When Samuel Morse demonstrated an electromagnetic telegram exchange between a railroad station in Baltimore and the Capitol Building in D.C. in 1844, his primary intended audience was with him in the room. Morse, whose initial line construction had been financed with a congressional appropriation from the federal government, hoped and assumed that the federal government would purchase his patent and absorb telegraphy into the Post Office. But Congress balked and Morse turned to private investors.
Casual summaries of the subsequent history of telecommunications sometimes present this episode as a fateful fork in the road. By letting Morse’s patent slip into private hands, Congress not only prevented telegrams from becoming an affordable medium of exchange for ordinary Americans. It also sent U.S. telecommunications down a path, divergent from that of many other nations, toward privatization, ultimately consigning telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, the internet and all subsequent communications media and networks to the caprices and ravages of competitive capitalism.
But as Dan Schiller chronicles in elaborate detail in Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications, from the Post Office to the Internet, the idea that long-distance communication ought to be a public right protected by the government did not die in 1844. On the contrary, the goal of “postalization,” as it was sometimes called, remained a compelling political objective and a symbolic banner under which various American reformers, activists, and radical critics pursued their visions of democracy and economic justice. The U.S. Mail, for most of its history, was celebrated as a paragon of public service, and it effectively embodied the federal government before the Civil War. During the Gilded Age, the Post Office Department expanded accessibility and services beyond mail delivery. And for a brief period toward the end of the Progressive Era, telegraphy and telephony were brought under its aegis. All of this will be familiar to readers of the scholars (including Richard R. John, Robert MacDougall, David Hochfelder, Paul Starr, Claude Fischer, and dozens of others) whose works are invoked in Schiller’s text and cited in his endnotes. Schiller’s significant contributions to this story are to unearth the role of communications workers and their unions – in addition to the regulators, independent service providers, corporate executives, and high-volume business customers who typically dominate the literature – and to stress the reversals, dissent, and complex regime shifts that attended struggles over postalization and privatization and framed the long evolution of our current media landscape.
Notwithstanding the possible implications of Schiller’s subtitle, the crux of that evolution involved neither mail nor the internet. His sprawling saga and expansive research deal more with telegraph and telephone wires (and secondarily with radio waves) than with post offices or computers. It would be impossible in this space to capture the book’s myriad arguments, in part because it is a narrative and in part because it is simply so long. But the framing of the narrative conveys a sense of its trajectory. The narrative is divided into three historical regimes, defined around ideology or class interest. The first, which runs up to Woodrow Wilson’s re-privatization of the wires in 1919, is titled “Antimonopoly” and shows how broad political opposition to the power of corporations, particularly Western Union, which “incarnated the finance capitalism” that was on the ascent, represented a radical “attempt to remake the entire political economy” (pp. 42, 153). In the second period, identified with “Public Utility,” opposition to the monopolistic privileges and powers of specific corporations became more procedural and reformist rather than radical. Nonetheless, federal regulation of telecommunications expanded, especially during the long FDR presidency, around a capacious understanding of telecommunications as public services and a heightened sense of government’s responsibility to oversee these utilities, whether or not they were monopolistic. Communications regulation served a variety of public goals during this era, which stretches from the 1920s to the 1950s and centers around the New Deal, including the promotion of consumption. The final section, “Digital Capitalism,” brings the story to the present, identifying key structural changes in the political economy between 1945 and 1960 that laid the groundwork for the privatization of key technological sectors and for a political reaction in the 1970s that would move telecommunications “in a direction contrary to public accountability” (p. 452).
In all three sections, Schiller devotes significant attention to the perspectives and interventions of workers, both men and women, and their unions (the Communications Workers of America play a striking role in the political history presented here). He also emphasizes formal politics, especially at the administrative level, and political ideology. All of these features enrich a history that might be misconstrued as primarily about technical innovation, business strategy, or legal doctrine. But Crossed Wires is also attentive to those and other subjects. Schiller writes with authority about media architecture, military procurement, and patent licensing. And he is comfortable reading sources as divergent as corporate memoranda and the sketch comedy of Lily Tomlin. Schiller is also effective at correcting some of the received wisdom about landmark events in the legal history of telecommunications. He argues persuasively, for example, that the 1934 Communications Act was more controversial, consequential, and ideologically significant than other scholars have acknowledged, and that the 1956 consent decree ending the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against AT&T had far-reaching consequences. Historians of twentieth-century America will want to engage these and similar instances where Schiller sees victories for the cause of public regulation that others have dismissed.
It is hard to say which, how, and whether readers will approach this vast book. Its structure and style make it difficult to consult as a reference or to explore selectively. The labor history is invaluable, though primarily significant in the context of the larger story. Some individual chapters (especially Chapter 8, “Patents Under Pressure”) stand out, but they too make more sense as parts of the unwieldy whole. Students in a variety of courses might benefit from Crossed Wires, but it is hoped that they are given more than a couple weeks to read it.
Professor Henkin is author of The Postal Age (2006) and The Week (2021), among other publications.
