Abstract

Elmer Rice’s expressionist play The Adding Machine (1923) opens with Mrs. Zero mercilessly berating her husband, Mr. Zero, for, amongst other things, watching too many Western films. Mrs. Zero’s fatigue with cowboy cinema corresponds to the prevalence of these films in the early twentieth century, and their mass appeal to male viewers, who idolized the rough-riding heroes as symbols of a bygone era of American masculinity. In contrast to these virile western roamers, Zero is enfeebled and spiritually malnourished by his mechanical work as an accountant. As a work of expressionist theatre, the play is deeply concerned with mechanization and mass industry. However, Rice’s allusion to western films adds a new wrinkle to the play’s social critique: Rice’s evocation of the cowboy figures him as a racist fantasy of a better, freer, whiter past—made more enticing by the dehumanizing mechanical innovations of the twentieth century. For Zero, the cowboy represents both the pinnacle of masculine power and the white authority of American territorialism, which came to an end with the nineteenth century. Too loyal to the capitalist ethos to recognize it as a system of wanton exploitation and disposal, Zero attributes his emasculation and employment troubles to racial equality. In examining The Adding Machine's depiction of mass labor through Zero’s anxiety over the marginal developments in racial equality, this article explores how work anxieties intersect with seemingly disparate social events to present a new way of understanding Expressionist theater’s concerns with mass labor and worker automatism.

Keywords: American / Drama / Expressionism / Film / Masculinity / Race


Introduction

Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923) begins in the cramped bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. Zero as Zero is berated by his wife for watching too many Western films. In Mrs. Zero’s opening monologue, which comprises the entire first scene of the play, she bemoans the prevalence of “them Westerns” and “all of them cowboys ridin’ around an’ foolin’ with them ropes” (67). Mrs. Zero’s fatigue with cowboy cinema highlights the prevalence of these films in the early twentieth century and their mass appeal, especially to male viewers such as Zero, who idolized the rough-riding heroes as symbols of a bygone era of American masculinity. In contrast to these virile Western roamers, Zero is a “thin, sallow, undersized, and partially bald” man enfeebled and spiritually malnourished by his repetitive and menial work as a department store accountant (67). The chasm between the vigorous cowboy and Zero is captured in the opening scene by Zero’s immobility as he lies prostrate on his bed. From here, the play in many ways parodies the plotline of a typical Western, with our feckless hero killing his boss in a blind fury after being fired from his job and then setting off for the posthumous wild west of the Elysian Fields after he is executed for the murder. However, even in the infinitude of the afterlife, Zero cannot ignore his programming: he inevitably abandons romance and free will to take up cosmic accounting. Further, he is duped into returning to Earth to continue his degenerative cycle of reincarnation as the operator of the dystopian super-hyper-adding machine, a futuristic counting device that only requires the operator to depress a button with their big toe.

Rice’s juxtaposition of these images of American masculinity—the brusque cowboy with the wimpy office worker—undoubtedly draws the audience’s attention to the ways modern industrial practices, specifically the mechanization and efficiency sciences of the twentieth century, have, in Rice’s own words, denigrated the laborer to “one of the slave souls who are both the raw material and the product of a mechanized society” (Minority Report 190). However, Rice’s allusion to Western films and the cowboy symbol should not be read as a nostalgic call for a bygone era of masculine self-determinism that apotheosizes white male heroism as the cure to the soul sickness of industrial mechanization and mass culture. Rather, Rice’s evocation of the cowboy figure offers a commentary on these flawed imaginings of a better, freer, whiter past—a past made more enticing by the dehumanizing mechanical innovations of the twentieth century—and how they play into and undermine white supremacist justifications for restricting non-white workers’ upward mobility.

This is captured explicitly in the courtroom scene, in which Zero conflates his labor anxiety and his race hatred in a stream-of-conscious confession that articulates the ways white anxiety concerning labor autonomy both fuels and derives from white anxiety concerning non-white progress in the early twentieth century. In Zero’s attempt to rationalize why he killed his boss, he is repeatedly distracted by the “damn figgers”—the endless stream of numbers that occupied him at work—that lead him into seemingly unrelated recollections (82). One of these recollections is of a Black man—whom Zero repeatedly calls “the dirty nigger”—who steps on Zero’s foot in a crowded subway (84).¹ The rhetorical slippage between the two words points up how Zero sublimates his anxieties concerning the work conditions that undermine his sense of manhood and individuality into a white panic over racial equality. The rhyme of the two words brings together the underlying tensions of Zero’s emasculation and excavates the uglier aspects of white labor grievances. In examining The Adding Machine’s depiction of mass labor through Zero’s anxiety at the prospect of racial equality, this essay explores how work anxieties intersect with seemingly disparate social events to present a new way of understanding Expressionist theater’s imaginings of mass labor and worker automatism.

The Close of Westward Expansion and the Rise of Cowboy Cinema

Surprisingly little scholarship attends to the play’s racial aspects. While Anthony Palmieri extensively tracks Rice’s wide-ranging commitment to social justice, he makes only passing mention of the racial elements of The Adding Machine. For Palmieri, and most other critics of the play, at the center of The Adding Machine is a critique of the homogeneity of modern mass culture, a position that marks Zero as a reactive participant in moments of social animosity. When Palmieri does speak of Zero’s racism, he attributes it to mob mentality, positing that Zero’s racism is his parroting of others’ racist remarks (Palmieri 64-65). Similarly, Christopher Wilson reads Zero as a representative of “a kind of mass unconscious made normative: a dream-life of mass culture made to dictate clerical desire” (149). This desire, Wilson argues, creates an insatiable need for headlines—primarily mass communication and entertainment—to compensate for a vapid identity: “Not knowing what to ask for, these minds stray into fantasies of headlines—headlines that, in turn, become catalysts for how they act” (154). Interestingly, Wilson gestures toward Zero’s violence, writing that these headline fantasies “are rewritten into dreams of revenge or suicide,” but he avoids specifying how exactly these dreams manifest (154). Furthermore, Robert Hogan notes that The Adding Machine’s popularity among performers and audiences is due in part to its attendance to the psychological alongside the social, making it “less tied to a particular social problem, political issue, or period of modern history” (31). Nevertheless, Hogan recognizes Rice’s inclusion of racist tangents in Zero’s courtroom monologue as an effective means of alienating the audience from Zero and expressing the “horror [of] a system which creates Zeros” (35). Craig Owens contends that Rice’s critique of the capitalist system centers on the incompatibility between “the American myth of ‘rugged individualism’” derived from “the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and […] theories of laissez-faire capitalism and self-sufficiency” and the realities of “advanced capitalism,” which “renders these ideals impossible” (70). Arguing that The Adding Machine “[recognizes] the vacuity and contemporary irrelevance […] of the mythologies of rugged individualism, Jeffersonian agrarianism, Tocquevillian [sic] self-interest, and Emersonian self-reliance,” Owens nevertheless asserts that it retains “a strong sense of nostalgia for these ideals, inviting audiences and readers to imagine and long for a preindustrial, prelapsarian, extra-ideological period during which these individualist aspirations were widely achievable” (70). While I agree with Owens’s assertion that the play reckons with the conflict between rugged individualism and industrial capitalism, I disagree with his claim that Rice is nostalgic for a “prelapsarian” past. It is Zero, and not Rice, that clings to a kind of labor nostalgia that prizes selfless devotion to his company as a means of achieving self-actualization and masculine autonomy. It is Zero’s failure to recognize the folly in this nostalgic understanding of the worker/employer dynamic that propels the events of the play. And it is Zero who is infatuated with violence as an expression of masculine autonomy. Thus, Zero represents an explicit critique of this imagined, “prelapsarian,” fantasy of an age when men possessed brutal authority over women and people of color. As such, The Adding Machine offers a commentary on both the impersonality of the present and the brutality of the past, situating the tension at their intersection as the fundamental point of rupture for modern American men. In The Adding Machine, this is cleverly expressed through an evocation of the Western as a massified and homogenized form of entertainment that mythologized the cowboy and his mastery of nature and the savage Other that inhabit it through professionalized violence.

As film scholars have posited, cowboy cinema came to prominence in the wake of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in which he proclaims the American frontier closed.² Turner observes that the 1890 census rang the death knell of the American frontier with its conclusion that “the unsettled area [of the western frontier] has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line” (1). The abrupt end to this westward expansion, according to Turner, cut off access to “the forces dominating American character” born from the “perennial rebirth” and evolution of America through its confrontations with “primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier” (3, 2). Randall Gann contends in his analysis of Western cinema’s relationship with Manifest Destiny that Westerns became “a tonic [… that] allowed American culture to endlessly repeat the myth of its exceptional frontier experience” by providing audiences a “teleological narrative of Manifest Destiny” (216-17). Despondent at the notion that American adventurism ended with the close of westward expansion and the prospect that life would become a cycle of grim mundanity, Americans could take solace in cinema’s “broad vistas and rugged Anglo Americans pursuing traditional individualistic values” (217). Americans seemed to jump at the opportunity. By 1910, Western films were so popular that they constituted 21% of all American films made (Buscombe 24). However, while Western films recaptured the mysterious and wonderful potential of the West, by the 1920s the primary appeal of these movies stemmed from their glorification of white male autonomy. As Marilyn Yaquinto explains:

These pursuing modernities, all perceived factors in Zero’s emasculation and automatism in the play, make for daunting pursuers and necessitate a violent response to their feminizing effects. Therefore, the myth of the cowboy, Yaquinto observes, “centers on a particular performance of masculinity—one specifically defined by toughness and epitomized by the gunfighter, a professionally violent man prized for his frontier battles and unchecked autonomy, with the ability to deploy his special skills when he deems it necessary” (29). In the 1920s, the cinematic violence is ratchetted up to compensate for declining genre interest. By the time that The Adding Machine is set, the cowboy genre is ostensibly “shoot-’em-up” schlock largely targeted at young boys as a matinee distraction in rural and second-tier movie theaters.³

Important to my discussion is the genre’s commitment to formulaic storytelling at the audience’s behest. Fans, especially male fans, became serious aficionados, prizing their ability to easily “sketch you a map” of the film’s narrative and scenic structure, and vehemently opposing any deviations from the formula (Smith 196-97). It is unsurprising that Zero would be drawn to movies that routinize the white male protagonist’s victory over women and wilderness, as such a pattern simultaneously recreates and counters Zero’s bleak cycle of reincarnation as a perpetually less fulfilling iteration of himself. Thus, the films become both wish fulfillment and unrecognized reflections of Zero’s reality, a conceit that the play humorously engages with through its fantastical journey from the mundanity of Zero’s mechanical life to his stint in the ethereal plains of the afterlife. Reading Zero in this way, one can imagine his narrative arc as a kind of satirical riff on the Western picaresque, with Zero serving as the milquetoast hero who escapes his doldrum life through a hysterical outburst of violence that results in his employer’s death and Zero’s execution. Transported to the lawless afterlife of Elysium, Zero is incapable of appreciating his newfound freedom, choosing instead his priggishness and mechanical accounting work, a choice that finds him sent back to earth to be reincarnated as another, lesser, iteration of his mechanical self.

Zero: The Emasculated Automaton

To establish Zero as the comic antithesis to the cowboy figure, Rice minimizes Zero’s on-stage presence to establish his subordination to the traditional cowboy foil: feminizing civilization. Often ignored in discussions of The Adding Machine’s commentary on modern mass labor is the gendered tension that underlies much of Zero’s anxiety concerning his work and his role in society. The play introduces Zero both spatially and physically as a passive figure degenerated by his sedentary, repetitive, white-collar labor and his torpid middle-class life. Importantly, the play opens with Zero in bed against the back wall of the set near the drawn windows, with only his “head and shoulders visible” above the sheets, while Mrs. Zero goes through her nightly routine in the foreground of a room papered over with “columns of figures” across the walls (1). This opening image provides a sardonic representation of his stagnation and confinement. Unlike the free-roaming cowboy, Zero is introduced as a captive to the cozy clutches of a down comforter (67). Zero is bound up in his bedding, diminished by the comforts of city living and a sedentary job, a kind of dead thing compared to his vivacious and talkative wife who dominates the scene. This visual language echoes across the play, repeated when Zero rises from a prostrate position in his coffin in scene five with only his head initially visible and again in the final scene of the play when Zero is found nearly buried in the receipt paper that blankets the room and “chokes the doorways” (123). The suggestion in the opening of the play, then, is that Zero is already spiritually deceased, a Bartleby of the twentieth century, habituated to the banal routines of work and leisure.

In addition to Zero’s physical smallness in the scene, his irresponsiveness to his wife’s criticisms—which also signals the frequency with which he hears them—highlights his status as a browbeaten and thoroughly domesticated man. The bulk of Mrs. Zero’s monologue reflects on her poor decision in choosing Zero for a husband, undermining his masculinity and business acumen according to Darwinian concepts of virile masculinity and survival-of-the-fittest exceptionalism. Mrs. Zero undercuts Zero’s fragile sense of self-worth by calling attention to the sedentary nature of his job; it is a jab at both his physical infirmity and his career impotence. Because Zero conducts his work while “sittin’ on a chair all day, just addin’ figgers,” Mrs. Zero implies that it is less meaningful than other more strenuous work, including her own more physically demanding household labor (4). Mrs. Zero even goes so far as to suggest that Zero’s job is merely idle dawdling, implied by her critique that he spends his days simply “waitin’ for five-thirty,” rather than producing anything of meaning or value, prodding at an insecurity for white-collar men who found that the abstract nature of their work undercut the legitimacy of their profession (4). Not only does this call into question the value of Zero and his work, equating his unproductiveness to the cowboy foolin’ that agitated her in the Western movies, it also unsettles Zero’s position as the male breadwinner of the family. This is reinforced visually in the scene by Zero’s recumbent position in bed, which is set behind his wife on the stage. This positioning and Zero’s resigned silence in response to his wife’s harangues highlights his submissiveness.

Although he still technically “brings home the bacon,” Mrs. Zero insists upon her greater sacrifices and her purpose in the marriage dichotomy: “I’d like to know where you’d be without me. An’ what have I got to show for it?—slavin’ my life away to give you a home” (5; emphasis added). While the language of homemaking is traditionally gendered to articulate a desire for nesting by the stay-at-home wife, it is clear through Mrs. Zero’s accusatory tone and the choice of give over make that she is subverting this meaning to argue for her dominant role in the relationship. It is she who slaves and provides while Zero putters around until the whistle sounds. This inversion of the marriage dynamic, according to Mrs. Zero, is the result of Zero’s inability to climb the corporate ladder, failing after twenty-five years to move beyond his entry-level position at the department store. What is genuinely tragic about Mrs. Zero’s invective is that it relies upon the same corporate logic that manifested, and continues to manifest, so much masculine anxiety concerning self-worth and employment. In Mrs. Zero’s estimation, Zero has little justification for his professional failings other than an inherent deficiency.

Mrs. Zero’s estimations of her husband are validated when Zero loses his job to the forces of mechanical innovation and corporate cost cutting. While Zero assures himself that he is guaranteed a promotion because of his unflagging dedication to his job, resting on outmoded notions of corporate loyalty to imagine himself on the precipice of professional assent, the dictates of efficiency management render Zero obsolete in comparison to advanced machines that can operate at greater speeds and with less professional supervision or professional knowhow. When Zero’s boss realizes that Zero has held the same position for twenty-five years—“Twenty-five years! That’s a long time”—his extended time in the position seems more a company oversight than a mark of professional accomplishment: “And you’ve been doing the same work all the time” (27). Thus, Zero’s place as a 25-year veteran is transmogrified from a marker of his devotion into another indictment of his failure as a man to climb the corporate ranks to a higher position.

Upon learning of his termination, Zero reels into a momentary mania, which is captured through some magnificent stagecraft. As the stage begins to revolve to merry-go-round music, Zero is forced to confront the reality of his position within the corporate system. As the boss explains why Zero is being replaced, the music grows increasingly louder and more chaotic, and the stage’s revolutions increase in speed, capturing Zero’s psychic break. The boss must compete with the clamor of both the music and “every off-stage effect of the theatre” while the stage’s spinning increases and the haunting “figgers” that follow Zero from scene to scene throughout the play are projected on the wall. If the opening scene of the play intends to capture Zero’s obsequiousness, then this visual outburst highlights an emotional explosion. As the scene breaks down into sensory chaos, the boss’ words are rendered down to unctuous corporate platitudes: “no other alternatives—greatly regret—old employee—efficiency—economy—business—business—BUSINESS” (29). Such programmatic speech, Owens explains, becomes an “invocation of mechanized efficiency […] preserving only its most significant terms, and condensing his words into the most efficient conveyers of meaning” (72). This dramatic breakdown is met with a crescendo of sound, punctuated by a thunderclap, a flash of red across the stage, and the implied action of Zero stabbing his boss to death with a bill-file.⁴

The cacophonous conclusion to scene two signals Zero’s psychic break. The stylistic ebullition of expressionist stagecraft marks the eruption of Zero’s psychic discontent and the toxic anxieties that have simmered under his milquetoast exterior. During Zero’s trial in scene three, Rice’s use of stream-of-conscious monologue captures the relationship between Zero’s conscious fears of mechanical obsolescence and his subconscious fears of race replacement. Initially, Zero tries to justify the killing in terms of labor injustice, emphasizing his impeccable attendance and devotion to his company to demonstrate his boss’s cruelty in firing Zero after twenty-five years of loyal service: “Never missed a day, and never more’n five minutes late” (55). Such an argument highlights the callousness of capital’s single-mindedness when it comes to technological innovation and efficiency management. Yet, Zero cannot stay on this bent for long; or, perhaps, one might suspect that Rice grows bored with the trite flippancy and apathy of the stock character. The boss becomes a formality more than a foe, as Wilson recognizes, and his death provides an opportunity for Rice to write beyond “the direct representation of vertical class conflict”: “The soon-absent boss becomes a kind of nonpresence, a sign that Rice’s interest is not in visible oppression but in the prison in Zero’s own mind” (150). Rather than settle on a rudimentary critique of class injustice, Rice chooses to complicate Zero’s oppression by making him culpable in his own misery; Zero misinterprets his failings as the product of Machiavellian forces that loom over him—the “damned figgers” that he has imagined from the start of the play.

The extent to which Zero imbues these “figgers” with his existential woes is made clear in his explanation that the numbers become to him living beings that possess human qualities. “Them figgers,” Zero explains, “They look like people sometimes. The eights, see? Two dots for the eyes and a dot for the nose. An’ a line. That’s the mouth, see?” (55). It would be fair to consider Zero’s anthropomorphizing a symptom of his neurotic number counting, what Robert Hogan describes as an uncontrolled effluence of “conditioned-response tabulation of meaningless digits,” but the extent to which these numbers are present throughout the play demands careful consideration of exactly who or what Zero sees in the numbers (35). The immediate response may be to assume that the numbers represent, as Hogan posits, the meaningless regurgitations of “Zero’s zombie-like intelligence,” or the disembodied omnipresence of Zero’s labor and therefore the boss that he kills (35). However, such a reading ignores the larger impetus to Zero’s monologue in the scene: his desire to vindicate himself against what he perceives to be a world steadily turning against him—a hardworking white man. Given that the bulk of Zero’s monologue focuses on the abuses endured, such a personification should be read as a far more malevolent representation of Zero’s bigoted mathematics of justice.

Zero’s angst toward the “damn figgers” that portend his obsolescence is rooted in a racial fear of being outpaced by Black workers, who were gaining ground in the workforce.⁵ This is exposed in Zero’s outburst of racist accounting while he babbles before the judge. Caught up in the narrative he is telling, Zero stumbles into a recollection of an event on the subway when a Black rider stepped on his foot as a rush of passengers boarded the car:

Zero’s grotesque fantasy of violent retaliation against the man on the train echoes the xenophobic and racist invective chanted by Zero’s friends-turned-jurors during the previous scene in the play, who blame the “Damn foreigners” for the supposed decline of the country. In this preceding scene, the misters and misses One through Six merrily sing of shooting, lynching, and burning non-Anglo immigrants and African Americans (47). The homogenous anger toward non-white citizens both furthers Rice’s vision of an automated culture while also signaling the broader relationship between racial animosity and national pride and white nativism. Like his peers, Zero cannot stand the imagined racial transgression of the Black man’s misstep and fantasizes himself as a modern vigilante, honor-bound to regulate Black people’s movement through so-called white spaces (47). This is expressed through Zero’s desire to participate in the lynching and to enact a similar form of racial violence against the man on the subway as retribution for stepping on his shoe. Not only does Zero’s desire to shoot the man on the train with guns akimbo articulate his desires for the frontier justice codified in cowboy cinema, but it also draws directly from famous cowboy actor William S. Hart, who invented the two-gun pose during his heyday in cowboy films of the 1910s. The actor, famous for his virile masculinity, was also an adamant white supremacist who baked into his films a Victorian conception of frontier masculinity that represented white frontiersmen as noble and powerful masters of the savage West they worked within (Smith 171-72). This is especially evident in Hart’s 1916 film The Aryan, in which he plays cowboy Steve Denton, who abandons the white race for a gang of Mexicans and “half breeds” after being betrayed by a white woman who double-crosses him and steals his gold. Denton’s sense of responsibility to his race is reignited by a chance encounter with a frontierswoman who convinces him that it is his duty to protect white western migrants from the horrors of his nonwhite cohort. The film concludes with Denton organizing an attack against his former gang to save the white travelers. Andrew Brodie Smith, in his analysis of the film, explains that this depiction of cowboy violence was the first film to “clearly [connect] the hero’s use of force […] with the maintenance of white supremacy” (168).⁶ Zero’s fantasy of racial violence echoes Hart’s cinematic display and functions as salve against his wounded pride. Like the bedroom scene that opens the play, Zero’s recollection brings his disparate anxieties together into a singular panic, knitting his labor, gender, and race anxieties together to form a tapestry of social transgressions.

Tying together the threads of Zero’s subconscious shows that his anxieties are, at least in part, a response to the broader social changes that he finds himself trapped within. More than simply a response to the changing face of work in the twentieth century, the “damn figgers” that loom over Zero throughout the play also encompass Zero’s fears of the “big n-----” that disrupts his sense of place in the social order. Rather than concede the failure of a capitalist system that views him as an expendable machine, Zero attributes his failings to newly empowered outsiders who represent an encroaching threat to white labor security.

The Elysian Fields and the Super-Hyper-Adding Machine

The final three acts of the play stretch the fantastical limits of expressionism to depict Zero’s ironic revulsion toward the idyllic fantasy of the liberatory frontier manifested in the Elysian Fields. Executed for the murder of his boss, Zero awakes in scene five as a corpse in a graveyard, where he meets Shrdlu, a pious and self-loathing matricide who accompanies Zero into the Elysian Fields in scene six. Being murderers, Zero and Shrdlu’s presence in the Elysian Fields appears to confute religious logic by flouting the precepts of holy judgment and the surety of Zero and Shrdlu’s spiritual damnation. Far from the “unspeakable torments” that Shrdlu anticipates as eternal punishment for their sins, the two are free to do whatever they please in a natural paradise “dotted with fine old trees and carpeted with rich grass and field flowers” (90, 91). A scattering of brightly colored silk tents along a meadow crossed with pristine streams and set under a “fleckless sky” promises a reverie of the western frontier that never was (91). In a shocking twist of fate, it seems that Zero has been rewarded for his violence by being transported to the apotheosis of the American frontier. To Shrdlu’s dismay, he explains to Zero, the as-yet unnamed heavenly authorities “don’t care” what anyone does in the afterlife (100). The only rule they set in place is that inhabitants must remain in the Elysian Fields until they understand. While Zero and Shrdlu never come to determine what they are tasked with understanding, it is clear that this exercise in self-reflection is a method of spiritual introspection aimed at rewarding the innocent and punishing the guilty. As such, the tranquility of the Elysian Fields belies its torturous effects on Zero, who is incapable of relinquishing the moral absolutism of productivism, even in the face of celestial bliss. Zero’s afterlife appears to be entirely his to determine, a zone of consciousness in which Zero’s desires manifest his surroundings and dictate his cosmic destiny. The Elysian Fields, then, offer the opportunity to rest, quite literally, in the paradise of a post-work euphoria, one in which Zero can live uninhibited in the pastoral tranquility that often informs nostalgic critiques of modern mass industry. This potentiality is made explicit by Shrdlu’s disquieted observations about the habits of the other spirits living in the Elysian Fields:

Of course, to Shrdlu and Zero none of this creative activity constitutes work as it is understood in capitalism, and so none of it is recognized as materially meaningful, or even morally acceptable. To a man like Zero, whose labor logic vests productivity with absolute righteousness, the afterlife can only be conceived as an extension of industrial capitalism: “good people” do not think of enjoyment; “profitless occupations” are a waste of time; artistry and creativity are concomitant with immorality and degeneracy. Zero, the corporate automaton of the accounting room, cannot fathom the pleasures of eternal unemployment because it demands a kind of self-directed imagination associated with individuality. It demands a reckoning with life beyond work, a conception of self apart from one’s work, a challenge Zero is unfit to surmount.

Zero’s abhorrence toward the grandeur of limitless freedom is played to comedic effect when he ultimately refuses the boundless pleasures of the Elysian Fields, including a romantic relationship with his former co-worker and unrequited love Daisy, to return to the monotony of the adding machine, now a giant calculator that Zero toils on endlessly.⁷ Although the final scene of the play is perhaps its funniest, it is also the darkest and most damning. Zero’s desire for the serenity of the adding machine’s rote action is more than Rice’s final lambaste of mass industry, for it also opposes the ideology of white supremacy that would excuse white mediocrity by decrying social progress. While Rice certainly sees mass industry as a malevolent force in society, evidenced by his abject horror at the regressive effects of mindless industrial occupation on the working class, he refuses to absolve Zero for his part in worshipping and thus perpetuating a system of oppression that wantonly exploits and discards workers with little regard for their well-being. The self-righteous logic of westward expansion—perpetuated under capitalism—festers as Zero’s unearned sense of social superiority. Thus, the tragedy of Zero is that he is simultaneously the unwitting victim of, and accomplice to, his own oppression.

Zero assumes, because he is white and male, that he deserves success. Rice rejects such an assumption as ignorant and hateful. As Lieutenant Charles, a celestial middle manager of the afterlife, explains to Zero in the play’s concluding scene, Zero’s entire spiritual journey has been a downward slide through exponentially more demeaning and dehumanizing lives: ironically, starting life as an autonomous monkey, only to be reborn into a series of lives as Egyptian, Roman, and English slaves; this work, Charles contends, at the least produced something. Now, the iron collar of slavery has turned white, and Zero’s work has degenerated like his body into “a bunch of mush” that can be processed more efficiently by a machine (105). In Rice’s accounting of American culture—in fact, world history—there is no meaningful exodus from the monotony and meaninglessness of Zero’s habituated number counting, at least not for someone that has conceded so much of his identity to his labor, as Zero has. The pretense of white masculine superiority that Zero felt was under threat is undermined by the realization that these grand narratives are built on the backs of nameless figures who labor to hold them up (the mass of Zeroes across centuries). This imagining, as Wilson explains, reduces “all of creation [to] a white collar purgatory […] envisioned as a many-layered corporation that simply reassigns its personnel” (151). What is more, it reveals Zero’s “very essence” to be “his willingness to have other […] verdicts written onto his life without expressing his own will” (152). While Zero believes himself to be an individual deserving of praise and adoration for his devotion to work, he fails to recognize his own vacuousness and corporate America’s disinterest. Given the opportunity to formulate an autonomous identity apart from his work, Zero can think of nothing more fulfilling than to continue calculating those damn “figgers.”

Conclusion

Such a nihilistic view of Zero posits an exponential fall for humankind, ironically described by Charles as the culmination of millions of years of human evolution, toward a near fully automated future in which the worker’s body becomes valuable only as a piece of the operative “super-hyper-adding machine”—in Zero’s case, the only part of his body that will be necessary to operate the machine is his big toe (106-7). The machine, installed in coal mines to register each shovel of coal scooped by a miner, will automatically track each miner’s movements with a white “graphite pencil” set upon “a blackened, sensitized drum” that serves as a kind of seismographic calculator. From there, Zero will only need to “release a lever” with “the great toe of [his] right foot […] which focuses a violet ray on the drum. The ray, playing upon and through the white mark, falls upon a selenium cell which in turn sets the keys of the adding apparatus in motion. In this way the individual output of each miner is recorded without any human effort except the slight pressure of the great toe of your right foot” (106). In this hyperbolic progression of the mechanical realities of labor in the twentieth century, the worker possesses no unique value for their work—no skills, training, or professionalization through which to assert autonomy—and is instead merely a biological circuit in the larger system of actions necessary for the machine to do its job. Zero will contribute nothing beyond the impulse to contract his toe to depress the plate to activate the violet ray. This undoubtedly reads as a dystopian prophecy of a grim future in which workers become not only surpassed by, but also subservient to, the machine; however, it is also presented as a fitting resolution to Zero’s audacity in believing that he was anything more than an automaton.

The Adding Machine’s closing image of Zero as a trivial piece of the corporate machine dispels the delusion of white exceptionalism. In Rice’s imagined future, any body can operate the “super-hyper-adding machine” (106). In its reductive power to minimize workers to motor impulses, big toes depressing pedals, the super-hyper-adding machine compels audiences and readers to recognize the indiscernibleness of workers in the productivity-focused eyes of an industrial machine more concerned with profits than human wellbeing. The bitter irony of Zero’s spiritual decline is that it is manifested by the very capitalist ideology to which Zero remains unwaveringly devoted. His function as a low-level white-collar worker—a social position from which African American workers were mostly excluded—strips him of his autonomy and makes him subservient to the future machine. Considering the simplicity of this occupation, it is only a matter of time before it will be eliminated by the same efficiency management that led to his previous firing. Thus, Rice uses the closing image of Zero’s reincarnation as a renunciation of the American fetishization of rugged individualism and the white delusion of manifest destiny and white supremacy. As a critique of these fantasies, Zero becomes the ironic culmination of the cowboy hero and his mythos as he devolves through infinite reproduction into a hollowed out simulacrum of himself. Like the matinee heroes of Western cinema, Zero embodies the recycled object of soulless profiteering, iterated upon until he is deemed obsolete.

This reading of Zero underscores the complexity of The Adding Machine and invites additional considerations for its larger thematic interests. Rice’s condemnation of racial violence and critique of popular culture, although seemingly tangential, represent integral pieces of the play that open up opportunities to analyze its larger existential concerns. While the play remains an evocative, darkly comical, and scathing indictment against the banal evil of Machine Age advancements in automation, it also recognizes the profound interconnectivity of social woes and the larger impact of automation beyond its direct effect on the worker’s body. More importantly, Rice shows us, automation constitutes a plodding diminution of the soul of the worker as well as their capacity to empathize with others as human. Zero’s dehumanization constitutes a broader social apathy that proves fertile ground for the proliferation of pernicious ideologies, such as white supremacy and unfettered capitalism. The Adding Machine cautions that the social fabric, so delicately constructed, cannot survive the existential assault of the technological push for maximalist profits at the expense of humanity.

Notes

1. In an effort to promote inclusivity and avoid unnecessary representation of hateful language, I have chosen, after thoughtful feedback from the editorial team at The Space Between, to censor any further racial slurs in this article. The reason for including this initial use of the word is to underscore the rhyme between the word and Rice’s use of “figgers” throughout The Adding Machine, which I see as a significant connection for discussing the racial themes of the play.

2. In a particularly interesting case of serendipity, Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” was first read at the same exposition where Thomas Edison showcased his kinetoscope, the progenitor of the movie projector that would soon display Westerns for a voracious American audience (Gann 216). For additional discussion of the Western’s role in a post-frontier America, see Edward Buscombe’s The BFI Companion to the Western (1988); William W. Savage, Jr.’s The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture (1979); Andrew Brodie Smith’s Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (2003); and Marilyn Yaquinto’s chapter “Frontier Ambitions and Cowboy Narratives” in her book Policing the World on Screen: American Mythologies and Hollywood’s Rogue Crimefighters (2019).

3. For an in-depth discussion of cowboy cinema of the 1920s, see Andrew Brodie Smith.

4. Presumably, the bill-file Zero uses to kill his boss is better known as a desk spike or receipt spike.

5. Zero is not selective in his xenophobia. Throughout the play he engages in various racial slurs. During the trial, Zero also complains about Jewish workers who get two holidays off to his one because of “Young Kipper an’ the other one” (83). For Zero, such religious considerations represent biases against him as a worker.

6. Andrew Brodie Smith makes clear that cowboy cinema had long suggested such connections between violence and the maintenance of white authority; however, The Aryan took the step of concretizing it for audiences. Such a step should not be so shocking considering the film came out one year after D. W. Griffith’s racist Civil War drama, The Birth of a Nation (1915). C. Gardner Sullivan, the writer of The Aryan, knowingly incorporated white supremacist ideology into his films to appeal to middle-class audiences, who celebrated a hero’s willingness to use violence both to ensure “racial order” and protect Christianity (Smith 168-69).

7. Designed by Lee Simonson, the adding machine in the original 1923 production of the play took up nearly the entirety of the stage, allowing Dudley Digges, the original actor to portray Zero, to walk atop it and press the giant buttons. Rice, in a letter to a friend, describes the absurdity thusly: “At the rise of the curtain, Digges in his absurd full-dress suit runs up and down on [the adding machine] like a monkey, gleefully pressing down the keys and pulling the gigantic handle which makes them spring back into place. His pantomime is wonderful and he gets a big laugh” (qtd. in Walker 176).