Conflict

I

Native Ways of Feeling

WHAT is a way of thinking? Thought may be feeling rationalized; feeling may be thought emotionalized. A way of thinking will not move people until it has become also a way of feeling.

It was a characteristic way of American thinking that overthrew the fatal dogmas imbedded in the European book of political economy—the book received in this country along with the forms of Old World industrialism.

The first and most disastrous of these dogmas was the brazen law of wages. Such was the term fixed by socialists upon the economic doctrine that there was a natural wage, or a natural price for labor, just above the line of misery, for if wages were more than this the proletariat would multiply too fast, thereby increasing the supply of labor and breaking the price. Another form of the same dogma was the doctrine of a limited wage fund. The total of wages that could be paid was determined by the amount of capital available for the purchase of labor—the wages fund—and this fund could be increased only by capital savings from the profits of industry.

Then the second dogma, namely—that profits and wages were directly opposed in natural principle. Neither could be increased but at the expense of the other. Therefore profits, from which the wage fund was derived, could not be increased without reducing wages to begin with; if, on the other hand, wages were increased, then profits were diminished and the wage fund was impaired. Secondly, if wages for any reason increased above the needs of bare existence, then the supply of labor increased by procreation, with again a disastrous effect upon the price of labor.

Thus, from the operation of what was believed to be a natural economic law, a proletariat doomed to exist outside the pale of prosperity, with no sense of participation in the increase of wealth, no strength of its own but the strength of despair.

Old World industrialism under the tyranny of this way of thinking became a menace to society; and if the state, acting on motives of both fear and humanity, had not interfered to provide out of the public funds such minimum decencies of environment as the proletariat was unable to buy with its natural wage, industrialism would have become a menace to the human race.

In this country occurred a revolution of thought. The American doctrine is that capital, profits and wages are limited only by production. If there is any law to limit production, we have yet to discover it. Therefore, so far as we know, prosperity is unlimited by any inherent fact. What we did discover, however, was that production could be limited by a state of feeling.

Leave capital and profits to come back to; take it now simply as to wages. More than fifty years ago an American economist definitely formulated the thought that wages were unlimited save by the productivity of labor. This was a vast seed, containing the complete principle of economic deliverance. Yet it did not immediately transform American industrialism.

Why was that? And why was Europe, whose economists took this American seed and examined it critically—why was Europe unable to grow it at all in the soil of Old World industrialism?

The answer to the first question is this: We perceive that wages are limited only by the productivity of labor. To increase wages in a progressive manner you have only to increase the productivity of labor per man in the like manner. Very good. But how are you going to increase the productivity of labor per man or per man hour? You may put in the hand of labor a tool more powerful and cunning, you may devise a science of motion, you may impose the perfect method; but if labor is dark at heart, if it is hostile or secretly disbelieving, still production will be limited. You may promise that the effort of willing collaboration shall be rewarded by higher wages, you may offer the wage beforehand; labor has heard all that before and has been many times so tempted to drive itself.

You see what has happened. Labor has accepted the old employers’ law of conflict between wages and profits in principle. It has organized itself against the despair implicit in that law, against an industrialism that treats labor as an impersonal commodity; specifically, it has bitterly organized itself to limit the production per man per hour in order to make more jobs. Suppose, it says, that for greater productivity you did pay higher wages. That would mean fewer jobs, unemployment, then two men running after one job everywhere and ultimately lower wages than before.

So, notwithstanding the liberating thought, the better machines, the more scientific method, production is still hindered. It is hindered by ways of thinking and feeling on the part of labor, and what labor thinks and feels is inevitable from the way of thinking that has hitherto governed industrialism.

There is the last impasse. No thought, merely as thought, has the power to break it. The thought might lie for centuries on the shelf of abstraction. It contains the mystery of fecundity; to germinate, it requires to be buried in the ground of common feeling. It must grow downward into feeling and become emotionalized; it must appear again on the plane of thought as feeling rationalized. Then it becomes dynamic. That takes a length of time.

As to the second question, why the American idea that wages were limited only by the productivity of labor was a seed that could not germinate in the ground of Old World industrialism, the answer is that it was alien to a social philosophy assuming the natural existence of a proletariat in a condition disciplined by poverty and fear of want.

There was all the time a characteristic way of American feeling. In the struggle between industrialism as it was in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s of the last century, and the old Puritan expectation that economic and social motives were to be reconciled, it suffered many defeats. At crucial moments it appeared to have lost its vitality. The early success of industrialism as a heedless force so offended and mocked it that some of it had turned away, finding refuge in cults of mortification. Much of it had been overwhelmed by the alien flood. This was the immigration that began about 1870 and continued for forty years. Regarded merely as a movement of humanity from one world to another, it was of epic proportions. Regarded from the traditional American point of view, it was catastrophic.

These were not such people as had been coming before, self-selected out of the ancestral stock. They were new people racially, and would be perhaps much more difficult to assimilate—some 25,000,000 of them in four decades, added to a population that was less than 40,000,000 when the inundation began. Generally their social emotions were class-conscious. They preferred the industrial centers and either regarded themselves as wage slaves or responded to that view of their condition when it was presented to them by demagogic leaders. For this was the Old World proletariat, bringing its feelings with it.

American industrialism, be it said, treated it as such; and the human spectacle in the environs of large production became even worse than it was in Europe, because here the material was polyglot, with nothing more in common than fear of the police, hatred of the boss and a sense of oppression.

Thus, industrialism in the European meaning, governed by Old World dogmas of political economy, was continued here long after that event of thought which was sometime to transform it, simply by reason of having this enormous and endless supply of cheap labor that bred itself in Europe and migrated hither.

Industry then had no ethical or social ground, no technic of justice. As an assertion of pure will, untamed, neither moral nor immoral, it had an aspect of grandeur. The scars of its infliction were deep. Americans who lived by their hands were engulfed and suffered with the aliens. The words that follow are those of an industrialist, Henry S. Dennison, president of the Dennison Manufacturing Company, and now a director of the American Management Association:

“There will be an underlying suspicion for one full generation after employers have for the most part been square and wise. The tales to-day’s workmen heard their fathers tell at the supper table set their subconscious attitudes.”

II

The Economic Secret Is Human

But a certain way of feeling was implicit in this foundation. The war was its powerful reagent; and if the passion then and afterward to Americanize alien things did seem often unreasonable or intolerant, that was only the surface tension, the zeal that goes to waste in any great motion of the human spirit. Those who sneered at 100 per cent Americanism, crude and ugly as the phrase was—Americans who sneered at it—were those who had gone so far in contempt of their own that they did not know what the word “loyality” was a touchstone of.

And what was it a touchstone of? Particularly, what does one mean by a way of feeling, native here, that could liberate the forces of production?

First, you might look. Glimpses of its effect on human behavior are everywhere familiar, only that we take them too much for granted and so miss the essential impression.

As a traveler by rail, you must sometime have seen the official train go by—one or two Pullmans and the president’s private work car. And have you noticed how it is saluted by the men on the ground—yardmen, train crews, even section gangs out on the right of way? They all make one gesture alike. It is a free, wide sweep of the arm, with this interesting peculiarity—that although it takes form suddenly as a reflex action, it ends slowly, instead of snapping out like a military salute.

Its character as human expression lies in that difference. The power that sustains it in space for one more instant at the end of the arc—what is it? You do not see, perhaps, that the men on the official train—executives, managers, superintendents, the president himself—are continually making that same gesture, no matter what else they may be doing or thinking. Sometimes they make it first, sometimes they see it first; that is by chance. The gesture asserts nothing. It is to and from all manner of men alike and yet is no assertion of their equality. To assert equality is puerile, as we know, for if it has to be asserted it does not in fact exist. The gesture is a sign of something they all know, and seals it silently.

As a refugee, a reporter, almost any kind of person, you might have been on a train that had waded miles through the Mississippi River flood, the train crews out ahead of the locomotive using poles to make sure the invisible track was still there; you might have noticed that at the end of the journey Secretary Hoover went forward and talked with the engineer. As Secretary of Commerce in charge of relief, it was his job to know more than anybody else about the flood. What he said to the engineer was to this effect:

“I hate to think what would have happened to this country without your railroad and its gang. I’m going to tell your president what I think of it all.”

“He’s doing a good job, isn’t he?” said the engineer, adding the railroad president’s surname.

“He is,” said Mr. Hoover. “But I’m thinking particularly of the way you pulled us out of the water today with this train.”

“That’s my job,” said the engineer.

That is all there was of it. Still nothing asserted. Values implicit. His job, the gang’s job, the general manager’s job, the president’s job, and that one fine gesture as their common sign.

As one pursuing the economic theme, you might come to the great steel plant at Gary. Here is the latest word in steel making. The operation is so large that you have to see it from an observation car attached to a yard engine. The superintendent says it may take twenty minutes to get the car up. While you were waiting, would you like to see the town?

See the town! It is a steel town. Only a few years ago you were expected not to see a steel town. Nobody mentioned it. Everybody took it somehow to be hopeless. Steel workers would live like that.

“We can hit the high spots and be back in twenty minutes,” says the superintendent. Putting a section of rail down on his papers, he starts for his hat, but turns back to his desk and pushes some photographs toward you. “That’s our own beach out there on the lake shore,” he says. “Some shots of our picnic last week.” Steel-town people playing on the sand! You recognize the superintendent among them.

“Oh, yes,” he says, “the executives go along. Those two kids right behind me—no, the other one, there—they are twins. That’s the mother. They did have a time of it. Look all right now, don’t they?”

The modern word in steel making. The works a standard of wonder. Yet before the works you must see the town, and before seeing the town you must take a minute to look at photographs of the all-hands picnic on the company sands, which illustrate, besides many things, that a certain Slav woman’s twins, notwithstanding the time they had of it, are looking very well.

Later, in the works, when you see men in small thoughtful gangs minding volcanic energies, releasing tides of power, controlling by means of tiny levers machines that cause tremors in the earth as they go in and out of motion—then you remember the town and you understand how important it is that steel people should have nice houses, parks, playtime, freedom from all unnecessary anxiety.

You remember the twins and make a relation. If, in the act of putting a million-dollar piece of mechanical equipment into a motion, a man were to be seized with a panic about his twins or by a bitter reflection on the wretchedness of their surroundings, he might jam the works quite without meaning to do it. Or if he had meant to do it, you would never be able to prove it. The hand slipped—that was all.

Leave out the slip. There is no visible accident. There is only the difference between a hand that is willing, always pressing for the optimum result, and a hand that is slack or heavy because the mind behind it is sullen, cares nothing for the ideal output, or means deliberately to retard production in order to keep more men on the job. When by means of mechanical equipment you have multiplied the power of the hand a million times, so you have multiplied this difference a million times, and it becomes enormous.

The more your investment is in machines, the greater your stake is in the man who touches them, in his general well-being, his manner of living, his conscious and unconscious attitudes. You see clearly what the head of the United States Steel Corporation means when he says the true problem of modern industry is how to gain the loyalty, the coöperation and the understanding of the individual man. Not men in general—the man. And there is new meaning in a saying you will hear very often among industrial managers:

“The better the coat a man wears to his job, the more he is worth to industry.”

Suppose you come to a motor town. It may be Flint, where the General Motors Corporation, organized somewhat like a federated government of free states, has several automobile companies, all competitive as to product and method, each one possessing state rights of which it is very jealous. The governor of one of these state jobs is a man who eats drop forgings as an after supper delicacy. He handled machines before he could reach them from the floor, and the drive boss of old industry was his childhood nature study, from the point of view of those who were driven.

He is talking when the personnel man walks in, and stops to introduce him. Everywhere, in everybody’s office, the personnel man. What does it mean?

“I’ll tell you,” says the governor. “It’s 90 per cent bull.” He grins as he says it, and the personnel man grins too.

The governor goes on with what he was saying. The man he keeps going around looking for rough spots had said to him the frame riveting job was bad in any way of looking at it. The hot rivets—one man to slip them into place, another to hold them, another to set them. A mean job; nobody liking it. The trouble was no one could think of a way to do it in a neat automatic manner.

The governor had said to him, “You’ve got a new job from today. Don’t do anything else, don’t think of anything else, until you find a way to change that operation.”

And they were now about to change it. The little thing to change it with was that—standing there in the middle of his desk—a new automatic tool. When you have admired it, he takes you to see what he thinks is the finest foundry in the world. No dirt, no dust. Do you know what a foundry used to be?

On the way, as you are entering the works, he says suddenly: “No man in this plant can be fired by his boss. I can’t fire one myself. The most a boss can do is to suspend a man and send him up to the personnel court for trial. No boss can fire a man. Do you get that?”

Along with it, lest you should forget it, you receive a half-ton hydraulic thump in the ribs. Recalling what he said ten minutes before on the meaning of personnel work, you perceive that such was levity—his way of punching the personnel man in his ribs.

“Well, what do you think of that foundry?” he asks.

You tell him it is fine. Only at the shakeout—that’s a little bad yet. The governor is terribly let down.

He says, “Now, of course, you would notice that, wouldn’t you? It’s the one damn bad spot we haven’t ironed out. But we’re on it.”

Almost the last place you might think to look would be in the clothing trade, with the traditions of feud and discord that belong to it; and for the reason, moreover, that because the machines must be small and individual, the industry would seem not to present big opportunities for increased productivity per man by scientific management on a machine basis. Nevertheless, in any one of the so-called x-production shops in Chicago where the union of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America has been developing the principle of collaboration you will see a new thing. The production manager representing capital meets the production manager representing labor—meets him on the floor in the open shop—and asks, “How’s it going?”

The production manager representing labor says, “Here and there a little piling up. Nothing we can’t move. Look around.”

From opposite sides they come to common point of view. The work goes at high speed, payment is by the piece, production is intensively intended, and yet the rhythm is spontaneous and self-sustaining. Wages are good—eighty cents to a dollar an hour for men and women together—and the costs are low.

This is a case in which the intelligence acted first, the feeling ensued. Notoriously, it was a sweated industry, wages low, hours long, conditions wretched. Union thought was generally radical, imbued with the idea of class warfare, learned in the Old World. If once the workers by militant solidarity could get physical control of production, then they would be able by extortion to take all the profit and thus destroy the institution of capitalism, with its wage slavery and other horrors. The result of warfare in that character was unexpected. The more it won in a particular case, the more it lost in principle.

The industry began to shrink in cities where the union’s power was, notably Chicago, and at the same time to expand very fast in the nonunion fields. Then a light broke on the union leaders and they acted with shrewdness. First they made a thorough economic study of the situation in order to be able to show their own people that their problem was to defend the union field. This they could do only by collaboration with capital.

Then they put their cards face up on the table and said to the manufacturers in Chicago, “What labor cost must you have to meet your nonunion competitors in Baltimore?” When the figure was arrived at they said: “Union labor will undertake to produce garments at that cost. This we propose to do not by cutting wages; we will reorganize the work on a scientific plan and at the same time we will superintend ourselves. While to do that will cost us nothing, it will relieve you of a large expense.”

Next they went to their own people, saying: “The trouble is there are too many of you on this work—too many cutters, for example, jealously guarding obsolete craft rules, such as refusing to cut two colors or more than a certain number of pieces at a time, thereby limiting production simply in order to make jobs for cutters. To reduce the labor cost of garments we have got to increase production per man. Unless we do this, the garment industry here will perish.”

The cutters were the aristocrats; they held the keys of production. But the survival of the union and of unionized industry was of more importance than jobs for cutters. In one case 200 of them were removed from the industry by edict of the union. The industry had agreed to give each cutter $500 of farewell money. Some of them went to other cities, some bought taxicabs, some were presently received back into the shops from which they had been expelled, because now, with lower labor costs from increased production per man, though wages were higher than ever before, the industry began at once to expand. The Chicago manufacturers were able to make headway against their competitors in the nonunion fields.

This had been a body of labor, nearly all of recent European origin, emotionally fixed in the fallacy shared by Old World radicals and conservatives alike that profits limited wages and that the conflict between them was by a natural law of capitalism. Therefore, from labor’s point of view, the only way to increase wages was to force capital to surrender more of its profits. It has learned the American doctrine.

What limits both profits and wages is high cost. The manufacturer is not interested in low wages at all; he is interested in low costs. And where capital and labor collaborate to increase production per man per hour per dollar of capital invested, there you may have the phenomena of low costs, high wages, high profits.

But what you are to notice particularly in these x-production shops of the Chicago clothing industry is the effect of this experience on the state of human relations. There is no fear of the drive boss; there is no drive boss to be feared. There is no change in the rhythm of activity as the production manager representing capital comes and goes. The workers set their own pace. They have a collective sense of responsibility for a total result and a method of their own with the slacker. The object is that the cost of a union-made garment shall be so low that it may compete with one not union-made. They have for the same reason a collective sense of responsibility for the quality of the work.

It will start a train of speculation to imagine that here, perhaps, in the midst of modern industry, is the reappearance of the ancient pride of guild.

The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, as a body, now is rich. It has a big bank in New York, runs an investment trust on sound economic lines and has loaned as much as $300,000 at a time to manufacturers in the union field whose business it could save by willing to save it. Seeing all this, the extreme radical left wing of labor from which the Amalgamated Clothing Workers departed has only one thing to say. These people have embraced capital. The union itself has become capitalistic. Quite so. It works that way.

The four industries touched in these glimpses—transportation, steel, motors, clothing—are very dissimilar. From the point of view of an engineer thinking to act upon them by extensions of method and agencies of power, they would seem to present unequal possibilities. And yet the force that does truly release human energy may act upon all of them alike. It must occur to you that the ultimate secret of American production lies neither in scientific method nor in the multiple use of mechanical power. You might have the perfect method and the very finest equipment, but without certain ways of thinking and feeling, from the office of administration down to the gate, you would not get the fullness of production.

III

Discoveries in Understanding

Scientific management as a way of thinking originated in a way of feeling. By an accidental path in the year 1880 a genius named Frederick W. Taylor appeared in American industry, in the guise of machinist and pattern maker. Partial eye failure had turned him from a career in law. He learned this trade instead; and then having finished his apprenticeship, he began as a day laborer with the Midvale Steel Company. Presently he got a lathe job, and shortly after that he was made gang boss in charge of lathes.

As a lathe hand he had done as the others did. He had limited his output to about one-third of his own and the machine’s capacity. Such was the universal practice of labor—called in this country soldiering, in England hanging it out and in Scotland cacanny. It was more than a practice; it was a principle of behavior enforced by the group on the individual as an ethic.

A man who would let himself go was disloyal to his craft. The ground of it was fear—fear of injustice and fear of unemployment. If pay was by the day, the lazy and the industrious received equal reward. That was unfair. If pay was by the piece, the fast worker was a rate breaker. This was so because employers treated the piece rate not as the true value of a given unit of work performed but as a price for labor as labor. If men exerted themselves more in order to earn more, the rate was cut, for no reason other than they earned too much, or more than labor was worth, quite regardless of the value of what it had produced.

What was too much? Anything more than the prevailing wage. A manufacturer who permitted his workmen to earn more than the prevailing wage was said to be spoiling the labor market and was liable to be treated by other manufacturers as in the factory other workmen treated that one who let himself go. The prevailing wage, of course, was a term to express the Old World idea of a natural wage—a sustenance wage—having no relation whatever to the productivity of labor at a given time and place. Thus, labor limiting output because the employer limited wages, and both together in this antagonistic spirit limiting the power of plenty.

When Taylor was made gang boss the men with whom he had soldiered on the lathes said, “Now that you are boss, you are not going to be a piecework hog, are you?” That was to ask if he intended to demand a greater output. Their experience was that greater output meant inevitably a cutting of the rate.

His sympathies were with the men, then and always afterward. His duty was to the management. He said he was going to get more out of the lathes. That was his job. They said he would see; and there was the beginning of a kind of fight that was chronic throughout industry between the drive boss seeking to increase production and the workmen resolved to limit it.

Taylor tried persuasion; he tried to drive them. He trained some young men to handle lathes as pacemakers, under an agreement beforehand not to limit output; but they were no sooner competent than they went over to the other side and soldiered like the rest. Then at last he did deliberately break the piece rate so that to keep their wages up they were obliged to produce more. Their retort was to break the machines, always in some ingenious manner to prove it was the speed that did it.

This was the point at which the management, as the men knew, was always ready to give up the fight. Taylor had warned his management that this would happen. It was the workmen’s last weapon. The management stood by him. Then he fined the men for machine breakage, no matter what the cause was. The roof might fall and break a lathe, but the lathe man had to pay. At that the men gave up, and agreed to do a fair day’s work.

Telling of that fight before a committee of Congress years afterward, Taylor said: “It took three years to bring this about. I was a young man in years, but I give you my word I was a great deal older than I am now with the worry, meanness and contemptibleness of the whole damn thing. It is a horrid life for any man to live, not to be able to look any workman in the face all day long without seeing hostility there and feeling that every man around is his virtual enemy.”

Out of that feeling grew the thought of scientific management. Taylor identified clearly the two radical problems.

First, industry had no means to determine precisely what a man’s output ought to be; therefore it did not know to begin with what was a fair day’s work.

Secondly, between employer and employe there was a bankrupt relationship, with so much suspicion, unreason, wrong thinking and bad faith on both sides that collaboration was impossible.

In both dimensions it was production that suffered.

To the first problem there was obviously a scientific approach.

Power machines had replaced hand tools, all the conditions that governed production had changed, and yet trades were still taught and learned as in the Middle Ages. The journeyman carried the knowledge in his head and imparted it to the apprentice by demonstration. The way the journeyman said to do it—that was the way. The speed the journeyman said was proper—that was the speed. None of the knowledge in the journeyman’s head had ever been submitted to analysis or scientific study. Nobody knew, for example, the ideal speed at which a lathe should turn for any certain kind of work, not even the lathe makers. It was what the journeyman said. Machines were a triumph of precision; handling of them was by the old journeyman’s rule of thumb.

He could not be expected to make a scientific study of his job. He had neither the time nor the means. Beyond his skill at lathe work was an art and science of cutting metals at high speed, and this could be discovered only by research, experiment, patient observation of fact, time measurement of motion and then scientific imagination acting upon the data. And there was perhaps no kind of job that did not contain in itself the materials of an undiscovered science.

To prove it, Taylor undertook to develop a science of shoveling. This experiment took place in the yards of the Bethlehem Steel Company, where there was a shovel gang of 600 men. All using the same type of shovel, they would go from a pile of rice coal, of which a shovel load was three and a half pounds, to a pile of ore, of which a shovel load weighed thirty-eight pounds. His assumption to begin with was that somewhere between these two extremes there must be an ideal shovel load—that is, a load at which a given amount of physical effort would move the greatest quantity of stuff. Two pairs of first-class shovelers were found willing to submit themselves to observation and training. They shoveled all day, the shovel loads were accurately counted, the pile they had shoveled was weighed. The weight divided by the number of shovel loads gave the average load per shovel, and it was, say, thirty-eight pounds. The next day the shovels were shortened to hold only thirty-four pounds, and at that average load, with no greater exertion each man handled thirty tons, where the day before he had handled only twenty-five tons. The amount handled per man increased as the shovel was further shortened, down to a load of twenty-one pounds; the amount handled per man decreased as the shovel load was reduced below twenty-one pounds. Therefore twenty-one pounds was the ideal shovel load, provided the lift was not more than five feet, the throw not more than four feet.

Next the difficulty of suiting the shovel to the material. It takes a large shovel to hold twenty-one pounds of rice coal; a small one holds that weight of ore. So now various types of shovels must be issued out of a tool shed as the men come to work, and the work must be planned ahead so that the right number of men will get coal shovels and go to the coal pile, or ore shovels and go to where the ore is, and so on.

Moreover, there were many wrong ways and only one right way of driving a shovel into refractory stuff, like ore—a way of transmitting the weight of the whole body through a locked forearm. The difference between the right way and any other way might be eight or ten tons a day in the quantity handled per man, with much more fatigue at the end. This had to be demonstrated, even to the first-class shovelers.

The result of putting shoveling on a scientific basis was that 160 men, working no harder, did what 600 men had done before.

To determine the exact conditions under which a unit of human effort will produce the maximum result is purely a scientific task. Then you may know what constitutes a fair day’s work. But how are you going to get it when you know what it is? That is where the second problem begins. Suppose labor declines to accept the scientific norm. Suppose it says, as it reasonably may, that wages should be determined by the result, not by the effort. Though the effort be less, still for the same wages as before it will produce the same result. Then what?

With all your knowledge, you are practically where you were before. You may know how 160 shovelers working no harder, only more scientifically, may accomplish as much as 600 working in the old way; but you will not get the result until the most scientific gang of shovelers in the world is also the highest paid gang of its kind. Such was the case with the Bethlehem Steel Company’s shovel gang. The two basic conditions of scientific management were realized. Hence the importance of that experiment in the early history of the Taylor movement.

One of Frederick W. Taylor’s perplexities was to find the right name for what he meant. He never did find one. Scientific management—that name—though he adopted it in place of Taylorism, emphasized exactly what he kept saying it was not. It was not efficiency, it was not any mechanical device for increasing the man’s productivity, though, of course, the means were necessary.

“In its essence,” he said, “scientific management involves a complete mental revolution on the part of workmen toward their work, toward their fellow men and toward their employers. And it involves the equally complete mental revolution on the part of those on the management’s side—the foreman, the superintendent, the owner of the business, the board of directors—toward their workmen and toward all their daily problems; and without this complete mental revolution on both sides, scientific management does not exist.

“The great revolution that takes place in the mental attitude of the two parties under scientific management is that both sides take their eyes off 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. They come to see that when they stop pulling against one another, and instead both turn and push shoulder to shoulder in the same direction, the size of the surplus created by their joint efforts is truly astounding. . . . Scientific management cannot be said to exist until after this change has taken place in the mental attitude of both the management and the men, both as to their duty to coöperate in producing the largest possible surplus and as to the necessity for substituting exact scientific knowledge for opinions or the old rule of thumb or individual knowledge. . . .

“I say that any set of men who want to earn a big profit in any industry must have that change of mind. If they want to get a big profit, they must have that view. You cannot keep men working hard on one side and not have them work equally hard on the other side. If you want a profitable business, you cannot have meanness and injustice on one side or the other; you have got to eliminate meanness and injustice from both sides.”

From a characteristic way of thinking had come the American theory that wages were limited only by the productivity of labor and that profit in the highest sense might be pure surplus—simply more wealth produced with the same amount of labor and capital as before. Here in the words of Taylor is the translation of theory into the language of a working principle.

It is feasible to conduct industry by a rule of dogged conflict. Fear of want will keep men at work; necessity will oblige capital to employ itself. It is not possible by that rule to have prosperity. The surplus above a sustenance wage for labor and a rate of interest for capital—that plus quantity out of which will come high wages, high profits and more capital—simply, it is not produced.

IV

Evolution of Scientific Management

The mental revolution that Taylor talked of did not come all at once. For thirty years industry at large understood scientific management to mean getting more for your money out of labor. The production engineer appeared. There was rapid improvement in shop practice generally. “Efficiency” was the magic word. You did not drive labor to exert itself more; instead, you created the conditions under which it was bound to be more efficient; and not the least important were conditions of working environment, such as lighting, heating, sanitation, creature comforts. All this was to the good, of course, but because the vital imponderable content of scientific management was neglected, or misunderstood, many disappointments occurred. Union labor was antagonistic. Scientific management seemed always to be something that was done to labor or for it, seldom was it anything in which labor had a sense of initiative.

As recently as 1912 the proposal to introduce scientific management on government work resulted in the appointment of a special committee of the House of Representatives to see into it. At about the same time Dartmouth College arranged a conference to spread information about it. The newspapers were giving a great deal of space to the subject. Popular interest had been originally excited by expert testimony in a famous railroad rate case to the effect that the railroads were inefficiently managed and might very easily increase their profits out of waste, with rates as they were, if they would only adopt scientific management. Much of the controversy was confusing from the fact that efficiency and scientific management were so often taken to be the same thing.

Not until some time after 1910 was it possible to recognize definitely a science of management in industry. Now one who seeks the meaning of American business, the secret of its character and the sources of its power, will be astonished at the authority and scope of that science. Management as an institution, with its threefold responsibility—to capital, to labor and to the public—has been an amazing development. It is a new science, with a new point of view, a new quality of curiosity, a new literature.

A recent bulletin of the Taylor Society, touching the extent of accumulated book knowledge, said:

“The literature of management has become so abundant that many individuals and firms are puzzled by the problem of selecting a moderate-sized library on management subjects. Stimulated by many inquiries for assistance, the society has prepared the following nucleus of a management library.”

The list, merely as a nucleus, contained 124 book titles and twelve bulletins and periodicals, all on the science of management.

In the earlier literature you will find the problem of human relationship regarded as one among others, under some such head as personnel administration. Steadily the emphasis has shifted, until now this is treated as the core problem. There is no right solution of any other problem but in relation to that one, and however you begin with that one, you come naturally to all the others.

You may approach industry from the point of view of profits and come eventually to the problem of unemployment as a natural evil. That was the old way. Or you may approach industry from the point of view of unemployment, as an economic and social disaster, and come from that direction to every other problem. To stabilize employment you have to sell what labor produces. To sell it, the product must be right, the price must be right, the cost must be low. There already you begin to touch the problems that belong to selling and production management. Then you have competition, change, seasonal rhythms, and so problems of policy, principle and general management.

How you will approach it is a matter of choice, and the choice will be determined by what is characteristic in ways of common thinking and feeling.

In 1923, when the American Management Association was formed, to succeed the National Personnel Association, which had succeeded the National Association of Employment Managers, a conviction was stated in these words:

“The association is organized on the principle that the human problem in commerce and industry is a major problem, and that personnel administration is a responsibility of the line executives, assisted wherever possible by the advice of staff executives trained and experienced in this field of activity. In short, without in the least denying the validity of other points of attack, it approaches the study of the whole management problem in terms of human organization.”

This was subscribed to by a board of directors representing such industries as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, the Eastman Kodak Company, the United States Rubber Company, the Dennison Manufacturing Company, the General Electric Company, the American Rolling Mill Company, the Miami Copper Company, the American Radiator Company and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.

Recognition of the human factor—such was the formal phrase—expressed itself for a long time in a variety of worthy activities comprehended in the term “welfare work.” The common weakness of much of it was that it gave people a sense of receiving from above what was benignly deemed to be good for them. That is all past. What was called welfare work is taboo by that name. In place of it is merely the good sense to provide what the civilities require, and nobody is either conscious or self-conscious about it.

Then came profit-sharing by various plans, some of them complicated, by no means all of them successful. Still something was left out. Stock ownership was a solid idea, leading as it did to employe representation. It worked out slowly. Employes of the United States Steel Corporation had been buying stock under a felicitous arrangement with the management for more than twenty years before they quite realized the implications of joint proprietorship. That corporation now has 50,000 employe stockholders and is greatly pleased when on their own initiative they elect a representative to appear at the annual stockholders’ meeting with a case to state or some observations to make from the point of view of labor partnership. This happens to be only the most notable case. The total amount of employe stock ownership in American industry is approaching $1,000,000,000.

Recently there has developed very rapidly the idea of employe representation with or without stock ownership, regarded either as a right that belongs to labor, or, if not as a right, then as a principle of relationship which the science of management finds to be sound. By employe representation is meant some form of direct participation by labor in the councils of industry.

Number 32 of a series of bulletins addressed by the American Management Association to production executives, entitled Some Major Aspects of Employe Representation, says:

“The movement is a complex of many motives. Few innovations in the field of business management have so gripped the imagination of those responsible for the conduct of American industries.”

The object is plain. It is that all matters shall be made open to human understanding. Beneath the object is the subject; and how the imagination of the science of management acts on the subject will be found at the end of the bulletin in these words:

“If it be true that the conditions of modern industrialism yield far richer experience than do the circumstances of private life, that they broaden the mental horizon and perfect the manual dexterity of the persons engaged in industry, then it should be considered equally true that employe representation is an effective means to these desirable ends. This improvement in individual quality constitutes the greatest asset any organization can have. Again, if we maintain that the first duty of the worker be to advance efficient production, should we not equally affirm that his willing consent establishes his moral claim to an equivalent reward? Such a reward beyond wages is found in employe representation. Its plan reveals native ability by providing incentives to originality and leadership. Its operation supplies contacts which illuminate the humblest task with the vision of mutual service. Each individual realizes that the successful completion of his own work depends largely on the assistance and coöperation of others.”

V

Thought Is Emotionalized, Feeling Is Rationalized, and the Revolution Is Complete

Observe that a cycle is accomplished. The revolution is working. A way of thinking that took root in the ground of feeling reappears on the plane of thought as feeling rationalized. Who now is talking of cultural values in the day’s work and taking it that the meaning of the job to the man is of paramount importance? Not the socialist, not the radical, not the Utopian. It is the science of management.

At this point it is no longer so difficult to define what it is characteristic in the American way of feeling that liberates the forces of production. Anyone may recognize it. Deeply, it is an attitude toward work.

If you ask again the question why and how we escaped those evils of laborism that limit production in the European system, particularly in Great Britain, the answer is indicated. Labor here is regarded from quite another point of view.

In the Old World, in perhaps every old system of civilization, labor has been treated as a curse, to be avoided or to be endured. Idleness was the blessing. All their economic Utopias turn out to be full of idleness. It was only in freedom from work that the individual found culture and self-expression. The act of producing wealth by contact of the hand with its raw materials was vulgar, low-caste. To command and spend it was polite, high-caste.

For the American—speaking now of what is characteristic in him—all this is quite upside down. He does not know what to do with idleness. He does not understand it. Generally it kills him.

Work is not a curse. It is his soul’s anxiety and the universal medium of his self-expression. To stain and roughen the hand in the creative conflict with Nature is no disgrace. There is a kind of hunger for it, as if human experience without it were somehow incomplete. Toil leaves no stimga on the hand. The hand is free and the man is whole.

There is no surprise for us in the fact that all but three members of President Coolidge’s cabinet some time made their living by use of their hands in systematic manual labor. But even in the late Labor government of Great Britain there was no such history of the hand. Here certainly for the first time in any form of industrial society the hand has been restored to full dignity. There is no intellectual class, born to that estate; there is no proletariat, born to that condition. It is neither who a man is nor how he lives that determines his social status; what is in him does. The disparities are not inherited. They are from differences of aptitude, capacity and character. What a man has in him, that he may be. At the top of the educational ladder no rungs are reserved for those whose rights are socially predetermined.

The thought that increasingly governs American education all the way up is how to equip the individual for self-expression in work. The emphasis is there, not on scholarship. It is not the function of the individual to exemplify learning; it is the function of education to discover and liberate the powers of the individual for the purpose of his own attack upon reality—for the job in life to which he is best suited. In the field of primary education the demand is more and more that the aptitudes of the individual shall be discovered. What is in him? What can he do?

It is illustrated again in the American idea of adult education, wherein it differs from the ideas that are represented in that movement elsewhere. In England the intent of adult education is to give the wage earner a cultural interest to fill up his leisure time—nature study, astronomy, the physics and chemistry of everyday life, literature, perhaps. In Germany the intent is technical. In Denmark it is to stimulate the mind generally. In France there is not much of any kind. But the American idea of adult education is to enable the man to find greater self-expression in his job.

And now big industry, with its daily problem of bringing men and jobs together in a manner to produce the ideal result, begins to regard the individual first, because that is the better method. Formerly the idea was to analyze the job and then find the man to fit it. The job was first regarded. Now the man is analyzed. What is he suited to do? What would he like to do? Find that out and you know what he will do well. This is the highest discovery yet made by the science of management in the field of human relations—that it pays to regard the individual first. That job a man can do well, whatever it may be, is the job that will call forth his utmost productive power. And it is the job in which also he will be most content.

Inequalities are facts of Nature. They cannot be abolished. There is no evidence that men want to be equal. Certainly they have no equal taste for responsibility. What they do want is equality of opportunity to exercise their powers. Equality of opportunity was first asserted as a social philosophy. Now the science of management gives it expression as an active principle. So at last after a long struggle in the dark, American industry conforms in ways both of thinking and feeling to the social philosophy laid down by the founders.

There are compensations. We have to give up something. As we have no caste of labor, neither have we a caste of pure learning. There are some Americans who sigh for the effect of American prosperity on the life of the mind. Many pedagogues will tell you that in fine scholarship we are inferior to the people of the Old World. They win the Nobel prizes; and that, says the pedagogue, is owing to the fact that we spread education so far and thin. And why we do that is explained in President Coolidge’s great sentence: “We have staked America on the potential capacity of the average citizen.”

Above a life of the mind for a few we esteem a life of richer values for the average. All the wonder of America is so derived.