Master of the Die, After Raphael:
Three Cupids Playing With An Ostrich (16th century)

"The stence of competing righteousnesses clogged the nostrils."

The American Way must be one phenomenon that can only be recognized when seen because it sure seems to defy description. I could haul out the fife and drum and affect a limping march while performing an old English drinking song about a gay blade. Very few would take offense at my performance because we were seemingly all raised with that representation, and we immediately recognize it as really about us. Call us, "Macaroni!" We expropriated much of who we are and what we've become from close associations with people from other traditions, other nations. If we aren't a melting pot, we're a slag heap, incompletely assimilated bits and pieces coexisting more or less. Our unity seems to come solely from our inherent diversity: out of many, one. This tenuous identity has been a defining trait through decades of misadventures.

This identity has been particularly annoying to efficiency experts, and few professions have ever been more American than efficiency engineering. Theirs was a perfectly-timed fiction that appeared just as our frontiers were shrinking into an industrialized heartland. We were becoming increasingly distant from the land that had initially motivated immigration and settlement. The government had stolen and then given away free land to encourage settlement and learned that not everyone who ached for property was good at animal husbandry or agriculture. Further, much of that free land was not amenable to civilization or cultivation. Much of it lacked adequate irrigation. After the first generation, more than half the settlers had nothing left for their sons to inherit. By the end of the nineteenth century, settlers were migrating into cities and taking factory jobs. Initially, these enterprises were essentially cottage industries, but many grew to massive size. What might have been hand-crafted came to be manufactured. The organization of manufacturing processes became the hot new occupation then, recognized worldwide as a distinctly American invention.

America then was the largest ubiquitous consumer market in the world, with railroads and telegraphs ever shrinking its distances. Money was made by producing faster and cheaper, even if the result wasn't necessarily better. Like any initial manufacturing economy, American Made initially stood for something shoddy, like Japan's manufacturing had been back in the 1950s. We slowly learned to manufacture better, primarily due to the demands WWI placed on our economy. Suddenly, uniformity seemed to matter, and so did predictability. Frederick Winslow Taylor and his assistant, Henry Gantt, invented the field of Industrial Efficiency between 1890 and 1920. By the twenties, economies around the world were importing American Efficiency Engineers. Stalin hired dozens to help fabricate the Soviet Union's first Five Year Plan. Germany and Japan both went a little crazy implementing efficiency. The Russians misused the technology mainly because they insisted on employing it to control organic processes. They planted efficient orange groves in the Ukraine where no amount of planning could have helped them thrive.

We created cars. We invented the assembly line. We even reengineered slaughterhouses, to initially horrible consequences. With the introduction of every new mass technology, we usually manage to make matters worse. Some muckraking followed by some reluctant government intervention would usually set the improvement on its wheels. As a result, we accumulated decades of necessary regulation and inefficiency. Any casual student of history couldn't help but see that the native human venality was usually replicated in our every activity. We were not Cupids fiddling with an ostrich, but capitalists interested in printing money. Our government had to intervene in the interests of the populace. Left unsupervised, industry could easily do away with all of us. Even when supervised, they've sometimes come uncomfortably close. There was always this tension between the manufacturing capitalists, their efficiency engineers, and the people’s democracy, which intended to preserve the citizens’ ability to continue pursuing happiness.

The capitalists and engineers found government intolerably inefficient, the single greatest sin to them. They saw its processes as wasteful rather than effective since, in manufacturing, margins ultimately rest upon achieving some efficient baseline. They argued that regulation served as an encumbrance to industry, a barrier to job creation, and thereby an inhibitor of the pursuit of happiness. Their argument was a stretch, but it made perfect sense to them. The people understood that shady operators would take advantage of them without some watchdog hovering nearby. Industry essentially earned its regulation by endangering its customers. Those who were protected didn't always appreciate what they'd avoided. Those poisoned with libertarian notions became fascist, constantly harping about government inefficiencies, as if they would design heaven on earth if only those inefficiency engineering regulators would stand aside. They imagined what couldn't be. Humans suffered in every instance where efficiency became the purpose of any human endeavor. Perfect processes have always curiously produced imperfect messes.

What is The American Way today? In this emerging NextWorld, the efficiency experts seem once again ascendent, Hell-bent on relearning the same lessons they were supposed to have mastered in the eighteen-eighties. Perhaps they've forgotten what their great-grandfathers faced when the progressives finally displaced the robber barons. Efficiencies remained available but were thereafter held accountable for serving the people they targeted as customers. It would not do to slip through some destructive condition in the small print. Usury became widely recognized as predatory. Every budding high-tech master of the emerging NextWorld cyber universe repeated the historical pattern by violating some principle of well-regulated civil society. Some tried to become monopolies by engaging in illegal activities. Others limited competition with predatory pricing. Tomorrow proved itself inexorably tied to its past. The more modern efficiency engineers and capitalists were just as impressed with themselves as their great grandfathers had been in their time. The stence of competing righteousnesses clogged the nostrils. The American Way, as near as I can say, was always a path of considerable resistance insisting upon the liberty to first self-destruct before figuring out how to sustain itself better. Call it The Cowboy Way or Efficiency, it's The American Way and probably always will be.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz