This paper will focus on these class implications, beginning first with an overview of Gilded Age industrialism, then proceeding to the specific relationships between class development and the "scientific" institutions of scientific management and patent medicines. Science only emerged as an autonomous set of discursive values after a prolonged struggle against ritual and it marked out its own identity by the distance it established from 'mere superstition'--science's label for, among other things, a large body of social practices of a therapeutic kind.1 In the field of science, amateurs dominated the field until the 1880s, during which period the area of study was transformed from a pastime of eccentrics into a number of specialized professions. These "official" scientific professions gained legitimacy--and funding--through providing research in the newly-formed management layers of the modernized corporation.2 While the advent of middle-management firms encouraged the professionalization and specialization of its constituent elements, an expanding middle-class created specialized sites of cultural dissemination that ran the gamut from the WCTU to the advertising industry. The emergence of such professional organizations were responsible for the demise of patent medicines, but also, in a sense, responsible for scientific management. As control mechanisms of the middle class, both social organizations and bureaucracies appropriated science in the name of class superiority, at the cost of workers' independence and social appreciation.

To properly understand the conditions partial to an appropriation of science for class interest, one must first understand the speed of industrial development in the Gilded Age. 3. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, both transportation and information costs were reduced as newly implemented infrastructure and interstate communication technology, technology unavailable before the 1890s, made transportation and communication both efficient and consolidated. The trans-continental telegraph was created and later consolidated by Western Union in the 1870s, while the 1880s witnessed the completion of trans-continental railroads, both of which allowed for unprecedented efficiency in resource allocation. Within New York, the localized development of rapid transit "was enlarging not only New York's metropolitan area, but also its capacity for refinement and spectacle. Such technological feats as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Elevated Railway "thus did more than simply knit together the expanding environment of New York; they also embodied the heterogeneous values which bourgeois culture projected onto that environment."4 The paradox of middle-class power and impotency stemming from the integration of science and industry was epitomized by Grand Central station, which "testified to the amalgamation of capital, expertise, technology and legal authority."5 These elements all combined to produce empowerment of specialized management, who maintained and augmented the industrial investment in technological capitalism. At the same time, the imposing quality of monopolized trusts such as the railroad suggested an unpredictable, untamable force, a speeding vehicle which management could ride but not steer. "

To direct the enlarged influx and increased speed of both physical and human capital, investor-manager separation became necessary, resulting in a shift in production control from the market to the firm, as a consequence of this separation of investor from manager6. According to Chandler, a firm is considered ÒmodernÓ when this combination of middle management and owner-operator separation is successfully introduced. As infrastructure and technological improvements went hand in hand, middle-class urban employment became increasingly more managerial in nature, supplanting the traditional owner-employee power structure and obscuring culpability within a growing private bureaucracy.7 The new industrial management class eschewed direct responsibility for corporate and social functions, making the machinations of the workplace "increasingly arcane and mysterious".8 For the first time, the nation's technical authorities were employed by industry, and the commercial advancement of such technology can be considered a "second industrial revolution"9. Chandler repeatedly stresses the increased velocity of resource transfer; when this velocity is realized in urban landscape one finds "underlying the metropolitan scale and expansiveness of [a Gilded Age lithography] is a dynamism which seems inscribed into the cityscape itself...this is the portrait of a city in motion--a landscape of incessant circulation and growth."10 An emphasis on overturn over high individual profit margin was precisely the management philosophy for yellow journalism publishers Hearst and Pulitzer.

Management Consultant Peter Drucker describes Talorization as "all but a systematic philosophy of worker and work." In terms of Taylorism's impact, Drucker doesn't mince words: "it may well be the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to western thought since the Federalist Papers.19" Modernization has "always been furthered by particular classes at the expense of others"; the Gilded Age was a critical period for modernization, and developments such as scientific management furthered the interests of the middle classes at the expense of the workers.20 Workers were denied creative license in the production process, and worker supervision and control became the overwhelming principles behind factory management. Taylor asserted that "as an absolute necessity for adequate management the dictation to the worker of the precise manner in which work is to be performed."21 This manner of dictation was "a means for management to achieve control of...every labor activity, from the simplest to the most complicated, " and caused antagonistic social relations that have plagued the factory ever since, for Taylorization is "empirically vital to modern management."22 Thus the bourgeois members of "modern management" exploited the period's technological advances, making the factory a site of class conflict in the name of dubious "science". ;.

Taylorization was not an original concept of the Gilded Age; Taylorization was a culmination of a pre-existing management trend towards industrial rationalization. Frederick Taylor, its founder, was an evangelical zealot on the subject of lackadaisical workers.23 Taylor spent years working on assembly lines, taking notes and working his way into middle management. It was during this period that Taylor performed his famous time-motion experiments, which were crudely executed and problematic in their scientific merit.24 Although these experiments were performed in the 1880s, it was not until the 1890s that Taylor began to publish his results.25 Taylor's objective in these experiments was to determine the best way to receive "a fair day's work" from the factory worker.26 Taylor determined this quantity of work by observing the maximum output for a worker in an optimal day. As Taylor's definition of an "optimal day" rested solely on his untested estimates of what a worker "should" produce, his application of "science" to management control must be considered anything but scientific. In contrast with this imaginary ideal, Taylor assessed workers as shiftless and lazy, describing their work as "soldiering". Taylor transformed Classical economic assumptions into "scientific" definitions, as when he incorporated Adam Smith's belief in the laborer's dispropensity to work into his definition of workers' "soldiering": "the natural laziness of men is serious, but by far the greatest evil...is the systematic soldiering which is almost universal under all the ordinary schemes of management..."27 The solution, Taylor proposed, was to remove the ability to soldier, to substitute worker control of production with a "scientific" approach to work, one in which the worker was prevented from "soldiering" through the regulation of each individual action.

Taylorization in its most empirical form was a means for disassociation of the labor process from the workers. This was made possible by removing "all possible brainwork from the shop", as a result of the knowledge-withdrawal process constituting the primary objective of scientific management.28 As the period's technological-industrial advancements had already demonstrated, social progress was inextricably tied to professionalization of science, and "science of work" was something that inspired managerial professionalization; it could not be haphazardly developed by the worker.29 Instead, this "science" would have to be the result of a new system that shifted emphasis to management and away from the worker; the labor functions of conception and execution "must be rendered separate spheres of work".30

 In the scientific management model, specific instructions are mandated by management to workers "in the form of simplified job tasks governed by simplified instructions which it is thenceforth their duty to follow unthinkingly and without comprehension of the underlying technical reasoning..." In light of Taylor's use of mystifying, crude methods for research, it is safe to say that not merely the workers but also the management lacked "comprehension of the underlying technical reasoning". The process, after all, was a means to obtain and then control a "monopoly over knowledge", and not a scientific endeavor31. The knowledge monopoly of scientific management was overtly cast in class terms; Taylor repeatedly described working as a manager as being "on the other side of the fence" from the worker.32 Thus on one hand, the class anxieties of the Gilded Age found in the emblem of "science" a ready tool for class division and stratification. On the other hand, the factory mentality that scientific management helped to engender, namely an unquestioning acceptance of any scientific doctrine as infallible and progressive, inspired and paralleled a similar public attitude; take, for example, the public acceptance of scientifically-unproven "race-science". This acceptance to a large extent could transcend class; the managers administrating it believed in the natural worth of science as much as the workers implementing it. As the Journal's Sunday editions illustrate, the public obedience to science produced a ready market for the fantastic pseudo-science of the yellow press.

Science as it was presented the yellow press was a mix of the respectable and impossible, both enjoyed and despised, as entertainment and a panacea. Authors wrote with the expectation of suspension of disbelief from their audience, making discussion science as breathtaking as it was dubious. The theme of scientific progress saturated the Sunday edition of the paper, and was always given ample space in the daily. Science was represented in two parallel forms in the paper: expose and therapy advertisement. The yellow paper's science articles, focusing primarily on medical innovations, were presented as evangelical testimonies to the rationalized professionalism that would eventually save humankind. A not atypical patent medicine ad, for example, announced it would "prevent half the death rate"33. As Jackson Lears put it, "science...was a kind of Easter-egg hunt; once the eggs were gathered the game would be over: the laws governing the universe would fully be known."34

 Within the pages of the Journal, the "Easter-eggs" of science were gathered together and displayed as advancements deserving and demanding public reimbursement, for if progress meant wealth, then science, at the heart of progress, needed consumption. This Journal article, taking advantage of the period's expanding use of electricity, describes an inventor who had "a new electric battery for restoring the optic nerve's power."35 Inventing with electricity contrasted with bureaucratic management, for it represented a bold taming of natural force. Thus Ames, the unaffected hero of Sister Carrie, "had a very bright mind, which was finding its chief development in electrical knowledge"36. Even more important than the manliness of the discovery itself, however, was the material wealth assured by the invention; the headline reads "million in sight for inventor Felts."37 In similar fashion, discoveries from stomach removal to bomb manufacturing were promoted for their marketability, as if the only way to ensure that science would "end the game" was to make tremendous profits through its use. While such articles could be enjoyed regardless of social status, it was thoroughly obvious that much of the "science" described benefited certain classes without affecting others. Just as today's therapies can often help but a fraction of those in need, the "discoveries" of the Journal were promoted for their high return on investment, not for their universal application.

If the science articles suggested that profit was a critical companion to progress, then patent medicine articles made such a connection explicit, offering amazing progress, at a "discount" price, and quite literally consumable in tablet or liquid form. The prostelyzing cant of print capitalism's "real" articles was only matched by that of the advertisements. Unlike the rationalizing, millennial science of the "official" medical industry and the social control "science" of Taylorization, patent medicines were a release, a "fantastic counterpoint to official idioms of repression in the late-Victorian period."38 The years 1880-1906 were considered the "golden age of patent medicines", and they remained an infamous factor in nearly all Gilded Age communities, irrespective of class, region or race.39 Taking New York as an example, the vast majority of Journal advertisements were of the patent medicine variety; ads for Ripan's Tablets alone could cover two pages40. Patent medicines, alternately called nostrums, found an eager market in an audience obsessed with a hypocondriatic avoidance of discomfort41. To address these discomforts, patent medicine makers broadened the doctors' diagnoses, and placed myriad maladies under the headings of specific ailments. "Catarrh" was perhaps the best-known of such ailments, and could be described as a disease "of the nose, throat, bronchial tubes, lungs and deafness", or any other part of the body, for that matter.42

Even more prevalent than the cure for Catarrh was the cure for "disease of men", a euphemism for impotence. Gail Bederman describes a ever-present challenge from workers and immigrants to middle-class virility in the Gilded Age.43 Middle-class men discovered a new disease called neurasthenia, spread through the "excessive brain work and nervous strain" caused by the middle-management occupations described above. Men questioned their ability to be "manly", and patent medicines responded in force. These ads helped via tireless repetition to convince men of the actual medical condition responsible for their inadequacy. Ads introduced and warned of the "problem" in the copy for the cure: "weakened mankind..."; "weak men, young or old"; "men be manly", and so on. No sooner had the problem been suggested, than a cure was proclaimed: "all secret and private diseased of men cured in a few days"; "lost life-force restored", "we make men", etc. Thus patent medicines formed "science" into identity problems as they solved them with "science"'s miraculous powers.

 The nostrum industry maintained a complex and often contradictory relationship with science, alternately embracing, scorning and fighting technological development. The relationship was further complicated through the awe-inspiring scale of promotion, which propounded a pseudo-scientific lexicon while attacking scientific progress as the source of social--and individual--disease. Ironically, the media assisted science proper in the eventual curtailment and regulation of proprietary medicines. Science as a profession thus emerged as an autonomous set of discursive values after a protracted struggle against nostrum "rituals", and it marked out its own identity by the distance it established from patent medicine's "'mere superstition'--science's label for, among other things, a large body of social practices of a therapeutic kind."44 Patent medicines may have been placebo or even narcotic, but their promise of instant therapy and cure for masses of managerial Americans may have provided a perfect remedy for the nervous anxiety prevalent in the day.

Gilded Age social commentators Henry James and Henry Adams believed that "in a capitalist democracy where one was encouraged to manufacture a self pleasing to others...the self becomes a series of stage effects...".45 If the self was comprised of "stage effects", an amalgamation of affectations and mannerisms, then patent medicines, marketed as the cure to all vague social discomforts, was a method of coping with and controlling them. To achieve the "highest cultivation in social manners", one needed to conceal from the world one's feelings.46 Through the inclusion of high doses of alcohol, opiates, and narcotics, patent medicines assisted in this concealment, allowing the user to affect an air of subdued contentment in the face of social anxiety. Scientists and reformers alike condemned nostrums for their tendency to contain such ingredients, but even temperance advocates found secretive pleasure in the inebriating effects47.

Gilded Age society held the belief that science would eventually cure all ailments; yet, in a sense, science also created ailments, and was presented as both the problem and the cure. As Americans in the Gilded Age witnessed an invasion of technological innovations into daily life, these innovations visibly overran the workplace, the city and the countryside. Where the ailment Patent medicines could thus credit much of their popularity to their targeting of such technology-induced social ills as time-machine fatigue and "speeding vehicles".48 Medicines were particularly vocal about suffering from fatigue, as if overworking was not only the fault of technology, but also curable by technology. Thus a certain "Vin Mariani", a red wine sold in pharmacies, could cure "profound exhaustion", while Dr. Hobbs Kidney Pills were really for those who "have...back ache."49

While finding tangible evidence of progress in factories and streets, most Gilded Age Americans knew little of the natural sciences' progress in medicine. Patent medicines often used this lack of education to their advantage. 50 Then as now, researching and testing the results of new technology delayed mainstream cures lag long after the discoveries they were based on; it was patent medicine makers who profited from the lagtime. When microbes were discovered, most doctors held their relevance to health in doubt; nostrum makers responded faster than mainstream medicine, and offered anxious consumers a choice: fall victim to the bacteria lurking all around, or imbibe a patent cure-all.51 This is but one illustration of how patent medicines relied on scare tactics in selling to an uninformed public; others included crediting all Catarrh to overheating the body, or back-aches to kidney failure.52

Scare tactics were the tool of the patent medicine advertiser, and one of the farthest-reaching aspects of the patent medicine era was its relationship with advertising. The incipient advertising industry depended on patent medicine business for its growth and survival53. Jackson Lears observes, "it was not the goods alone that promoted [nostrums]; it was the combination of their goods and the conditions of their sale."54 The modern advertising industry grew out of Gilded Age nostrum promotion, and nostrum production grew exponentially as a result of its advertising. Producing the product was not the problem; rather, the challenge for patent medicine makers was sales55. Patent medicines were the first products to appear in national advertising campaigns, and the first to use large-scale billboards.56 Nostrum advertisements appropriated the language and imagery of scientific research, using technical jargon and mysterious objects to impress audiences of their offerings' advanced healing power. The advertisements' illustration of the scientist's trademark tubes and flasks of gave patent medicines the "awesome authority of the laboratory."57

The advertisements for patent medicines also displayed the product as almost magical, even religious; a medicine could be discovered by an "Indian Witch Doctor", or claim to do battle with the grim reaper himself.58 The reference to Native Americans in nostrum advertising was not unusual, as advertisers cultivated the exotic imagery of a barbarous Other; because of their primitive state, exotic races were also closer to nature, and possessed a magical healing power long lost in industrialized regions. Nor was advertising's usage of religious imagery uncommon; for example, the consumption of Hembolt's Buchu was marketed as a pseudo-religious experience. Hemboldt built a $250,0000 Temple of Pharmacy in New York, which featured perfume fountains, esoteric rituals, and an inner "Sanctum Sanctorium" in which Humboldt was worshipped on a daily basis.59

Alternately, nostrum makers presented their products as a healthier, more cost effective alternatives to mainstream medicine. Doctors regularly utilized bleeding, purging and blistering as curative procedures; patent medicines, in contrast, were unmatched in their mildness, and "as harmless as water from the mountain spring."60 Nostrum promoters never tired of telling the public about the shortcomings of mainstream medicine, that "their therapy was brutal, his was mild...their procedure was costly, his was cheap...their procedures were mysterious, his were open."61 Thus medicine ads asked the reader, "why be tortured to death with an instrument of torture...", or assured "no more dread of the dental chair."62 At the same time, patent medicines relied on mainstream medicine for their technological basis. Buchu tonic was authenticated, so its maker Hemboldt claimed, by its primary ingredient, buchu, receiving notice in the Pharmacopeia. This book of medical ingredients was an early-day Physicians Desk Reference of sorts; Hemboldt only neglected to mention that buchu had long been deleted.63 Patent medicines targeted the adverse effects of progress, while claiming to embody progress in its ultimate form.

The events of New Years Eve, 1898 epitomizes this instrumentality of science in influencing class relations. The page three Journal headline reads "Electric Aurora on the City Hall", with the subheading detailing, "like a great white palace, it stood shining as a springtime dawn."64 According to the Journal, the theme of the evening was one of international solidarity, symbolized by the parading of those "foster children of greater New York", the German, Irish, and Italian immigrants. The German-singing societies "take the first place" in the events of the night, which culminated in the midnight illumination of city hall and New York's mayor raising the flag with "an ingenious bit of mechanism used to convey the electric current."

The Journal's phrasing of its self-created spectacle as a "great white palace" invokes memories of another "great white palace", that of the Chicago Colombian Exposition of 1893. The 1898 New Years palace, like the Colombian "White City" five years prior, is described as a "palace of whiteness". The 1893 Exposition's palace, centerpiece of the "great white city", was an openly promoted contradiction: it represented culture as a "relief from American materialism", and stood as a monument to the preeminence of American progress and technology, yet it was constructed in a superficial imitation of European Classicism65.

The Exposition professed another prominent landmark to the realm of scientific professionalism, that of the founding of the American Social Sciences, spearheaded by the "Frontier Thesis" as propounded by "professional" historian Frederick Jackson Turner. The Colombian "white city" provided a marked contrast to the rest of the exhibits, as all surrounding it were either un-progressive or downright "savage", as typified by the "savage village". Similarly, the Journal's "white palace" at midnight contrasted with all of New York shrouded in dark; its "triumph of light" is also an obvious contradiction, as its "praise of light" only serves to emphasize New York's profound encompassing darkness. Likewise, the description of New York's uniting inhabitants as "foster children" only serves to demonstrate the class division of the worker immigrants from the middle class Anglos; that the Germans "take first place" merely reflects their social status among immigrants. Moreover, none of the immigrants are described on the same page as the "white palace"; their intrusion might conceivably compromise the "whiteness". Described alongside the "palace" in the article is the technology used in its creation; the significance of the flag-raising ceremony in particular is overshadowed by a description of the "ingenious contrivance" used to electrically raise the flag. Thus, in this yellow celebration of unity and tradition, the "whiteness" and the industrial science making it possible prevail over the events celebrated. While many public dialogues left the equation of race and technology implicit, here it was made manifest: science produces class; technology produces "whiteness". As with the case of scientific management, the use of science here promoted a biased relationship between new technology and the classes which experienced it. Yet, as with the case of patent medicines, the use of science promoted a utopian vision which seemed to offer escape from class obligation rather than emulate professionalism. .

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