How About That Elroy?

BRIAN: Peter, Ed, terrific piece on The Jetsons, one of my personal favorites. Although I got to put in a plug for history. I like The Flintstones too. I’m struck by the conservative use of technology. It kind of masks the fact that on the eve of a social revolution, the civil rights movement and radical changes in gendered relations, everything remains the same socially. My question for you is: Does technology mask social change all the way back in the 18th century and the 19th century? Is this a consistent theme?

PETER: Well, Brian, people’s social aspirations are always conservative. And the people who settled America—the Europeans that settled America—did so because they want things they couldn’t get in the old world. But their horizons were shaped in the old world. And what did you find in America? You found an extraordinary abundance of land. And for a land starved people—and I mean very few English people owned land and could make decisions about how to use it.

So I think the aspiration is: from landlessness to landedness to becoming landlords or masters of all you survey. And that vision is available and motivates people—settlers on the frontier—where the land is virtually worthless. You can’t do much with it, but you can own it. Every man as you and I would put it in the 20th century—every man can be a king in America.

ED: So Peter, that’s a profoundly conservative vision these people have—

PETER: I think it is.

ED: —right? You know, you go—

PETER: Almost monarchist.

ED: It’s ironic people go in the other side of the world in order to replicate more of what they have, except kind of better. You know, so it’s a very Jetson kind of image in many ways, right?

PETER: Well, think of all the towns called “New” in English America.

ED: Yeah, exactly.

PETER: “New” London.

ED: Yeah. Right. Right. And so then, of course in the 19th century, you might expect this to break, Brian, because that’s the time you asked about technology originally. 19th century, of course, sees the great disruptive technologies of world history—of the railroad, the telegraph, the steam engine on boats. All those things shatter the idea of space and time on which that original vision that Peter had talked about had been built. And so Brian, you might think that that would be the time people would have new visions of the future.

BRIAN: And of social relations in the future.

ED: Yeah, exactly. And unfortunately, what you have is that on one hand, you have slavery spreading like a cancer using these new technologies. It actually accelerates the spread of the most archaic social order of all time.

BRIAN: And how did they actually used that tech—how does that help them expand it?

ED: Well, steamboats are their first great innovation. It’s that, how would you carry all this cotton against the current? So the South is blessed with all these rivers, but they only run one way. If you can adapt these technologies of the steamboat, and the cotton gin, and of the cotton press, you’re producing the most valuable commodity in the world with this new technologies. And this is before the North has actually found ways to harness these same technologies.

PETER: And I think, Ed, what we’re talking about is highly-capitalized industrial agriculture on a large scale is predicated on labor exploitation.

ED: And Brian, to go back to your question of, what do they use it for—the slave holders? Sadly, they use it to actually move the labor force itself. That when enslaved people are being bought and sold in the 1840s and 1850s, the new Middle Passage is on a railroad and on the steamboat. At the same time in the North, they also don’t really imagine a new social order. They just imagine more farms in which the men are the little kings, and they’re just going to keep expanding, right?

And so here’s the irony—is that when you have a telegraph that can conquer space and time with information and a railroad that can conquer land with speed and limitless carrying capacities, this actually triggers the great crisis of the American nation. That they see, here are two visions of the future, which are actually the same visions that they had 200 years ago, which is the spread of all these farms and commerce—one based on slavery, one based on free labor—racing for California, racing for the markets of the West, racing to connect with the rest of the world.

And because people can imagine that they’re going to run out of this land if they’re going to just keep replicating these systems—the crisis of the Union. The Republican Party emerges and said, we’ve got to stop that cancerous spread in the South. And the people in the South say, we’ve got to stop that cancerous Republican Party that’s trying to constrain the future, and let’s have a war before there’s actually anything immediately at stake.

PETER: Not immediately at stake, Ed. But that’s our whole business about visions of the future.

ED: Exactly.

PETER: And you’re going to reach a terminal point, aren’t you? You’re going to run out of land. And there is—

ED: Pretty darn soon.

PETER: —even in this struggle for control of the West, an awareness that now is the time to strike, because it may be too late. And that idea of a finite supply of land, and therefore, a fundamental challenge to the American way of life, that’s looming in the background.

ED: So Brian, Peter, what we see is that the future and the past are always braided together.

PETER: Yes, exactly.

ED: There’s never really a profoundly radical vision of the future that just eviscerates what we’ve had in the past. Even with The Jetsons—if you listen to the voice of Rosie, their antiquated and yet lovable robot, who cleans the house, she clearly has a working class voice, an immigrant voice from mid-19th century America.

So even when we’re trying to envision labor saving devices, we either envision it as a butler, like in Star Wars, that fits Peter’s vision so perfectly, or in an American case, like an immigrant we bring here to actually do the work that people with the buttons don’t want to do.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[SINGING]: The world tomorrow will be empty and cold…