YOUNG GENTLEMAN IN THE STEEL WORKS

At the summer meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 189S, a small, thin, pernickety engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor read a paper entitled, "A Piece-Rate System, Being a Step toward a Partial Solution of the Labor Problem." Most of those who heard it considered this paper but one more in the series of papers on the question of wage payments that had been presented to the Society over the years. Actually it was much more. It was the first inkling of a new order for the factory which Frederick W. Taylor was rearing at Midvale Steel Company in Nicetown, Pennsylvania.

Ostensibly, Taylor's paper dealt with incentive systems, and thereby fitted in with the growing interest in methods of wage payments which appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth century. America was a country of high labor costs, in which almost any effort to save labor or use it more intensively was worth considering. The spread of cost accounting techniques and the reports of the growing strength of trade unions underscored the high cost of labor and gave the question of incentive wage payment added importance. Taylor's "differential piece rate" was more stringent than most incentive systems. It required that the shortest possible time for each job be computed and fixed. If the worker finished the job in this time he was given a good price per piece. If he failed, he was given a rate so low that the "lazy or inferior" worker could not hold the job. Taylor's piece rate was a carrotand-stick device to make the laborer work harder and more quickly. The increased work speed rewarded the worker with a higher total wage, and the low cost per piece provided the employer with larger profits. Thus it made "each workman's interest the same as that of his employers."

The differential piece rate, Taylor asserted, would root out the demoralizing effects which attended other wage systems. Other systems allowed or encouraged loafing and led to deceit between workers and employers. Fixing an honest day's work would put an end to all that. Hard work, Taylor believed, built inner strength. From "A Piece-Rate System," the first public statement of his ideas on management, to the last statement of his program, twenty years later, Taylor always opened his lectures with a discussion of "soldiering"—the worker's loafing on the job. The factory, for Taylor, was not only an instrument for the production of goods and profits, it was also a moral gymnasium for the exercise of character.

Yet morality worked hand in hand with science. Taylor proposed that an "honest day's work" be fixed scientifically, by methods free from human bias. This immediately set Taylor's piece rate system apart from all others. At first Taylor tried to calculate a day's heavy labor by "how many foot-pounds of work a man could do in a day." But he discovered that there was no relation between work measured in foot-pounds and its tiring effects on the laborer. He then hit on the idea of breaking the job down into its "elementary operations" and timing each operation by use of a stop watch and a first-rate worker. He hoped to develop a handbook which would list the "elementary operations" from which the correct speed of any job could be reckoned. To get an "honest day's work" did not require the selection of only honest workers or urging the workers to honesty. "If a man won't do what is right," Taylor said, "make him." The differential piece rate was an attempt to make the worker do what was right. It meant the transfer of the category of wages from economics to physics—from a realm (as then understood) beyond direct control to one where most things could be manipulated.

"Scientific rate-fixing" had ramifications throughout the factory. The speed at which the laborer worked was inextricably tied to the kind and the quality of his tools, the shop procedures, and even the over-all organization of the factory. If one were really to fix an honest day's work "scientifically," then the entire plant had to be brought under control. In retrospect, Taylor's reorganization of the factory can be seen as logically following from his notion of "scientific rate-fixing." Yet clearly, logic alone was not enough to draw him on. For this logic led through a long series of flops and frustrations that afforded much bitterness and derision. It led to exacting experiments on machine belting which extended over a period of nine years, and to between thirty and fifty thousand experiments on metal cutting over a period of twentysix years. It led to schemes which often seemed unprofitable or beyond good sense. The logic is clear, but to understand the relentless drive behind that logic, the vehemence which sometimes made even Taylor's friends uncomfortable, we must take a closer look at Taylor the man.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was born into Proper Philadelphia. The Winslows and the Taylors were important families in America as far back as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Philadelphia branches were Quaker, but even before Frederick was born Quakerism had become a faded and parochial creed to many of its followers. Frederick's mother, Emily Taylor, took up more ardent beliefs. She was interested in transcendentalism and active in the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements. When she broke her ties to the Society of Friends she chose Unitarianism, the communion of the high-born and high-minded, as her religion.

Franklin Taylor, Frederick's father, was a lawyer who devoted himself to literature, languages, and the good works of charity rather than the practice of law. It is unexpected and yet suggestive that the father of the man who tried to revolutionize the world of work was a leisured gentleman. Emily Taylor was said to have had "the stronger personality." She was blunt and exacting; Franklin was sensitive and delicate. He loved poetry; she did not. Frederick wrote that his father had a "soft, mild manner and a gentleness which was almost that of a woman." And the son often showed concern with his own manliness. Though young Taylor was noted for his full-dress female impersonations in the skits at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, he wished that he were bigger and more brawny. He studiously developed the knack of cussing, and was terribly earnest in sports.

Young Fred was an obedient son, likable but rigid and intense. One of his childhood friends remembered that Fred's quarrels with his playmates often stemmed from his insistence on subjecting their games to strict and elaborate rules. He was disturbed by oppressive dreams and decided that they were related to sleeping on his back. Taylor therefore made a harness of straps and wooden points which he wore to bed at night and which would wake him when he turned. This was but one of his nightmare-fighting machines. Throughout his life he used many devices to force himself to sleep in a sitting position.

Many who knew Taylor commented on what his biographer called his "nervous disposition" and what his doctor decribed as his "extraordinary intense nature." Taylor's youthful pictures seem to show much feminine sweetness. Yet the man who looks out from the later photographs usually adopts an even more brisk and belligerent stance than was customary in the scowling pictures of that day. There is something anxious and obstructed-looking about the man. Taylor gave many signs of deep emotional turmoil. He would turn white at any talk of illness or death. He suffered from recurrent sleeplessness and indigestion, and even in sport found it hard to relax. He worked at play. At one time he appealed to his doctor to help him stop thinking, to get rid of the thoughts that were oppressing him.

Taylor's program for systematizing the factory should be seen in terms of his attempt to systematize most things, including himself. Order can serve to curb impulse and to limit hazards and perhaps pain. The machines and machine-like organizations with which Taylor busied himself resembled human beings in their capabilities, but were more malleable and predictable and were exempt from human feeling and hurt. Taylor's frenzy for order was the counterpart of the disorder within him.

Taylor's very entry into industry was linked to a psychological crisis. The family had planned that he should be a lawyer like his father. He was sent to Phillips Exeter to prepare for college, but toward the end of his studies developed unusual headaches and eye troubles. At this point, young Taylor wanted to give up law and study medicine at Yale or perhaps engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After a long family conference, however, he took the Harvard entrance examination and passed with honors. Yet his eye-sight soon became so poor that he could not even complete the work at Exeter. After a few month's rest at home, Taylor went to work as an apprentice patternmaker, a job which called for the reading of complicated mechanical drawings. He persisted in this apprenticeship though his eye troubles soon disappeared. Clearly, this troublous period of impaired vision hinged as much upon problems of the mind as of the body.

The decision not to become a lawyer might plausibly be linked to the psychological difficulties of following in his father's footsteps. However, the decision to enter industry as a laborer, once the legal career was abandoned, suggests the influence of his mother. Emily Taylor presided over his early education and the shaping of his first precepts and pursuits. His ascetic and use-minded temperament mirrored hers. Like his mother, Taylor identified himself with the Unitarian Church. Though in later years he assumed an agnostic position, he remained a member of that church until his death. Of the many attitudes and beliefs which passed from mother to son, by far the most important was the general tendency to demand much of onself.

Many children of the well-to-do found the work-centered morality of the second half of the nineteenth century menacing. Riches and ease, it was believed, arrested the development of character. The achievements of one generation seemed to threaten destruction of the next. Henry Ward Beecher told his wealthy congregation that their business losses might be their children's gain. "How blessed, then, is the stroke of disaster which sets the children free, and gives them over to the hard but kind bosom of Poverty, who says to them 'Work!' and, working, makes them men." Carnegie's proposal for returning the "surplus" wealth to society seemed too radical an answer. A professional career for the children of the rich was more acceptable. When Taylor's way to the legal profession was blocked, however, he was given over to a mock poverty with the understanding that he would work his way to the top.

Of course, Taylor did just that. He became an apprentice patternmaker at the age of eighteen and promptly raced up the familiar ladder of success. After his apprenticeship he went to work at Midvale Steel Company as a journeyman machinist and in six years was chief engineer. He went on to independent consulting work, the discovery of high-speed steel, and the presidency of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. After he retired from active engineering, at forty-five, he often described his accomplishment in public lectures on success and education. He extolled "the real monotonous grind which trains character" and directed the young man to go out of his way, if necessary, to find it. He condemned the "kindergarten plan of interesting and amusing children," the lax college discipline, and the university elective system. Every student, whether intending to be a minister or a mechanical engineer, should leave college at the end of the freshman year and spend at least one year "in actual hard work … under careful and constant supervision." He preached the strenuous life of the workshop and foundry. The Midvale Steel Company was to Taylor what the Big Horn Mountains were to Theodore Roosevelt.

It must be noted that Taylor's rise did not strictly follow the rules of Ragged Dick. When young Taylor left the shop after a day's work he went home to Germantown, one of the most exclusive sections of Philadelphia. He was probably the only laborer in America with a member-ship in the local cricket club. Because he could work for little or no money, he moved quickly through his apprenticeships. During the early years of Taylor's rise at Midvale, one of the principal owners was a friend and neighbor. His social connections undoubtedly gave him entry to places otherwise inaccessible.

Taylor brought to the factory the type of sustained and methodical thinking derived from the formal academic world he had left. In his early days at Midvale he felt the need of increasing his scientific education and took home-study courses in mathematics and physics. Through an arrangement with Stevens Institute of Technology, he planned a course of study which brought him a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Taylor became a member of the newly formed American Society of Mechanical Engineers and found his way into a milieu within which he developed his ideas. The impulse toward order came from within; the imperatives of hard work came from his education and upbringing; and the specific content of his work owed much to the profession in which Taylor found himself.

Before the middle years of the nineteenth century, the direct influence of contemporary science on engineering practice was quite uneven. Some of America's most prominent mechanical engineers, even in the last decades of that century, were still men of little or no scientific training who had happened into apprenticeships at various engine works and evinced a knack for machine building. However, the scientific and mathematical achievements of such technologists as William Rankine and Rudolph Clausius soon gave the mechanical engineers with scientific and mathematical training such a decided advantage that they, in effect, blocked entry into the field for most engineers who were not graduates of the engineering colleges. This brought important changes in the social composition of the engineering fellowship. For a college education was often costly and required, even in the state colleges which were nominally free, a sum of leisure which in itself was an expensive luxury. The elevation which science provided and the new sources of recruitment which it demanded converted mechanical engineering from what had been often considered a trade to what was now more often called a profession.

The mechanical engineers of the late nineteenth century strained for the prestige of the traditional "learned professions" and took much of the pre-capitalist professional ethic as their own. In appraising motive, manner, and accomplishment in their new profession, they often looked to standards which stood outside the market place. Within their profession, the engineers frowned on advertising, urged esprit de corps rather than competition, insisted that prerogatives and prestige should derive from proven competence, and proclaimed responsibility to the social good as a solemn duty.

This professionalism was invested with an aura of independence. The engineer apparently would not simply do his client's bidding. He saw himself as standing closer to the doctor who gave the patient what he needed than to the merchant who gave the customer what he wanted. Those who enlarged upon the ideals of the engineering profession often designated the engineers as a new industrial intelligentsia, standing between capital and labor, and peculiarly fitted to resolve the nation's social conflicts.

The lofty temperament of the professional ethic seems particularly to have appealed to many of the engineers who came to the field from established old-stock families like Taylor's. Men of this sort provided the American Society of Mechanical Engineers with much of its initial leadership. They demanded that engineering be esteemed and influential. Of course, there were other, less exalted, aspects of the enthusiasm for professionalism. The fixing of minimum fees and the elimination of jurisdictional disputes among the various branches of engineering were also considered important steps toward improving the status of the profession. Economic gain itself was never condemned; only grasp and greed. Acquisition was a just reward of hard work and character. The mechanical engineer of the late nineteenth century often spoke of his own reward as a "competence"—an adequacy of means for living comfortably, but without excess. The engineer's task was not "the piling of gold and silver in treasury vaults, and not the aggregation of fictitious values in Wall Street," wrote the first president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, but the production of "durable materials" essential to the comforts of mankind. The engineer was in the market place, but not completely of it. This was true of his day-to-day work as well as his broader social outlook.

Efficiency, the unifying concept of mechanical engineering, lives a double life—having one meaning in mechanics and another in commerce. Mechanical efficiency is an output-input ratio of matter or energy, whereas commercial efficiency is the relation between price and cost. Occasionally, these efficiencies are opposed. Taylor's first paper before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers concerned just such a conflict. Comparing the efficiency of two gases in the steel-making process, he found that the one which yielded the greatest heat per unit did not yield the greatest heat per dollar. The solution was straightforward. In the event of such a divergency, profit obligations prevailed and the mechanically less efficient gas was used. But at times, this decision was made with some suggestion of discomfort.

The intellectual fascination of a scientifically trained mind with the skillful adaptation of material means to ends was quite a distinct and separate thing from the profit to be produced. Costs and prices varied with time and place and were dependent upon apparently accidental circumstances, while matter and energy could be dealt with in accordance with enduring scientific laws. Science had a luster all its own. For a generation in which most people believed that progress was written into the laws of the universe, true and good often seemed to be indistinguishable. Science, which was a more certain form of the true, could also appear as a more rigorous form of the good. The very fruitfulness of science seemed to substantiate this. Furthermore, for the engineers, science was the passkey into their new profession. It is not surprising, therefore, that the problems of mechanical efficiency and the skills employed in their solution afforded considerable prestige. "Economy may be taught even if the material costs nothing," declared a speaker at the same meeting where Taylor delivered his first paper. "We can teach intrinsic values without meddling with market values. The former are permanent, the latter fluctuating.… "

Nevertheless, in the day-to-day work of the engineer, more clearly than in the presidential addresses at conventions, the demands of the market place prevailed. If the better mousetrap which the engineer built was unprofitable, hardly a soul would beat a path to his door. The constant awareness of the commercial limitations of engineering was essential to success within the profession. And it was with a certain grimness that the engineers who seemed to believe that engineering could be practiced without regard to money values were condemned. "These men may be ingenious inventors or designers, they may be great mathematicians, they may even be eminent as scientists, but they are not engineers." On at least two issues, this conflict between the scientific and business emphasis broke out into the open. These were the question of the adoption of the metric system and the problem of the engineer's attitude toward conservation.

The metric system had various attractions for the scientist. Its smaller unit was more useful for exact measurement and was well on the way toward being internationally accepted. Equally attractive was the fact that the metric system mirrored in the realm of measurement the unified picture of the world that was presented by the physical sciences. Like science, the metric system presented simple and elegant relations between the different kinds of units and allowed the scientist to interconvert mass, length, and capacity. The unity of science seemed to make intelligible, and the metric system to reflect, the unity of reality itself.

At the very first meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a prominent member delivered a paper attacking the metric system. He insisted that it was unwise to tamper with the English standard because of its central position in the system of interchangeable parts so important to American industry. The speaker personified American industry's huge investment in the inch: he was manager and later president of the machine works whose system of screw sizes prevailed in America. The Society endorsed his view.

Metric reform, however, could not be turned aside so easily. It seemed to have a fascination for engineers. The issue was debated back and forth again in 1885, in 1902 and in 1906. The arguments and the results, however, remained much the same. The "scientific enthusiasts … captivated by the nicety of the thing," were amply denounced. And the picture which was drawn of catastrophic cost and confusion which would result from conversion to the meter was admonition enough to secure a rejection of metric reform proposals.

Conservation ideas found a more favorable reception at the meetings of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Conservation presented a problem quite similar to Taylor's juggling of material and economic efficiencies in his first paper. The process which yielded the maximum coal per mine, for example, often did not yield the greatest amount of coal per dollar. Conservation reformers, nevertheless, urged the elevation of physical values above market values. The particular business ties of the mechanical engineers were not as directly challenged by the conservation programs as they had been by the proposals for conversion to the metric system. Moreover, the social and moral interest which the conservationists aroused in their cause gave it a compelling force which metrics never had. The appeal to the social responsibility of the engineer (of which the advocates of professionalism spoke so much and so often) helped to lift conservation ideas out of the class of dangerous scientific distractions.

Official representatives of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers attended Roosevelt's conservation conference in 1908 and approved its resolutions. The Society devoted a meeting to the subject and listened patiently to exhortations that engineers must direct themselves to "the larger interests of humanity." The engineering societies must fall in with the conservation idea, the Society president declared. Perhaps the doctrine of government "appropriation and beneficial use" was needed as an antidote to "the uncontrolled greed for gain." However, the engineer had to build and operate works so as to compete with others in the same line. The crucial test remained in the cost per unit of output. Therefore "the real work of the engineer, in the field of conservation, will be measured by the ability of the works designed by him to compete in the markets of the world." The engineer supported conservation but with conspicuous qualifications and confusions.

This was the situation of the mechanical engineer of this era—he could not feel completely at ease either as a scientist or as a businessman. Though the values of business prevailed, the values of science, especially in questions of broader scope, occasionally provided a counterforce which left the engineer off-balance.

At first glance it would appear that Taylor made common cause with those who stressed the exigencies of the commercial enterprise of which technical engineering was but a part. This is not at all surprising, for during those very important years at Midvale his close personal ties to its owners surely made him aware of the interests and needs of a business venture. At the time when the metric controversy was provoking tempers at the meetings of the ASME, he dutifully testified against a law which would have required metric units of all contractors for the government. He was particularly interested in the early papers on management problems and presented two management papers of his own. He cautioned young engineering students to "remember that the kind of engineering that is most wanted is that which saves money; that your employer is first of all in business to make money and not to do great and brilliant things."

Yet he did not arrive at this outlook without struggle, and, once attained, it was not easily held. The occasional tug-of-war within engineering between science and business found its counterpart within Taylor. Though he testified against the metric-system bill he admitted that he had earlier favored it, now thought it should be introduced voluntarily, and used metrics himself. He also showed sympathy for conservation principles. When he lectured the engineering students about their employers being in business to make money and not to do great things, he was probably lecturing to himself as well. After he left Midvale, Taylor frequently got into difficulty with his employers because of his habit of "making money fly." In a letter to a friend he confessed that if he had followed his personal inclinations he would have given a greater part of his time to invention and scientific investigation. Taylor loved the quiet of the laboratory and the study and often became worried by the diverse and clashing activities of the shop. His biographer tells us that "he seemed always in danger of reverting to the pure engineer." Yet Taylor is important to us precisely because he did not revert; rather, he thrust the laboratory and the study directly into the realm of the factory. But there was always something ambiguous about this intrusion.

This ambiguity was implicit in Taylor's first presentation of his ideas on management. The discussion which followed his paper, "A Piece-Rate System," was lively and generally sympathetic; yet Taylor was disappointed. The method of "scientific rate-fixing," which he considered its most important feature, was almost completely ignored. This was a portent for the future. What Taylor thought to be the crux of the matter, his ever widening audience often felt to be simply a tendency to carry things to crazy extremes.

The very notion of a completely integrated, scientific system for the factory was a distraction. The truly "scientific" standard for "an honest day's work" (the point of maximum mechanical efficiency of the human machine) could not be established and maintained unless the entire factory was systematized. Yet most business firms, as Taylor himself once noted, need only be more efficient than their competitors. This was one of the reasons that businessmen preferred efficiency stunts, devices, and mechanisms to a complete system of scientific management. The adoption of a complete system was often not the most profitable use of investment capital. Here, unlike the discussion of which gas to use in steelmaking, commercial efficiency did not automatically come first. The system should be adopted, Taylor's most orthodox disciple asserted, even when it might not be a paying investment.

Though Taylor and his followers directed their attention toward business, they seemed to be looking beyond it. Their occupation was management, but their preoccuption often was "science."

The sources and supports of Taylor's program for the factory were manifold. His own personality furnished the initial thrust. The morality of hard work, in which Taylor had been sedulously schooled, played an important role. And of course, the new profession of engineering, with its occasional dissonance between the modes of science and business, provided a persistent influence. This dissonance was responsible, in part, for the limited appeal that Taylor's system had for businessmen, as well as some of its particular attractiveness for many progressive reformers.

TAYLOR'S FACTORY WORLD

In applying "science" to what had been considered strictly business problems, Taylor overstepped the interest of many of his fellow engineers—both those of technical and those of commercial bent. In 1910 the ASME shelved a paper on management by Taylor on the grounds that the membership was not interested in papers of this sort and that there was nothing new in it. This work subsequently became world-famous under the title, The Principles of Scientific Management.

Of course, Taylor was not alone in the study of management. In fact, the placing of Taylor's program against the background of contemporary ideas in this field helps to emphasize his special accomplishment. There were at least two usually distinct groups that devoted themselves to these matters: the "systemizers" and the proponents of "industrial betterment." "Industrial betterment" or "industrial welfare" was an uneven and varying mixture of philanthropy, humanitarianism, and commercial shrewdness. Some of its outstanding exponents were ministers seeking redemptive agencies supplementary to the Word of God. Pullman's model town of the 1880's was an early industrial betterment venture in America, but the "practical religion" of John H. Patterson's National Cash Register Company soon dominated the field and became the archetype of almost all the programs that followed. One of the important aims of these schemes was to prevent "labor troubles" and get better work from the workman. This was to be accomplished by providing lunchrooms, bathhouses, hospital clinics, safety training, recreational facilities, thrift clubs, benefit funds, profit-sharing plans, and Ruskinesque garden cities. Industrial betterment proclaimed that human happiness was a business asset.

The "systemizers" were a diverse group of accountants, engineers, and works managers who rose to some prominence in the last decades of the nineteenth century, along with the growing size of American factories and business enterprises. The systemizers attacked improvisation in business and taught the profitability of orderly arrangements. "The object of modern administrative organization," wrote one of the leaders in the field, ''is to readjust the balance of responsibilities disturbed by the expansion of industrial operations, and to enable central control to be restored in its essential features." The literature of system leaned heavily upon analogies to the human body, the machine, and the military. The body and the machine usually illustrated the need for close integration within the factory while military organization exemplified hierarchy and discipline. At times, these illustrations passed beyond analogy and appeared as instances of natural laws of organization which justified the hierarchy and discipline of the factory as well as described it. But for the most part the systemizers had no explicit theory, and system usually took the form of a series of maxims based on recent shop practice and business arrangements.

Like the industrial betterment advocates, Taylor tied productiveness to morality and well-being. But Taylor stressed one side of the equation (hard work yields morality and well-being), while the advocates of industrial betterment insisted upon the other (morality and well-being yield hard work). Taylor concentrated on the worker in the factory and the industrial betterment advocates on the worker after work. This was more than a difference in interest. It stemmed from contrasting views of the human being and differing moral outlooks. The literature of industrial betterment made much of the goodness which would flower if man were nurtured in a benevolent environment. Against this, Taylor emphasized the weakness in man which must be curbed by the "habit of doing what is right." "Too great liberty," Taylor wrote, "results in a large number of people going wrong who would be right if they had been forced into good habits." Out of this difference came arguments, perplexing to both sides, in which the spokesmen of industrial betterment pursued Taylor and his followers with accusations of "ignoring the human element," while the Taylorites declared that they alone actually paid attention to it.

There was less open controversy with the systemizers. In fact, Taylor often described his own work as "systemizing." He fully accepted the imperatives derived from the division of labor and the expansion of industry—co-ordination, hierarchy, and discipline. Like many of the systemizers, Taylor favored the analogy between the organization and the machine. Taylor was not satisfied, however, simply with an orderly arrangement of parts. He wanted to know how well each component performed its task, and he intended to bring each component "to its highest state of excellence." The usual standard for judging an innovation of the systemizers was whether it paid off in dollars and cents. Though profit was important, Taylor decided that the adequacy of a shop's management frequently was not reflected in the dividends it paid. Science, he thought, could supply a more precise and well-founded standard. First, by way of calculations in foot-pounds, and later with the aid of his techniques of time and motion studies, Taylor went in search of scientific laws of work to answer the closely related questions of how a job could best be done and how much could be produced. He derived a "science" of shoveling, pig-iron lifting, lathe work, etc., through a controlled variation of the isolated elements in each task. This usually meant the conversion of the task into its physical quantities. Taylor thus passed from commercial to mechanical efficiency.

Taylor's work was more comprehensive and complex than that of most systemizers and writers on industrial betterment. He posed questions, explicitly and by implication, which were beyond the bounds of their inquiries. He developed a system of factory polity with an image of the worker and a shop hierarchy which referred directly to his science of work.

Taylor's image of the worker had within it a personal as well as a more generalized component. Copley tells us that he deliberately adopted "much of the culture of working people" in protest against the overrefinement and effeminacy of polite society. When Harvard invited him to lecture on scientific management he shocked his audience by sprinkling his talk with a good number of cusswords from the shop. He would bring a steelworker as his dinner guest to Philadelphia's plush Hotel Bellevue-Stratford and also warn college students that there were first-class mechanics who were their mental equals. But if he rattled the genteel by proclaiming the virtues and virility of workers, when he confronted the working man, it was usually as a boss.

The worker was like everyone else but also quite different. His motives were the ordinary motives of men (that is, middle-class motives), but his abilities were usually of a more limited order. When Taylor discussed the incentives which brought special effort from the worker, he drew upon these middle-class motives, such as the desires to excel, to rise, and to increase one's income. Even "Schmidt," Taylor's famous pig-iron handler, whom he calls "a man of the type of the ox," is depicted as buying a plot of land and building a house on it. Incentives were important because man was naturally lazy and the worker had learned under most previous systems of management that it was not in his interest to work hard. In addition, the work of the factory was often tiresome and uninteresting and might become even more so. For one of the aspects of applying "science" to work was elimination of the elements of play that are intermingled with it.

When discussing the place of each worker in the factory, Taylor turned to Platonic metaphors of racehorses and dray horses, songbirds and sparrows. He saw the factory hierarchy as one of abilities. The division of labor did not constrict the worker excessively, because he might rise to that level of competence of which he was capable. Taylor insisted that workers be treated individually and not en masse. Each was to be rewarded and punished for his particular deeds. In this way Taylor introduced individualism into the factory, but individualism in a diminished form. It could not measure up to the model of the entrepreneur in the market. The worker was granted an individuality of incentive but not of discretion; the intricate interrelation of parts in the factory did not allow for that. There was no "invisible hand" in the factory to bring order out of complexity. This order was to be discovered and realized by the systemizer. The workers must "do what they are told promptly and without asking questions or making suggestions.… it is absolutely necessary for every man in an organization to become one of a train of gear wheels."

The worker's power of free decision was further limited by the necessities of the "science" of work. For one of the most important general principles of Taylor's system was that the man who did the work could not derive or fully understand its science. The result was a radical separation of thinking from doing. Those who understood were to plan the work and set the procedures; the workmen were simply to carry them into effect. This separation might have been reinforced by the need of Taylor's system for exact measurement. The stop watch, an instrument for timing overt action, could gauge only the most routine mental processes. Therefore, to the extent that Taylor's science strained at strict precision, to that degree it had to externalize work and remove the thinking from it.

The Taylor System placed restrictions upon the entrepreneur and the manager in the factory as well as the worker. Taylor attacked the cult of personality in management. Methods were primary, not particular to men. The discovery of a science of work meant a transfer of skill from the worker to management and with it some transfer of power. Yet this power was fixed not directly at the top but in the new center of the factory, the planning department. Taylor asserted:

The shop (indeed the whole works) should be managed, not by the manager, superintendent, or foreman, but by the planning department. The daily routine of running the entire works should be carried on by the various functional elements of this department, so that, in theory at least, the works could run smoothly even if the manager, superintendent, and their assistants outside the planning room were all to be away for a month at a time.

The planning department was to be the repository of the science of production and therefore to possess a new kind of authority which stemmed from the unveiling of scientific law rather than the expression of arbitrary will. Taylor warned that scientific law should not be tampered with by either worker or employer. "Nine-tenths of our troubles," Taylor said, "come in trying to make men on the management side do what they ought to do.…"

The "military system" of factory organization, with ranks built of the successive levels of worker, foreman, assistant manager, manager, and a chain of command which allowed for much undirected choice at all levels, was no longer adequate. Under Taylor's program the foreman, for example, could no longer hire and fire or assign tasks. These functions were to be performed in the planning department by the "disciplinarian" and the "instruction card clerk." Much of the traditional hierarchy of the factory was to be maintained for the surveillance of the work, but some of its authority on all levels would be drained into the planning department.

The new demands on management would necessarily raise the proportion of auxiliary employees to those directly involved in production. In this sense Taylorism was in step with the overall trends in American industry. But the popular notion which equates Taylor's system with the outstanding features of modern industrial order, with exaggerated forms of division of labor, mass production, and mechanization and technological innovation, is inaccurate on all three counts. Taylor did not disapprove of these developments, but they were not a significant part of his particular program. Converting each job into a "science" often made possible routinization and the accompanying increase of dexterity in each task without further dividing it among different workmen. Taylor's system had its first complete developments and its typical subsequent applications in small and medium-sized plants which made diverse items. This placed severe limits to the further division of labor. Also, Taylor could not be considered a fervent advocate of technological innovation and mechanization. In fact, he was suspicious of new and radical inventions in machinery and instead laid emphasis upon perfecting the tools at hand to a point of high efficiency. In order to press the broadest application of his stop-watch studies, he did insist upon extensive standardization and synchronization of machines. Yet while he would eliminate any obviously antiquated tools, his inclination was toward getting the most out of existing equipment.

Taylor's system not only applied to the factory but reached out to society as a whole. He tried to broaden the scope of his proposals to an extent unimagined by most systemizers and by a method more definite and internally consistent than that of the industrial betterment advocates. He proposed to make each workman's interest the same as his employer's. The differential piece rate was to give the worker a high daily wage and the employer a low labor cost per piece. For society as a whole, the increased production would lower prices and raise the general standard of living. Especially in Taylor's later writings, increased productivity became a salient point of his social program. He asserted that "the one element more than any other which differentiates civilized countries from uncivilized countries—prosperous from poverty-stricken peoples—is that the average man in one is five or six times as productive as in the other." When critics contended that scientific management might be helpful in the realm of production but ignored the problems of distribution, Taylor replied that this was precisely its great accomplishment. Scientific management brought about a "mental revolution" which set the employer and worker pulling together rather than apart. For "both sides take their eyes off the division of the surplus until this surplus becomes so large that it is unnecessary to quarrel over how it shall be divided."

At first sight, this was a twentieth-century Whiggism. The commonplaces about the harmony of interest among all groups in the American social order were given a current appropriateness and a "scientific" cogency. In the Whiggism of former generations, the tariff had served as the economic bond between employer and worker. In Taylor's program, increased productivity was to play that role. It was from the standpoint of this credo of production that he criticized the profit-sharing schemes which were so dear to advocates of industrial betterment. Profit-sharing, he said, did not lend itself to increased production, and even if all profits were divided among the working people, the addition to wages would be slight. Furthermore, this belief in the primacy of production also led Taylor to condemn the entrepreneur's restriction of output to maintain prices, just as he had disapproved of the worker's "soldiering." On occasion, he contrasted the engineer as hero to the "financier" as villain; the one constantly in the presence of the production process and sensitive to its needs, and the other distant from production but with the power to control it.

Because scientific management allowed for operation at low cost, Taylor thought that it would be thrust upon entrepreneurs through competition. However, it became apparent that in important sectors of the economy, competition was no longer an effective force and, therefore, could not be relied on exclusively. When the Eastern Rate Case splashed scientific management before a large public audience, Taylor came upon a new way to spread his program. He appealed to the "whole people" to repudiate "the type of employer who has his eye on dividends alone," or the laborer who demands more pay and shorter hours but resists efficiency. The "whole people" would be the agents of his system. The role of the consulting scientific management engineer, upholding "science" in the factory against the narrow vision and vested interests of worker and employer, bore some resemblance to that of the middle-class reformer in society upholding the public interest against the pressures of both capital and labor. When Taylor invoked the public interest, scientific management was drawn toward that growing company of progressives who set the tone for the era.

Though Taylor appealed to public opinion for support, he did not look to public opinion for any sort of guidance. All the guidance, so far as scientific management was concerned, would come from experts. The application of science to business, Taylor thought, would have effects much like those which had followed the application of science to engineering a half a century earlier. There would be handbooks of "elementary operations," codifying the laws of work, similar to those engineering hand-books which codified the laws of machines. But, most important, authority would be placed in the hands of those who followed the rules of science rather than the "rule of thumb." The scientific management expert would replace arbitrary command with the dictates of science. And science, Taylor thought, was an oracle free from human bias and selfishness which would point the way to an elevating moral purpose. It would bring a professional attitude. "It is inconceivable," Taylor declared, "that a man should devote his time and life to this sort of thing for the sake of making money for a whole lot of manufacturers."

Many of the shifts in emphasis in Taylor's program over the years were tied to its widening audience. Taylor's first paper, "A Piece-Rate System," was addressed to a small group of engineers and manufacturers and printed in the Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; his last paper, The Principles of Scientific Management, was serialized in the American Magazine, which spoke the vernacular of reform to a large segment of America. "Early" Taylor cast his proposals primarily in the form of a business service, while "late" Taylor stressed their more widely beneficial aspects. His picture of his own work was changing. Those close to Taylor toward the end of his life tell of "his dreams of the ultimate applicability of Scientific Management principles and ideas, not only to every industrial activity but to every conceivable human activity."

Paradoxically, Taylor's stress on the broader relevance of his system was accompanied by a lessening in his specifically moral tone. This, at first, is even more perplexing, since his new audience was deeply imbued with moral sentiment. Yet Taylor's code differed from theirs. His underscored man's weakness and placed punishment at its center, while theirs usually dealt with man's potential and emphasized precepts of permissiveness. While Taylor, for the most part, did not bring himself to accept the moral outlook which prevailed among most of his new audience, he gradually muffled his own. In the "science" of work, the problem of how work was to be done began to overshadow the determination of the time in which work ought to be done. The differential piece rate, which embodied a dedication to hard work and some fear of its material products (if men have too much they become "shiftless, extravagant and dissipated"), almost disappeared. While in 1895 the Taylor System always meant hard work, by 1911 it sometimes meant easy work.

Taylor could make this transition because scientific management had become almost an end in itself for him. "Indeed, so intense was his will to get there, so grim was his resolution not to let anything stand in his way, that sometimes he resorted to stratagems and subterfuges so far from guileless as rather to puzzle and pain some of his most devoted followers." The toning down of the "old fashioned" moralism of his system gave it the appearance of a neutral device. Because scientific management became almost an end in itself for Taylor, it could become simply a means for others.

Yet the continuity within scientific management must not be overlooked. Taylor's system, from his first public statement of it in 1895 to his last, twenty years later, encompassed three things: it was a method of business therapy; it was a "science"; and it was a social program. During Taylor's lifetime these were three aspects of one outlook. In the generation of his disciples they were separated and each set in its own direction.