They all laughed when Edison
Recorded sound
"They All Laughed" is a song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, written for the 1937 film Shall We Dance where it was introduced by Ginger Rogers as part of a song and dance routine with Fred Astaire.
The lyrics compare those who "laughed at me, wanting you" with those who laughed at some of history's famous scientific and industrial pioneers, asking, "Who's got the last laugh now?" People and advances mentioned are Christopher Columbus's proof the earth is round; Thomas Edison's phonograph; Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraphy; the Wright brothers's first flight; the Rockefeller Center; Eli Whitney's cotton gin; Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat; Milton S. Hershey's Hershey bar chocolate; and Henry Ford's "Tin Lizzy" Model T car.
This lyrical list of inventors, explorers and creatives is a story that fits into a historical scheme to support the idea of an American exceptionalism.
American exceptionalism is an ideology holding the United States as unique among nations in positive or negative connotations, with respect to its ideas of democracy and personal freedom.
Though the concept has no formal definition, there are some themes common to various conceptions of the idea. One is the history of the United States is different from other nations. In this view, American exceptionalism stems from the American Revolution, becoming what political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset called "the first new nation" and developing the American ideology of "Americanism", based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, republicanism, democracy, and laissez-faire economics.
This ideology itself is often referred to as "American exceptionalism." Another theme is the idea that the U.S. has a unique mission to transform the world. Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg address (1863), Americans have a duty to ensure "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Another theme is the sense the United States' history and mission give it a superiority over other nations.
The theory of the exceptionalism of the U.S. has developed over time and can be traced to many sources. French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was the first writer to describe the country as "exceptional" in 1831 and 1840.
The actual phrase "American Exceptionalism" was originally coined by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as a critique of a revisionist faction of American Communists who argued that the American political climate was unique, making it an 'exception' to certain elements of Marxist theory.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan is often credited with having crystallized this ideology in recent decades. Political scientist Eldon Eisenach argues in the twenty-first century American exceptionalism has come under attack from the postmodern left as a reactionary myth.
"The absence of a shared purposes ratified in the larger sphere of liberal-progressive public policy....beginning with the assumption of American exceptionalism as a reactionary myth."The theme has had a significant backstory and became a common assumption, if not the specific phrase. This can be found especially in textbooks. From the 1840s to the late 19th century, the McGuffey Readers sold 120 million copies and were studied by most American students. Skrabec (Quentin R. Skrabec (2009). William McGuffey: Mentor to American Industry. Algora Publishing. p. 223.) argues the Readers;
"hailed American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and America as God's country... Furthermore, McGuffey saw America as having a future mission to bring liberty and democracy to the world."
The engineer, manufacturer, and subject of Ira Gershwin's lyric, Henry Ford, cited McGuffey's Readers as one of his most important childhood influences. He was an avid fan of McGuffey's Readers first editions, and claimed as an adult to be able to quote from McGuffey's by memory at great length. Ford republished all six Readers from the 1867 edition and distributed complete sets of them, at his own expense, to schools across the United States.
In 1934, Ford had the log cabin where McGuffey was born moved to Greenfield Village, Ford's museum of Americana at Dearborn, Michigan. In 1936, Ford was an associate editor (along with Hamlin Garland, John W. Studebaker and William F. Wiley) of a collection of excerpts from McGuffey Readers. This 482-page compendium was dedicated to Ford, "lifelong devotee of his boyhood Alma Mater, the McGuffey Readers".
What the American Exceptionalism ideology does not present is the condition of permanent turmoil that a capitalist and technologically innovative model visits upon its own society. This omission, and the contradictions found in a rhetoric of freedom and the facts of slavery, both past and present, in the cotton gin, the chocolate bar and the assembly lines of Henry Ford's company, reveals an exceptional crisis of social values.
In Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage at the top of a double page design it says:
and how!
. . . and along the bottom of this two page spread there runs a quote from A. N. Whitehead:
"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."
And later, on this page McLuhan writes:
The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration - the technique of the suspended judgement is the discovery of the twentieth century as the technique of invention was the discovery of the nineteenth.
One particular omission from Ira Gershwin's lyric is the invention of the movie, the hybrid form of technological communication par excellence. Could there have been a verse for Muybridge?
One of the more advanced and complicated uses of the wheel occurs in the movie camera and in the movie projector. It is significant that this most subtle and complex grouping of wheels should have been invented in order to win a bet that all four feet of a running horse were sometimes off the ground simultaneously.
This bet was made between the pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge and horse-owner Leland Stanford, in 1889. At first, a series of camera were set up side by side, each to snap an arrested moment of the horse's hooves in action. The movie camera and the projector were evolved from the idea of reconstructing mechanically the movement of feet. The wheel that began as extended feet, took a great evolutionary step into the movie theater.
Page 194-5 of McLuhan's Understanding Media
The drawing of Mickey Mouse's ears were equally inspired . . .
. . . by a pair of reel to reel film spools!
When he said the world was round
Recorded sound
When they said that man could fly
It's the same old cry
They laughed at me wanting you
Said I was reaching for the moon
But, oh, you came through
And now they'll have to change their tune
They all said we never could be happy
They laughed at us and how
But ho, ho, ho
Who's got the last laugh now?
They all laughed at Rockefeller Center
And now they're fighting to get in
That's how people are
Why they laughed at me wanting you
Said it would be, "Hello, Goodbye"
But, oh, you came through
And now they're eating humble pie
They all said we'd never get together
Darling, let's take a bow, for ho, ho, ho
Who's got the last laugh? Hee, hee, hee
Let's at the past laugh, ha, ha, ha
Who's got the last laugh now?
