The Sons of Martha Versus the Sons of Mary: Forging Iron and Finding Gold in Engineering and Business Ideologies

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the Victorian British Empire, has a number of themes in his poetry that are closely aligned to the ideology of Veblen. In this chapter, I shall examine these themes in the context of an industrializing Canada where Kipling was invited to write a kind of Masonic ritual to serve as a professional ideology for Canadian engineers. Kipling enthusiastically accepted this invitation and the unique “Iron Ring” ceremony continues be a part of the graduation rites of Canadian engineering students. Kipling’s “Sons of Martha” from his poem of that name, which serves as the core of the Iron Ring ceremony, could well have been an ode to Veblen’s “Spirit of Workmanship”. It appears to have resonated with engineers not just in Canada but in the United States as well and elicited a response (again in the form of a poem, called the Sons of Mary) from those who rejected the ideology implicit in the poem and adhered to a distinctly business ideology. I shall analyze and contrast these conflicting ideologies and attempt to identify the contradictions in both of them. Both contributed to forming the uneasy nexus between business and engineering that continued to evolve during the twentieth century.