The Promise of American Television, 1929–1952

In the antebellum house of intellect, Perry Miller argued, belief in mechanical progress was more common than the skepticism raised by Thoreau and others might suggest. If, very late in the century, Henry Adams bemoaned future mechanical wonders, Edward Bellamy foresaw with delight a Utopian Boston powered by great innovations. Others into the twentieth century remained optimistic, or like Lewis Mumford, at the very least ambivalent, about still more marvels: the triumph of electricity over steam and the advent of new types of mass communication. An increasing number of intellectuals, however, had trouble with the machines of tomorrow. The Great War with its well-tuned instruments of death disheartened some, while the Great Depression ended others' devotedness to the master engineers of the New Era. Then, too, new devices like radio caused writers to doubt the promotional fervor of manufacturers of such “things to come” as television. Those charmed by American “know-how” at the 1853 New York exposition had been succeeded by a generation jaded about the technology displayed at the 1939 World's Fair. The “unquestioned faith in the machine,” Lewis Mumford wrote in Technics and Civilization , “has been severely shaken.”