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]