Abstract

Making Pretty Pictures: Technopolitics in the Early United States

This paper explores the role of the federal government in shaping the transportation revolution in antebellum United States through the lens of “technopolitics”—the strategic practice of designing or using technology to enact political goals. It is often overlooked that the US military funnelled several hundred engineers, who had been trained over a four-year period at the West Point Military Academy, to work for railroad and canal corporations. The reason scholars have tended to downplay army involvement is the assumption that these learned engineers were neither necessary nor distinct. Despite their training and military background, they provided “neutral” technical aid in service to the needs of capital differing little from the recommendations proliferating from their civilian counterparts. They imposed no standards. By contrast, this paper argues that federal engineers sought to enact highly politically charged goals as they worked on the nation’s railroad and canal corporations. In designing and supervising the construction of transportation projects through novel scientific and technological tools—descriptive geometry, in particular—army engineers proposed a range of standards and prescriptions for American business, seeking to rearrange power relationships in ways that privileged experts, and by extension, the federal government, over directors, agents, builders and workers. The paper highlights that while the military standards, and the new hierarchies they suggested, left their mark on the development of corporations, they engendered resistance from civilian builders, superintendent, and workmen who had very different conceptions of how to carry out of public works.