SOURCE: Frederick Taylor and the Public Administration Community: A Reevaluation, State University of New York Press, 1989, 175 p.

[In the following excerpt from his book Frederick Taylor and the Public Administration Community, Schachter addresses the major points of Taylor's method as laid out in The Principles of Scientific Management and Shop Management and recounts the reaction to Taylor's ideas during his lifetime.]

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

Shop Management and The Principles of Scientific Management are the two works that embody Taylor's mature ideas on organizational improvement and motivation. Although the first originated as a 1903 ASME presentation and the second was originally serialized in the April, May, and June, 1911 American Magazine (circulation 340,000), they can be examined as a single entity. Taylor wrote them for the same audience, chiefly industrial managers and engineers; their arguments are similar to the extent that the author quotes chunks of Shop Management in the later Principles.

A third published source for Taylor's ideas is his January 1912 testimony before a special House of Representatives committee convened to investigate the social impact of shop management systems. This is a particularly valuable source for people who want to understand how Taylor envisioned management principles, since here he replies to criticisms of the earlier presentations.…

SHOP MANAGEMENT

For Taylor, management, alternately described as an art and as a science, is essentially a question of the relations between employers and employees. What is wanted is a system that gives satisfaction to both, shows that their best interests are mutual and can"bring about such thorough and hearty cooperation that they can pull together instead of apart."

Historically, Taylor argues, such cooperation has been impossible because employers, ignorant of actual work time and indifferent to individual workers, have equated low wages with the low labor costs they desired, to the point that,

it is safe to say that the majority of employers have a feeling of satisfaction when their workmen are receiving lower wages than those of their competitors.

This attitude defeats any chance to increase productivity because employees, seeing that hard work brings no monetary reward, adopt a slow pace, marking time or "soldiering." The end result is loss to employers and employees, the former paying higher prices per piece than required and the latter receiving poor wages.

This system, with its "bickering, quarreling, and … hard feeling … between the two sides," need not continue. A contrasting high-wage/low-labor-cost system can be created if organizations generate the necessary information.

This means developing procedures for completing work more quickly and efficiently. A major component of such development is work time study, deconstructing jobs into elementary components and studying the time it takes workers to perform each of these actions under varying conditions. The time-and-motion researcher with the co-operation of the workers gets a sense of the best way of handling each component by first recording how long it takes a first-class employee to complete the motions and then adding a given percentage of this time to cover unavoidable delays and interruptions, and rest periods. Comparative experiments then reveal which changes in layout, equipment, or the order of physical motions would improve the time taken for the job.

Time study is not an end in itself. It is one tactic to improve shop production, which itself is simply a strategy to reach the goal of industrial cooperation, the assumption being that employers will be less relentless in pursuing low wages if profits are greater.

Time study does not determine a precise and unvarying count of seconds it takes to do each motion. Any set of experiments is tentative, yielding advances that themselves become subject to later improvements. Taylor never claims that time study yields perfect knowledge of how to labor; all he avers in its defense is that it gives "a vastly closer approximation as to time than we ever had before."

Among the most-often-quoted passages from Taylor's books are vignettes illustrating what he accomplished with accurate time studies at Bethlehem Steel. This material shows how his work studies are applied to what are generally viewed as simple, repetitive, unskilled manual jobs.

Taylor opens one narrative by asserting that "the average man would question whether there is much of any science in the work of shoveling." Yet

for a first-class shoveler there is a given shovel load at which he will do his biggest day's work. What is this shovel load? Will a first-class man do more work per day with a shovel load of 5 pounds, 10 pounds, 15 pounds, 20, 25, 30, or 40 pounds? Now this is a question which can be answered only through carefully made experiments.

By varying shovel loads, Taylor found that shovelers were most productive with 21 pounds on their shovel. As a result he rescinded Bethlehem's practice of having each worker use his own implement and issued each man a shovel that would hold 21 pounds of whatever material he was lifting, a small one for iron ore and a large one for ashes.

A more elaborate illustration involved loading pig iron on railroad cars. Taylor's research assistant timed its constituent tasks, such as picking up the pig iron from the ground, walking with it on a level and an incline, throwing the iron down and walking back empty to get another load. Based on over three months of observations, Taylor concluded that workers were most productive if they were under load and allowed to rest at specified periods of the day. He offered a worker whom he calls "Schmidt" (actually Henry Knolle) a chance to earn $1.85 a day, rather than the regulation $1.15, if he would follow the researcher's work/rest regimen so that "When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up and you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day." Schmidt agreed, and following Taylor's methods he learned to handle 47.5 tons per day, rather than the 12.5 tons that he and other Bethlehem workers routinely loaded. This meant lower labor costs for Bethlehem and higher wages for an unskilled employee.

The Schmidt episode is often used to castigate Taylor because of the way he describes pig iron loading and the mentality of loaders. Because Taylor wants to emphasize the universality of his methods, he goes to great pains to show that the task is so crude that most people would not associate it with science. He calls it "the most elementary form of labor that is known." To clinch the case he uses two offensive animal analogies.

This work is so crude and elementary in its nature that the writer firmly believes that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be.

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles … the ox than any other type.

While these remarks are inexcusable, they represent a miniscule fraction of Taylor's writings on work and have to be taken in the context of asserting the importance of studying even such routine labor, rather than a simple assertion that Schmidt himself was a gorilla or an ox. They are a deviation from Taylor's own stricture against being patronizing and condescending, but they cannot be used to assert his contempt for labor; in his letters, he uses equally offensive analogies concerning managers (e.g., financiers as hogs).

The point of the narratives is to leave the skeptical reader "convinced that there is a certain science back of the handling of pig iron," and other menial chores. Taylor could assert that he had never met a single contractor to whom it had even occurred that there was such a thing as a science of labor. Since the books address practitioners, Taylor uses cases to make his points; he embellishes work stories so that they interest an audience of managers and engineers through their particularity as well as their applications. The stylistic problem is to write entertaining narrative while linking each case with the assertion that all work—no matter how repetitive and manual—benefits from study and experimentation. Taylor's awk-ward, even offensive, handling of the issue should not obscure the purpose of the stories: to show that "there is no class of work which cannot be profitably submitted to time study," whether pig-iron loading, clerical work, or solving problems in mathematics. While the animal analogies can be argued as showing Taylor's distancing himself from labor, the idea behind his narratives is actually to unite skilled and unskilled work by showing that both are capable of study; the thrust of the narratives is to deny the notion that any work is truly unskilled.

Planning

A new approach to studying work leads inexorably to proposing a new organization structure. Developing and maintaining a valid work science or art requires reorganization, particularly creation of a planning department. This is a central record-keeping repository that stores information derived from time and motion studies and serves as a clearing house, sending instructions to and receiving reports from operating personnel. Besides performing all work experiments, the planning department staff analyze all incoming orders for products, for which they perform required design and drafting, and then route those orders from place to place in the plant. The planning department's written archives supplant the foreman's memory as the repository of information on requests and plans for new work, materials in inventory, cost of items manufactured, pay, and discipline. The company regulates and prints the various forms that the new department requires, including shop reports, time cards, instruction sheets on preferred work methodologies, pay sheets, and storeroom records. As in Metcalfe's arsenal system, these are filled out by the workers and directly submitted to the central repository—bypassing the shop foremen.

With so much new information being created, organizations must abandon the military form of command where each worker reports to a single agent. Functional management is needed, with each worker receiving daily orders and help directly from eight different supervisors, each of whom has a different function.

Located in the planning room are those supervisors concerned principally with recordkeeping—the order-of-work, instruction card, and time-and-cost clerks—and those who discipline workers for lateness or absences. On the shop floor, the "gang boss" prepares work. The "speed boss" supervises the use of tools and setting of machine speeds. The "inspector" is in charge of quality control. The "repair boss" supervises the care and maintenance of the machines.

Some of these supervisors relate to each individual worker for such short periods that they can function for the entire shop. Other supervisors have heavy hands-on contact, and consequently must oversee only a small group where they "should be not only able but willing to pitch in… and show the men how to set the work in record time."

The shop management has to change worker-supervisor grouping under the new Taylor system. Each entry-level employee belongs to eight different aggregations which shift according to the particular functional supervisor who guides him at a given moment. Since Taylor advocates competence in specific tasks (e.g., setting up work or repairing machines) as the basis for supervisory appointment, this system emphasizes the role of knowledge or skill as legitimators of supervisor's authority. It also stresses the disparate skills necessary to run an organization; opportunities for promotion should be found for those with record-keeping abilities, for those who can repair tools, and for those with the many other discrete skills. This is in line with the philosophy that each workman should be given as far as possible the highest grade of work for which his individual ability and physique fit him. A reorganized factory offers many opportunities for promotion not found in a foreman-do-all establishment.

Chance for Success

While optimism pervades Taylor's work, he did not perceive either managers or workers rushing to embrace so novel a system—the first use of work experiments and a pervasive repudiation of the rule that each worker have only one boss. To use Taylor's ideas, every hierarchical level would have to experience a change in its vertical relations from "suspicious watchfulness and antagonism and frequently open enmity … to that of friendship." Employees, duped so many times in the past, might find it hard to cooperate during the experimentation and training phases. They might well regard as "impertinent interference" attempts to teach them new ways of handling their chores, unless they can be made to see that the experimentally derived standards were advantageous to their own interests. Managers will be even harder to convince because "money must be spent, and in many cases a great deal of money, before the changes are completed which result in lowering cost."

Conversion requires initial sacrifices at all levels, none more daunting than the need for a "complete revolution in the mental attitude and the habits of all those engaged in … management, as well as … the workmen." Because the system relies on cooperation, it cannot be imposed by force. If the owners want to convert, they must stress to managers "a broad and comprehensive view of the general objects to be attained," including the eventual economic usefulness of non-producers such as the trainers and recordkeeping clerks.

A convinced manager receives the task of explaining the system to the workers, giving them every chance to express their views. During a two- to five-year period, volunteers are requested for work training and development, no attempt being made to coerce those who prefer using their own methods.

The first few changes which affect the workmen should be made exceedingly slowly, and only one workman at a time should be dealt with at the start. Until this single man has been thoroughly convinced that a great gain has come to him from the new method, no further change should be made. Then one man after another should be tactfully changed over. After passing the point at which from one-fourth to one-third of the men in the employ of the company have been changed … practically all of the workmen who are working under the old system become desirous to share in the benefits which they see have been received by those working in the new plan.

Object lessons—rather than talk—convince employees that experimentation not only aids the company by increasing productivity but helps the workers personally by extending new material and psychic rewards, including higher wages, improved communication and, most important, advancement opportunities. The presence of peers who enjoy these satisfactions convinces the recalcitrants of the superiority of the new methods.

At no point does Taylor predicate workers' conversion based on higher wages alone. A chance to earn more money is cited as a necessary—rather than a sufficient—prerequisite. Taylor states flatly that of more importance still is "the development of each man … so that he may be able to do, generally speaking, the highest grade of work for which his natural abilities fit him." It is difficult to see how modern textbooks can speak of "pure" or "sole" economic motivation when Taylor insists that despite the importance of wages, the "most important object … should be the training and development." His motivational approach is clearly tri-dimensional, centering on higher wages, improved communication, and opportunities for advancement.

Higher Wages—After training, an employee who performs a suggested fair day's task receives from 30 to 100 percent more per day than the company's previous average pay for that task. A differential piece work system ensures high pay for a large output and lower wages for poorer or more careless performance, giving those who learn the new methods "a good liberal increase, which must be permanent."

Improved Communication—With its emphasis on information flow and new methods, shop management required more two-way communication than the traditional foreman-do-all setup with its extremes of driving or coercing workers and leaving mem to their own unaided devices. Taylor was well aware that anxiety develops when workers lack knowledge about how their efforts are viewed. At a time when employees received almost no written feedback, he recommends giving each a slip of paper identifying daily progress on tasks. He suggests bulletin boards to keep work units posted on the status of orders. He insists that

Each man should be encouraged to discuss any trouble which he may have.… Men would far rather even be blamed by their bosses … than be passed by day after day without a word.

Interaction includes supervisors' listening to the worker's point of view and reacting with respect to the information they receive so that workers "feel that substantial justice is being done them."

In particular, training involves "close, intimate, personal cooperation between the management and the men," where each worker gets "the most friendly help from those who are over him." At a bicycle ball factory where Taylor consulted,

each girl was made to feel that she was the object of especial care and interest on the part of management and that if anything went wrong with her she could always have a helper.

For the workers, training involves learning new methods and then suggesting improvements. Taylor notes that "the first step is for each man to learn to obey the laws as they exist, and next, if the laws are wrong, to have them reformed in the proper way." In a factory, this means that the employees learn the planning department's latest methods before suggesting improvements. All suggestions are tested by the planning staff, and if they increase productivity they are adopted by the entire crew.

As a consultant, at the Link Belt Company, Taylor used esteem as a motivator by telling workers he would test their suggestions and name useful changes after those who proposed them. He justifies this by saying, "It is quite a thing for a man to have the best method about the works called Jones' method." Why should this matter at all if money is the sole motivator?

In Principles Taylor addresses the charge that training diminishes worker autonomy, that employees lose something if they are not left to their own devices unaided. His reply centers on the anomaly of proscribing training for workers while accepting it for surgeons or dentists, when

the training of the surgeon has been almost identical in type with the teaching and training which is given to the workman. The surgeon, all through his early years, is under the closest supervision of more experienced men, who show him the minutest way how each element of his work is best done. They provide him with the finest implements, each one of which has been the subject of special study and development, and then insist upon his using each … in the very best way.

Only when the student learns the basis of his craft is he invited to "use his originality and ingenuity to make real additions to the world's knowledge instead of reinventing things which are old." The only innovation in worker training is in extending education to the factory, providing the shoveler with an activity normally reserved for his "betters" with high school and college diplomas. A painful discrepancy exists when people praise academic education for a small elite and disparage efforts to teach manual workers better ways to handle their jobs, reinforcing a distinction between work that requires skill and work that needs no particular ability. Taylor sees no such distinction, noting that,

if it were true that the workman would develop into a larger and finer man without all this teaching … then it would follow that the young man who now comes to college to have the help of a teacher in mathematics, physics, chemistry, Latin, Greek, etc., would do better to study these things unaided and by himself.

Yet no one suggests solitary academic labor as a generic alternative to universities. At the academic level, the advantages of teacher-pupil interaction are clear. Why is the person at the bottom of the hierarchy the only one who cannot benefit from education?

A letter from an Australian judge extends this analogy to the arts, a field Taylor relied on as much as the sciences for a model of how careful preparation is prerequisite to real discovery. Taylor was fond of quoting Judge Charles Heydon's assertion that music teachers were longstanding shop management advocates because they knew that the "genius who plays the piano without having been taught the proper, i.e., the most efficient method of fingering, will come short of his very best." Why should imposed technique serve the artist and stifle the pig-iron loader? Why should specialized training not serve as a foundation for helping each do a proper task?

Modern management theory emphasizes the importance of training and feedback. A recent article uses the artistic analogy for a strongly argued proposition that freedom in organizations cannot occur without training. In words that would have engaged Taylor, political scientist Larry Preston notes that creativity is only

possible for those who have mastered established ideas and practices.… The virtuoso pianist, exemplifying creative freedom at the keyboard, builds on years of training and practice. And his or her creativity is primarily an extension of the methods developed and learned by past teachers and masters of the piano. No one sits at a piano and invents a technique.… If we want to enhance individuals' freedom, we must be willing to provide an understanding of prevailing practices and the resources needed to decide and act with respect to them.

Taylor does not expect the full-time line worker to have as many new ideas as people performing experiments all day, since the full-time worker lacks the time for and habits of generalizing—which seems obvious and does not raise hackles with regard to professions. Do general practitioners discover as many new drugs as researchers attached to universities? Is it elitist to name this disparity? He does insist that workers who suggest improvements be given encouragement and full credit when their innovations are useful. Through such procedures, "the true initiative of the workman is better attained under scientific management than under the old individual plan."

Training and concomitant two-way communication are important motivators both directly and in permitting the company to offer a career ladder where each person is challenged by the highest grade of work that he can learn to perform well. Education not only facilitates workers' mastering their own jobs but it enables the company to groom the most able for higher-paying tasks or lateral transfers where people who are poor at one job may prove excellent at another. Training accompanied by structural reorganization sets the stage for those advancement opportunities that Taylor sees as the ultimate motivational strategy.

Opportunities for Advancement—Creating a career ladder is a paramount "duty of employers … both in their own interest and in that of their employees." Both Shop Management and Principles assert the motivational power of having

the laborer who before was unable to do anything beyond, perhaps shoveling and wheeling dirt from place to place… taught to do the more elementary machinist's work, accompanied by the agreeable surroundings and the interesting variety and higher wages which go with the machinist's trade,

while at the same time, the best "machinists become functional foremen and teachers. And so on, right up the line."

Training enables workers to learn more highly skilled work that might well have been closed to them in the past. Functional restructuring demands

a larger number of men in this class, so that men, who must otherwise have remained machinists all their lives, will have the opportunity of rising to a foremanship.

New opportunities to do "much higher, more interesting, and finally more developing" work are an important motivational strategy.

Some of Taylor's modern critics condemn functional foremanship for creating "a master class of scientific managers ruling over a servant class of workers." This anachronistic criticism is predicated on modern corporate personnel practices, where few, if any, managerial vacancies are filled by blue-collar workers without college degrees. Taylor makes it perfectly clear that he intends to use the most competent workers to fill executive positions without regard to academic credentialing because the most vital managerial attributes are "grit" and "constructive imagination" and "success at college or the technical school does not indicate the presence of these qualities, even though the man may have worked hard." In a letter to Edwin Gay, dean of Harvard University's Graduate Business School, he objects to graduates appearing at factories to inquire if they can commence their careers with shop-management research; he notes that "one trouble with the man who has had a very extensive academic education is that he fails to see any good coming to him from long continued work as a workman," while Taylor, on the contrary, sees such long, continued work as the best way to learn how to plan and manage work experiments. Managers and workers do not constitute autonomous classes; task labor is the advocated route into task management. Principles contains an oblique warning against managers trying to install scientific management without taking the time and trouble to train employees as functional foremen and teachers so that their very presence serves as an object lesson on the new system's personal benefits. Possibilities for promotion are an essential feature of a system that emphasizes co-operation, one whose technical mechanism of time study should not be

used more or less as a club to drive the workmen, against their wishes … to work much harder, instead of gradually teaching and leading them towards new methods, and convincing them through object-lessons that task management means for them somewhat harder work, but also far greater prosperity.

IMMEDIATE RECEPTION

Taylor wrote to precipitate action—immediate, measurable results. He told an associate, "the people whom I want to reach … are principally those men who are doing the manufacturing and construction work of our country, both employers and employees." To interest such a large, variegated audience, he insisted on giving his books a narrative form, including recital of anecdotes with semifictional dialogue. He changed the title of his second book from Philosophy of Scientific Management to Principles, noting, "I am afraid that the word 'philosophy' in the title will tend to make the thing sound rather high-falutin."

The man's language often seems coarse to the modern scholar's ear, particularly the language in the Schmidt anecdotes. While one cause of this may lie in the passage of time (we think we are more honest in our expression than our grandparents, but we have our own circumlocutions), Taylor's insistance on using unvarnished shop-floor language elicited complaints from his own associates. One, Morris Cooke, notes,

The term "Gang Boss" especially seems to me objectionable and out of harmony with the spirit of scientific management The word "supervisor" seems to me to be better adapted to our business.

Here, Taylor is cautioned to use a softer word with positive personnel-management connotations, a request he quickly denies, noting, "I … do not like 'supervisor.'" "Gang boss" it remained, Taylor's delight in actual shop-floor expressions overwhelming any interest in using more academically respectable nomenclature.

Just as Taylor decried the gulf between skilled and un-skilled work, he also tried to break down the conceptual distinction between professional and popular publishing. He takes the stance that his work can have professional insights worthy of discussion at ASME meetings while at the same time being couched in popular prose for publication in American Magazine with its mass circulation. Again Cooke remonstrates:

The principal disadvantage of publishing in this magazine is that you are a technical man and that until quite recently it was not considered good professional practice for technical men to use mediums of this kind for bringing out new scientific doctrine.

Taylor ignored this criticism, his goal being to provide technical information to a mass audience, not a summary of technical data (say, a three-page article based on Principles), but the identical message presented to people who shared his educational pedigree. At his own expense, he printed copies of Principles for all ASME members while seeing to its American Magazine serialization. This ensured simultaneous scholarly and popular discussion.

The decade before America entered World War I saw extensive professional and popular-press debate over Taylor's theories. A 1912 ASME committee described the work as spawning enthusiastic advocates and vigorous opponents. As Taylor foresaw, his ideas also produced a sizable cadre of managers who borrowed discrete techniques (e.g., time study and differential piece rates) while abjuring the underlying principles of cooperation, employee development, and mutual gain. Although Taylor vigorously criticized those who borrowed discrete aspects of his system, many outsiders confused their practice with Taylor's theories. The written legacy produced by adherents, opponents, and those who used only some aspects of Taylorism gives a unique picture of scientific management as it was viewed in its own time. The work of Taylor's supporters is particularly interesting because it stresses facets totally absent from most modern textbooks.

ADHERENTS

From the Midvale years on, Taylor was the center of a small circle of engineer acolytes. Henry Gantt and Carl Barth (his Midvale assistants) were charter members. Others include Horace Hathaway, hired to help Barth improve the Link Belt Company's productivity in 1904, and Morris Cooke, a publishing executive.

Outside this group, scientific management was most attractive to public-sector-oriented Progressive reformers rather than to business leaders. The first quarter of the twentieth century marks the heyday of Progressivism, a pervasive but diffuse political movement based on the belief that (1) a corrupt political system benefited a few rich people at the poor's expense and (2) planned progress towards a better system was possible as well as desirable. Typical Progressives condemned some excesses of the new plutocracy and were in full cry against monopoly, but they were not anti-business. They accepted the large corporate industrial capitalist system as a natural product of social evolution, and associated its evils with particular corrupt financiers and acts of fraud.

They were fundamentally conservative to the extent that they offered programs that did not alter business supremacy over the control of wealth, although they sympathized with the workers whom they viewed as underdogs. They displayed a Taylorite optimism in believing that a good society would, should, and could alleviate the lot of poor people.

In the legal sphere, the movement pressed for specific governmental changes to push the country towards reform, some affecting procedures (for example, direct primaries, initiatives, referenda) and others, policy (child labor laws, progressive income taxes, etc.). On the local level, sympathizers opposed electoral "machines," which were generally viewed as corrupt.

Key Progressives perceived shop management as a means for initiating organizational reform on a manageable and practical scale without damaging business. Taylor's views on training were congenial to professionals (lawyers, ministers, college professors) who loomed large in the reform ranks and whose own status depended on training that enabled them to apply a corpus of knowledge and techniques on the job. Taylor's ideas seemed to offer an equivalent way of increasing the satisfaction and esteem of blue-collar factory occupations. The notion that scientific management decreased the conceptual gap between the status-rich professions and the underdog workers led one adherent to label the theory "part of a larger movement, the realization of a sense of social solidarity, of social responsibility of each for all."

The muckraker, Ida Tarbell, stresses this interpretation in a series of American Magazine articles asserting that scientific management dignifies factory labor by considering it worthy of study, thus eliminating any skilled-unskilled dichotomy. Tarbell also paints a very positive picture of the human-relations changes wrought by the new management style. Her narrative places Taylor as a New England Butt Company consultant holding open meetings to explain the project's benefits for the workers, describing the information he needs to collect and its usefulness, giving his audience a chance to ask questions and raise objections to participating in work experiments. The new system is described in terms of its psychological advantages to the worker's self-respect and its propensity to minimize arbitrary orders that can now be challenged on the basis of data learned in training or by calling for experimentation. Tarbell echoes Taylor himself in considering higher wages only one motivation for participation in the new mode of worker-manager relations; the opportunity for training and a chance to rise through the ranks and perform more varied and interesting tasks are also motivating.

One suprise Tarbell has for the modern reader is her assumption that scientific management's principal opponents will be selfish employers who resist diminution of arbitrary power, who prefer the role of taskmasters to experimenters and educators. Her title, "The Golden Rule in Business," indicates her missionary zeal to convert old-fashioned employers and her understanding that scientific management enables executives to treat a laborer as they themselves would wish to be treated. Her work emphasizes the centripetal aspect of Taylor's ideas, how their implementation bridges the gap between the treatment of skilled and unskilled employees.

Taylor demonstrated his relation to Tarbell and other Progressives by serializing Principles in American Magazine, a journal known for publishing reform writers. Its editor solicited the manuscript because of his interest in "insurgency," acknowledging that Taylor and his associates represented the insurgents in the factory management sphere.

Cautioned against publishing in a radical journal, Taylor answers in language that gives the lie to his personally favoring factory owners over employees:

Among a certain class of people the American Magazine is looked upon as a muck-raking magazine. I think that any magazine which opposed the "stand-patters" and was not under the control of the moneyed powers of the United States would now be classed among the muck-rakers. This, therefore, has no very great weight with me.

Before World War I, ASME conferences often erupted into imbroglios between Progressives and "stand-patters." The reformist faction found a staunch ally in Taylor, whose stance in these controversies almost always weighed in against the short-term economic interests of factory owners. He unsuccessfully fought to have the society sponsor a section on public matters that would investigate how industrial practices such as polluting affected city life. In April 1909, he signed a petition requesting that the Association hold a conference on air pollution, open to the public and including speakers from the public health field, a request that the society's officers, under pressure from industry, denied. His official biographer quotes him as saying shortly before his death, "Throughout my life I have been very much inclined toward the radical side in all things." This is almost certainly an avowal of Progressive leaning.

Brandeis—Taylor's most useful Progressive adherent was Louis Dembitz Brandeis, known in his day as "the people's lawyer." Brandeis originally approached Taylor for help in a difficult case. In the spring of 1910, the railroads east of the Mississippi gave their employees a pay raise and applied to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) for permission to raise freight rates. Brandeis saw this move as a corporate attempt to recoup operating losses by overcharging consumers. Representing the Trade Association of the Atlantic Seaboard as unpaid counsel, he opposed the increase, arguing that the railroads could support the pay hike through more efficient management.

Hearings in Washington, D.C. began on October 12, 1910. Two weeks later, Brandeis wrote Taylor, asking for data on scientific management (a term he seems to have coined—Taylor previously used "shop management" or "task management"). Readers of post-World-War-n textbooks might surmise that Taylor would reply by explaining how his system motivates worker productivity through higher wages. But those who have read Taylor's own books will be ready for his return letter outlining the system's use of noneconomic motivation. Taylor asserts that shop management democratizes the plant and removes class distinctions by extending training to all. The system provides new advancement opportunities, increasing worker ambition.

Taylor asked Morris Cooke and Henry Gantt to work with Brandeis on his presentation. Gantt was particularly active. He unsuccessfully tried to persuade the ASME council to endorse the anti-increase brief. He testified at the hearing, reiterating Taylor's emphasis on noneconomic motivation, gains the system brings by checking arbitrary supervisors and allowing talented mechanics to rise into the planning department. Scientific management increases worker performance because,

we get from our men … who have worked at routine work … the material for more responsible positions.… Inefficiency in the workman is not his fault.… We have spent a tremendous amount of money in developing machinery and … very little money in developing men.

The hearings proved a publicity bonanza. A February 1911 ICC decision against the railroads was one factor that propelled scientific management into people's minds. Taylor thanked Brandeis for bringing his theories to wide public notice.

Had Brandeis simply appropriated scientific management to win a case, he would have relinquished his interest after the victory. In reality, he made it a point to advocate Taylor's approach in a wide array of later speeches. At the 1912 Brown University commencement, he stresses the Taylor system's cooperative basis, noting, "The old idea of a good bargain was a transaction in which one man got the better of another. The new idea … is a transaction which is good for both parties to it." At a talk before the Boston Central Labor Union Brandeis stressed how training gives employers a stake in conserving labor. Even unscrupulous owners will not want to arbitrarily fire or overwork people in whom they have invested development money.

Brandeis' forward to Frank Gilbreth's Primer of Scientific Management emphasizes the system's equalizing effect through training and promotion opportunities that afford workers a chance for the same self-respect and satisfaction held by professionals. A 1920 address in the Taylor Society's memorial volume notes that scientific management "makes the hire worthy of the laborer," and with Progressive optimism proposes that its impact may be to "make work … the greatest of life's joys." Brandeis' understanding of scientific management is very close to Tarbell's. Both had an interest in Taylor's ideas because they believed his system would bring workers material and nonmaterial benefits and bridge the gap between professionals and factory labor. The Taylorism they support foreshadows much of Elton Mayo's advocacy of better human relations in the factory and the work-as-motivator insights currently credited to Douglas McGregor and Abraham Maslow. While neither Brandeis nor Tarbell can be considered radicals in the sense that either wanted to replace the economic dominance of the corporate sector, they were concerned with meliorist changes from noneconomic motivation, particularly the increase in worker self-respect and interest that develops from training and a chance at frequent promotion.

OPPONENTS

Taylor's earliest opponents were old-line plant managers objecting to the fiscal implications of higher wages and company-sponsored training and foremen jealous of their traditional prerogatives. Few modern summaries of Taylor analyze this rebuttal of Taylor's work, but Shop Management labels "the opposition of the heads of departments and the foremen and the gang bosses … the greatest problem in organization." Taylor asserts that he can more readily persuade workers to try the new way than superintendents and foremen.

A second, somewhat later antagonist was the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Representing skilled workers, it argued that scientific management was a ploy to break their members' monopolies on shop expertise. For union leaders, the time-study man was sent into the factory to steal their members' trade secrets, thus enabling employers to fire them and hire unskilled laborers at low wages and train them to perform those craft tasks, heretofore the province of the small elite possessing the requisite skills. Frank Hudson sums up the union view in a thoughtful American Machinist article in 1911 expressing a willingness to hear about better methods but rejecting company-wide training. An International Association of Machinists circular of April 1911 denounces the system for enabling companies to hire unskilled manual laborers for machinist positions, which "will mean the wiping out of our trade and organization with the accompanying low wages, life-destroying hard work, long hours and intolerable conditions generally."

Labor opposition may have surprised Taylor more than managerial intransigence because he was not intrinsically anti-union, while his work does attack prevailing managerial practices. He saw a necessary union role in traditional factories without other channels for curbing authority. To a Harvard business school professor, he wrote that he is "heartily in favor of unions" where the employer is a hog or careless of employee rights. Shop Management states:

When employers herd their men together in classes, pay all of each class the same wages, and offer none of them any inducements to work harder or do better than the average, the only remedy for the men lies in combination; and frequently the only possible answer to encroachments on the part of their employers is a strike.

However, he did believe that scientific management would supplant the trade union movement as a means of helping the worker, that as scientific management increased productivity, employers would be able to raise wages and shorten work weeks, thus eliminating the need to bargain over these issues. With workers and managers cooperating to develop better methods together, "the close, intimate cooperation, the constant personal contact… will tend to diminish friction and discontent," thus eliminating almost all causes for dispute and disagreement.

He agreed with Brandeis—generally considered a union sympathizer—who writes, "There is absolutely nothing in scientific business management opposed to organized labor." He believed that workers and right-thinking managers could cooperate in a manager-initiated system, a view that may have appeared naive to union leaders, who would have asked, "Where is the evidence?"

Modern works dealing with Taylor make few if any references to his old-line manager opposition, with its reactionary complaints that now seem so irrelevant. Much more is written about the AFL critique, spearheaded by the International Association of Machinists, which does seem to bolster scientific management's anti-labor image. It is easy to read the quarrel as Exeter-educated "have" versus blue-collar "have nots." This obscures the fact that union opposition represented labor's own elite fighting to prevent less fortunate or less skilled workers from taking even a few steps up the factory ladder.

Taylor argues that his system benefits all workers:

It is true, for instance, that the planning room, and functional foremanship, render it possible for an intelligent laborer or helper in time to do much of the work now done by a machinist. Is not this a good thing for the laborer and helper? He is given a higher class of work, which tends to develop him and gives him better wages.

[Concurrently,] the machinist, with the aid of the new system, will rise to a higher class of work which he was unable to do in the past, and in addition, divided or functional foremanship will call for a larger number of men in this class, so that men, who must otherwise have remained machinists all their lives, will have the opportunity of rising to a foremanship.

The International Association of Machinists protested the lumping together of their members who do not become foremen with people who start as common laborers, thus diluting the pool of skilled workers and making it easier to hire machinists at low wages. The association's quarrel with Taylor is partly a matter of vantage point. Quite understandably, the union is concerned with the welfare of its members. While Taylor can assert, "In the sympathy for the machinist the case of the laborer is overlooked," the association is in business to ignore the laborers when their interests conflict with the AFL machinists. (The quarrel might have been totally different if helper/laborer unions had existed in 1911.)

To some extent the controversy can be clarified with empirical evidence. What happens when a factory adopts some scientific management variant? Do machinist wages sink? Are unskilled laborers eventually promoted?

Some empirical support does exist supporting the contention that scientific management in practice brings machinists closer to the status of laborers; but it does so by raising the unskilled workers rather than tangibly lowering the machinists. In 1915, Robert Hoxie, by no means a Taylor supporter, studied factories that had adopted some variant of scientific management. He concludes that the new system tends to realign wages, leveling the skilled/unskilled disparity but that it does so by raising the pay of the unskilled. What the craft workers are protesting is a decline in relative financial superiority. This is an understandable cause for a proud machinists' union but hardly an appropriate one for a battle of "haves" and "have nots."

The second union fear is that planning departments cut the worker's independence and use of his own good judgment. To the extent that planning departments standardize tools and methodologies, this cutback is inherent in the system. The defense is that the best workers move into the planning department, which encourages suggestions from employees working on the shop floor.

Particularly after 1911, Taylor tried to respond to union criticisms. He arranged for the president of the Boot and Shoe Makers Union to talk to workers at plants where he had consulted. Morris Cooke writes

I think the most important thing to be accomplished by his visit is to convince him beyond any doubt that we really mean it when we say that our relations with the workmen are not only friendly but are of such a nature that it will be impossible for him to find any of them who will criticize what we are doing.

In addition, Taylor fought to break the easy assumption that any company using time and motion studies was actually committed to his ideas. No union chief was ever angrier than Taylor himself at managers adopting his mechanisms as a club to force workers into higher productivity. He realized quite early that his worst enemies were managers who borrowed some of his mechanical devices (notably the stopwatch) without any commitment to his aim at cooperation and increased benefits for all. Specific union complaints were often based on misapplications of his system—even when such misapplications contradicted explicit arguments in his major works.

To the extent that Taylor perceived managers as his worst enemies, he loses points as a prophet. The union critique has been much more damaging, particularly in the political arena. The only salve for his prophetic ego could be his contention that the union critique stemmed from managerial misapplication of his methods, that the AFL distrust arose from managerial antagonism to change in basic reward patterns. Complaints about a planning room divorced from workers cannot stem from Shop Management or Principles, both of which make abundantly clear that the workers rise to the planning department. Such complaints can come as a reaction to managers bent on using time study and centralization to extract gain for management alone. With this interpretation, the way to minimize union dissent is to eliminate managerial misapplication. In practical terms, this means condemning halfhearted imitators borrowing specific mechanisms but not the new system's underlying philosophy, those who time employees' work but will not create a planning department staffed by the workers.

IMITATORS

As early as his time at Bethlehem, Taylor was forced to realize that the committed enthusiast and the workaday line manager have radically different perspectives. The theorist can afford to emphasize the long-term benefits of two-way communication and worker training. Most managers are more concerned with short-term profits even if they consider human relations worthwhile.

Taylor's system contains practices that may increase short-term productivity without helping the workers. A company can force its workers to have their motions timed and then enforce new production quotas based on the knowledge obtained. This violates Taylor's explicit stricture against timing without consent, and certainly cannot be considered an aspect of the Taylor system. But why should managers focused on the present bother with consent, when, as Henry Gantt notes, "people value these methods only as new ways of controlling workmen … a chance to get something for nothing."

A new occupation soon arose made up of engineering consultants offering to systematize plants by using some of Taylor's methods but with shortcuts, such as testing work time without prior explanations or worker permission. In January 1910, for example, Taylor complained to Cooke that commentators were associating their names with consulting work done at the American Locomotive Company:

In reality, the facts are that our methods were not all being used there. Harrington Emerson went there with his various shortcuts … and Van Alstyne had a whole lot more shortcuts of his own, and then enforced all of this with a club. Now this combination, which uses many of the details of our system and leaves out the essential underlying principles, is the worst thing that can happen to us. Van Alystne has used time study as a club, not as a means of harmonizing the interests of employers and employees.

To separate his ideas from those of such imitators, Taylor refused to join the National Society for Promoting Efficiency nor the New York and Philadelphia Efficiency Societies because Harrington Emerson and other perceived half-way implementers were members. Explaining his conduct, he notes

All the world, of course, wants Efficiency now, as it has always wanted it. This is not, however, a sufficient basis for a group of men to get together any more than you would get together a society of men, say, to be good. All the world wants to be good.

It is only when you have some particular scheme for promoting goodness that people are able to get together profitably.

Taylor was intent on distinguishing his "scheme" from that of other engineer consultants.

The most destructive conflation of Taylor and his imitators occurs in recrimination over the Watertown arsenal strike. Because management tactics leading to the strike misused scientific management—and were explicitly objected to by Taylor before the labor unrest—it is important to examine and disentangle this particular conflation.

Watertown Arsenal—In January 1909, General William Crozier, head of the Army Ordnance Department, visited Taylor in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to learn how standardizing tools might improve arsenal production. During the next half year, Taylor met personally and corresponded with Crozier about using scientific management in armament manufacture, eventually recommending that Carl Barth reorganize the machine shop at Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts.

Controversy hung over Crozier's efforts. At its Washington headquarters, the International Association of Machinists issued an anti-Taylor circular urging workers to complain to their congressman. In the plant itself, many workers were afraid that any pay gains Barth brought would be temporary because of subsequent rate cuts, an understandable fear with such cuts common at the turn of the century.

Some of the foremen objected to using incentives to reward workers instead of simply punishing the less productive. One supervisor proclaimed:

If a man is so lazy—to use no better word—that he will not do a day's work without being put on a premium system, he should be immediately removed from the shop and a better man put in his place.

Barth arrived at the arsenal in June 1909, and did little to dispel the controversy, by, for example, soliciting input from the machinist's union. He did follow Taylor's injunction to involve the workers from the start and show them how the new system benefits them in both material and noneconomic ways. An early step was creating a planning department staffed from men in the machine shop. The arsenal's master mechanic was put in charge, with three long-time foremen serving as assistants. Gang boss promotions went to three workers who now had the responsibility to route information between the planning room and the shop floor.

Dwight Merrick, the time-study person, did not arrive until May 1911, when the machine-shop workers could already see that Barth's presence had brought promotions to some of their own. Following Taylor's advice, Merrick explained why he was bringing a stop watch into the plant. No worker was timed without that person's consent. When one machinist complained that the watch made him nervous, Merrick stopped timing his motions. At least one foreman recalled challenging planning-room methods and having these methods changed after proper experimentation.

This process of consultation and consent looked incredibly drawn out to some of the officers for whom it was an idealistic and unworkable method to increase production. Major Clarence Williams showed his displeasure by telling a machinist who was complaining about a planning department method, "Shut right up."

By June 1911, Barth was encountering pressure from Arsenal officers to either speed up his work or allow them to implement an incentive plan of their own choosing in the foundry. Taylor immediately warned Crozier that such action would bring labor trouble; the necessary change was not a speedier system but more understanding by the officers of the workers' fears through more contact between them. Taylor's advice is clear:

If you go right straight ahead in introducing our system, one step after another, and do not attempt short cuts and do not try to hurry it too fast … you will meet with practically no opposition.

Taylor might have been able to withstand the officers' pressure. But in August 1911, Barth gave in to the complaints of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Wheeler and Major Williams, permitting them to introduce their own incentive plan in the foundry, as long as they understood that their process did not represent an application of Taylor's methods.

On August 10, with Barth absent from the arsenal, Wheeler and Williams introduced time study into the foundry without any prior preparation. No planning department had been created to show that changes might develop and promote workers. No explanations were offered for the presence in the foundry of Merrick and his stop watch; certainly the officers wasted no time soliciting permission for timing their own subordinates' motions. Shifting Merrick to the foundry was, in itself, a violation of Taylor's dictum that a time-study person has to know the task. Merrick had a back-ground in machine shop work and knew very little about foundry molding, a point that became painfully apparent as he tried to time specific motions.

After the first day's timing, the molders met informally and agreed not to cooperate with any of Merrick's attempts to time their labor, and to compose a petition protesting the new shop techniques. The next morning, an unsuspecting Merrick arrived at the foundry brandishing his stop watch. He first tried to time Joseph Cooney who, adhering to the molder's decision, refused to work with Merrick standing nearby. After a heated exchange, Merrick called Major Williams, who ordered Cooney to cooperate (a clear violation of Taylor's written advice and quite the contrary of Barth's practice in the machine shop). Cooney again refused. To Williams this was gross insurbordination. He discharged Cooney, sparking a mass exit from the foundry.

The strike lasted until August 18, when Colonel Wheeler promised Cooney's reinstatement and an Ordnance Department investigation of the new management techniques. For the molders, the job action was brief and inconclusive, for the changes continued while the investigation was in progress. The major consequence of Cooney's dismissal lay in its publicity value for the International Association of Machinists' campaign against Taylorism. Although the job action did not encompass the association's members, it forged an emotional focus for calls to end the timing of work motions. Because the arsenals were public organizations, with public funding, the union lobbied Congress to examine the Taylor system and prohibit further government agency use of stop watches and premium pay. Under the chairmanship of William Wilson (Dem., Pa.), a former United Mine Workers' official, the House Labor Committee heard a request for such examination from James O'Connell, International Association of Machinists' president, and Nick Alifas, a local Machinists' official, but none, interestingly, from any molders or other workers employed at Watertown. On August 21, the Committee appointed a three-person group to investigate the Taylor system—the first of many attempts to link the foundry strike and Taylor's theories, rather than to see the job action as a result of repudiating Taylor's principles.

Those closest to the situation appreciated the difference. Taylor himself saw the strike as validating his concern with worker involvement. To Cooke he wrote, "This ought to be a warning not to try to hurry task work too fast." Crozier receives a harsher message:

No time study whatever should have been undertaken in the foundry. You will remember that I have told you time and again that without a whole lot of preliminary training no set of workmen should be subjected to the ordeal of time study.

Barth laments that "in the eyes of the world, the Taylor system is responsible for the trouble, while the fact is that the real Taylor system man at the Arsenal has never … been inside the foundry." More strikingly, the molder's own lawyer noted "the system in operation is not either the Taylor system or scientific management according to the principles of Frederick W. Taylor." An exhaustive modern study of the strike concludes, "Wheeler and Williams were clear in their own minds that they were not installing the Taylor system." If public administration textbooks want to write about the "Wheeler/Williams management theory," they can use Watertown as an example of these officers' gross insensitivities; the only thing the strike tells us about Taylor's ideas is that they are relatively easy to misapply, a point which does constitute a deficiency in an imperfect world but hardly the deficiency for which he is usually held culpable. Taylor was correct in perceiving that people like Wheeler and Williams were more dangerous to him than committed opponents. No old-line manager, no union chief acting alone could have caused the intense public scrutiny following the foundry strike. Only two partial imitators could have precipitated the House hearings. Antagonism mounted after misapplied attempts to study work without worker involvement in the use of that knowledge to create incentive schemes.

CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS: ATTACK AND REBUTTAL

The House hearings, which lasted from October 1911 to February 1912, took place before a committee chaired by Representative William Wilson and consisting in addition of William Redfield (Dem., N.Y.) and John Tilson (Rep., Conn.). The committee's composition provided an aura of impartiality, given Wilson's labor background and Redfield's pre-politics business career, an impartiality furnished a further post hoc seal of approval when President Woodrow Wilson appointed Redfield Secretary of Commerce and William Wilson Secretary of Labor in 1914.

Taylor's opponents hoped that the hearing would lead to a condemnation of his ideas as oppressive. But by organizing a public forum, they gave their target an unprecedented opportunity to clarify his ideas and distinguish them from imitations. Brandeis, fully aware of the session's publicity value, warned his friend that it was crucial to let the legislature "see scientific management as it is, and not as it is represented."

Taylor, who enjoyed verbal combat, gave twelve hours of testimony spread over four days in January 1912. He challenged the testimony of people who spoke against his system without having read any of his books. His evidence has particular importance because it explicitly rebuts the picture mat dominates modern public administration, a portrait that actually seems to describe what he considered misapplications rather than his original theory.

Post-World-War-II public administration literature often argues that Taylorism enthrones efficiency as a public goal. But the January 25, 1912, testimony states: "Scientific management is not any efficiency device, not a device of any kind for securing efficiency; nor is it any bunch or group of efficiency devices." Its goal is a mental change in managers and workers with "the substitution of hearty brotherly cooperation for contention and strife; of both pulling hard in the same direction instead of pulling apart." Efficiency is only important as a means enabling managers and workers to

take their eyes off of the division of the surplus as the all-important matter, and together turn their attention toward increasing the size of the surplus until this surplus becomes so large that it is unnecessary to quarrel over how it shall be divided.

Since elements associated with increased efficiency (e.g., time studies) can be used "for good and for bad," the intention to cooperate is the only way of differentiating adherents of scientific management. An employer may well increase production by wielding a club, but he is not thus advancing the goals of Taylorism, for "without this complete mental revolution of both sides, scientific management does not exist."

The testimony reiterates Taylor's insistence that time and motion studies require worker agreement, with volunteers recruited through a variety of economic and ego rewards. He suggests the following for recruiting shovelers, for example:

See here, Pat and Mike, you fellows understand your job all right; both of you fellows are first-class men; you know what we think of you; you are all right now; but we want to pay you fellows doubles wages. We are going to ask you to do a lot of damn fool things, and when you are doing them there is going to be some one out alongside of you all the time, a young chap with a piece of paper and a stop watch and pencil.… Now we want to know whether you fellows want to go into that bargain or not? If you want double wages while that is going on all right, we will pay you double; if you don't, all right, you needn't take the job unless you want to; we just called you in to see if you want to work this way or not.

While this sounds patronizing to the modern ear, it is a long way from Major William's insistence on firing workers who would not cooperate; one method should not be confused with the other.

Taylor also reiterates his insistance on urging workers to challenge the planning department's methods. Before any change occurs, a manager should say:

Try the methods and implements which we give you … and then after you have tried our way if you think of an implement or method better than ours, for God's sake come and tell us about it and then we will make an experiment to prove whether your method or ours is the best, and you, as a workman, will be allowed to participate in that experiment.

This give and take is not window dressing but, for Taylor, absolutely crucial as a way of making progress. (General Crozier noted that challenges were allowed by Barth in the Watertown machine shop, where each worker had "the privilege of raising any point he desires and of having it attended to.")

The testimony also records Taylor's emphasis on worker development. One motivation is that "in most cases those who set the daily tasks have come quite recently from doing work at their trades." Union fears about scientific management's eliminating skilled jobs are goundless because what actually should happen is that the best workers are transferred to the management domain as "teachers, guiders, and helpers." This means higher wages and more interesting work, two sources of worker satisfaction. Fewer hands needed at machines is good for workers as long as factories are restructured to need more supervisors and planning personnel.

Concurrent with Taylor's testimony, the ASME subcommittee on administration prepared a report reiterating several of the key points in the House exposition. This nine-member committee, chaired by Progressive businessman James Dodge, stressed the new management system's "appreciation of the human factor" with its potential for educating workers and gaining their cooperation. Taylor, present at the group's discussions, agreed that good relations were essential, a point that Wheeler and Williams seem to have proved beyond possibility of refutation.

The work of the ASME group may have played a role in the House committee's final determination on scientific management. Taylor's own testimony certainly influenced the conclusion that no evidence existed to label his system injurious to workers. The machinists union had lobbied for the hearing to produce a report attacking the new system. The actual outcome was inconclusive; it did not provide the union with the desired victory. The army continued to use its version of the new methods in arsenals; in direct outcome, the hearings protected Taylor as well as his imitators.

DIETRICK AMENDMENT

Despite this setback, the machinists union continued to lobby legislators to end time-and-motion studies in arsenals. One politician who pledged his support was Representative Frederick Dietrick, from the Watertown arsenal district, who succeeded in putting a rider on the 1914 Army and Navy Appropriations Bills to supress such research and payment premiums in government-managed armaments manufacture.

Dietrick made no pretense at being an expert on Taylor's ideas. According to his own testimony, he had not read the two major books in their entirety, and what he had perused he had not always been able to understand (an amazing admission since the volumes were written for the average high school graduate). His amendments to the appropriations bills were, obviously, not directed against scientific management as theory but rather its practical application at the Watertown Arsenal and, to an even greater extent perhaps, its reputation with the International Association of Machinists as a way to eliminate their crafts.

The riders passed the House but not the Senate. This meant that two versions of both bills were sent to the joint Congressional Legislative Conference Committee for reconciliation. By chance, the committee chose to handle the Navy bill first. Since the Navy was not engaged in time-and-motion studies, its officers made no objection to using the House language against such research, and when the Army bill was handled afterwards this precedent was allowed to stand. A recent case study of this reconciliation process concludes, "If the Army Bill had been taken up first, the result might have been different." But the Dietrick amendments did pass. The International Association of Machinists achieved a notable political victory—stop watches and premium pay were henceforth banned from federal armed forces production operations.

The American poet John Greenleaf Whittier notes:

Of all sad words of tongue or pen
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

The passage of the riders overshadowed the benign "wait-and-see" attitude of William Wilson's committee, which had examined scientific management and heard Taylor's human-relations-oriented testimony. It had arrived at no condemnation, while the man responsible for the riders was imperfectly aware of what the system meant. Yet to much of the public, it must have seemed as if congress had studied and condemned the Taylor system.

The political realities of the rider's passage were clear. Taylor's theories and officers Wheeler and William's practice were lumped together as forbidden in defense installations and hence, for at least part of the public, as equally unwise choices. Taylor's pre-eminent fear, that his theories and their misapplications might become indistinguishable, became reality in a law that lumped together voluntary and enforced time-and-motion research. The bill's major impact, then, was not so much its mandate, but rather its implicit assumption that Taylor's ideas and their use in other people's hands should be dealt with in only one way and without investigating the different conditions under which scientific management techniques might be implemented in organizations. The legislative acceptance of this assumption was a severe blow to Taylor's attempts to erect a wall between his proposals and their misapplication, to claim separate intellectual territories for his ideas and for the industrial practices spearheaded by others, particularly industrial practices he had already explicitly condemned in Shop Management and Principles.

THE PROBLEM OF TAYLOR'S IDEALISM

It is not absurd to call Taylor a scientific management prophet. He was so involved in promoting his ideas that his dedication assumes a religious quality, both in its intensity and in its appearance of proselytizing without financial reward. When the question arose at the Wilson committee hearings if he had money interests in scientific management, he responded:

I have not a cent I have not accepted any employment money under scientific management of any kind since 1901, and everything I have done in that cause has been done for nothing. I have spent all of the surplus of my income in trying to further the cause for many years past, and am spending it now.

He did not even accept reimbursement for his lectures or travel expenses in discussing scientific management.

A quasi-religious idealism is also present in the optimistic, millenial predictions that more compassionate human behavior would eventually prevail and lead to a better world. Vintage Taylor is his exchange with Rep. William Wilson:

The Chairman (Wilson.) Mr. Taylor, do you believe that any system of scientific management… would revolutionize the minds of the employers to such an extent that they would immediately, voluntarily, and generally enforce the golden rule?

Mr. Taylor. If they had any sense, they would.

In one sense this idealism is Taylor's least attractive feature, because he takes the attitude that misapplication of his ideas on labor-management cooperation is a unique problem rather than a dilemma that happens to many theorists whose work must be applied by others. The idealistic argument for cooperation would also be strengthened if Taylor had related it to his own experience with situations where cooperation was impossible. He knew the thorny road he had walked at Bethlehem Steel. He saw his own associates having petty quarrels. He must have understood the difficulties in gaining cooperation, and yet he embraced it as a realizable ideal, thus limiting the real-world usefulness of his ideas. The most valuable theories on motivation will explain how to create cooperation in a world where thorny paths and petty quarrels are almost the norm.

Miner Chipman, lawyer for the Watertown molders, grasped that idealizing human nature defeated Taylor in his confrontations with practicing managers who borrowed some of his methods. Chipman argues that Taylor "indulged in Utopian dreams equally as panacean as that of the radical socialist." These dreams were bound to fail because they ignored fallen human nature. Chipman notes, "If we were truly righteous, truly just, truly altruistic, if we really loved our brother man, the socialistic commonwealth would not be a bad sort of thing … and … scientific management would also be a very good thing."

For the real world, Taylor gives too little thought to situations where the impetus for mutually beneficial cooperation coexists with a potential for conflict over how to cooperate (what the political scientist Thomas Schelling calls "mixed-motive" situations). Taylor envisions a future where managers and workers are so closely allied that the need for collective bargaining disappears. Chipman argues:

It is not for scientific management to build up Utopian conditions, wherein organized labor would be unnecessary. Organized labor IS. It is our job to take it as it is, not as it ought to be, and work out, slowly, if necessary, the conflicting ideals that separate employer and employee.

Towards the end of Taylor's life, University of Chicago economist Robert Hoxie wrote a study also dismissing Taylor as an "idealist" who failed to distinguish between what might be and what actually was. The critique of scientific management as overidealized is borne out in the actual behavior of business managers and government officers. Many of them like Taylor's discrete methods but reject the moral shift that he postulates should accompany these techniques, being skeptical whether their employees are ripe for such conversions.

At the end of the House testimony, Rep. John Tilson asks Taylor, "How many concerns, to your knowledge, use your system in its entirety?" Taylor replies, "In its entirety—none; not one." …