'Dreamers with Shovels': Science and Technology in the New Deal Political Imagination

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Project Abstract SES Proposal 0135333 "Dreamers with Shovels:" Science and Technology in the New Deal Political Imagination Jessica Wang, University of California, Los Angeles The project investigates, through a series of biographically-based historical case studies, the role of science and technology in political thought and action during the New Deal period in the United States. Within science and technology studies, many observers of technocratic political thought have emphasized its hegemonic, instrumentalist, and undemocratic character. In recent years, however, scholars have recognized that while this approach has contributed much toward understanding the nature of technological society, it needs to be revised and augmented. A study of the New Deal provides an important opportunity to reconsider prevailing assumptions and scrutinize the complex nature of technocratic politics as a set of beliefs and practices. The study centers on three main subjects -- planning, electrification, and state-building -- and discusses how science and technology affected policymaking in each of these areas during the New Deal years. The section on planning illuminates how Rexford Guy Tugwell, Frederic A. Delano, Wesley C. Mitchell, and Charles E. Merriam sought to translate technocratic ideology into action. With electrification, the study turns to technology itself and investigates the conflicts within the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration over the proper relationship between technology and human values, and the appropriate political structures for technological development. The discussion of state-building examines how Jerome N. Frank and William M. Leiserson used ideas about science to legitimize the New Deal state and justify its expansion of state power via the new administrative agencies of the 1930s. The final part of the project probes the postwar experiences of Henry A. Wallace and David E. Lilienthal, examines the transformation of technocratic politics wrought by the cold war, and explores how cold war instrumentalism replaced the technocratic liberalism of the New Deal. By examining how the New Dealers understood science and technology as a resource for politics, the project contributes to a renewed debate within STS over the nature of technocratic ideology and its political ramifications. The New Deal reveals the full complexity behind technocratic politics. Some of the New Dealers adopted subjectivist beliefs about the nature of knowledge, some brought a nostalgic, agrarian dimension to their version of technological progress, and most took seriously the problematic relationship between experts and democratic society and struggled over the question of whether technocratic politics could be made consistent with democratic values. The diverse range of thought and experience among the New Dealers suggests that an image of technocratic politics as naively positivist, dedicated to an unwavering faith in technological progress, and overly willing to subordinate democratic values to a cult of expertise requires refinement and reevaluation. The project will reinforce STS's current efforts to readdress the relationship between expertise and democracy and explore the full meaning of science and technology as forms of political thought and practice.