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Ingenious Yankees: The Rise of the American
System of Manufactures in the Private Sector.
By Donald R. Hoke. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990.

U ntil recent years, the history of technology used to be writ-
ten, and taught, for its own sake and almost completely
isolated from economic and social history. Who among us has
not had his eyes glaze over at tedious recitations of the technology of
the flying shuttle, or the power loom, or the open-hearth process? The
treatment was tedious because treated in isolation; about all we were
told of the economic effects was that these machines improved pro-
ductivity and lowered costs.

This tiresome tradition came to a sudden end with the arrival of
the fascinating and crucially important work of David A. Hounshell,
From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (1984),
which created a new paradigm dominating the field of American
technological history. Hounshell’s achievement was to integrate tech-
nological with economic and social history, and bring us, for the first
time, a genuine history of the development of mass production. Thus,
for example, in his pioneering history of the bicycle industry of the
1890s, Hounshell showed that the bicycle was, in two ways, a critical
prelude to the invention and development of the automobile because,
(1) the bicycle taught consumers the possibility and the joy of indi-
vidual, mobile transportation (in contrast to the mass transportation
between fixed points essential to the railroad); and (2) it taught
bicycle makers the technology of the wheel, the tire, and the axle. It
is no accident that the first automobiles were made in bicycle shops.

But there was one troublesome aspect to this new paradigm, one
that conspicuously did not fit with an economist’s knowledge of the
market economy and the way it operates as compared to government.
Based on his own work and on the contemporaneous studies of
Merritt Roe Smith, Hounshell asserted that the fountainhead of mass
production was U.S. government armories. Operated by government

The Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1992): 121-124
ISSN 0889-3047

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122 The Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 6, No. 1

and with government as their only customer, the federal armories,
beginning particularly in the late 1840s, were able to give full sway
to the “technological enthusiasm” of engineers, and, heedless of cost,
could develop mass production of firearms with perfectly inter-
changeable parts. This aesthetically pleasing but costly method of
manufacture gradually spread its way from the public sector to
private mass production. Thus, modern mass production was a cre-
ation of government typically heedless of cost rather than of private
entrepreneurs functioning in a market economy.

But now comes Donald Hoke, in this exciting and highly signifi-
cant work, to upset completely the Hounshell-Smith picture of “Ar-
mory Practice” as the key to the development of mass production in
America. While building upon Hounshell’s work, Dr. Hoke stands
Hounshell on his head. Hoke makes it clear that he is an old friend
and colleague of Hounshell’s: both of them emerging from the remark-
able economic history and history of technology program of the
Hagley Foundation and the University of Delaware. Hoke demon-
strates conclusively that, long before Armory Practice, mass produc-
tion was brought to American industry by the remarkable engineer-
entrepreneur, Eli Terry. As early as 1807, Terry, an ingenious Con-
necticut Yankee, created a wooden movement clock industry, as a
mass produced clock with interchangeable parts, completely super-
seding the old hand crafted clock. In 1814, Terry delivered another
shock to the clock industry, by creating the highly successful wooden
movement shelf clock, as compared to the “hang-up” clocks previously
dominant. In contrast to the highly costly arms manufacture, Terry’s
clock process was adopted precisely because it drastically lowered
costs, and could thus be sold at a very low price and create a new mass
consumer market for clocks that had previously been a luxury item
for the wealthy.

One of the keys to this private mass production, which Hoke
shows was to become the rule throughout American industry, was
that the parts were not perfectly interchangeable, an inordinately
rigid and expensive procedure. Instead, the wooden clocks and pri-
vate manufacturing in later industries, were designed to be not
“perfect” but adjustable, with built in adjustable elements such as
screws, which allowed the parts to be fitted in each unit at the final
assembly. Thus, interchangeability was not “perfect,” but as much as
necessary. This built-in flexibility allowed mass production to cut
costs; for, in contrast to government operation, the emphasis by Terry
and later private producers, was on cutting costs of manufacture and
on easy use by the consumer. Hence, Terry and his successors were
driven, not just by technological enthusiasm, but by such enthusiasm


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Book Reviews 123

intimately combined with a continuing quest to make products more
cheaply and to render them more usable by the consumer. All this
development was made possible by close cooperation between engi-
neers and entrepreneurs; in this way, technology was always ad-
vanced in close collaboration with private, profit-seeking entrepre-
neurs for the benefit of the mass of consumers.

The next great case of mass production was the axe handle
industry, developed in the 1830s and 1840s, also in Connecticut, by
the creative engineer, Elisha K. Root, in collaboration with the far-
seeing entrepreneur, Samuel W. Collins. Once again, the key was
profit-seeking and cutting costs, and in the case of Root, in an
integrated, systems approach. And rather than this mass production
being influenced by Armory Practice, it was the Colt armory that
hired Root, eminent from his development of axe handle factories, to
manage its arms production at the end of the late 1840s. Thus, the
major influence was, contrary to Hounshell, not so much from Armory
Practice to private industry, as the other way around.

Donald Hoke goes on to study two other prominent cases begin-
ning around the Civil War and also relatively neglected by historians:
the intricately precise typewriter industry, and watch manufacturing
as established by the Waltham Watch Company at Waltham, Massa-
chusetts. In all cases he found the same pattern: emphasis on profit-
seeking through cost-cutting and the development of a mass market;
adjustable rather than “perfect” interchangeability; and collabora-
tion between engineers and entrepreneurs. Not only that: In each and
every case, Hoke found that not only was the industry private, but
that there was virtually no reliance on government subsidies, or even
on government contracts or purchases. The American System of mass
production was private and market-oriented through and through.

Why have David Hounshell and other previous historians missed
the boat so badly? Why, in particular, was the great pioneer Eli Terry
virtually unknown before resurrected by Donald Hoke? Hoke’s hy-
pothesis is that Hounshell and the others have been deficient as
antiquarian engineers: that is, they work solely from documentation
and never from close study of the three-dimensional, old objects
themselves. Hoke shows that Hounshell shows pictures of the objects
produced in the nineteenth century only to illustrate his story, not as
objects of study themselves. Hence, Hounshell and the others get the
story wrong. Hoke, steeped in antiquarian engineering and in its
journals, and therefore in close study of the objects themselves, was
able to avoid this error.

In sum, Ingenious Yankees is a superb book, providing a new
paradigm of American technological history consonant with sound


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124 The Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 6, No. 1

economics, based on thorough scholarship and a deep study of the
produced objects themselves. It combines sparkling writing, bursting
with the excitement of his paradigm discovery, with meticulous detail
on the specific engineering innovations and their broader signifi-
cance. There are also fascinating nuggets of insight that I hope Hoke
or others will pursue further. Thus, Hoke finds absolutely no labor
strife in these private mass production industries, despite their often
rapid technological change. This harmony contrasts, for example,
with the bitterness of many craftsmen working in the Harpers Ferry
Armory. It is very possible that the technological force-feeding of
government operation created more resentment than the cost- and
customer-conscious collaboration between entrepreneurs and engi-
neers. Hoke also notes the fundamental error of those historians who
wail about mass-production workers being reduced to skillless ma-
chine operatives, deprived of the high skills of their craftsmen-fa-
thers. Hoke replies that, not only did mass production create many
more jobs, but that the new mass production required and developed
many new skills, including invention, production, maintenance, and
repair. The new skills were different from those of craftsmen, but the
skills were still extensive.

Hoke also makes some telling points about later periods in Amer-
ican history. He shows that even Henry Ford was engaging in mis-
leading bravado when he proclaimed that there were “no fitters” in
this mass production; on the contrary, even automobiles needed
adjustments and fitting. Even on Hounshell’s own turf of the bicycle
industry, Hoke shows that Alexander Pope's bicycle factory was not
nearly as Armory Practice oriented as Hounshell claims, that his
machine tools were adjustable rather than “perfect” and that Pope's
increasingly successful competitors after the mid-1880s were even
farther removed from Armory Practice.

With the appearance of Ingenious Yankees, the history of technol-
ogy has become more deeply scholarly, focusing at last on the pro-
found study of the actual three-dimensional technological objects,
and at the same time, becoming integrated with social and economic
history as well as with the teachings of economic theory. In his
preface, Hoke quotes the eminent historian of medieval technology
Lynn White, Jr. that “the history of technology is, emphatically, fun.”
In the hands of Donald Hoke, at least, it certainly is.

Murray N. Rothbard
University of Nevada, Las Vegas