1. Silcox, F. A., “Discussion,” in “Workers' Participation in Management,” Bulletin of the Taylor Society 14 (02 1929): 25.Google Scholar

2. Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Mentor Books, 1932), p. 31Google Scholar. First published by Scribner's (1904).

3. Houser, J. David, What the Employer Thinks: Executives' Attitudes Toward Employees (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), p. 113.Google Scholar The following quotations are from pp. 108–109, 114–16.

4. This description of Louis Althusser's method comes from an essay by Jones, Gareth Stedman, “History: The Poverty of Empiricism,” inldeology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory, ed. Blackburn, Robin (Bungay, Suffolk: Fontana, 1971), p. 114Google Scholar. Jones also refers to Althusser's neo-Marxist strictures against viewing history as time with a “unitary flow that subsumes all classes, and epochs within it”; that is, events denned in terms of a “liberal historiography” obsessed by empirical facts in contrast to the early writings of Marx in which values “are grounded and verified by the immanent movement of history itself.” Jones's remarks on Althusser are applicable to this essay's concern with language that simultaneously opposes (while attempting to reconcile) a world of facts (what is) against a world of values (what ought to be). Since Jones suggests that liberal historians were at fault for imposing hurtful “fact/value distinctions in history” in the first place, we shall look at the values given to the “facts,” as well as the “profitvalue” accorded to ideals by members of the business enterprise.

5. The words quoted here (see Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism [London and New York: Verso, 1987], p. 245)Google Scholar are a paraphrase of Terry Eagleton's position made by Michael Sprinker in his book-length apologia for Louis Althusser's importance as a theorist of neo-Marxist historiography and interpreter of literary texts. Sprinker believes in Althusser's “definite rupture” with the belief of “bourgeois humanists” that history and poetic texts alike create teleological narratives of purposiveness. He also thinks that Althusser's method overturns the tendency of Marxists such as Sartre and Fredric Jameson to isolate “the human sciences” from “materialist practice.” On both counts, the questions raised by Althusser fit the situation addressed by this essay: the documents under examination exemplify the impossibility of such isolations and of their authors' desire to find purpose in history. What Adams contributes is the self-conscious reenactment of these impossibilities and these desires.

6. The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Samuels, Ernest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 379Google Scholar. Pagination for subsequent quotations is within parentheses.

7. In his essay on Adams, in Columbia History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 646–47Google Scholar, John Carlos Rowe states, “If history betrayed Adams, then it was in large part Adams' chosen labor to expose such treason and restore nineteenth-century America to the principles and virtues of human reason, as well as the social institutions best suited to develop such distinctively human powers” through Adams's sense of the urgency that “modern man be led to assume such responsibility.” Agreed, what with all of the documentation that indicates that Adams and others of his generation hoped to expose this “treason” and desired to restore “the principles and values of human reason.” But I also submit that the narrative strategies of Adams's Education and the other documents under survey here reveal, on different levels, the problematic nature of any attempt to overlay so-called 18th-Century rationality and virtue upon the “scientific” irrationality of 20th-century machine processes.

8. In This Sheba Self: The Conception of Economic Life in 18th-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)Google Scholar, J. E. Crowley readjusts the standard notion that the early 1800s were the period when “moral” and “economic” views of work went their separate ways as the result of dislocations taking place between the older mercantilism and the newer laissez-faire industrialism. Crowley places the shift well within the 1700s. Therefore, the divisions experienced by the ten-year-old Henry Adams throughout the “Quincy” chapter (brought to a head by his grandfather's death) were under way in the 1700s, the years when his Quincy ancestors were already having to deal with gaps between the morality and economics of human activity.

9. Veblen, , Theory of Business Enterprise, p. 148Google Scholar; the following quotations are from the same page.

10. Veblen elaborates the stages through which science, industrial technology, and business practices had already moved to reach the current situation in two follow-up essays to his Theory of Business Enterprise: “The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation” (1906) and “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View” (1908). He argues that although pure science and technology have different epistemological aims, both often “play into one another's hand” because both try to deal objectively, impersonally, with processes that “take no thought of human expediency or inexpediency” and so “must be taken as they are, opaque and unsympathetic.” Problems arise when this agenda conflicts with the nonscientific, pragmatic strain in the business mind concerned with personal knowledge of “what had best be done.” Therefore, clashes between brutal facts and personalized values are built into the system. Quotations are from “The Place of Science…,” in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays (New York: Viking, 1932; 1st ed., Huebsch, 1919), p. 18Google Scholar. Also see Segal, Howard P., Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).Google Scholar

11. Veblen, , “The Place of Science …,” p. 7.Google Scholar

12. Adams acknowledges the relativism that defeated his earlier attempts at writing traditional histories of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison in 1889–91, since “no one saw the same unit of measure” and everyone detected a different “sequence.” The properly run industrial society envisioned by Veblen places control in the hands of impersonal engineers devoted to the objective consistency of efficiently functioning units of measure and reliable sequences, but this is not the situation experienced by either Veblen or Adams. Just as intriguing are the paradoxical similarities between the industrial society described by Veblen and the world imaged by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as “a factory, a workshop” where the Unconscious “engineers” where “it is mechanic.” (See Anti-Oedipus, trans. Hurley, Robert, Seem, Mark, and Lane, Helen R. [New York; Viking, 1977], pp. 53, 55.)Google Scholar Adams's notions of the Unconscious as childlike fall into line with Veblen's description of the primitivistic elements hidden within the business mentality that contradict the rationalization of the pure machine process. So when Deleuze and Gauttari criticize Freudian definitions of the Unconscious as being part of the repressions placed by capitalistic societies against instinctual forces that they fear and try to control, you run into a nice twist that both confirms and complicates the position of these French neo-Marxists. Society as “a factory, a workshop” in the age of Taylorism was where the engineer and the businessman stuggled to gain control by means of the “newest” technological rationalities and the “oldest” preindustrial urges. Also see Harland, Richard, Superstructualism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (London: Metheun, 1987), pp. 172–76.Google Scholar

13. This essay is a portion of a much larger project-in-progress. Certain important matters that will not appear here include Fordism and attempts by the Ford Motor Company's Sociological Department to control conduct in the factory and at home, and the ways in which narratives about working women became an important rhetorical strategy used by both labor and management.

14. Marx's remarks come from a letter of September, 1879, as part of his attack upon those who were pushing reformist aims within the Social Democratic Party (The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, Robert C., 2nd ed. [New York: Norton, 1978], p. 550).Google Scholar

15. Marx-Engels Reader, p. 726Google Scholar; the following comments, including the admonition, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” are from the same page.

16. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, by James T. Kloppenberg, is an excellent study in the relations of American pragmatism to European social thought of varying degrees of radicalism. Also see note 83 for other treatments of American socialist and Marxist thought.

17. This and the following quotations from Veblen, 's Theory of Business Enterprise are from pp. 25–26Google Scholar. Brandes, Stuart details the unsettling mix of democratic ideals and bureaucratic techniques in American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 9.Google Scholar

18. Garland, Hamlin, “Under the Lion's Paw,” from Main-Travelled Roads (1891)Google Scholar. Garland's story concludes with the good “religion” of Farmer Council canceled by the ruthless business efficiency of Jim Butler. “Ought” is powerless to lift the crushing lion's paw of what the traffic will bear.

19. Ford, Henry, My Life and Work, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1922), p. 9Google Scholar. The following quotations are from pp. 154, 207, and 278. The quotations from Today and Tomorrow (Doubleday Page, 1926)Google Scholar that follow are from p. 269. Ford's “writings” are carefully reorganized notes taken by Crowther of Ford's free-flowing talk during a series of interviews, supplemented with material written by William J. Cameron for “Mr. Ford's Page” in the Ford-owned Dearborn Independent.

20. Bendix, Reinhard, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York: Wiley, 1956), p. 199.Google Scholar

21. My Philosophy of Industry (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), p. 34Google Scholar. The following quotations are from pp. 34–35, 37, 38, and 40. This text, based on interviews with Ford, was compiled by Fay Leone Faurote.

22. Ford, Henry, with Crowther, Samuel, Moving Forward (London: Heineman, 1931), p. 75Google Scholar; the next quotations are from pp. 75 and 78.

23. My Philosophy of Industry, p. 88.Google Scholar

24. Roosevelt, Theodore, “Latitude and Longitude Among Reformers,” first published in The Century (June 1900); from The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century, 1901), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

25. Lenin, V. I., “Raising the Productivity of Labour,” in The Immediate Task of the Soviet Government; from Selected Works, one-volume edition (New York: International Publishers, 1971)Google Scholar. Also see Afanasyev, Viktor G., The Scientific Management of Society, trans. Ilyitskaya, L., ed. Daglish, R. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971)Google Scholar, for a more recent assessment of the value placed upon Taylorism by the Soviet industrial system; it, like all Marxist-Leninist texts dealing with scientific management theories, calls for the same critique that one exacts of “bourgeois” writings.

26. Veblen, , Theory of Business EnterpriseGoogle Scholar; this and the following quotations are from pp. 14–15.

27. For an informative survey of the role of the engineer in American culture from 1900 on, see Tichi, Cecelia's Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).Google Scholar

28. For appraisals of labor-management relations and the role played by Taylorism and unionism, see the following scholarly studies: Baritz, Loren, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in A merican Industry (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bendix, , Work and AuthorityGoogle Scholar; Haber, Samuel, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Meyer, Stephen III, The Five-Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981)Google Scholar: Nadworny, Milton J., Scientific Management and the Unions, 1900–1932: A Historical Analysis(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Nelson, Daniel, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Nelson, D., Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975).Google Scholar

29. DuBrut's comments are from p. 1457 of Taylor's “Shop Management,” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 24 (1903)Google Scholar. Page numbers for subsequent quotations from Taylor's paper are within parentheses. Taylor's first paper on the subject was presented at the ASME meeting of 1895, but according to Nadworny its message was largely ignored.

30. For the ways in which technological metaphors have invaded everyday life, see Connolly, William E., The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Edge, D. O., “Technological Metaphor,” in Meaning and Control: Essays in Social Aspects of Science and Technology, ed. Edge, D. O. and Wolfe, J. N. (Edinburgh: Tavistock, 1970)Google Scholar. My emphasis, however, moves in the opposite direction: the incorporation of nontechnological language and narrative techniques into areas of industrial discourse.

31. In speaking of “the routine of the machine industry,” Veblen remarks that “this routine and its discipline extend beyond the mechanical occupations as such, so as in great part to determine the habits of all members of the modern community” (The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts [New York: Huebsch, 1918; orig. ed.: Macmillan, 1914], p. 311).Google Scholar

32. Resistance to Taylor's management theories by fellow engineers and plant owners during his lifetime, and Taylor's efforts to promote his ideas are treated in the following books: Bendix, , Work and AuthorityGoogle Scholar; Haber, , Efficiency and UpliftGoogle Scholar; Nelson, , Taylor and Managers and WorkersGoogle Scholar; as well as Copley, Frank Barkley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1923)Google Scholar, and Kakar, Sudhir, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970).Google Scholar

33. Edge, D. O.'s paper, “Technological Metaphor,”Google Scholar defines metaphor as the overlaying of two puzzling images. As instanced throughout this essay, the language of “the machine process” constantly overlays, as it were, the metaphor of the donkey (untamed primal energy) with that of the “first-class” horse (purposeful discipline); moral puzzlement is the result.

34. See Taylor, , “Shop Management,” pp. 1411, 1415, 1454Google Scholar. The antagonism of Taylorism to welfare work is hammered home in the essay by Nelson, Daniel and Campbell, Stuart, “Taylorism Versus Welfare Work in American Industry: H. L. Gantt and the Bancrofts,” Business History Review 46 (Spring 1972): 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Peter B. Petersen (of the Management History Division, Academy of Management, Johns Hopkins University) modifies the Nelson-Campbell thesis in an analysis prepared at the Hagley Museum and Archives, Wilmington, Delaware, where the Bancroft Papers are housed. Petersen's unpublished paper is titled “Henry Gantt's Work at Bancroft: The Option of Scientific Management.”

35. As jobs within the factory were broken into ever smaller units, this heightened specialization disrupted traditional categories of boss, mechanic, and laborer; this led, paradoxically, to placing less emphasis upon mechanic's skills that were both broad and deep. Its consequences to both labor and management are detailed in Hounshell, David, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Management Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Meyer, , The Five-Dollar DayGoogle Scholar. Taylor also commented upon the changes that his own practices had initiated; see “Shop Management,” p. 1347.Google Scholar

36. Taylor goes so far as to accuse his competitor in “the management war,” the Towne-Halsey system, of sharing with piecework “the greatest evil of the latter, namely that its very foundation rests upon deceit, and under both of these systems there is necessarily … a great lack of justice and equality” (p. 1355). Not surprisingly, F. A. Halsey, who was present at the reading of Taylor's paper, counterattacked with his own allegations. But when Halsey points out that Taylor's plan denies initiative and intelligence to workingmen, he does not say that this is wrong for reasons of character malformation; rather, it invalidates the “economic soundness” of their wages, (p. 1467).

37. Gramsci, Antonio, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 278Google Scholar. Subsequent quotations are from pp. 298, 302, and 317–18.

38. In Capital, Vol. 1, Book IVGoogle Scholar, Marx repudiates the process that Taylorism and Fordism became: the “constant labour of one uniform kind [that] disturbs the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits which finds recreation and delight in mere change of activity.” However, the age of Taylor and Ford that enfolded Lenin and Gramsci set its values against “animality.” See Capital, trans, from the 3rd German edition by Moore, Samuel and Aveling, Edward (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 322.Google Scholar

39. The four texts referred to in the following section are, in order of publication, James, William, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” Ethics: The International Journal of Ethics 1, no. 3 (04 1901): 330–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cooley, Charles Horton, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Scribner's, 1902; rev. ed., 1922Google Scholar; pagination from Transaction Books [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983]); Ward, Lester F., Applied Sociology: A Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society (Boston: Ginn, 1906)Google Scholar; and Dewey, John and Tufts, James H., Ethics (American Science Series) (New York: Holt, 1908).Google Scholar

40. The following quotations are from James, , p. 344Google Scholar; Cooley, , p. 361Google Scholar; Ward, , p. 29Google Scholar; and Dewey, and Tufts, , pp. 496–97.Google Scholar

41. Cooley, , pp. 364–66, 373.Google Scholar

42. Marquis, Samuel, Henry Ford: An Interpretation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), pp. 165–66.Google Scholar

43. James, , p. 350.Google Scholar

44. U.S. Congressional Report of the Industrial Commission on Relations and Conditions of Capital and Labor Enployed in Manufacturers and General Business, vol. 14 (57th Congress, First Session, 1901)Google Scholar, House Document 183, p. 35. The next quotation is from pp. 350–51.

45. Patterson, John H., “Altruism and Sympathy as Factors in Work Administration,” The Engineering Magazine 20, no. 4 (01 1901): 579.Google Scholar The following quotations are from pp. 578, 579, 584, and 600.

46. West, Thomas D., The Competent Life (Cleveland: Cleveland Publishers, 1905).Google Scholar

47. Taylor, for one, insisted that intelligence was not required for the average factory job, only for the fulfillment of the duties of “the first-class men” holding managerial positions. Lester Ward agreed that the lower classes totally lacked intelligence but specified this situation as the cause of all social inequalities – one that had to be remedied by lifting the working class through education.

48. Lewis, Laurence, “Uplifting 17,000 Employees,” The World's Work 9, no. 5 (03 1905): 5939.Google Scholar The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, whose welfare programs received such high praise by Lewis in 1905, became the battleground where the infamous “Ludlow Massacre” occurred on 04 20, 1914Google Scholar, after a fifteenmonth strike. (See Eastman, Max, “Class War in Colorado,” The Masses 5, no. 9 [06 1914]: 5–8.)Google Scholar Page numbers for subsequent quotations from Lewis's article are given within parentheses.

49. The paternalistic tendencies of welfare programs and their extension as new modes of social control receive attention in the following studies: Baritz, , The Servants of PowerGoogle Scholar; Ehrenreich, John H., The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Graebner, William, The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Meyer, , The Five-Dollar DayGoogle Scholar; Nelson, , Managers and WorkersGoogle Scholar; Nelson, and Campbell, , “Taylorism Versus Welfare Work in American Industry: H. L. Gantt and the Bancrofts.”Google Scholar

50. Lawrence T. McDonnell criticizes the sentimentality of Herbert Gutman's liking for the comradely drinking bouts common to workers in turn-of-the-century America. McDonnell, as did Bill Haywood of the IWW, views drunkenness as a serious problem that the working class had to overcome; attempts by industrial welfare programs to correct the problem cannot, therefore, be damned out of hand. See “‘You Are Too Sentimental’: Problems and Suggestions for New Labor History,” Journal of Social History 17 (Summer 1984): 635.Google Scholar

51. The 1903 strike is alluded to one other time when Lewis tells of the company's solicitude for the camp children. Guards escort them past the strike line to their school; Christmas trees and toys are provided for their holiday pleasure; the mothers are duly grateful for the kindnesses shown. The Ludlow Massacre of 1914 would, however, leave two women and eleven children dead.

52. Nelson, Daniel's Managers and WorkersGoogle Scholar contains useful information on the formation and goals of the NCF.

53. The following quotations are from Beeks, Gertrude, “What Is Welfare Work?” National Civic Federation Monthly Review 1, no. 6 (08 1904): 5–6.Google Scholar The next year, an article on welfare work by Porter, H. F. J. appeared in The Engineering Magazine 29, no. 5 (08 1905): 641–55Google Scholar, titled “The Higher Law in the Industrial World”; the editors prefaced Porter's piece by noting, “The statement in this instance is forceful, not only by the manner in which it is put, but because it is supported by recent, practical, and successful trial, and indeed is the record of actual results under working conditions.” From the start, Beeks had to validate welfare work both through the “manner” of her text and “actual results.”

54. In Managers and Workers, Nelson provides a perspective on the delicate position in which welfare secretaries were placed between their own employers and workers on down the ladder. He also indicates that the majority of welfare posts were held by women. Also see Ehrenreich, , The Altruistic ImaginationGoogle Scholar, and Graebner, , The Engineering of Consent.Google Scholar

55. However, when Beeks points out that it is “but humane to furnish a couch on which a prostrated woman may be restored, instead of permitting her to lie on the floor or on two chairs,” she does not follow through with a statement of the practical benefit to the employer. She remains with the image of the ailing woman, apparently absorbed with concern for her plight.

56. Taylor, Graham, “The Policy of Being Human in Business,” Chicago Daily News, 06 16, 1906, p. 8.Google Scholar For further data concerning Taylor's active role in aiding the workingman, see Wren, Daniel A., “Industrial Sociology: A Revised View of Its Antecedents,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 21, no. 4 (10 1985): 313.3.0.CO;2-K>CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. Welfare Work, Clothing Manufacturers, New York City: Some Deplorable Conditions, Garment Trades Committee, New York and New Jersey Section, Woman's Department, NCF Investigations, 1908–1909. The following quotations are from pp. 5, 7, 15, and 23.

58. Comstock, Sarah, “A Woman of Achievement: Miss Gertrude Beeks,” The World's Work 26 (08 1913): 444–48Google Scholar; the following quotation is from p. 445.

59. Donald Wilhelm's profile of Cyrus H. McCormick makes the industrialist the hero of his own “welfare work” narrative, as do Wilhelm's portraits of Judge Gary of the Steel Trust and Dr. Steinmetz of the General Electric Company. See “The ‘Big Business’ Man as a Social Worker: A Series of Personal Portraits,” The Outlook 108, no. 4 (09 23, 1914): 196–201Google Scholar, for the McCormick story written in the style of Bartley Hubbard's interview of Lapham, Silas for “The Solid Men of Boston”Google Scholar series in Howells, William Dean's novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham.Google Scholar

60. See Copley, , Frederick W. TaylorGoogle Scholar; Haber, , Efficiency and UpliftGoogle Scholar; and Kakar, , Frederick Taylor.Google Scholar

61. Horace Bookwalter Drury, who wrote the first full-length study of scientific management in 1915, cites the Louis Brandeis Eastern Rate Case of 1910–11 as the occasion that gave the principles of shop management a name that forthwith entered upon widespread public use. It is ironic that ideas that had “been in the process of formation for about thirty years” and that Taylor, had “fortuitously” named in his 1903Google Scholar paper remained “unfamiliar to most persons” until, at Brandeis's urging, a small conference was held in October, 1910, for the purpose of deciding on “a single term” that “would apply to the system as a whole.” Drury also offers statistical data on the increased use of “scientific management” and “efficiency” in the titles of periodical essays between 1898 and 1913 as proof of their popularity once they had received official sanction through the media's coverage of the Brandeis case. See Drury, , Scientific Management: A History and Criticism, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922), pp. 36, 38, 41 (1st ed., 1915; rev. ed., 1918).Google Scholar A national Efficiency Society was founded in 1911. Information concerning the rapid proliferation of its activities, its waning by 1915, and its demise once the nation entered World War I is supplied in Haber, 's Efficiency and Uplift.Google Scholar

62. Taylor, , The Principles of Scientific ManagementGoogle Scholar, from Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management; The Principles of Scientific Management; The Testimony Before the Special House Committee (New York: Harper, 1947), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar Taylor includes an imaginary conversation with the imaginary Schmidt, one in which Schmidt was “talked to somewhat in this way.” It is a comedy skit in the Abbott and Costello mode, flavored by the kind of dialect humor familiar from vaudeville acts of the early 1900s. It plays off the stupid, stubborn little foreigner against the straightforward American speech of Taylor, his boss. Schmidt is, and plays, dumb, while Taylor teases, joshes, and flatters until he gets the pig-iron handler to admit he “vants $1.85 a day.” In (perhaps pretended) exasperation, Taylor states, “Oh, you're aggravating me. Of course you want $1.85 a day – every one wants it! You know perfectly well that has very little to do with your being a high-priced man. For goodness' sake answer my questions, and don't waste any more of my time” (pp. 44–55).

63. Taylor, , The Testimony Before the Special House Committee (included in the Harper edition cited above), p. 9.Google Scholar Pagination for subsequent quotations from Taylor's testimony will be given within parentheses.

64. Chairman Wilson picks up on the baseball team analogy during the discussion period; he asks whether Taylor does not realize that members of professional baseball teams are “bought and sold like cattle on the market.” This catches Taylor off guard. He says that he had not realized this, and that his illustration was drawn from his experience with the Phillips Exeter team, where they “never bought and sold me” (p. 219).Google Scholar

65. See “Immigrants and Other Americans” by Sollors, Werner, in Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 568–88Google Scholar, for an excellent scholarly resume of the many print forms used to voice minority views. In 1907, Upton Sinclair made note of a number of socialist papers abroad in the land; see The Industrial Republic (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1907), pp. 21–24.Google Scholar

66. Mitchell, John, “Efficiency Not Acceptable to Wage-Earners,” in Eleventh Annual Meeting: The National Civic Federation, New York, January 12, 13, and 14, 1911, Welfare Workers' Conference (New York: NCF, 1911), p. 114.Google Scholar One of the “facts” that Mitchell tried to put across was the resistance to bonus-wages by “the American and English-speaking employees.” By means of his chart-listing, he showed the audience that “persons whose names indicate they are Americans protested against the acceptance of the new plan.” (Mitchell left the NCF the same year after affiliation with the organization was forbidden by the United Mine Workers.)

67. H. Emerson's offer is on page 75 of the Eleventh Annual Meeting. Quotations from Stone's talk, bannered in the record of the proceedings as “Railway Engineer Opposed to Efficiency” (itself a put-down on the part of the NCF), are from pp. 103–106.Google Scholar

68. A doctoral dissertation being written by Madeline Gold, Department of History, UCLA, on Goldmark's many achievements, will assess the current debate among historians concerning whether the Brandeis-Goldmark “protection” of women workers best served the feminist cause.

69. Goldmark, Josephine, Fatigue and Efficiency: A Study in Industry (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1912), p. 3.Google Scholar The following quotations are from p. 197.

70. For comments on the importance of statistical studies during the Progressive era, see Rogers, Daniel, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 188–89.Google Scholar Also see Thompson, Clarence B., “Classification and Symbolization,” in Scientific Management: A Collection of the More Significant Articles Describing the Taylor System of Management, ed. Thompson, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914).Google Scholar

71. Goldmark, , pp. 226–27, 235.Google Scholar These quotations were extracted by Goldmark from earlier studies dated 1895, 1901, and 1909. Two views, then and now, that do not take exception to workers' enjoyment of “cheap amusements” are those of Pattern, Simon, The New Basis of Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1912)Google Scholar, and Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

72. Note the pamphlet, Trade Unions' Attitudes Toward Welfare Work (New York: Welfare Department of the NCF, 1907)Google Scholar, in which J. W. Sullivan states that he speaks for the workers. It is they who must educate their employers, and they who have brought about better working conditions, not the other way around. Sullivan also reveals his bias against nonskilled, non-“American” laborers when he comments that welfare work deals with three areas: (1) “American white-working people”; (2) “negroes removed by a gulf” from the others; and (3) immigrants who are as far removed from the whites as the negroes (a sentiment with which Taylor concurred). On the hostility between “American” workers on the one side, and blacks and immigrants on the other, see Mink, Gwendolyn, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Walling, William English, “Class Struggle Within the Working Class,” The Masses 4 (01 1913): 12–13Google Scholar, who denounces the exclusionary policies of many labor organizations.

73. The following quotations are from Hoxie, Robert Franklin, Scientific Management and Labor, Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: Kelly, 1966) pp. 2, 5, 94, 108–9, 113, 117, 119, 137, 169.Google Scholar Italics are added throughout the seven points listed in the text.

74. The chief sinner named under no. 7 is Taylor himself; he is labeled “an enthusiast” and “an idealist” who fondly believed “that he had discovered industrial laws and methods of universal applicability,” yet “failed to distinguish between what might be and what is.” Compare an editorial by Eastman, Max for The Masses 4, no. 10 (07 1913)Google Scholar; there he assails the harmful idealism of the upperclass altruists and disciples of economic progress in the name of “brotherhood as an artificial emotion.” Eastman concludes, “We simply hold our idealism to be more scientific.”

75. Drury, Horace B., “Democracy as a Factor in Industrial Efficiency,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 65 (05 1916): 15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A newly appointed professor at Ohio State University, Drury had authored Scientific Management: A History and Criticism, published the preceding year. Written as his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, Drury's book was the first “history” of a movement whose origins may have reached back into the 1880s, but which had only achieved general public recognition four years earlier with the publication of Taylor, 's Principles.Google Scholar

76. Hopkins, Ernest Martin, “Democracy and Industry,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 65 (05 1916): 63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hopkins rebukes those who view “industrial democracy” as an X-factor, “the unknown quantity in the equation” based on “whatever is, is wrong.” Addled reformers think the solution comes through an identification of the X-factor with the workers' authority, a solution that “was to give us better conditions all around” (p. 59).Google Scholar Not only does this misguided notion threaten the employers' authority, it thwarts their right to a procedure “which most consistently breeds efficiency and stimulates output in production.” To shift power to the workers under the guises of “industrial democracy” means society's “sacrifice in character of the individuals who compose it, through their being so little called up to acknowledge authority to anybody or anything” (p. 63; italics added). The next quotations are from pp. 58–59.

77. Richards, Ellen, Euthenics, The Science of Controllable Environment: A Plea for Better Living Conditions as a First Step Toward Higher Human Efficiency (Boston: Whitcomb and Barrows, 1910), p. 85.Google Scholar

78. Russell, Charles Edward, “The Invisible Government,” The Masses 4 (07 1913): 3.Google Scholar

79. Robinson, James Harvey, “Intellectual Radicalism,” The Masses 8 (06 1916): 21.Google Scholar

80. Taylor, , Scientific Management, p. 216Google Scholar; the next quotations are from p. 218.

81. Sue Clark, Ainslie and Wyatt, Edith, “Scientific Management as Applied to Women's Work,”Google Scholar in Thompson, , ed., Scientific Management: A Collection of the More Significant Articles Describing the Taylor System of Management.Google Scholar In addition, there are tales of “poor girls … subject to wrong and oppressive maltreatment at home” who find “refuge and consideration” in factories under scientific management (p. 833).

82. “I Make Cheap Silk,” The Masses 5 (11 1913): 7.Google Scholar

83. In addition to Kloppenberg, James T.'s Uncertain VictoryGoogle Scholar, the following shed light on the controversial issue of whether early 20th-century American political thought resisted Marxism and, if so, what forms of modified socialist belief took hold: Brick, Howard, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Denning, Michael, “‘The Special American Conditions’: Marxism and American Studies,” American Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1986): 356–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herreshoff, David, American Disciples of Marx: From the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” in Sources of Contemporary Radicalism ed. Bialer, S. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977).Google Scholar Also see Marx, Karl, Marx and Engels on the United States (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979).Google Scholar

84. Silcox, , “Discussion,”Google Scholar in “Workers' Participation in Management,” p. 25.Google Scholar