in turn influenced by Fordistorganizational
formations.[footnoteRef:41] [41: Franko, Mark. The Work of Dance:
Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2002) p. 1.]
In the words of the famous Detroit-based puppeteer John
McPharlin, puppetry was handicraft in the Machine Age, and was a
kind of spiritual salve for the inexorable hardness of the
encroaching machine age according to a prominent historian of the
subject.[footnoteRef:42] Prokofieffs Age of Steel (fig. 5)the
ballet performance that accompanied Bufanos Oedipus Rexwas a
skeptical commentary on the rhythm of machine industry and its
large-scale efficiency.[footnoteRef:43] Motivating the folk dance
revival was not simply a delighted antiquarianism, but a desire to
reconstitute the Fordized body as a relevant site of creation,
knowledge, and self-control. But the puppets soon became
super-human, and modern ballet soon dematerialized the body, and
folk dance became the handmaiden of modernity. Understanding that
the dancer-as-worker metaphor was extensive during the period, one
sees in these examples that Fordisms working self was practically
unimpeachable, as attempts at critique were simply reinterpreted to
its benefit. But was this permanently so? Had the interwar period
arrived at a new definition of work that required the devaluation
and dematerialization of the modern working body? It is a question
which will have to be answered by wiser heads than mine, said the
author who pined for Arcadia.[footnoteRef:44] [42: Bell, John, p.
72.] [43: Martin, John. The Dance: Social Satire. New York Times,
19 Apr. 1931: 109.] [44: Carter, Irving. Jazz Brings First Dance of
The City. New York Times 14 Jun. 1925: SM9.] 5. Two dancers from
Serge Prokofieffs Pas dAcier (Age of Steel). [from Martin, John.
The Dance: Social Satire, New York Times, 19 Apr. 1931: 109]