As Rebecca Wright notes in her introduction, the development of American ‘energy consciousness’ has largely been framed in relation to fossil fuels and anthropogenic climate change. Now her new book points to earlier and far more varied US debates concerning the moral value of energy and its use. She explores how commentators understood ‘energy’ as a scientific measure of natural resources but also of human mental, economic, cultural, sexual and many other activities. Building upon work by Cara New Daggett and other historians in the field of energy humanities, Wright demonstrates how these energy discourses reflected and naturalized contemporary political positions on the accumulation or distribution, regulation or liberation of the energies of the environment, society and the individual. The discussion moves from the turn of the twentieth century through the reform movements of the Progressive Era and New Deal, but is consistently framed by what Wright calls an ‘energy paradox’: the more contemporaries strove to define energy as an external, objective measure for reorganizing society, the more energy took on the values it was supposed to eschew.
Following the introduction, Chapter 1 establishes the impact of thermodynamics on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about social progress and free will. Wright compares the influence of German monists, transmitted to the United States in Jacques Loeb’s mechanistic conception of energy, with the notion of individual will, promoted by William James. While the former sought to reduce waste and increase efficiency through collectivist ‘energetics’, the latter turned to the potential of the dynamic will to generate and direct energy, two ideals which saw political expression in President Theodore Roosevelt’s emphases on both environmental conservation and the ‘strenuous life’. Conversely, contemporary historians such as Henry Fairfield Osborne and Henry Adams suggested a more pessimistic view of civilization’s inevitable dissipation of accumulated energy. Chapter 2 further explores this theme in American concerns surrounding the supposed role of climate in racial difference and impending social collapse. Here Wright points to the prominence of climatic energy, measured through sunspots or tree rings, in popular historical works of the interwar period. Ellsworth Huntingdon, geographer and later president of the American Eugenics Society in 1934, thus returned to the Hippocratic contrast between temperate and tropical zones while joining others in setting apart non-white or immigrant groups on the basis of supposed climatic variations in energy and morality. In this way, Wright notes, commentators believed they could understand a fragmented nation through the unifying causal lens of climatic energy.
In Chapter 3 Wright discusses how notions of the environment and its latent energy were in turn shaped by concepts from the human sciences, centring on supposed ‘psychic waterways’ of libidinal, social and cultural energy. Reinterpreting Sigmund Freud’s reflections on civilization and its repressive functions, members of the Regional Planning Association of America, such as Lewis Mumford and Benton Mackaye, sought to liberate and redistribute human activity from ‘artificial’ urban centres and commercial networks outwards into the hinterlands, in accordance with the ‘natural’ flows of ‘primordial energy’. This chapter provides a particularly compelling account of the varying impact of these ideas in the infrastructure projects of Pennsylvania’s Giant Power and, subsequently, the Tennessee Valley Authority, both seen as opportunities to reorganize human social and economic networks along natural lines and to revitalize American culture through contact with the ‘psychological resources’ of the environment.
Chapter 4 moves to the short-lived technocracy movement of the early 1930s and its emphasis on ‘energy determinants’ of value in response to the collapse of confidence in monetary economics following the 1929 crash. This chapter sees perhaps the most direct case study of Wright’s ‘energy paradox’: while the objective value of energy was contrasted with ‘artificial’ and wasteful economic systems, attempts to locate and measure this value reimbued energy with the attributes of money as it was adapted to various existing perspectives. Thus, while proponents of government intervention called for an objective ‘yardstick’ of energy value (in line with New Deal regulation of electricity prices), libertarians such as Isabel Paterson opposed intervention in the natural energy flows of the free market. The chapter also addresses other radical movements and their attempts to reconnect value to the energy of natural resources and human labour, while also intersecting with anti-Semitic attacks on ‘international finance’.
Finally, Chapter 5 looks to post-war, international perspectives, as earlier progressive interests in the reorganization and regulation of human energy met with increasing fears of totalitarian control and conformity. Much of this chapter is focused on the optimistic ambitions of Julian Huxley as first director general of UNESCO and his promotion of cultural integration as part of a global energy system. Conversely, it points to a turn towards the individual as a source or conduit of new energy, through examples including Randian Objectivism, Joseph Campbell’s heroic archetypes, and later countercultural drug use. In closing her historical narrative, Wright makes a valuable contribution in demonstrating significant continuity from earlier energy discourses to the atomic age and beyond.
Rather than focusing on a particular field or institution, these chapters explore the significance of ‘energy’ in an impressively broad range of settings and debates, and the connections which Wright traces are compelling and often surprising, ranging from presidential politics and state infrastructure to juvenile delinquency and expressionist art movements. As such, this book provides a valuable resource for any researchers interested in the intersection of scientific, political and cultural thought in twentieth-century America. Sections discussing the significance of energy and environment in contemporary historiography will be particularly interesting for environmental historians. As a contribution to the history of energy, this book successfully develops a broader perspective on the reciprocal exchanges between science, technology and society. Highlighting the importance of the history of ideas and, in particular, the human sciences, Wright presents a highly pluralistic account of how energy became a moral concern.
