Abstract
For all the attention paid to the Internet, the stubborn truth remains that the telephone is still the workhorse of telecommunications. Because its history and geography are so deeply intertwined with that of society and the economy as a whole, the development of the telephone has received enormous scholarly attention. This fascinating, well-written volume examines the first half-century of this technology in the United States and Canada, from its introduction in 1876 to AT&T’s victory over its rivals in the 1920s and the formation of a national telephony system. Contrary to much of the technological determinism that pervades this literature, MacDougall’s text emphasizes the political nature of this process.
Because AT&T enjoyed more than a half-century of almost total monopoly in the telephone industry, much of the history of this subject has been written as if its victory was natural and inevitable. Yet this volume goes far in uncovering the hitherto little known series of battles that led to this outcome, revealing it as contingent and the result of numerous political choices rather than some predestined fate. As he notes, “History has been kind to AT&T, because AT&T wrote it” (p. 3). Rather than spreading over the national landscape, telephony grew in the context of hundreds of pitched battles. In the 1890s following the end of Bell Telephone’s near monopoly generated by its ownership of Alexander Bell’s patent, the industry was wracked by a series of battles between “the octopus,” as it was often called, and hundreds of “independents”—small, locally owned telephone companies that styled themselves as the “people’s network.” The confrontation was about much more than telephony, but spoke volumes on competing visions about the economy (i.e., populist movements against robber baron monopolies) and the construction of scale (national vs. local). The discussion of scale could have informed, and been informed by, the rich body of geographical work on this topic, an omission that reflects the costs of disciplinary boundaries.
The early telephone was almost exclusively a tool of businesses and the wealthy. Prohibitively expensive, few working-class families or farmers could afford one. But once Bell’s patent expired in 1894, opening the door to an influx of new firms, the independents provided a cheap means of connecting once-isolated households. Independents posed a serious challenge to firms like Western Union and Bell Telephone, which presented their monopolies as “natural.” For a brief window of time—roughly 1895 to World War I—thousands of independents served millions of customers, catering to markets ignored, overlooked, and dismissed, sometimes contemptuously, by Bell Telephone. Independents represented not only an economic challenge but also “embodied different ideas about corporate power, local autonomy, and the scale of economic and social life” (p. 133). The independents were far from united, but quarreled incessantly among themselves, often failing to present a united front against “The Octopus,” American Bell. What they did share in common was local ownership and orientation. As a result of “dual service,” or the presence of two or more telephone companies in the same city, many locales were covered with spider webs of telephone wires. Thus, whereas standard histories view Bell’s monopoly as uninterrupted, this book performs a valuable function in demonstrating that it was erected by patent monopoly, disrupted by competition, reformed by consolidation around World War I, and ultimately broken again by deregulation in the 1980s.
Bell’s advantage, however, was long-distance service, which the independents could not provide. Long-distance telephony was simultaneously reflective and constitutive of national economic and social integration. MacDougall is emphatic that despite its role in the massive time-space compression of the Progressive Era, usage of and conflicts over the telephone were largely local in nature: “Pine and cedar tree trunks sunk into city streets embedded the supposedly space-annihilating technology of the telephone into both physical spaces and local political milieus” (p. 59).
Ruled at the time by the conservative and short-sighted Boston Brahmins, Bell Telephone showed little interest in rural and working-class customers, stressing instead the high-profit, urbanized business community. Yet in revealing competing visions of telephony, the volume illustrates how this model was but one of several. Alternative ideologies emphasized a localized series of independent telephone networks as bastions of democracy on the one hand, and a large, centralized national system (i.e., AT&T) on the other, a view energetically promulgated by the company’s famous founder, Theodore Vail. Ultimately, of course, it was this latter vision that prevailed. With a shift from Boston to New York that evicted the Brahmins, and with Vail at the helm, American Bell metamorphosed into AT&T and quickly became the world’s largest corporation.
The book also sheds light on how the different political cultures and geographies of the United States and Canada generated distinct systems of communications. Much of the analysis focuses on the Midwestern U.S. states, where distrust of East Coast banks and companies ran deep, and on Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec). In the midwest, independents flourished like mushrooms, whereas in Canada, where the Boston Brahmin ideology reigned unchallenged, the telephone was promoted as an instrument of national unity. Even within Canada this vision was limited in scope, largely confined to Anglophone elites in Toronto; in the prairies, this view was received more skeptically. In the United States, competition drove down prices and spread the telephone rapidly; in Canada, Bell’s monopoly went essentially unchallenged, prices remained high and telephone penetration rates lagged. Canada’s relative lack of service was compounded by Bell Canada’s indifference toward rural and Francophone customers. In 1907, Iowa alone had more telephones than all of Canada combined. In the United States, the early telephone was a source of sociability, fun, and gossip; in Canada, such uses were frowned upon as interfering with the more “proper” use for commercial ends.
Starting in 1907, the independents began to disintegrate steadily and resistance to AT&T crumbled. The behemoth began steadily acquiring and absorbing local companies, offering them a place within Vail’s national system. Increasingly regulation of independents was transferred to state utility commissions, which were not so hostile to The Octopus. Although the U.S. Department of Justice initiated antitrust proceedings under the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1913, AT&T responded by lobbying the federal government to transfer oversight from Justice to the Interstate Commerce Commission, which has no power to break up monopolies. World War I was the final nail in the coffin for independents, when the federal government temporarily took over the telephony system and implemented numerous changes that favored AT&T. Although a few stalwarts persisted, most independents had given up the ghost by 1920. The Octopus’s reign lasted for the next 60 years.
Central to Vail’s vision and AT&T’s hegemony was the notion of “system,” then highly popular among engineers, technocrats, pundits, and corporate executives. Viewing social and technological phenomena as systems conjured up images of efficiency, productivity, and scientific prowess. In addition to AT&T, systems were at the core of Ford’s auto plants, slaughterhouses, the postal service, farming, and even household management. This view was not apolitical in nature: “Systematic management was one of the weapons by which the autonomy and authority of skilled labor in America was broken” (p. 234). MacDougall makes clear that this ideology was also a means by which AT&T gained newfound respectability, offering technological justifications for the monopoly’s organizational triumph. This latter point was hammered home by AT&T’s massive public relations campaign of the 1920s when telephony was growing exponentially, which was widely imitated by other large corporations. In endlessly celebrating its nationwide network, the malevolent Octopus became benign Ma Bell, at last shedding Bell Telephone’s Gilded Age aura and dressing itself up as the company that used the telephone to shrink a continent into a neighborhood. As he puts it, “In embracing the Bell System, Americans came to embrace their nation’s new political economy” (p. 257).
Relatively few readers will be sufficiently interested in the history of telephony, per se, that they will plough through this long, scholarly, and thoughtful volume. Yet this topic has important implications for current debates about telecommunications, in an age in which we see, yet again, rapid technological change, massive time-space compression, and aggressive corporations using and changing public policy to their advantage. It is worth closing with an extended quote from the book that points to its relevance to contemporary issues: As the commercial threat of independent competition declined, AT&T appropriated the rhetoric of its former foes, promoting the telephone itself as an innately democratic and democratizing technology, a cure for the curse of bigness. This brand of technological populism has become our default way of talking about new communication technologies in the twentieth century and beyond. Wireless telephony in the 1910s; broadcast radio in the 1920s; television in the 1940s and 1950s; personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s; the Internet in the 1990s; and at the start of the twenty-first century, wireless telephones again: each would be described in their day as empowering the individual and rejuvenating democracy, even when those technologies were owned and controlled by monopoly-seeking corporations (p. 261).
The more things change, the more they stay the same.