Prologue : technology as progress? -- "Economy of a madhouse" : Entering the Depression-era debate over technological unemployment -- "Finding jobs faster than invention can take them away" : Government's role in the technological unemployment debate -- 'No power on earth can stop improved machinery" : labor's concern about displacement -- "Machinery don't eat" : displacement as a theme in Depression culture -- "The machine has been libeled" : the business community's defense -- "Innocence or guilt of science" : scientists and engineers mobilize to justify mechanization -- "What will the smug machine age do?" : Envisioning past, present, and future as America moves from Depression to war -- "Automation just killed us" : the displacement question in postwar America -- Epilogue : revisiting the technological unemployment debate.