1929

...So, after reading Sloat, it's not surprising to hear echoing back in time the script of a "scenario" like the current thwarted cover-up at the still projected Marble Hill nuclear plant in southern Indiana...

...Its growth forever tilted the balance of Western power overseas from the Empire to another kind of empire already adept enough to costume itself as a highly-developed free enterprise system...

...The dominant answer, in many of the leading magazines of the time, was that when scientific minds like Edison's and Ford's ruled the world, the cure for technology's harmful effects would be solved—by more technology...

...Sloat cites the example of government servant Charles Schwab who, while employed by Carnegie Steel in 1894, discharged a huge U.S...

...From 7929 we might well turn to someone like Studs Terkel for the more intimate news and history of the people who, under such heroes, were finding themselves herded, images of light bulbs in mind, into hard times, even as we've found ourselves, survivors of a similar dreamscape, images of light-bulbshaped nuclear clouds in mind, being herded ever more intently by the celebrities that run our nation toward even harder times...

...The dynamo that generates our particular brand of superpower long ago began conducting through our language and ourselves the peculiarly modern connotations of words like security, bastard words like scenario, and slogans like executive privilege...

...but I had knowledge of this fact, that they did not make any plates that did not have blowholes.' 'You had knowledge that these blowholes were plugged in many instances?' ' No sir, I did not say that...

...Instead, Sloat's predilection for narrating the publicized events of the time focuses us on movers and shakers, and also contributes to the patchwork quality of this work,.where, under loose headings (e.g...

...The dynamo that hums familar double-standards of America's puritanically-vested interests has grown inevitably, by virtue of its promise of unlimited power, from humble homemade beginnings a century ago—while Victorian England's own double standard flourished—in Edison's New Jersey lab...

...Machinery, the New Messiah") Sloat takes up, drops, and sometimes returns to celebrity subjects much in the manner of his sources' descendants, those gossip-oriented magazines and papers that pretend to carry news to our doorstep today...

...The imperfections in the metal, caused by uneven cooling, were plugged up...

...In his interest of assembling a panoramic coruscation of ironies, his nostalgic/anti-nostalgic snapshots, Sloat sometimes piques our curiosity without deepening our understanding...

...and Edison who, according to Sloat, "had founded the modern technological-social matrix" and whose ' 'social and commercial senses were perfectly integrated," a lionized public man whose name nonetheless had been absorbed into General Electric, who came to be effectively frozen out from participating in the mass production of and profits from many of his own inventions, and who labored unsuccessfully for years toward the end'of his life to find a plentiful domestic source of rubber...

...7929 is valuable, as well, for its lengthy multifaceted portraits of these two idiosyncratic American geniuses—Ford, a very private person who ironically stage-managed not only the highly-touted Light's Golden Jubilee, but also the movement of the American economy toward mass production and the creation of a mass audience for the products...

...All we might lack are adequate names to fill the blanks left by Edison's and Ford's removal...

...Applied science would in time solve all problems...

...There, where defective concrete was not only reluctantly discovered but reportedly inadequately patched, we find a "public servant" utility merely acting on longstanding precedent...

...1929 uses Henry Ford's elaborate staging of "Light's Golden Jubilee" —that iconoclastic mass-man's tribute to Thomas Edison—as its set-piece, around which its cast of businessmen and promoters perform again their quasi-alchemic, but pragmatically crafty assumption of roles as earnest modern technocrats...

...And of course its undercurrent in American life has, probably forever, determined those technocratic priorities that because of a nation's scope and selfinduced dependencies become selfjustified, self-perpetuating, and necessarily inhumane, anti-self...

...Sloat does manage to concoct a "staccato history by vignette as evocative as a photograph album," as the jacket leafs puff promises...

...It is chastening and worthwhile to discover or rediscover that we've allowed ourselves to be herded in the closing quarter of this century into a dreamworld so startlingly similar to the one our forebears inhabited during the century's first quarter...

...With heroes of this sort...

...Navy contract by working his shifts around the clock, although Navy inspectors assigned to insure the contract terms only presided during the day...

...For those readers stunned by today's conglomerate growth, appalled at the ballyhooed astro-gruel with which media happenings have carpeted the country, and disillusioned by the industrialized rhetoric of service, through which a certain worm always screws to the tune of profit, Warren Sloat's anecdotal history may serve as a disheartening reminder that most of our power elite's selfserving sleight of hand, our networks' cultural homogenization, our establishments' doublespeak, are simply new twists of old tricks...

...But the satisfactions of reflective movement that a more controlled prose narrative of a period might provide elude us, too...

...29 August 1980: 479...

...When called before a House committee and asked whether the concealment was carried out with his knowledge, Schwab brazened out the assault: 'Well, the concealment was not, no...

...Sloat's account of public response to the real news of watch-dial painters dying from radium poisoning might serve today as a summary tacked on to any number of Gallup polls concerning equally critical human dilemmas: Technology produced breakdown as well as development, and to systems as well as to individual people . . . But most people were no more disheartened by technology's death tolls than by its effect on moral standards...

...John Druska THIS JOURNALISTS book draws largely on the periodicals of the time to recreate events of a year in which "the various facets of electronic technology were converging . . . and the age of electronics was emerging...

...Today as only yesterday we have learned to accept celebrity as fame, sacrificed privacy to the dictates of public information thanks to the electronic tools at hand, increased our appetite for news to such an extent that we need to invent and manage much of it before anything can happen, and, although badly burned by technology gone awry, have come to require always higher orders of technology to solve applied science's errors...

...But despite lack of an adequate structure to support the frequently shuffled, occasionally telescoped chronologies Sloat tries to animate, and the book's bias toward chronicling "extraordinary lives" via its kind of voyeuristic historytelling, 7929 offers enough valuable insight into the American scene then and now to recommend itself for consumption as a sort of time-traveler's guidebook...

...I said I had knowledge that the plates had blowholes, and that I should not be surprised if they were concealed.' What might surprise us in 1929—the daft naivete that by 1929 had allowed a Commonweal: 478 public to be converted into a consumer society—isn't much explored in the book, though Sloat avers that the trend distressed even Henry Ford who, as much as anyone, had caused its generation...

...Sears' Julius Rosenwald, the Rockefellers, Morgans, Insull and others, and its panoply of anecdotes, 7929 succeeds, in spite of its diffuse narrative, at least as a looselyjointed parable as apt for our time as for theirs...

...There was more furious activity than ever when the inspectors left...