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American Plastic: A Cultural History

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Meikle produces a book, a text, really, that is almost imperative to every student and instructor of Sociology or Cultural History. The book serves as more than a technological manifest of an object's history, as many tend to do, and exposes a critical part of our modern lifestyles.

Few can ignore that plastics exist througout our modern lives more than ever before. In fact, plastics are some pervasive that few care to remember them any more. Such an important material, a material so born in human creation, deserves due notice. American Plastic is just that.

The reader stands to benefit from Meikle's background in art history. The development of plastic in the Twentieth Century restricts plastic's popularity not for its utility but rather for its art. The art of plastic became manifest to me when I started working in plastics a few years ago. Before I left, I was able to witness first-hand the development of plastic parts for the myriad "toys" we see today. My division was merely responsible for coloring the material, yet this step was crucial more than any other merely because American's have an aversion to the ugly.

We shun the idea of plasticity, a word filled with images of large infinte primary colors and decades long past, but we forget that it is the same plastic we use in our cell phones, computers, soda bottles and cars that we cannot live without. Meikle's work exemplifies this artistic aspect as a factor as important as the technology behind the material.

Nonetheless, he does not fail to provide the reader with a rich history of the technological, political and sociological development of plastic. Meikle does not stray for his purpose, and perhaps this is partly why this book is so enjoyable to read.

Who would have thought that plastic was as important to 20th century American culture as Meikle persuades us it is? Well, the moviemakers of Mrs. Robinson, for one: "plastics, my boy, plastics," says one smug capitalist to the hapless anti-hero, played by Dustin Hoffmann. Meikle reminds us of this scene, just as he reminds us of what a revolutionary material Bakelite was, and how important to the 20th century vision of modernity and scientific-technological progress it was, as evidence that the mysteries of deep science could make an eternally malleable, shape-shifting, color-shifting material that could be used on stovetops and Kodak cameras alike. Meikle is obsessed and his obsession rubs off on us. The illustrations are great, too.