The Century of Progress
Starting in the 1930s, the International Harvester Company became one of the most influential promoters of agribusiness futurism. As sociologist C. Horace Hamilton observed in 1939, along with machinery International Harvester sold farmers “a set of ideas about the social advantages of mechanization” and “the theory of social and technological progress.” For the 1933—34 “Century of Progress” World's Fair in Chicago, International Harvester built a massive hall, in the shape of a streamlined barn and silo, to showcase its farm implements. The exhibit included displays of the kinds of complicated machinery that were in the process of taking over the vast agricultural fields of California, including harvester-threshers, cultivators, corn pickers, mowers, tractors, and mechanical cotton harvesters. While there were no electric sheep, the Dairy Exhibit included a demonstration of the McCormick-Deering milking machine on an animatronic Holstein that “could moo, switch its tail, turn its head, wink its eyes, chew its cud, breathe and give milk” (actually, imitation milk pumped via a pipeline into the mechanical cow’s leg and out its ersatz udders). The exhibit also included daily outdoor demonstrations of a remote-controlled tractor and a replica of a family farm. As the company brochure described the scene:
Combining the appeal of popular science and midway attractions, both exhibits present agricultural technology as a magical means for saving labor, so that even the cow’s production of milk is mechanized, or, in the words of a Popular Science article about the radio-controlled tractor, “Robot Plows while Farmer Rests.” At the same time as the exhibit promotes spectator identification with white male corporate farmers, it promises the imaginative pleasures of using technology to “direct” or “control” labor on a massive scale.
A mechanical man in farming clothes, seated comfortably on the front porch of a small farmhouse... converses with the spectators by means of an invisible loud speaker, and apparently directs every movement of the tractor. Broadcasting equipment, carefully concealed in the house, speaks for the farmer, and, by means of small electric switches, starts and stops the tractor and steers it in any direction desired. When the demonstration is completed, the tractor disappears through mechanically-operated garage doors at the rear of the farmhouse. Will the farmer of the future be able to sit on his front porch while directing all his farm work? Will it be possible to sit in an office in Chicago or New York and direct the operation of fleets of tractors throughout the world? Will it be possible by these methods to operate farm properties in both hemispheres and gather harvests in practically every month of the year? What are the possibilities of radio control in housework, industrial work, transportation, and especially warfare? These are a few of the unanswerable questions with which the weird spectacle of a driverless, yet perfectly controlled tractor, excites the imagination.
Combining the appeal of popular science and midway attractions, both exhibits present agricultural technology as a magical means for saving labor, so that even the cow’s production of milk is mechanized, or, in the words of a Popular Science article about the radio-controlled tractor, “Robot Plows while Farmer Rests.” At the same time as the exhibit promotes spectator identification with white male corporate farmers, it promises the imaginative pleasures of using technology to “direct” or “control” labor on a massive scale.
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