SOURCE: "Progressive Visions of War in 'The Red Badge of Courage' and 'The Principles of Scientific Management'," in American Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1, March, 1991, pp. 46-72.

As Henry Fleming turns his back on war at the end of The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephen Crane describes Henry's retreat with a biblical allusion that collapses the difference between war and peace. "He came from hot plowshares to prospects of clover tranquility," Crane writes, "and it was as if hot plowshares were not." His text is the famous passage from Isaiah 2:4: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up swords against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." But Crane mangles the logic of Isaiah's text, reversing its association of war with swords and violence and peace with plowshares and agriculture, as if the battle Henry is retreating from—the place of "hot plowshares"—were the scene of a violently heated beating of swords into plowshares, or war itself the peaceful activity which produces plowshares from swords. Readers are left with the sense that the difference between war and peace can be established and maintained only by means of violence itself. Readers of The Red Badge have always noticed how detached its violence appears to be from any of the specific ideological or political issues of the Civil War, and the image of the hot plowshare affirms mat detachment: violence, in Crane's eyes, seems a general condition of peace as much as it is of war.

In recent years some of Crane's most sophisticated critics have taken this apparent absence of ideological context in The Red Badge to indicate its critique of the progressive, reformist ideology of its era. These critics focus in common on Crane's tendency to visualize war as a normative social condition, the same tendency displayed briefly in the image of the hot plowshare. For Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan, for example, Crane's overriding focus on spectacles of war stripped of ideological justifications makes The Red Badge into a kind of demystifying camera lens directed at the ideology of American industrial capitalism. Underneath the era's attempt to rewrite the Civil War as me historical origin of a new, peaceful, and progressive union, The Red Badge, in this critical view, unmasks new social divisions and sources of conflict which were emerging from the systematic transformation of American society to an industrial base.

Such readings of Crane leave out of the context of the era's ideology, however, the way that progressive industrial reformers embraced the same ideologically critical realism that Crane practiced, as a means of promoting a positive vision of industrialization's potential to transform society. These reformers, worried about the "over-civilizing" and softening effects of peace and prosperity on the national character, proposed that America beat its swords into mass industrial machinery, uniting the nation on a mass industrial war footing and reproducing what they considered to be the social benefits of war—heroic individual effort and democratic cooperation—while eliminating the destructive violence of past wars. Crane's figure of the hot plowshare, far from indicating a literary vision which escapes the era's ideology, captures with remarkable accuracy a widespread progressive vision of a generalized, systematic, and industrial "war on nature," in William James's words, which was to provide the basis for a healthy industrial society.

The most sweeping and influential statement of this ideology appeared in Frederick Winslow Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Taylor promoted a "new viewpoint" on industry, a vision of industrial inefficiency itself as society's natural enemy. He argued that scientific management's systematic division of labor would end "wars" between labor and management by uniting them in a democratically cooperative battle against inefficiency. Scientific management would systematically produce or "develop first-class men," as he put it, and, at the same time, produce an identity of interests between the laboring and the managerial classes. The Red Badge—with its battle scene imagery of machines and mass production and wth its account of the development of Henry Fleming into a hero—shares with Principles an ideologically progressive realism, exemplified by a vision which fuses war and peace, heroic individuals and systematized workers, in an imagination of a progressive and democratic union.

I

Such a vision of industrial reform comes vividly into focus in 1885, the year Edward Bellamy published his hugely popular Utopian novel Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888). In the year 2000 Bellamy's hero Julian West finds that world society has been transformed through the institution of a democratic "industrial army," designed to organize and amplify the martial drives of each member of society and to direct those drives toward the elimination of humanity's natural needs. This ultimate reformation and rationalization of society, in Bellamy's imagination, would be the result simply of a clarified vision of the potential of such a martial, industrial cooperation to overcome natural needs. Bellamy's novel could have been titled "Hindsight is Better than Foresight"; what is only seen darkly in 1887, Bellamy tells us, will be clearly visible by 2000. Bellamy, however, cannot resist directing some aggression of his own at humanity circa 1887, out of frustration with their very dullness of vision. Julian West returns in a dream to the Boston of 1887 with his vision of a cooperative, socialist, industrial army, only to be rejected by his conservative, upper-class former friends as "an enemy of society." West is relieved to wake up once again in the year 2000, and his relief is an index of Bellamy's sense of the blindness of America in the 1880s to his vision of industrial progress.

Looking Backward shows that progressive industrial reformers saw their task as the reform of their society's vision of industrialization's democratic potential, while it also exhibits the critical paradox which afflicted that visionary reform. If progressives such as Bellamy proposed to unite humanity in a shared vision of a natural enemy of industrial society, they almost always ended by attacking that element of human society which failed to share in the vision, reproducing a new version of the social antagonisms they had set out to reform. For William James, as for Bellamy, mis element was made up of the leisured classes, which remained "blind," as James put it in an essay entitled "The Moral Equivalent of War," to the antagonism subsisting between humanity and a hostile natural environment. James's response to this problem of blindness to the reformist potential of industry was itself industrial: as a cure for the blindness of the leisured, James proposed an industrial draft, through which each generation would be sent off in its youth to coal mines and factories in order to have their eyes opened to the necessity of industrial exertions, to pay their "blood tax" in the "moral equivalent of war," the "immemorial human warfare against nature."

The concern showed by Bellamy and James over the blindness of the leisured classes manifested a much broader concern, felt by progressives of all stripes, that the successful winning of wealth and comfort eventually led to indifference, or even antagonism, toward the larger social good. Such a concern rose out of an enduring commitment in the dominant American culture to basic Protestant values of individual labor and social productivity, values which progressives hoped to preserve precisely by systematizing and rationalizing them. The clearest statement of such a rationalization was Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), where he elevated a Protestant work ethic to the level of a first scientific principle. Veblen argued that an "instinct of workmanship," or an instinctive drive efficiently to exploit nature to human ends, was the very biological basis of human evolutionary progress. Since the exertion of this instinct in modern times was restricted to the engineering and industrial classes, Veblen argued that the leisured classes, because of their lack of contact with physical work, had become detached from a process of biological progressivism. The ideological blindness of the leisured classes to the value of industrial progress, in Veblen's analysis, was due to mis detachment, which left them in an epistemological fog, where they seized upon the superficial traits of a prior, essentially feudal level of social evolution—walking sticks, extravagant dress, elaborate social proprieties—and confused these surfaces with the evolution of civilization itself.

In his 1911 address on "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," George Santayana identified as an en-during structural principle of American cultural history an opposition very much like Veblen's distinction between the engineering, industrial classes and the leisured classes. His essay can situate for us the progressive industrial reform movement within a larger tradition of American critical realism in philosophy and literature. Santayana praised an iconoclastic, enterprising, and critical tradition of American culture, rooted in the Calvinism of the Puritans, and attacked a conservative, complacent, and genteel tradition, which had detached itself from the first tradition to embrace a comfortable, materialistic, Victorian status quo. He praised the first tradition and attacked the genteel tradition as little more than a drag on the advance of civilization, insofar as the first preserved the true spirit of what he felt was a deeply valuable Protestant world view. This was the view of a rational and critical natural philosophy humble enough never to presume mat the answers it found were more than temporary, contingent ones. It was an essentially evolutionary view of the type Veblen embraced; the great nineteenth-century practitioner of this way of seeing, for Santayana, was Emerson, and he found it embodied, in his day, in the pragmatism of his friend and colleague William James. Along with James, then, Santayana believed that a progressive realism was necessarily at once a practical and a critical pursuit; cast in the tones of Calvinism, it was a constant struggle to make nature reveal itself to human understanding, a struggle which could no more ultimately succeed than it could be abandoned. "Eternal vigilance," Santayana concluded, "is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual experiment keep quick the edge of life."

"Vigilance," "hazard," and "experiment" mark the points of affinity between Santayana's philosophical history and the practical, progressive ideal of a combined martial and scientific industry, an ideal which was to be produced through a strenuous visualization of nature and which opposed itself to the self-satisfied blindness of the genteel leisured classes. What sets Frederick Winslow Taylor apart from me reformers and thinkers surveyed here is the intensity and focus of the vision he shared with them: Taylor recognized within the practical pursuit of industry itself the uncritical blindness found by the others in the leisured classes who were exempted from industrial practice. Late in his life Taylor described the genesis of this project in the language of the visionary progressive, writing that he had his "eye on the bad industrial conditions which prevailed at the time and gave a good deal of time and thought to some possible remedy for them." These bad conditions within industry, Taylor concluded, were due to the same epistemological mistake Veblen attributed to the leisured classes: management and labor, he believed, had both fixed on a certain stage of industrial development, the stage of violent industrial conflict, as the natural structure of industry itself. "There is no question," he wrote in the opening pages of Principles, "that, throughout the industrial world, a large part of the organization of employers as well as employees, is for war rather than for peace, and that perhaps the majority on either side do not believe that it is possible so to arrange their mutual relations that their interests become identical." Taylor felt that because labor and management were each so committed to seeing the other as the enemy, they were blind to the inefficiencies in the labor process which were their real, common enemy. He set out to reform this situation by getting labor and management to take their eyes off of each other, in effect, so that they might once again begin scientifically to search out inefficiencies in the industrial process itself. The scientific manager, he wrote, must make "an effort of the imagination" in order to "appreciate," as he put it, "awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men," phenomena which "leave nothing visible" to the unreformed eye. Along with this appreciation of inefficiency as the real enemy of industry, Taylor claimed further, would come a new appreciation for the potential of cooperative industry to improve the lives of both labor and management. It was the adoption of this "new outlook," Taylor claimed, this "new viewpoint," which was "of the very essence of scientific management."

As a practical system for the rationalization of industrial production, Taylorism is extraordinary for its foundation in a socially critical mode of vision, an aesthetic vision of industry as the arena of human activity where a universal interest might appear and be realized. Before he could efficiently produce pig iron, or gun carriages, or ball bearings, Taylor wanted to produce this new viewpoint in both workers and managers, a production he equated with that of scientific managers. The scientific manager was thus not simply the heroic, reforming agent of the industrial system; he was also the system's original product. "In the past," Taylor proclaimed, "the man has been first; in the future the system must be first"; and Taylor's system was clearly designed to "make this competent man," or to "develop first-class men," from the ranks of both labor and management. Both would achieve first-class status simply by opening their eyes to the new viewpoint of scientific management.

If his reformed management originated in a democratic, aesthetic vision of a universal industrial interest, in practice Taylor called for a systematic division between the tasks of management and labor in industrial shops—where management became the eyes and mind and labor the hands and body of the system. Each job was to be split into distinct supervisory and physical aspects with one man "watching" and one man "working," as Taylor put it. In these terms, Taylor's worker was figuratively blind: his every action, down to the slightest movement of his limbs, was overseen and prescribed for him by his manager. On the other hand, the work of the scientific manager for Taylor involved an intense, even obsessive focus on seeing and making visible the content of every task in a shop and then singling out and eliminating the inefficiency "hidden" in each task. The manager performed first a sort of studious spectatorship at a given worker's task, followed by a series of mathematical calculations aimed at breaking the task down into parts and finding the most efficient way to perform it. Taylor's early disciples would then produce a graphic diagram of the task in order to make visible the difference between its efficient and inefficient components. His protégés Frank and Lillian Gilbreth ultimately pioneered the use of stop-action photography and movies as a means of visualizing each task as a series of distinct, abstract movements which could then be efficiently reorganized by the scientific manager.

Taylor's opponents among labor leaders of the day attacked him above all for this tendency of his system to reduce the ability of workers to supervise themselves, and to put that capacity under the strict control of management. In other words, Taylor's new viewpoint on industry, when put into practice, seemed to its critics to blind laborers effectively and to reserve all intellectual and supervisorial capacity to management. Historians of era have continued to attack Taylor in these terms until he has come to be seen as the embodiment of the worst aspects of a progressive ideology which, under the banner of social progress, cloaked a drive to dominate and control social and individual behavior. In Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, the most thorough of these critiques, Taylor appears as the virtual embodiment of the interests of capital and of capital's power to degrade the quality and autonomy of skilled labor. "The perfect expression of the concept of skill in capitalist society is to be found in the bald and forthright dictums of the early Taylorians," Braverman writes, "who had discovered the great truth of capitalism that the workers must become the instrument of labor in the hands of the capitalist, but had not yet learned the wisdom of adorning, obfuscating, and confusing this straightforward necessity." It has been left to "modern managers and sociologists," according to Braverman, to obscure Taylorism's "forthright" promotion of a rational division of labor by appealing to a reactionary, hypostatic realism which dictates that "all that is real [is] necessary, all that exists … inevitable," and thus that "the present mode of production [is] eternal."

Braverman's account of the way the techniques of scientific management have transformed industrial working conditions is careful and thorough, but he is less careful in his account of Taylor's ideological interests and practices. To say that Taylor "had not yet learned the wisdom of obfuscating" the division of labor that his system called for is itself an obfuscation, one which makes Taylor into a straw man for Braverman's Marxist model of ideological demystification. By the terms of this model, the more closely tied one's interests are to a capitalist system of production, the more deeply involved one necessarily must be in the ideological mystifications that obscure those processes of accumulation. Taylor, however, was clearly dedicated to displaying and publicizing his plan for scientific management, in a way entirely consistent with his conviction that industrial progress depended on a strenuous visualization of the content of industrial practice. Indeed, Braverman himself admits that Taylor "is still the most useful source" for a critique of scientific management because of the forthright way he explains and illustrates its practices; and in his critique, Braverman relies heavily on citations from Taylor's own writings.

Principles represents Taylor's own attempt to unmask an ideology of reactionary realism that viewed the present mode of production as eternal and to practice a more progressive realism which would "point out, through a series of simple illustrations," the virtues of a new view-point of industrial cooperation. In his testimony before a 1912 House Committee considering the status of scientific management in army arsenals, Taylor claimed that the real source of opposition to scientific management lay in such conservative adherence to the status quo, which he believed could be found across the social spectrum, both within and without industry. In any shop, Taylor claimed, scientific management always uncovered a few "incorrigibly lazy" men, or men who "can work and won't work." "There are a few men who remain, you might say, incorrigibly lazy," he wrote, "and when those men are proved to be unchangeable shirkers they have to get out of the establishment in which scientific management is being introduced." Taylor's problem with these men was not that they were shirkers; he understood the laziness of workers—"soldiering" in the slang of the day—who felt it was not in their interest to work. His problem was that these men were unchangeable; that they refused to adopt his new viewpoint of scientific management, a viewpoint which would make visible to them that it was in their best interests to work efficiently and cooperatively. Taylor went on later in his testimony to claim that the ultimate source of this unchangeably conservative way of seeing was to be found outside of industry, not in the working classes, but in the genteel literary classes. "For the almost universality with which this view is found among workingmen," he testified,

and still more for the fact that this view is growing instead of diminishing, that the men who are not themselves working in cooperative industry and who belong, we will say, taking a single example, to the literary classes, men who have the leisure time for study and investigation and the opportunity for knowing better, are mainly to blame.

Taylor's animus against the literary classes in this passage does not rise from his sense that they opposed him, that they were working, for example, to convince labor that their interests were opposed to those of management; it arose from his sense that the literary classes were taking no interest at all in the nation's industrial affairs. In other words, Taylor felt that the literary classes were an entire class of people who, like the rare, incorrigibly lazy man found within shops, could work to promote the better interests of the nation but would not. Taylor's hostility to the leisured literary classes echoes here the antagonism to the leisured classes shared by the industrial reformers, in particular Santayana's hostility towards a genteel traditionalism which divorces itself from the practice of a progressive, visionary social criticism. These sympathies are further evident in a letter in which Taylor explained his decision not to publish a paper on scientific management in the Atlantic. "The readers of the Atlantic," he wrote:

consist probably very largely of professors and literary men, who would be interested more in the abstract theory than in the actual good which would come from the introduction of scientific management.… The people whom I want to reach with the article are principally those men who are doing the manufacturing and construction work of our country, both employers and employed.

That George Santayana was both a professor and, most likely, a reader of the Atlantic does not diminish the ideological sympathies evident here between Taylor's opposition to the presumed gentility of the Atlantic's readers and Santayana's opposition to a genteel philosophical tradition. Both defined their progressive way of seeing in terms of its resistance to a stolid and conservative mainstream which appeared even within industry itself, according to Taylor, in the persons of the few "unchangeable shirkers" to be found in any shop. In imaginative and ideological terms Taylor's system did not oppose supervisorial watchers to blind workers so much as it opposed two ways of seeing: a progressive industrial realism against a conservative, literary view which in its blind commitment to the status quo exerted a passive resistance to progress.

For Taylor, the new viewpoint of scientific management transcended and made obsolete the specific interests of both labor and management; he was able to imagine opposition to his system, then, only in terms of a point of view that held no interest at all in industry or social progress. Evidently, in imagining that his own interests represented a universal interest, Taylor simply distorted the particular interests of laborers and labor leaders, managers and factory owners, all of whom had their reasons for opposing the idea that they should surrender control of the conditions of production to a disinterested managerial class. As David Montgomery has shown, Taylor's insistence that there were no particular interests attached to scientific management helped to create a state of affairs where the interests of capital were able to dominate the applications of Taylor's techniques: workers could be compelled to conform to the strict control called for by those techniques, but managers and owners could not be compelled to conform to Taylor's philosophy of cooperation and mutual benefit. The point of taking seriously Taylor's distorted account of the conservative ideological opposition he encountered is not to defend Taylor against critics who attack the role of scientific management in degrading the autonomy of industrial labor, but simply to note that Taylor practiced a system of ideological critique which critics of industrialism such as Braverman continue to practice, a critique which they can direct at Taylor only at the expense of distorting the way in which ideology is produced and criticized.

II

In his study of turn-of-the-century culture, Stephen Kern has linked the stop-action photographic techniques of Taylor's protégés, the Gilbreths, to the modernist aesthetics of Cubism and Futurism which were germinating at the time. In reading The Red Badge along with Principles, one can begin to link Taylor's views on industrial reform to the realist aesthetic Crane adopted. Crane's friend Joseph Conrad, in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, professed his desire "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel … before all, to make you see"—a motto which could have served Taylor in his attempts to "point out, through a series of simple illustrations," the virtues of his vision of industry. Crane's critics focus on this power of realism to make The Red Badge an ideologically demystifying lens through which readers clearly see the violent social transformations brought about by industrialization in the 1890s. Thus the socially critical force of Crane's battle scenes, according to Donald Pease, comes from their discarding the kind of "adequate ideological underpinnings" which would make social sense out of war, in favor of pure, photographic spectacles of violence. In the same vein, Andrew Delbanco claims that "[r]eading The Red Badge relieves us of our ideology and, to the extent that this is ever possible, replaces it with raw experience." The Red Badge, however, can be praised for escaping the ideological context of its day, and for criticizing progressive society as a warlike spectacle, only by ignoring its imbrication in the ideologically critical context of progressive martial industrialism, a movement which already had set out to make society see itself in terms of war.

The aesthetics of literary realism that Crane embraced in Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) shared the hostility to genteel traditionalism and the commitment to a strenuously critical vision of life which is evident in the ideology of progressive industrial reform. Taylor dropped out of college and turned his "eye to the bad industrial conditions prevailing at the time"; Crane dropped out of college, as he put it, "to study faces on the streets." Maggie, the result of this study, shocked genteel readers with its photographically precise visions of slum violence, but it earned extravagant praise from the era's most powerful spokesman for a progressive literary aesthetic, William Dean Howells, who toasted Crane as a writer who had "sprung into life fully armed." A few years before Maggie, Howells had praised the Personal Memoirs (1885) of a real soldier, Ulysses S. Grant, in terms which can begin to explain why and how Crane chose to follow Maggie with a Civil War novel. "He does not cast about for phrases," Howells wrote of Grant, "but takes the word, whatever it is, that will best give his meaning, as if it were a man or a force of men for the accomplishment of a feat of arms. There is not a moment wasted in preening and prettifying, after the fashion of literary men." In Howells's disparagement of "preening and prettifying" literary men, one finds once again, here within the realm of literary culture itself, a by now familiar hostility to a genteel literariness which detaches itself from real life in order to uphold conventional aestheticist notions of beauty. When Howells describes Crane as "fully armed" with literary talent and praises Grant for writing as if literature could be "a man or a force of men" accomplishing "a feat of arms," one sees him importing into literature the valorization of martial effort which Bellamy, James, and Taylor set out to import into industry.

Grant's memoirs were an especially popular example of a huge body of literature produced between 1880 and 1900, which aimed to revise the nation's view of the Civil War from a nearly disastrous shattering of national identity into a violent crucible which had produced a new and vigorous post-war ideology of union. Grant, for example, singled out the valor of both Confederate and Union soldiers at Shiloh as proof of the quality of the post-war American military establishment. This vision of war as a socially cooperative effort dovetailed neatly with visions of martial industrial reform such as Looking Backward; indeed, the Civil War memoirs themselves occasionally partook of the language of martial industrialism. A theme of industrial management runs through Warren Lee Goss's Recollections of a Private (1890), for example, which Goss sums up by writing: "The whole military machine must be lubricated with general, special, necessary and unnecessary, ornamental and practical orders," while the component soldiers of the machine must learn "the trade of war thoroughly and systematically."

In 1895, Crane gave Howells a signed copy of The Red Badge with an inscription thanking Howells for "many things he [Crane] has learned, and above all, for a certain readjustment of his point of view victoriously concluded some time in 1892." His war novel makes clear that, in winning his way to the point of view of Howells's progressive realist aesthetic, Crane also effectively adopted the realism of Taylor's view on industrial reform. The Red Badge virtually catalogs the concerns of industrial reformers, picturing the Civil War both as the historical source of the problems those reformers addressed and as the genesis of the martial, industrial solution. As the book opens, Henry Fleming is afflicted by a typically progressive fear of the softening and levelling character of modern life. Where Taylor was extraordinarily acute in finding this softening effect even within industrial shops, Crane uncovers such softening and levelling effects not within the leisured comfort of modern peacetime, but within modern war. War seems to Henry Fleming to have become an overcivilized, overrationalized "blue demonstration," which has made obsolete the kind of traditional heroism Henry admiringly pictures as "Greeklike struggles." He paraphrases the fears of a soft and comfortable industrial peace expressed by advocates of a martial industrialism: "Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions." His fear is that his own experience in the army will be merely a blue demonstration, or a systematic and artificial substitute for war in which he is merely "drilled and drilled and reviewed, and drilled and drilled and reviewed," that the army will "make victories as a contrivance turns out buttons," and that he himself, in the heat of battle, will turn out to lack Greeklike qualities.

Thus Henry's actions are motivated not by his opposition to Southern interests or his commitment to the Union, but rather by his consuming desire to see the appearance of a real, Greeklike war within what looks to him like an overly civilized, mechanized blue demonstration, a desire which implies the pre-existence of a certain unity between the antagonists of the war: both sides are committed to seeing violence. Henry wants to see war itself rather than any human enemy, and this vision becomes identified with a pure, antagonistic agency: a visionary war on war. On the way into battle, Henry thinks: "They were going to look at war, the red animal—war, the blood-swollen god." At the same time, Henry is afraid of being seen with his back turned to the war, of failing in his soldierly job of "looking at war." As he skulks behind the lines after fleeing battle, Henry imagines the innocent questions of a comrade in terms a soldiering laborer might have applied to the supervision of a Tayloresque manager: "The simple questions of the tattered man had been knife thrusts to him. They asserted a society that probes pitilessly at secrets until all is apparent.… He admitted that he could not defend himself against this agency. It was not within the power of vigilance." After he flees the battle, Henry is not ashamed of himself so much as he is afraid of being seen by the "society" of his regiment in such a shameful position; indeed, this kind of visibility would literally constitute his shame. "He would truly be a worm" he thinks as he makes his way back toward the lines, "if any of his comrades should see him returning thus."

The advice Henry's mother gives him as he leaves home to join the army—"You watch out Henry, an' take good care of yerself in this here fighting business—you watch out"—functions as a kind of ruling principle to Henry's career, as it might for a scientific manager. Henry, as both subject and object of an aggressive form of vision, figures the slippage observed in Taylor's systematic division of men into watchers and workers in terms which virtually mimic the scientific terms of Taylorism. Private Fleming may be constantly drilled and reviewed by his generals, but at the same time he becomes the Tayloresque, scientific general-manager of his own performance. He tries "mathematically to prove to himself that he would not run from a battle" and makes "ceaseless calculations," but this mental supervision is useless without a physical object. Henry finally concludes that he will have to watch the work of his own body, or "figuratively to watch his legs to discover their merits or faults. He reluctantly admitted that he could not sit still and with a mental slate and pencil derive an answer. To gain it, he must have blaze, blood, and danger, even as a chemist requires this, that, and the other."

This identification of the battlefield soldier and the scientist explains Henry's rationalization of his own flight from battle. He attributes it to his commitment to a martial form of rational, industrial efficiency, which he imagines as a democratic enterprise in which the meaning of the military terms "private" and "general"—or the Tayloresque terms "worker" and "manager"—become totally interchangeable.

He had done a good part in saving himself, who was a little piece of the army.… Later the officers could fit the little pieces together again, and make a battle front.… It was all plain that he had proceeded according to very correct and commendable rules. His actions had been sagacious things. They had been full of strategy. They were the work of a master's legs.

Henry completely dehumanizes himself by imagining himself as a "little piece" of the army, "fit" in by the officers; but at the same time he claims for himself as a little piece the strategic capacity to supervise the work of his own legs, reducing the officers to the mere mechanical labor of fitting together the independently "sagacious" little pieces of the army.

In the terms of a Tayloresque system, the problem with Henry's masterful management of his own legs in fleeing battle is precisely that no one besides Henry saw it. In the world of The Red Badge, courage as well as shame is not integral to the soldier but systematic, defined by its visibility before the eyes of the army. Henry is not courageous until his desire to see violence is itself made visible by the painful "knife thrusts" of his own army's visionary agency. His fear that the tattered man's questions will bring his shame into visibility is accompanied by his approval of, and desire for, a visible courage: "He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage." As he approaches the front, this is exactly what he gets when he meets a panicked member of his own retreating army who "adroitly" crushes his rifle on Henry's head. In this soldier's fusion of panic and adroitness, one sees in microcosm the fusion of irrational Greeklike violence and rational blue demonstrations.

His wound, of course, is interpreted by his regiment as the badge of his courage, and in turn is seen almost universally with some degree of irony by Crane's critics as an empty sign of something which remains absent: Henry's courage, the possibility of heroism in a modern war. In particular, the superficial, visual character of this red badge has been taken as a prominent example of the book's lack of ideological roots. But the very terms with which Henry rationalizes his flight betray his deep commitment to the system of blue demonstrations where he is drilled and reviewed; and this commitment translates directly into Henry's Greeklike conception that people with torn bodies are peculiarly happy. They are happy, in other words, because they have been torn; their courage—their commitment to the system—has been made visible, available to review. Precisely because Henry's wound is both produced by the army and subject to review by the army's vigilant eye, it signifies his unambiguous commitment to that system of vigilance and to a definition of heroism, not as something internal, or integral, to the individual, but as something mass-produced by a martial system.

This process of systematic, visionary development is completed the next day in battle when Henry momentarily surrenders all of his own rationalizing and supervisorial faculties. "He lost sense of everything but his hate," one reads, and he becomes "so engrossed in his occupation that he was not aware of a lull." In the manner of a worker under Taylorism, Henry does not stop until someone tells him to: "He turned then and … looked at the blue line of his comrades.… [T]hey all seemed to be engaged in staring at him. They had become spectators.… 'By heavens,'" Henry's lieutenant crows in admiration, '"if I had ten thousand wild cats like you I could tear the stomach outa this war in less'n a week!'" Henry realizes that "as he had gone on loading and firing and cursing … they had found time to regard him. And they now looked upon him as a war devil."

By figuring Henry as both subject and object of something very much like Taylor's conception of managerial vision, Crane imagines the population of a Civil War battlefield as a progressive, Tayloresque society, united in its commitment to a systematic vision of war. In Crane's imagination, the system no longer exactly directs violence at an enemy; rather, it seems to reproduce enmity itself, and its successful function comes to be defined as a production of violence, a war on war, in which final victory—"tearing the stomach outa this war"—becomes literally inconceivable. Henry does not want to see victory so much as he wants to see violence, and the enemy on which Henry is systematically compelled to gaze is not only the "red animal, the blood-swollen god," but also the industrial system itself. Henry thinks to himself: "The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine.… Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He must go and see it produce corpses." The battle's grim processes, then, figure the same system which produces Henry Fleming, "first-class" soldier: the "torn bodies" with whom Henry wishes to identify himself "expressed the awful machinery in which the men had been entangled." The "tattered man" captures the function of this violent system in an anecdote he tells Henry.

I was talkin' cross pickets with a boy from Georgie, onct, an' that boy, he ses, "Your fellers'll all run like hell when they onct hearn a gun," he ses. "Mebbe they will," I ses, "but I don't b'lieve none of it," I ses; "an b'jiminey," I ses back t'um, "mebbe your fellers'll all run like hell when they onct hearn a gun," I ses. He larfed. Well, they didn't run t'day, did they, hey? No, sir! They fit, an' fit, an' fit." His homely face was suffused with a light of love for the army which was to him all things beautiful and powerful.

By the time the tattered man gets to the end of this passage, "they" are both the tattered man's "fellers" and the Georgie boy's "fellers." "The army" has become a blanket term unifying blue and grey in a they who "didn't run," but "fit, an' fit, an' fit": an exceptionally violent, but otherwise faithful version of the cooperative industrial armies imagined by James and Bellamy and a strict example of the unionist revisions of the Civil War in the literature of the 1880s and 1890s. Heroism here is both democratic and systematic: one need only "fit" as a little piece within a system of blaze, blood, and danger; one need only become visible there by being torn, in order to be regarded as a war devil. His love for this "beautiful" vision of the army makes the tattered man's tatters a quality of his vision, as well as his body.

Crane graphically represents as a tear or tattering the division of the individual into visionary and physical components called for by the Taylor system: The system of blaze, blood, and danger in The Red Badge, however, does not simply produce men whose tatters display to one another their courage; it also produces corpses, which would seem to represent a scandalous breakdown of the society of the battlefield, that its democratic system of violent vigilance is grounded in the brutal victimization of a certain class. Crane's literary view of the Civil War seems to anticipate Taylor's critics: in order to produce managers systematically, a scientific industry, it appears, must also produce a blind and brutalized work force. Crane's corpses, however, appear to be neither blind nor precisely victimized. He characterizes them, consistently, by both their uncanny capacity to see and their remarkable military potency. Such is the "invulnerable dead man" they encounter on their way into battle, who lies on his back, "staring at the sky." Such, in particular, is the corpse that a terrified Henry Fleming encounters in chapter eight of The Red Badge. Here Henry, in his efforts to put distance between himself and the battle, is pushing deeper and deeper into the woods on the edge of the battlefield. Suddenly he stops:

horror-stricken at the sight of a thing. He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree.… The youth gave a shriek as he confronted the thing. He was for moments turned to stone before it. He remained staring into the liquid-looking eyes. The dead man and the living man exchanged a long look.

Far from representing a scandalous breakdown of the cooperative social system of the battlefield, or a victimized body, emptied of all capacity to manage or oversee its own fate, this corpse is much closer to being an un-canny scientific manager par excellence: a "supervisor" without an effective body, rather than a body effectively blind. The "long look" Henry exchanges with the corpse is the ultimate instance of his being reviewed by the hostile knife thrusts of his society's visionary agency, an agency which corpses continue to possess and to exert on the living. This spectatorial power is implied first by Crane's phrasing—Henry stops at "the sight of a thing"—and then aggressively literalized by Crane—"he was being looked at by a dead man." When he reaches the limits of the battlefield, Henry does not encounter a hidden scandal which refutes the ideology underpinning the battle; he finds a pure form of the same visionary violence which constitutes the battle, and it has the same effect on him that it always has. Leaving the dead man, Henry immediately begins "to run in the direction of the battle" in order to "witness" it, and—but this amounts to the same thing—to fight in it again.

III

In Crane's imagination of a martial industrial system, the system's violence peaks not in the production of blind corpses, but rather in a doubled vision of corpses, in the seeing of corpses who themselves see. These corpses, in turn, evoke Taylor's incorrigibly lazy men who hold what Taylor disparaged as the literary view of industry: they watch the industrial system's functioning but do not actually work at it. The corpse with whom Henry exchanges a long look is a threat to Henry, but not because he represents the interests of a class victimized by Henry's commitment to the systematic machinery of battle. The corpse is terrifying because his view of the war is empty of any perceptible interest in war. Unlike the tattered man, he does not quite fit on the battlefield; he does nothing to make himself visible there; he just looks at it. His spectatorship, if anything, is disinterested, and the fear Henry feels under the eyes of the corpse is clarified by noting that Crane himself felt a similar horror for the idea of a disinterested literary vision. This horror comes out in a letter in which Crane wondered about the aesthetic principles of Henry James. "What," Crane wondered:

does the man mean by disinterested contemplation? It won't wash. If you care enough about a thing to study it, you are interested and have stopped being disinterested. It clamours in my skull that there is no such thing as disinterested contemplation except that empty as a beerpail look that a babe turns on you and shrivels you to grass with.… [T]he horrible thing about a kid is that it makes no excuses, none at all. They are much like the breakers on the beach.

As the look of Crane's "babe" approaches complete aesthetic disinterest, the babe, mysteriously and ominously, is at once objectified and naturalized, appearing to become first a "beerpail" and then a "breaker on the beach." What worries Crane is that, at the same time, the unlucky human subject of the babe's disinterested look—in this scenario, Crane himself—is violently objectified, naturalized, "shriveled to grass," just as Henry Fleming felt himself "turned to stone" by the gaze of the corpse. Crane seems to feel that a truly disinterested vision threatened the definition of human existence itself, which, simply, was to be interested in what one sees. Thus his babe dissolves into the aspect of an ocean wave, and the yellow and green corpse Henry meets in the woods seems a part of the forest it inhabits, except that the babe and corpse turn a terrifyingly disinterested gaze on their human witness.

Crane is not attacking James here—they became friends and mutual admirers—so much as he is expressing his inability to conceive the possibility of a vision both disinterested and fully human. The invulnerably hostile corpses in The Red Badge, however, do represent Crane's real hostility to the genteel, moralistic elements of his society which rejected the socially critical visions of his literature—for example, the critic who denounced Maggie in The Nation. "His types are mainly human beings of the order which makes us regret the power of literature to portray them," wrote this anonymous reviewer. "We resent the sense that we must in certain points resemble them." But Crane did not find this genteel hostility only in the class of fastidious "literary men." Like Taylor, he found it across the social spectrum, for example, in the eyes of the proper old ladies he met in Jacksonville on his way to Cuba, "sitting on hotel porches saying how well the climate suits them and hurling the same lances with their eyes to begin bloodshed." Crane found it in the slums themselves, in very persons whose resemblance to himself the genteel reviewer in The Nation wanted to deny. In a letter discussing the Bowery, Crane complained about the "conceit" of its population, about the "person who thinks himself superior to the rest of us because he has no job and no pride and no clean clothes"; and he attributed the misery of the Bowery's residents to a lack of willingness to fight, to "a sort of cowardice … a lack of ambition or to willingly be knocked flat and accept the licking." In his sketch entitled "An Experiment in Misery," Crane described his encounter in a flophouse with one such "person," in a scene which he revised and put into the war novel he would soon write:

Beneath the inky brows could be seen the eyes of the man exposed by the partly opened lids. To the youth it seemed that he and this corpse-like being were exchanging a prolonged stare and that the other threatened with his eyes.… The man did not move once through the night, but lay in this stillness as of death.

How close Taylor's antipathy to the "literary view" of industry was to Crane's hostility to a genteel way of seeing is evident in an anecdote in which Taylor's language echoes the kind of language Crane used to describe the vision of his antagonists. Describing one of the "college men" at Midvale whose aloofness from the society of the shop floor infuriated him, Taylor wrote: "He had a rather imperturbably wooden face, and looked at one with an expressionless eye.'… This man was not only disliked, but cordially hated by all men." Taylor's figuration of his opponent's vision, or better his disfiguration, locates his writing style and diction, if just for a moment, clearly within the borders of the literary realism exemplified in the era by Stephen Crane.

The liminal quality of these antagonists of Crane's—the way they seem to straddle a border between life and death, between human and natural existence—marks Crane's acknowledgement that despite their apparently irremediable hostility, he and they did "resemble" one another. There is no peaceful exterior to the battlefield of The Red Badge; in attempting to leave it, Henry Fleming inevitably finds himself at its heart. Crane once referred to his own career as a "beautiful war" between the progressive realists such as himself, Garland, and Howells and the genteel conservatives who promoted a tendentiously moralistic literature. When he tried to paraphrase his conservative opponents, however, he found it impossible. They were "those who say—well, I don't know what they say: They don't, they can't say much, but they fight villainously [sic] and keep Garland and I out of the big magazines." Crane imagines his critics here in the same way he imagines the disinterested babe, as persons who mark a kind of mute, passive limit to human existence, where a form of violent vision is detached from any visible or articulate interests which might justify that violence.

IV

The point of the preceding examination of the systems of critical visualization shared by Taylor and Crane has not been, of course, to argue for the accuracy of their visions of American culture around the turn of the century but to show that the literary and industrial visualizations rose directly out of a shared ideology and a shared practice of realism. To the extent that The Red Badge is an apology for the progressive ideology of industrial systematization, it is pointless to try to use literary realism to locate a critical perspective outside of that ideology. The affinities between The Red Badge and Principles indicate that there is no such outside perspective any more than there is an outside to the battlefield of Crane's novel. The industrial system of the Progressive Era produced its own internal ideological critique, in the form of literary realism such as Crane's, as well as in the form of Taylor's industrial realism.

The important place of Taylor's vision of industrial reform in the context of Crane's realism has been ignored, perhaps out of an understandable desire on the part of modern-day literary critics to deny any point of resemblance between their own critical practice and the practice of Taylorism. Nonetheless, when a reader of Crane such as Amy Kaplan attributes the critical potency of his book to its capacity to "isolate discontinuous moments of vision"—making visible the inadequacy of the mythological narratives imposed on the Civil War during the 1890s—she adopts the language and techniques of the same critical realism Taylor adopted, using Crane as a kind of camera eye to locate the hidden sources of violence within the era's ideological status quo. These techniques recall the double edge of Crane's hot plowshare: recognizable in the violence of The Red Badge is how far the industrial systematization of labor actually was from progressivism; but one sees this only by adopting a systematically and rationally critical perspective shared with Taylorism.

In identifying a critical view of the Progressive Era with Crane's literary view, we identify with a technique which criticizes and, at the same time, reproduces ideology in a capitalist era, a technique embodied, above all, by the ultimate technique of Taylorism: photography. The conflicting ideological consequences of such an identification are the subject of Walter Benjamin's seminal essay on "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in which Benjamin argues that the camera's capacity to reproduce its images destroyed the possibility of authentic art, thereby wrecking the conditions for an authentic selfhood which, for him, were linked closely to the ability to unburden oneself of ideological mystification through the appreciation of true art. Despite these negative effects of photography, Benjamin hailed its advent because, in the process of destroying the traditional conditions for authentic art, it also shattered the traditional distinction between aesthetics and political economy. As W. J. T. Mitchell has put it, on the one hand, the camera embodied for Benjamin the ideology of capitalism in the way that it reduced reality to a reproducible effect of a technological means of production. On the other hand, the camera also embodied in the art form of photography the natural tendency of capitalism to expose the social contradictions it creates and which ideology has always functioned to hide. For Benjamin, in an era of mechanical reproduction the aesthetic question of what was true and beautiful in art could never again be separated from the technical question of how an industrial means of production mediates our perception of truth and beauty: the photograph had bound art and industry together, and it was in this divided form that the ideological battles of industrial society would be fought.

For Benjamin, it was not difficult to distinguish between the liberating and the oppressive functions of the mechanical reproduction of art; he believed it was essential to the nature of history eventually to distinguish between the two, to eliminate the repressive and mystifying function, and to unfetter once and for all the liberatory and clarifying one. One can now see clearly enough the extent to which Benjamin's classically Marxist historical optimism, in which history itself would eventually bring about a kind of progressive super-realism, was a wishful distortion. The tendency of capitalism to expose its contradictions is not a natural effect of history at all. As Taylor shows plainly, it is part of the essential practices of capitalism, part of its constant process of self-criticism and evolutionary reform. Reading The Red Badge together with Principles, as camera eyes trained on one another, may show how difficult it is to separate the capacity of critical realism to relieve people of ideology from its tendency to reproduce ideology and its mystifying and distorting effects, a tendency which goes on behind our backs. One continues to need opposing perspectives to make visible the ideological distortions which have gone into raw historical experience.

The reader of The Red Badge, then, seems to be figured within the text—not so much in Henry Fleming as in the more broadly representative figure of the tattered man whose love for the "beauty and power" of his violent society might make readers want to deny any points of resemblance between themselves and him. After witnessing the horrific death of Jim Conklin, the tattered man says to Henry Fleming, "Look-a-here, pardner. He's up an' gone, ain't 'e, an' we might as well begin t' look out fer ol' number one." He and Henry are both always looking out, watching out, which makes the two of them as one: tattered, torn, divided, and thus marked for all to see as fit members of a progressive society. The hot plow-share might be this society's emblem, but its motto could come from Walter Benjamin, from his picture of what would be necessary for authors to become agents of progressive social change in an age of mechanical reproduction. "It is not spiritual renewal," Benjamin wrote, "that is desirable: technical innovations are suggested."