The Impact of World War I on Tractor Adoption : Reflections on the Industrial Ideal

While economists generally assume that producers adopt new technology when it makes sense to do so, historians do not necessarily agree; and the views of the latter may have greater influence over popular thought. Deborah Fitzgerald, a historian of technology at MIT has argued that farmers were essentially bamboozled into buying tractors in the 1920s by “the industrial ideal” – a set of progressive ideas spread by business leaders, economists, engineers, and the county extension agents of land grant universities. This paper takes issue with the Fitzgerald thesis