The Mansion of Happiness (21 page)

One million dollars a day! Suddenly, those theretofore obscure ICC hearings made national news. Brandeis won the case, and Taylor became a household word. In 1911, Taylor explained his methods—Schmidt and the pig iron, Gilbreth and the bricks—in
The Principles of Scientific Management
, a book the business überguru
Peter Drucker once called “the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.”
¹⁵
That’s either very silly or chillingly cynical, but
The Principles of Scientific Management
was the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century.
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Taylor had always said that scientific management would usher in a “mental revolution,” and it did.
¹⁷
Modern life, and not just work life, is Taylorized life.
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Above your desk, the clock ticks; on the shop floor, the camera rolls. Manage your time, waste no motion, multitask: your phone comes with a calendar, your breast pump comes with a stopwatch. “Who is Schmidt?” journalists wanted to know. Vell, ve are.

In 1908,
Edwin Gay, a Harvard economics professor, visited Taylor in Philadelphia. Gay had been frustrated in his efforts to start a business school at Harvard. “I am constantly being told by businessmen that we cannot teach business,” he complained. After meeting Taylor, Gay felt vindicated, declaring, “I am convinced that there is a scientific method involved in and underlying the art of business.” If laws, scientific laws, deducible from observation, govern the management of business, then business, as an academic discipline, was a much easier sell.
Harvard Business School opened the next year, with Gay as its dean. Taylor came to Cambridge and delivered a series of lectures, which he repeated every year until his death.
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Taylor is the mortar, and the Gilbreths the bricks, of every American business school. But it was Brandeis who brought Taylor national and international acclaim.
²⁰
He could not, however, have saved the railroads one million dollars a day—that number was, as one canny reporter noted, the “merest moonshine”—because, despite the parade of experts and algorithms, one million dollars a day was based on little more than a ballpark estimate that the railroads were about 5 percent inefficient.
²¹
That’s how Taylorism usually worked.

How did Taylor arrive at 47.5 tons for Bethlehem Steel? He chose twelve men at random, observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading 23.8 tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten “large powerful Hungarians” and dared them to load 16.5 tons as fast as they could. A few managed to do it in under fourteen minutes; that comes out to a rate of 71 tons per hour. This number Taylor inexplicably rounded up to 75. To get to 47.5, he decreased 75 by about 40 percent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired. Only one—the closest approximation of an actual Schmidt was a man named
Henry Noll—loaded anything close to 47.5 tons in a single day, a rate that was, in any case, not sustainable. After providing two years of consulting services, which could have saved Bethlehem Steel a maximum of $40,000, Taylor billed $100,000 for his services (which works out to be something like $2.5 million today), and then he was fired.
²²

Brandeis, like very many Progressives, believed Taylor, and believed
in
him. What shocked him was that the unions didn’t. Brandeis had long been a labor hero. Convinced that lawyers, by taking the side of capital, had
“allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations,” he had worked to establish the standard of an eight-hour day and had deftly arbitrated labor disputes, including the New York Garment Workers strike of 1910.
²³
But, early in 1911, delivering a speech called “Organized Labor and Efficiency” before the
Boston Central Labor Union, he was heckled. “You can call it scientific management if you want to,” one woman shouted, “but I call it scientific driving.”
²⁴

Brandeis, ever hopeful, pressed on. The next year, he wrote the preface for
Frank Gilbreth’s
Primer on Scientific Management
, attempting to explain, once again, why unions should embrace it. “Under Scientific Management men are led, not driven,” he insisted.
²⁵
By then, Taylor had come under the scrutiny of the House
Committee to Investigate Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management. In the last months of 1911, the committee took testimony from sixty witnesses—workers and experts alike—and in January 1912, it called Taylor himself. Facing the committee chairman,
William Bauchop Wilson, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had gone down into the coal pits at the age of nine and joined the union at eleven, Taylor didn’t offer up Schmidt and the pig iron—he had trotted out that story too many times, and people were getting suspicious—but he did tell another of his favorite yarns, the one about the science of shoveling coal. “The ordinary pig-iron handler,” who is as dumb as a dray horse, is not suited to shoveling coal, Taylor said. “He is too stupid.” (“Anything above 85 IQ in the case of a barber probably represents so much dead waste,” Lewis Terman had written, explaining the great benefit of administering IQ tests to people before assigning them to any particular kind of work. This would speed things up, given that, as Terman believed, it had been well established that 15 percent of the “industrially inefficient” were of “the moron grade.”)
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A first-class man, though, Taylor continued, could lift a shovelful of coal weighing 21.5 pounds, and could move a pile of coal lickety-split.

“You have told us of the effect on the pile,” an exasperated committee member said, “but what about the effect on the man?” Wilson wanted to know what happened to workers who weren’t “first-class men.”

Taylor knew he had performed badly. Asked to proof the transcript of his testimony, he ordered a lackey to steal Wilson’s copy of
The Principles of Scientific Management.
Taylor had the idea that he could lift passages from his book and dump them into his testimony—replacing what he had actually said, under oath—but the switch would be too risky if Wilson had the chance to compare the transcript with the book.
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He didn’t get away with it. Speedy Taylor had met his match. The next year, the president appointed William Bauchop Wilson secretary of labor. But, by then, Taylorism had permeated the culture. So had therbligs. In 1913, an American magazine published a cartoon illustrating the fifteen unnecessary motions of a kiss.
²⁹

Speeding up production meant that workers came home knackered. Some of the
ironworkers Taylor had timed in Bethlehem were so wrecked after a Taylor-sized day’s work that they couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. In 1914,
Henry Ford announced a five-dollar, eight-hour workday—generous terms, at the start—but after that, salaries froze while the speed of production increased; meanwhile, Ford kept reducing his workforce.
³⁰
As one of Ford’s workers later put it, “Ye’re worked like a slave all day and when ye get out ye’re too tired to do anything.”
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Brandeis hoped that an auto worker might spend his evening at a lecture or a political rally, but more likely, he went home and collapsed on the couch while his wife (who, quite possibly, had put in eight hours at Ford’s, too) made dinner and got the children ready for bed—efficiently. For lots of people, probably for most people, speeding up at work—which you might think would mean slowing down at home, enjoying that promised land of leisure—meant just the opposite: home got sped up, too.
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No one knew that better than Frank Gilbreth’s wife, who had rather a lot to say on the subject of exhaustion, and who understood, better than Taylor and Brandeis did, that scientific management isn’t the kind of thing you can leave at the office, or on the factory floor.

Lillian Gilbreth, who first met Taylor in 1907, was pregnant with her fifth child when she attended that meeting with Brandeis in New York in October 1910. Taylor taught efficiency; Brandeis championed it; Gilbreth lived it.

Born in Oakland in 1878, she graduated from the University of California in 1900 and married
Frank Gilbreth four years later. They agreed to have twelve children, six boys and six girls, and to raise them by the most scientific methods. In 1800, the
fertility rate among white women in the United States was over seven; by 1900, it was half that.
³³
The Gilbreths’ plan was, at some level, a eugenics project: the fit should have more children, and
could
have more children, if only they would follow scientific methods. In an era of rapidly shrinking family size, the Gilbreths’ household, a laboratory of efficiency, would show the world what economies of scale were all about.

Between 1905 and 1922, Lillian gave birth thirteen times, at about fifteen-month intervals; one child died, at the age of five, of diphtheria. She breast-fed every baby. The zaniness of the Gilbreths’ family life was recalled by two of their children in
Cheaper by the Dozen
, published in 1948 and made into a film, two years later, starring
Myrna Loy as “Boss,” which is what Frank called his wife.
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Lillian disliked the book and was embarrassed by the film, not least because both completely ignored the fact that, during those years, she ran a consulting business, became the first pioneer of scientific management to earn a doctorate, and wrote very many books.

Admittedly, it’s hard to see past all those pregnancies. In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake,
William Randolph Hearst offered a hundred dollars to anyone who had a baby in one of the city’s emergency hospitals. Frank, who was in the city courting building contracts, wrote to his wife, ribbing her, “I think there is a chance for it if you hurry.”
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He named their summer place the Shoe, after the woman with too many children who lived in one and didn’t know what to do. Once, when he told a colleague, “Lillie always feels better when she is pregnant,” the other guy shot back, “How the hell can she tell?”
³⁶

It always bugged Lillian that lying-
in hospitals took all her pencils and notebooks away.
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But once she was home, she got back at it. Frank considered postpartum bed rest wasted time (“Dear Boss,” he wrote, “
MOTION IS MONEY
”),
³⁸
so Lillian used the weeks after childbirth to edit her husband’s books, most of which she also coauthored—or, as some scholars believe, authored entirely, even when her name didn’t appear on the title page. (Lillian’s prose is distinctively “gabby,” as Frank put it.) In 1911, she edited
Motion Study
after giving birth to Frank junior, and it was likely Lillian, not her husband, who really wrote
The Primer of Scientific Management.
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The next year, the Gilbreths moved to Rhode Island so that Lillian
could enroll in a PhD program at Brown; there she studied psychology, which is what she thought was missing from Taylorism. (She wouldn’t have been able to go to Harvard, which refused to grant a PhD to a woman.) In Providence, the Gilbreths lived so close to campus, Frank joked, that Lillian “could go to class and if a child fell out of the window, catch him before he landed on the ground.”
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Lillian kept what she called “Mother’s Daily Schedule.” It read, in part:

Meanwhile, Taylorized workers kept complaining about being bone-tired. In 1912, molders at an arsenal in Watertown, Massachusetts, refused to work under the eye of a timekeeper. During an investigation into the ensuing strike, it came out that Taylor had told his timekeeper not to bother too much with the stopwatch; better to simply make “a rough guess.” Pouring a mold and making a gun carriage usually took fifty-three minutes; Taylor’s timekeeper told the molders to do it in twenty-four. In a petition to their boss, the molders wrote, “This we believe to be the limit of our endurance. It is humiliating to us, who have always tried to give the Government the best of what was in us. This method is un-American in principle.”
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Taylor, plagued by controversy, grew ill. He sent Frank Gilbreth to deliver lectures in his stead. The Gilbreths, though, had misgivings about Taylorism. In 1913, when Frank was substituting for Taylor in Chicago, Lillian went along, with a nursing three-month-old. Onstage, Frank was challenged by
Emma Goldman. He was pointing to a chart illustrating the hierarchical relationship between the foreman and the worker. “There is nothing in scientific management for the workman,” Goldman shouted. “The only scheme is to have the workman support the loafers on top of him.” Lillian leaned over and whispered something to Frank, who cheerfully turned the chart upside down.
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That was a cheap stunt, but Lillian
had an argument to make, too, which she put forward in
The Psychology of Management
, published in 1914: “The emphasis in successful management lies on the
man
, not on the
work.
”
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And maybe even on the women and children, too.