The Origin of Scientific Management: Why Fred Taylor?
Why (Not) Philadelphia?1
In the autumn of 1878 Fred Taylor took the Reading Railroad from his Germantown
home to Midvale Steel. He was starting his first job as a journeyman machinist and
patternmaker and a dramatic shift in workshop practice was about to begin. Clashing
with skilled workers, Taylor elaborated a new system of production that had a
fundamental impact upon manufacturing in the twentieth century -- not just in
Philadelphia and the rest of the United States, but throughout the industrial world. He
believed that mechanics’ familiarity with the process of production enabled them to
control the shop floor and Taylor set himself the goal of depriving them of that
privilege. Drawing upon the methodologies and rhetoric of science he closely
examined the work process in the machine shop, foundry, steel mill and yard. In
twelve highly productive years that Taylor spent at Midvale he devised time study, the
differential piece rate, an embryonic planning department, functional foremanship,
and experimented with the best methods of cutting metal. He spent the 1890s
elaborating his system as a consultant engineer to eastern firms. After leaving
Bethlehem Steel in 1901 -- the last major project he participated in -- he assumed the
role of promoter of managerial reform, supported by a band of loyal disciples.
Labelled “scientific management,” his ideas became popular in the efficiency craze of
the early twentieth century.2
Taylor claimed scientific management as his own; we should not accept his
inflated assertion. Such boasts were inevitable as management reformers battled to be
1
heard and make a living from lucrative consultancy. Taylor was one individual within
a wider scientific-management movement. Taylor’s reputation has suffered more
recently as historians accuse him of claiming more than is rightfully due him and that
the impact of his system has been exaggerated. All this is true, but it should not
obscure the fact that Taylorism offered a more radical departure from existing
engineering practice than that offered by his contemporaries and that such a major
initiative occurred in Philadelphia. Indeed, I would argue, that Taylorism can only be
understood as a product of a local environment. Equally important, the emergence of
his system tells us about the nature of shop-floor relations, the competitive position of
Philadelphia engineering and the characteristics of her entrepreneurial class. The
arrival of Taylor and Taylorism in the 1870s and 1880s shines a torch upon a
machinery building industry at its peak.
Although the scientific management movement has been the subject of intense
academic scrutiny and Taylor’s story is well known, we still lack a satisfactory
answer to the questions: why was it Taylor who developed such novel ideas; why
were some proprietors willing to listen to him; and why, given the city’s pioneering
role, did workshop owners ultimately reject his scheme? Harry Braverman, perhaps
the movement’s harshest critic, sees Taylor as part of a transnational capitalist
impulse to deskill labour that has little to do with Taylor as an individual and nothing
to do with Philadelphia.3 While such broad sociological critiques of scientific
management inevitably cast no light on Taylor, coming to grips with his personal
significance has caused problems for historians. Contemporaries who knew him
judged him a crank, which leads some older studies to emphasise eccentricity as an
explanation for scientific management. He is an inviting target for psychohistory.
2
Sudhir Kakar sees Taylor’s early life as conditioned by the dominance of his mother,
his insecure sexual identity and the search for a father figure.4 Wary of the old
fashioned ‘great men’ approach to history writing and reacting to speculative attempt
to ‘psychologise’ Taylor’s life, Daniel Nelson and Robert Kanigel, his two modern
biographers, put stress on the normality of their subject: Taylor’s decision to abandon
his schooling, for example, is interpreted as the result of nothing more than poor eye
sight which was corrected with glasses; his hasty and mildly aberrant decision to
apprentice himself as a patternmaker and machinist was “no radical turn,” according
to Kanigel, and is explained as something any rich lad of his generation might do.5
While this approach is a useful antidote to the ‘Napoleonic’ interpretation of history
and the conjectures of psychohistory, by emphasising the normality of Taylor, what is
socially and historically significant about the man and his early environment washes
away. As Nelson and Kanigel rightly point out, Taylor shared many of the ideas and
prejudices of his generation. But, nevertheless, ‘ordinary people’ placed outside
familiar environments can create extra-ordinary results.
I
To make sense of Taylor and to understand the importance of Philadelphia in the rise
of scientific management we need to closely scrutinise Taylor’s background and the
social, economic and technical milieu of the Philadelphia machine shop he was thrust
into during the seventies. Historians have not explored the particular set of features
which made Philadelphia mechanical engineering the birthplace of scientific
management. What also demands attention is the puzzling fact that once promulgated,
local workshops rejected scientific management. Why did the pioneer city fail to
grasp the labour system that might have preserved Philadelphia’s engineering lead?
Most of Taylor’s successes occurred elsewhere. Examining the intersection of the
3
personal and industrial narratives explains the significance of Taylor and
Philadelphia’s place in the development of scientific management.
Fred Taylor was born into an upper-class family in 1856. His father briefly
practised law, but the family lived on the proceeds of an inherited investment
portfolio. Fred was uninterested in most of his parent’s wider social projects;
nevertheless, their Quaker turned Unitarian beliefs instilled in him a puritan zeal and a
sense of discipline that encouraged a striving for goals in the face of hostility and
ridicule. He was “born with the high moral courage to seek and follow the one best
way regardless of how it might appear to others.” Although a part of the rentier class,
his parents identified with Republicanism, the political programme of Philadelphia’s
manufacturers. His mother, Emily Winslow Taylor, was one of a group of feminists
and radical abolitionists who gathered in London for the 1840 world anti-slavery
conference. The intellectual driving force of the family, she was friends with William
Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, William H. Furness and Lucretia Mott.6 Brought up
to lead others, he was destined to assume not the role of ending slavery as his mother
had done, but to further the mission of the city’s workshop owners.7 The two
objectives were not so far apart as it first appears. The industrial transformation of
Philadelphia in the 1840s and 50s stimulated the development of free labour and antislavery ideas and the political success of the manufacturing class during the Civil War
prepared the ground for a new system of production. Republicanism introduced
individual freedom for all adult males and Fred extended its programme to the interior
of the workshop. Older relations between master and mechanic and craft mutualism
(especially rituals preventing overwork and those antithetical to marketplace ideas)
4
were replaced by incentive wage systems and an insistence that management knew
best.
In 1874 Fred complained of eye strain and his parents, worried that he was
studying too hard, encouraged him to withdraw from the demanding environment of
Phillips Exeter Academy and shelve plans to enter Harvard.8 Still keen to have Fred
attend college, they suggested he explore engineering as an alternative and less
intellectually demanding vocational subject. He returned to Philadelphia but his life
remained unsettled. Fred let academic ambition slip entirely: he passed the Harvard
entrance exam but never attended college; and he failed to follow an interest in
engineering, despite the fact that Philadelphia’s Polytechnic College was one of the
few institutions in the United States offering degrees in mechanical engineering.9 Out
of the blue, in the autumn he apprenticed as a machinist and patternmaker at the
Enterprise Hydraulic Works, a small firm with thirty-four hands at 2218 Race Street.10
Here in the dim workshop he would execute intricate designs in wood and metal.
Fred, an earnest and stubborn young man, was in the process of abandoning parental
ambitions and cleaving to his own goals in life.11 There is a world of a difference
between Harvard student and apprentice mechanic and the gap between the two
measured the extent of Fred’s youthful rebellion. The senior partner of the business
was Joseph L. Ferrell also a Germantown resident and family acquaintance.12
Following long held practice, the Taylors, as wealthy parents, agreed to waive the first
year’s pay in return for a more varied training diet.
Hard working, earnest and competitive with a love of sport, his restless spirit
could have, under different circumstances, secured him a post as colonial
5
administrator in some far flung territory of one of Europe’s empires, or running a
cattle ranch in the West. Instead, curiosity and ambition drove him to discover the
dark and unreconstructed world of the Philadelphia workshop. This was Fred Taylor’s
personal version of Kipling’s great imperial adventure. What looked like a youthful
escape from the puritan goals of his parents was, in fact, the displacement of their
agenda on to another terrain. Fired by his mother’s sense of leadership and moral
purpose, after the briefest exposure to shop life, Fred Taylor realised that his task in
life was to transform the world of work. Also, just like some colonial official, Taylor
‘went native’: he dressed plainly and affected what he took to be the deportment and
language of the workman; he cultivated blasphemy (though he drew the line at
smoking and imbibing, and never drank tea or coffee); and developed a hostility to the
‘effeminate’ college educated. Yet, never, even for one moment, did this obscure his
driving ambition nor cause him to lose sight of the interests of the company that
employed him.13
But for the temporary hiatus in Fred’s otherwise promising school days, one
that sent him down a different path than was expected of a young man from his social
background, he would have gone to college and then to an otherwise unremarkable
career as a lawyer, doctor or engineer. Scientific management would have been born
but the circumstances would have been different. Fred’s stubbornness and his
adolescent crisis, compounded by the seemingly endless depression of the 1870s,
suggests that the family and Fred made hasty or ill considered decisions. The
Enterprise Hydraulic Works and Joseph Ferrell were of indifferent quality. The firm’s
technical reputation was in decline: by 1883, statistician Lorin Blodget reported that
the shop was manufacturing simple elevators and hoisting equipment.14 In the late
6
eighties, the ailing Southwark Foundry recruited Ferrell’s services in a desperate bid
to stave of bankruptcy.15 Although John Merrick and Charles Porter, two of the
corporation’s officials, disagreed about everything, neither trusted Ferrell and Porter
called him "an oily-tongued man."16 Ferrell soon departed and more capable hands
rejuvenated the business.
The family’s decision to indenture Fred, even though commonplace for many
young men in Philadelphia, was entirely out of character for someone from his upperclass background.17 A typical son of a workshop owner might tour the shop where he
would absorb a variety of manual and technical skills and learn the art of commanding
labour before moving on to the draughting department and the general office. To be tied
to the shop floor for four years was an act of faith and gritty determination that
Taylor’s well-off peers no longer experienced. An increasing number of fathers
encouraged sons of Taylor’s generation to skip manual training entirely and go directly
into clerical occupations.18 Those who came from professional or affluent family
backgrounds (that is, those closest in social character to Taylor) were more likely to go
either directly into the draughting or commercial offices or to spend a large part of their
time there before assuming executive positions. Extra years of schooling gave them an
advantage where mathematical calculations, drawing and double-entry book keeping
were required. Taylor’s intimate managerial associates were men who first attended
college before entering the workshop. Wilfred Lewis, a close friend, graduated from
MIT, spent two years in the shop of William Sellers before entering the draughting
office; Clarence Clark, son of a Midvale proprietor, graduated from the University of
Pennsylvania before joining Midvale; and Ernest Wright, son of another Midvale owner
and family friend, graduated from Stevens Institute before turning to a career in
7
engineering.19 College, two years on the shop floor, then the draughting office was the
normal route to an executive position in a Philadelphia workshop for Taylor’s affluent
peers. He not only turned his back on college but also quite deliberately chose to spend
four years as an apprentice and twelve years at Midvale on, or very close to, the shop
floor in spite of his ample qualifications for early entry to the office. Forced to accept a
clerical position at Midvale, he gave it up as soon as possible to return to the ranks of
journeyman machinist. In his late twenties, fearing that college graduates might
shoulder him aside in the race for promotion, Taylor received a degree in mechanical
engineering from Stevens Institute, yet never attended classes. He need not have
worried about college boys: in contrast to his better qualified contemporaries who
spent less time in the workshop, Taylor’s intimate knowledge of shop-floor life
enabled him to carry out fundamental changes to engineering processes with a
supreme confidence they lacked.
Men, like Taylor, whose ambition was to join the proprietorial class but who
lacked the lineage to guarantee succession were relatively rare in Philadelphia
workshops by the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Forty years of expansion
had created a mechanical class that recruited from within. Much earlier, when machine
building was a new industry, young men from a variety of artisan and commercial
backgrounds filled the ranks of entrepreneurs. But the workshop class of 1880 was
heavily recruited from within its own ranks. Sixty per cent of all workshop owners had
fathers who were themselves owners, or had been owners, of engineering businesses; a
further 10 per cent had entrepreneurial backgrounds in other industries (see Table 1).
Sons followed fathers into the same branch of industry and often into the same firm,
where they assimilated the traditions and customs of the workshop. As capital
8
requirements grew, naturally sons of successful and wealthy workshop proprietors used
their position to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. When Taylor joined Midvale he
started at the bottom with no assurance that he would become a proprietor. Lacking an
automatic right of entry to ownership disadvantaged Taylor and placed him on the
outside (though still in a privileged position), but it also allowed him to travel without
the accumulated baggage of shop culture -- a factor that fundamentally conditioned
his whole career. 20
It is Taylor’s attachment to the shop floor and his role as outsider that provides
the answer to the question ‘why Taylor?’ Not being the son of a workshop owner, nor
an inheritor of the habits of the workshop afforded him new ways of looking at
familiar problems. The passing on of workshops from one generation to the next
through inheritance did little for the innovative zeal of Philadelphia machine builders
in the seventies and eighties. The pioneers of the thirties and forties handed over
control to their sons but many carried on the business with little enthusiasm. Two
large firms, the Bridesburg Manufacturing Company, makers of textile machinery,
and the Southwark Foundry were badly hit as the golden baton of ownership passed
from fathers to sons.21 Taylor’s arrival in the seventies gave a much needed boost to
the creativity of the mechanical class. Most commentators note the significance of
Taylor’s superior social status in insulating him from the consequences of workingclass hostility as he set about reorganising the workshop, but this misses the point22:
after all, entrepreneurs and their managerial associates did not live in the same streets
as their employees, yet it was Taylor, not workshop owners and their sons, that
initiated far reaching changes in the seventies and eighties. Fred was not the offspring
of a machine builder and so was unaccustomed to the social practices of the workshop
9
(although he subscribed to the general class outlook of proprietors). Crucially, he
refused to accept as binding the compact between mechanics and owners that had
regulated production and determined the broad rhythm of shop-floor life in
Philadelphia engineering since the foundation of the industry a half century earlier.
Although most trades and departments altered substantially in the face of changes in
the division of labour and the introduction of machine tools, nevertheless, craftsmen
in the 1870s and beyond still controlled the machine and, as a result, in large measure
determined the rhythm and pace of the shop floor.23 Taylor never considered himself
party to an agreement that allowed skilled workers a degree of self regulation in return
for their active co-operation in the production of complex machinery. He insisted on
the right of owners to direct the labours of mechanics; he rejected currently held
views on what was an acceptable workload; and he was the first to break the racist
understanding between master and mechanic that kept Philadelphia engineering lilywhite.
A comparison with the life of Samuel Vauclain, a head of the Baldwin
Locomotive Works, reveals the significance of Fred’s distance from workshop culture
and his role as outsider. The same age as Taylor, Vauclain was born in Port
Richmond, an industrial neighbourhood of Philadelphia, the son of a master mechanic
and railroad official. His father had helped build Matthias Baldwin’s earliest
locomotives and engineering was in his blood. “My first picture book was an
illustrated catalog of the Baldwin Locomotive Works” and in the workshop he
“inhaled coal smoke greedily” even as a young child. Sammy Vauclain served his
apprenticeship at the Altoona shop of the Pennsylvania Railroad and in 1883 joined
the Baldwin Locomotive Works as foreman of the Seventeenth Street shop before
10
entering the partnership sixteen years later. By any conventional measure Vauclain’s
career was a success. He rose from lesser social circumstances than Taylor to
executive position in the largest locomotive business in the world. Like Taylor, he had
a truncated domestic life and a voracious appetite for work; most waking hours he
spent in the shop six and often seven days a week. Baldwin, founded in 1831, already
had a successful and well-established system of production and the firm more
moulded Vauclain to its habits than the other way round. In his autobiography,
Steaming Up!, Vauclain portrayed himself as a new broom sweeping aside cautious
managerial practices as he introduced hydraulic machinery in the blacksmith
department and electric-powered tools and overhead cranes. But his contribution to
the technical reorganisation of production was incremental and minor by national and
international standards. He was a vigorous executive but he left intact Baldwin’s gang
piecework system and strove to increase productivity within the well-established
parameters of existing shop practice and mechanical culture.24 Taylor, in contrast, had
fewer preconceived ideas and at Midvale joined an expanding new foundry business
on the periphery of engineering, less caught up in the traditions of craft autonomy so
prevalent in machine building.
II
The Taylor family’s mildly out-of-the-ordinary decision to allow their son to spend so
much of his time on the shop floor of a Philadelphia engineering business, of itself, is
hardly the stuff of history. But Taylor was entering a machine-building world
substantially different in character from that of other centres of American engineering.
The city held a reputation for building heavy machinery -- steam engines, machine
tools, hydraulic equipment, locomotives and iron steam ships -- collectively known as
‘Philadelphia Style.’ Customers ordered machines produced singly or in small batches
11
by highly experienced mechanics to suit their individual requirement.25 Demand was
often insufficient or too precarious for firms to specialise and shops might turn out a
variety of other machines. William Sellers & Co. is an extreme example: not only did
the firm hold a national reputation in tool making, it also produced boiler injectors,
shafting, hangers, turntables, and pivot bridges. In 1870, machine tools represented
only thirty-nine per cent of total output.26 Separate and discontinuous processes of
production, with strong departmental traditions forced proprietors to rely heavily on
the initiative of their workforce. In contrast to Philadelphia, New England, the other
major centre of the industry, specialised in mass-produced light engineering along the
interchangeable system.27 Given the misleading title the “American System” by
historians, this division of labour was more intense and the role of the mechanic more
constrained.28 Within the framework imposed by the design office and the foreman,
Philadelphia mechanics planned and executed their work as their judgement dictated.
They worked at a pace unlike that of the textile-mill operative or the New England
mechanic, but according to a rhythm considered appropriate to ‘manly’ independence
and their status as skilled workers. Yet such a system could threaten innovation and
create high labour costs. Technical and marketing considerations encouraged
engineering firms to grow in size but, as Bruce Laurie and Mark Schmitz have found,
this was at the expense of declining marginal rates of efficiency.29 The city had a
number of large engineering and foundry businesses and it is no coincidence that the
first experiments in scientific management should occur in their shops.
The depression of the seventies deposed Philadelphia as the pre-eminent
centre of engineering. Important in many machinery lines, the city was the centre of
American tool building. [Deflate figure with Historical Stats] Output of machinery
12
in Philadelphia rose by only two per cent in current prices during the decade -- an
increase from $13.2 million in 1870 to $13.5 million in 1880 (see Table 2). Output
dropped rapidly in the depression: at the high point of the cycle in 1873, the Baldwin
Locomotive Works produced 437 machines, falling to 130 two years later, and a
sustained recovery did not materialise until 1878-9.30 Even a large and well-managed
business like engine-builder I. P. Morris & Co. was "suffering in these hard times."31
In 1877 the firm’s turnover declined by thirty-five per cent and profits shrank to
$7,621 -- three years later good times returned and profits swelled to over $127,000.32
The onset of depression precipitated strikes at Baldwin and the Southwark Foundry
and, as unemployment rose, mechanics turned to political action through the
Greenback Labor party. Well-to-do businessmen also felt the pinch as they abandoned
membership of their cherished Union League. In 1873 membership stood as 1,861, six
years later rolls had fallen to eight hundred and fifty one.33 Professor Robert E.
Thompson of the University of Pennsylvania, a keen disciple of political-economist
Henry Carey, was alarmed by the social consequences of the severe downturn in the
market: "Men are walking the streets of our great cities, morning, noon and night,
week after week, asking nothing but a chance to earn something, and asking in
vain."34 The arrival of healthy able-bodied mechanics and labourers seeking
assistance startled officials at the House of Corrections. The worst years of the
depression coincided with the Centennial Exhibition when city authorities did all they
could to keep the mass of destitute beyond the gaze of visitors. 35
Philadelphia’s early start in mechanical engineering and sustained growth
from the late forties until the financial panic of 1873 made her builders prosperous
and gave them a considerable share of regional and national markets. In the
13
competitive environment of the seventies these advantages were threatened not only
by traditional rivals in New York City and New England but from builders in the
West. Some branches did worse than others: locomotives and textile machinery did
relatively well, while steam engines and machine tools did badly. Philadelphia’s millengine builders, who suffered a decline in output of over forty per cent in current
prices over the decade, were forced to make painful re-adjustment to the long-term
decline of their southern markets, to face up to problems created by the increasing
scale of business organisation and the difficulty of handing over ownership and
executive authority to a new generation. Machine tools, the third largest branch of
building in the city, suffered a seventeen per cent decline in output (see Table 3).
Tools, as a capital good supplied to other capital-goods industries, experienced more
intense and wilder swings than for machinery supplied to consumer goods industries
(for example, textile machinery). Order books collapsed at the onset of the financial
panic, while the prolonged nature of the depression destroyed many tool firms before
better times came to their rescue. Builders throughout the country slashed prices and
some hunted out other lines of business to keep them going. Mid western cities
challenged Philadelphia’s leadership in tools: just as Philadelphia builders had earlier
wrested supremacy from New England, so now Cincinnati, and later Chicago usurped
her. The seventies was a watershed in the development of machine building in the
city. The rise of new and more dynamic centres of production forced the city to make
a painful adjustment to a more competitive environment. New York temporarily took
over the lead from Philadelphia in 1880 and ten years later Chicago overhauled them
both. The industry recovered from the devastation of the 1870s and substantial
expansion occurred in the late eighties and nineties, but Philadelphia never regained
its premier position.
14
Philadelphia engineering may have suffered from what Philip Scranton calls
“second generation burn out”36 but proprietors were keen to remodel the workshop
and reduce costs – a task given greater urgency by the depressed seventies. Indeed,
Taylor, who entered the workshop at a time when managerial initiatives were under
heated discussion, is best seen as a product of this broad movement -- while scientific
management was a response to what he perceived as its shortcomings. During the
seventies, firms tried to integrate their disparate and autonomous departments through
the use of a shop order system. Here the firm issued instruction to workers and
attached cards to components as they moved through the shop in order to track
progress and properly allocate costs. Captain Henry Metcalfe, officer in charge of
manufacturing at Frankford Arsenal, Philadelphia, was an early pioneer of the system.
Baldwin and other workshops used the draughting department as the locus of the their
shop order system.37 (Later, Taylor advanced his rate-fixing department as a more
bureaucratic alternative to these simple managerial structures.) The impact of the
draughting department is often underestimated in the shop order system. No longer
were most mechanics actively involved in machine design. Harry Braverman claims
that Taylorist scientific management severed the organic link in human work between
conception and execution yet, clearly, proprietors were already circumscribing the
creative power of mechanics and needed no prompting from Taylor.38
The Philadelphia workshop environment also encouraged the development of
systematic managerial thinking. Henry Towne, the first to publicly call for the
recognition of workshop management as a science, was the son of John Towne,
partner in the Southwark Foundry and, later, I.P. Morris & Co.39 Henry broke off his
15
studies at the University of Pennsylvania during the Civil War to take up a post in the
draughting department of his father’s business at Port Richmond Iron Works.
Studying engineering at the Sorbonne, he later worked for William Sellers before, in
1868, setting up his own business in Connecticut as Yale & Towne. In 1877, a group
of local mechanical and civil engineers, academics, and proprietors formed the
Philadelphia Engineers’ Club to encouraged “social intercourse among men of
practical science.”40
Managerial reforms of the seventies that centred on the shop floor tried to
enlist the mechanic’s support.41 Many Philadelphia shops introduced piecework
believing that men were motivated by a seemingly transparent connection between
effort and reward. The Baldwin Locomotive Works – which experimented with
piecework as early as the 1850s – developed a more advanced system of collective
piece contracting. Here, an experienced mechanic took charge of a group of men and
agreed a price with the company for a number of components or assemblies. Baldwin
secured the support of skilled mechanics as the best way to closely supervise the men
and assure quality and delivery.42 Taylor was familiar with these initiatives – indeed
Midvale introduced piecework and a shop order system prior to Taylor’s arrival43 -but, at the same time, his belief that mechanics were withholding output pushed his
remedies in a completely different direction. What separated Taylor from all other
shop-floor managerial initiatives of this period was his implacable opposition to coopting the energies and wisdom of mechanics and his insistence that management
accumulate knowledge of production independently of employees.
16
III
Into Philadelphia’s profoundly unstable industrial environment entered the young
Taylor, himself riven by his own personal crisis. The qualities that he possessed and
his insertion into the shop floor helped Philadelphia builders explore ways to shift the
existing organisation of production to a new stage. The emergence of scientific
management in Philadelphia is a story that intertwines the life trajectory of an
individual with the social dynamics of classes, the crises of late nineteenth-century
capitalism and the technical development of an industry. With his social connections
Taylor would have expected to find a job in one of the city’s important machine-tool
firms, but those with national reputations such as Charles Van Haagen & Co. and
Ferris & Miles were bankrupt, and William Sellers & Co. was in serious difficulty.44
Production at Sellers fell from $707,542 in 1870 to $446,960 ten years later -- a drop of
thirty-seven per cent.45 William Sellers, the senior partner, who was a major force in
the creation of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, resigned from the prestigious
post of vice president of the board of finance in order to devote his full attention to the
affairs of his ailing tool business and Edgemoor Ironworks and Midvale Steel.46 The
depression constrained Taylor’s career choices, but the collapse in profits made
builders like Sellers receptive to radical solutions to their problems. If Philadelphia
industry was to compete successfully against producers in other cities and regain its
lost glory, the power of the skilled worker needed curbing and costs reduced. In 1878
Taylor found employment at Midvale through connections with the principal stock
holders, Edward Clark and William Sellers. Taylor’s personal decision to enter a
machine shop, combined with the crisis in the city’s engineering industry was to
produce extra-ordinary results.
17
At the time of Taylor’s arrival at Midvale Steel the business operated an open
hearth furnace, smithy, machine shop and set of rolls from half a dozen dilapidated
buildings on a dismal malaria ridden site in a section of the city appropriately named,
Nicetown. The firm was expanding its production of high-quality steel forgings for
tools, locomotive tyres and naval guns and between 1878 and 1882 the number of
employees rose from four to six hundred.47 Midvale, as a foundry business was on the
periphery of engineering. Large batch production, rather than custom order made most
of the tasks simpler compared with machine building. This proved vital for the
success of Taylor’s experiments. Even with Midvale’s increase in output, the effects
of the depression were still evident and Taylor spent the first two months as a labourer
in the machine shop. From then on his rise was meteoric: he became rate-fixing clerk,
journeyman machinist, gang boss, foreman of machine shop, master mechanic in
charge of repairs and maintenance, chief draughtsman, and finally chief engineer -- all
within the space of six years. Even after promotion beyond foreman he retained
charge of the machine shop.
A protracted fight with mechanics to raise output brought home to an
inexperienced Taylor his own and management’s ignorance of the work process.48 As
the world knows, this realisation led to his revolutionary solution: managers should
not rely on the co-operation of skilled mechanics but, instead, familiarise themselves
with the intricacies of the work process and through their own observations and
calculations, determine the appropriate techniques and level of output. Using time
study and controlled experiments he set about finding out just what levels of
production were achievable. In 1881 Taylor began his time and motion studies, and
two years later William Sellers permitted him to hire a clerk. Taylor consistently went
18
over the heads of his bosses at Midvale to deal directly with Sellers. Where Midvale
managers protested at the cost of some of these experiments Sellers determinedly
protected his protégé.49 Compared with most Philadelphia machine shops, work at
Midvale was unsophisticated and repetitive, making the job of analysing, recording
and tabulating each movement of the mechanic much easier. Around 1883 Taylor
created a planning department. Here data from time-and-motion studies were
gathered, piece rates calculated and instruction cards directly issued to mechanics. By
ignoring the traditional foreman, the process bypassed an important layer in the
existing chain of command.
Unwilling to rely on information offered by his mechanics, Taylor
simultaneously set about determining the best speed, feed and angle of cut for
machining. These metal-cutting experiments used vast amounts of time, materials and
clerical support, yet William Sellers never wavered in his commitment. Taylor’s
persistence paid off, for in 1898 while he was at Bethlehem Steel he developed highspeed tool steel.
As Taylor’s responsibilities increased, foundry workers and common labourers
came under his gaze. The work of the Midvale machine shop involved repairs and
simpler machining, but early scientific management found that dissecting even some
of these tasks to be beyond their capability and often turned to studying the
uncomplicated operations of yard labourers. Unskilled labourers were also easier to
replace and made fewer objections to the arbitrary reorganisation of work that timestudy assistants demanded. Taylor was keen to know what were the physical limits to
work and experiments with common labour seemed to him the easiest way to achieve
19
results.50 Taylor broke up the ethnic loyalties of American, Irish-Catholic and English
work gangs by employing African Americans from outside the plant. Taylor was the
first superintendent to flout the racial bar in Philadelphia machine building. He
employed African Americans in skilled and unskilled positions in the foundry and
yard, although they were absent from the machine shop.51 Taylor also disturbed the
habits of the hard-drinking English and Irish immigrants by preventing the
consumption of alcohol at work, stopping men leaving the mill for lunch and
recruiting the support of the local Catholic priest and temperance society. Historians
are right to associate Taylor with the technical reorganisation of work and wage
incentives but his concern to increase production drove him, however tangentially, to
alter the social pattern of the shop floor.
Daniel Nelson calls Taylor’s decision to join Midvale “a logical conclusion to
his apprenticeship.”52 But the most obvious choice for a well-bred young man with
burning ambition would have been to enter the draughting department of William
Sellers. The shop was the locus of technical creativity in Philadelphia and ambitious
lads, many from well-to-do backgrounds, trained in its draughting offices. In addition
to Henry Towne, it acted as a training ground for other systematisers: the company
allowed Wilfred Lewis, assistant chief engineer, to join Taylor at Midvale before he
went on to make a career in the scientific management movement. Norwegian-born
Carl Barth, a prominent member of the scientific management movement, spent
nearly fourteen years in the Sellers draughting office before joining Taylor at
Bethlehem Steel in 1899. Taylor would often go there to seek William Sellers’
assistance and have the workshop make prototypes of machines he developed. But for
his sudden career change and the economic crisis of the seventies, he might have
20
entered its gates as an apprentice or a journeyman. Yet, if he had gone there, Taylor’s
contribution to scientific management would have been delayed or muted. On the
edge of machine building at Midvale he had freedom: the business was youthful and
growing rapidly, and he played an active part in developing new ideas; there were
more pliant unskilled labourers and fewer of the highly trained and prickly mechanics
that were to make the introduction of scientific management so difficult in later years;
local management was easy-going and William Sellers, who hardly ever appeared in
the works, adopted an indulgent hands-off approach. Not working in Philadelphia’s
premier tool shop had its advantages: at Midvale Fred was a big fish in a small pool. It
was the business needs of William Sellers & Co. that propelled the youthful scientific
management forward, yet the less sophisticated Midvale machine shop proved to be
the perfect laboratory. William Sellers greatly admired Taylor’s ideas and introduced
his method of calculating work. Sellers support for Taylor was part of a bigger
picture. Like most workshop owners, Sellers was already engaged in cost cutting: in
the sixties he standardised and simplifying machine components, and in the seventies
reorganised the firm’s departmental structure.53 The visceral experience of the
depressed seventies encouraged Sellers to support Taylor.54
When William Sellers stood down as president of Midvale, Taylor’s long-term
prospects with the firm received a mortal blow. He and his brother-in-law, Clarence
Clark, had looked forward to taking charge of the firm. In 1886 Edward W. Clark and
James A. Wright sold their interests in the business to Charles Harrah Sr. Taylor’s
dealings with Harrah and his son, who took over after the father’s death in 1888, were
cordial, but gone was the fruitful relationship with William Sellers. In 1890, without
the patrimony of a safe berth in the front office of a Philadelphia workshop, he was
21
forced to take a job as general manager of a paper mill business with plants in Maine
and Wisconsin. This was a poor career move, for not only did it subject him to much
travel, which he hated, and his wife to unfamiliar surroundings in rural Maine, but it
left his managerial reforms in abeyance for three years. For the rest of his working life
he remained beyond proprietorship – a privileged outsiders – choosing the role of
independent consultant in what became known to the world as scientific
management.55
IV
Philadelphia metalworking and mechanical engineering was fertile ground for the
development of Taylor’s ideas but, ironically, the birthplace of Taylorism proved
resistant to the application of scientific management. The Midvale flagship let
Taylorist ideas slip during the nineties and supporters of the movement recognised
only two Philadelphia adherents -- the Tabor Manufacturing Company and Link Belt
Engineering -- by the beginning of the twentieth century.56 Shop floor resistance, the
adoption of alternative managerial approaches to controlling labour and the particular
requirements of Philadelphia’s heavy engineering all meant that Taylorism achieved
greater success in other cities and other industries.
The power of the city’s mechanics, which first excited Taylor’s desire to
reorganise the workshop, checked the spread of managerial reform. In the winter of
1894-95 Taylor conducted metal-cutting experiments at the shipyard of William
Cramp, but mechanics and foremen stoutly resisted reorganisation. He systematically
overhauled belting, introduced a central store and tool rooms (with uniform methods
of tool dressing), and experimented with different cutting tools and machine speeds
(the latter conducted jointly with Sellers & Co. at its shop). Workers made life
22
difficult for foremen, and foremen and other workshop functionaries -- whose jobs
were also under threat from Taylorism -- set about sabotaging his efforts. The firm
had little to show for its substantial expenditure on new equipment and facilities and
eventually withdrew him from the yard. Taylor claimed that the limited improvements
soon disappeared as Cramp reverted to its old ways, but this exaggerates the victory
achieved by craft traditionalism.57 Cramp tried again in 1903 with the appointment of
Russell W. Davenport as vice president of the company. One of Taylor’s bosses at
Midvale, he had been instrumental in inviting him to Bethlehem Steel in 1898.
Davenport’s untimely death the following year, on the eve of his promotion to
president, undoubtedly blunted managerial reorganisation.58 Part of the problem in
gauging the success of Taylor’s efforts at Cramp, or anywhere else, was the
impossibly high standard set by him and his supporters. If a firm did not willingly
carry out wholesale, permanent and costly changes, it was not considered part of the
movement. Nevertheless, the fact that Cramp extended an invitation to Taylor and
Davenport suggests that the corporation was keen to confront entrenched craft
tradition in the yard. The competitive logic of world ship building, and naval
construction in particular, forced Cramp to change methods of production and new
heavy tools and hydraulic power were introduced independently of Taylor.
Unpalatable as it was to Taylorists, their reforms were just part of a much broader
managerial initiative to restructure nineteenth-century methods of machine-shop
production. Although the craft character of shipbuilding remained largely intact, when
Cramp confronted its skilled workers in an International Association of Machinists led
dispute in 1899, the firm was able to replace many mechanics with semi-skilled
machine tenders.59
23
Six years after Taylor’s visit to Cramp and following his experiments on high
speed machining at Bethlehem Steel, Taylor rejoined the fight against Philadelphia’s
workshop culture. Taylor received an invitation from William Sellers to reorganise
the workshop and resume his metal cutting experiments. But, just as at Cramp, he
faced determined resistance. Bowing to the pressure of his managers, William Sellers
soon concluded Taylor’s consultancy.60
Although Taylorism existed in only a handful of shops, Philadelphia builders
such as Sellers and Cramp searched for ways to improve their competitiveness in the
unstable business environment of the late nineteenth century. They were proud of
their own achievement in managing a decentralised shop system and controlling a
refractory labour force, and were not always willing to share the credit with Taylor.
The Baldwin Locomotive Works rejected out of hand the paraphernalia of Taylorism,
believing that in gang piecework they already had in place an effective system of
labour control. If some firms could make substantial productivity gains as a result of
introducing scientific management, this was more a reflection of the poor state of their
management, argued Alba Johnson head of Baldwin, than any intrinsic worth of
Taylor’s methods.61 But what ultimately stopped firms introducing Taylorist ideas
was not reluctance to confront their skilled workforce but a belief that Taylorism
offered little in the way of greater efficiency. A common complaint made by
workshop owners was that the planning department constituted an unnecessary burden
on the ‘productive’ side of the business.62 What persuaded many Philadelphia
workshop owners to proceed with caution was concern that centralisation and
routinisation of the workshop reduced their shops’ ability to handle a range of diverse
tasks and products. So long as firms accepted orders for widely differing machines,
24
then flexibility remained essential and extensive time study and a planning department
was more of a burden than a potential for cost cutting.63 For firms that had reached
their maturity, like Baldwin, Sellers and Cramp, the social and technical cost of going
over to the full Taylor system outweighed the advantages. As Howell Harris
demonstrates, in the twentieth-century employers combined commitment to this
seemingly archaic system of labour relations and management structure with attacks
on craft unions through Open Shop campaigns.64 The city’s firms were slow to give
up the nineteenth century craft organisation of the workshop, while newer and more
dynamic firms in a variety of other industries eagerly grasped at the new methods of
managerial reform. For better or worse, Philadelphia foundry and engineering shops
gave the world Taylorism; but the city’s reluctance to adopt the system it did much to
pioneer caused the world to forget the importance of Philadelphia. In contrast, the
Progressive Era turned Fred Taylor, management consultant and publicity seeker, into
an icon of the efficiency movement.
25
Table 1
Occupational Background of Philadelphia Workshop Proprietors in 1880
______________________________________________________________
Family Background
Number
Per cent
______________________________________________________________
Workshop Proprietors
32
60
Non-Machine Building Businesses
4
8
Professional and Clerical
4
8
Commercial
4
8
Skilled Worker
7
13
Farming
2
4
__
___
53
101
TOTALS:
_____________________________________________________________________
Father’s occupation determined family background. Three hundred and thirty five
workshop owners, producing textile machinery, steam engines, locomotives, machine
tools, iron ships, printing presses and brick making machinery, enumerated in the 1880
Manuscript Manufacturing Census and business directories, were linked to standard
published biographical source, city directories, and the Manuscript Population Census.
Social historians recognise the difficulty of linkage, nevertheless, family background
was arrived at for 16 per cent of proprietors. Predictably, linkage was relatively
easier among large builders. Excluding small builders – since this study focuses on
larger businesses -- would raise the proportion of mechanics inheriting a
26
workshop.
27
Table 2
Leading Machine Building Cities in the United States, 1870-1890
_________________________________________________________________
Number of
Capital
Workers1
Output2
Establishments
__________________________________________________________________
1870
1. Philadelphia
166
10,911,757
7,752
13,218,838
2. New York
120
5,150,650
3,819
7,437,177
3. Worcester
90
2,906,300
2,471
4,952,896
4. Providence
65
3,464,060
2,903
4,081,376
5. St Louis
31
2,079,000
1,416
3,795,280
1. New York
287
10,635,508
9,753
14,710,835
2. Philadelphia
226
12,231,058
9,936
13,455,238
3. Chicago
133
4,455,417
4,887
8,934,629
4. Brooklyn
121
4,079,250
3,890
6,984,832
5. Boston
134
4,824,833
3,845
6,234,775
1. Chicago
213
22,410,275
12,260
30,227,816
2. Philadelphia
345
30,680,644
16,387
29,554,444
1880
1890
28
3. New York
343
15,036,597
9,528
19,543,794
4. Brooklyn
170
12,508,718
7,276
15,627,536
5. St Louis
103
10,184,926
5,887
11,945,493
______________________________________________________________
1
Males only. For the sake of comparability throughout the period, proprietors,
managers, and clerical staff have been omitted.
2
Up to 1870 the major Census category is "machinery," to which I have added the
values for fire engines, locomotives and millwrighting, wherever they are enumerated,
for each city. From 1880 the sole Census category is "foundry and machine shop
products."
Source: Ninth Census, The Statistics of the Wealth and Industry of the United States
(Washington, 1872), 78, 689, 703, 728, 731; Tenth Census, Report of the Manufactures
of the United States (Washington, 1883), 385, 387, 392, 417, 422; Eleventh Census,
Report on Manufacturing Industries in the United States. Part II Statistics of Cities
(Washington, 1895), 658-60.
29
Table 3
Philadelphia Machine Tools, 1870-1880
_____________________________________________________________________
Number
Capital
of specialist
Horse
Workers
Output
power
firms
_____________________________________________________________________
1870
9
1,899,616
351
1880
8
2,435,281
402**
914*
1069
1,383,574
1,149,511
_____________________________________________________________________
* Data for 8 firms.
** Data for 7 firms.
Source: Manuscript Census of Manufactures, Philadelphia, 1870 and 1880.
30
End Notes
1 My thanks Ghillian Potts for her close reading of this article.
2 Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive
Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1964).
3 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974). Other
important works dealing with scientific management not cited elsewhere include:
Hugh G. J. Aitken, Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in
Action, 1908-1915 (Cambridge, 1960); Robert F. Hoxie, Scientific Management
(New York, 1915); Daniel Nelson, “Scientific Management, Systematic Management,
and Labor 1880-1915,” Business History Review, 48 (1974): 479-500; David Noble,
America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New
York, 1977).
4 Sudhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation
(Cambridge, 1970), especially chapters 2-4.
5 Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management
(Madison, 1980); Robert Kanigel, One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and
Enigma of Efficiency (New York, 1997), the quotation is on 108.
6 Copley, Taylor, 1 (New York, 1923), 32, 44-64. The quotation is from page 56.
7 Nelson sees Taylor as “A reformer in one sphere, he was a reactionary in others.”
(Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, x.) I see Taylor as of one piece.
8 Nelson, Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 26.
9 Historical Record of the Polytechnic College of the State of Pennsylvania
([Philadelphia? 1897?]). The College experienced its greatest popularity between
1861 and 1880, graduating an average of sixteen students a year, approximately five
were mechanical engineers.
10 1880 Manuscript Census of Manufactures, Philadelphia Social History Project 78,
University of Pennsylvania (hereafter as MCM, PSHP). The workshop was owned by
Joseph L. Ferrell and William H. Jones, and later by Ferrell and M. Richards Muckle.
Dun & Co., Credit Reports, Pennsylvania 14: 345, Baker Library, Harvard University,
Microfilm Edition; Copley, Taylor, 1:77.
31
11 Copley, Taylor, 1:74. Nelson discounts personal crisis as an explanation for the
rapid change in plans. Nelson, Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 26.
Kanigel also believes that eye strain had a physiological cause. One Best Way, 89-90.
12 Gopsill’s City Directory (Philadelphia, 1880), 566; 1880 Manuscript Population
Census, Philadelphia, Twenty-Second Ward, 454 District, 18.
13 Copley, Taylor, 1: 72-90, 145-6; 2: 168-9, 224.
14 Lorin Blodget, Census of Manufactures of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1883), 147.
15 Dun & Co., Credit Reports, 3: 400.
16 Charles T. Porter, Engineering Reminiscences (New York, 1908), 87.
17 For contrary opinions see: Nelson, Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management,
27; and Kanigel, One Best Way. “In fact,” says Kanigel, “apprenticeship, not school,
was still the far more customary path into industry for a young man, even for those
blessed by circumstances” (107-8). Indeed, apprenticeship was so “natural and
obvious a course as to merit scarcely a word [among family members].” (108). Yet
Carl Barth recalled that Taylor’s parents opposed his decision to sign an indenture
(108). Taylor’s parents never mentioned apprenticeship in any correspondence
because it was furthest from their minds. Lads from respectable working-class and
lower middle class backgrounds entered the workshop in large numbers, but for the
upper class, the attraction of the workshop floor had diminished more than a decade
before Taylor’s arrival.
18 In large workshops the trend toward reducing the emphasis on manual skills was
already apparent among the current generation of proprietors. Of the six partners in the
Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1880, only two – Charles T. Parry and Edward
Longstreth -- were trained primarily on the shop floor. For Edward H. Williams see
Charles Robson The Manufactories and Manufacturers of Pennsylvania of the
Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1875), 11. For William P. Henszey see 1870 MCM,
PSHP, 396: National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 27 (1935), 142-3; and Ellis
P. Oberholtzer, Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: S.J. Clarke, nd) 3: 34, 37. For John H.
Converse see NCAB, 9 (1899), 420. For George Bunham, Encyclopaedia of
Pennsylvania Biography, 10 (New York, 1918), 179-80. For Parry see, E.A. Bingham,
“The Labor Situation and the Baldwin Works,” Iron Trade Review, 36, 12 February,
1903: 40; and Dictionary of American Biography, 7 (New York, 1964), 262-3. For
Longstreth see EPB, 14 (New York, 1915), 116-8.
32
19 Kanigel, One Best Way, 146-7, 180.
20 Taylor never sought the financial assistance of his parents, although his father was
immensely wealthy. Nelson, Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 105.
21 Dun & Co., Credit Reports, 2: 626; Mary W. Brinton, Their Lives and Mine
(Philadelphia, 1972), 38-48.
22 See, as an example, Dan Clawson, Bureaucracy and the Labor Process: the
Transformation of U.S. Industry, 1860-1920 (New York, 1980), 210. David
Montgomery believes that Taylor’s bourgeois origin afforded him two advantages:
that he was always supported by management in any dispute between him and the
men; and that his ability to retreat to his Germantown home enabled him to avoid the
“irresistible pressure” which would have fallen on ordinary foremen and contractors.
(Fall of the House of Labor [Cambridge, 1987], 190.) There were, in fact, plenty of
men on the shop floor who acted as the agent or the eyes-and-ears of the proprietor.
Sons of owners and middle-class lads intent on occupying the front office still
received a good part of their training in manual skills alongside mechanics. In
addition, not all foremen owed any great allegiance to fellow workers; again, some
came from lower middle-class backgrounds or had ambitions beyond wage labour.
The crucial point is that they did not formulate the radical programme of scientific
management but Taylor did. He came from a crusading upper-class background that
lacked habituation to the workshop.
23 John K. Brown, The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831-1915: A Study in American
Industrial Practice (Baltimore, 1995), 127-32.
24 Samuel M. Vauclain, Steaming Up! The Autobiography of Samuel M. Vauclain
(New York, 1930), 101-5, quotations are from pages 2 and 3; John K. Brown and
Samuel M. Vauclain, “Comments on the System and Shop Practices of the Baldwin
Locomotive Works,” Railroad History, 173 (1995): 103, 107-8, 132.
25 For early studies see: Edwin T. Freedley, Philadelphia and Its Manufactures
(Philadelphia, 1859); Charles Robson The Manufactories and Manufacturers of
Pennsylvania of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1875) and Joseph W. Roe,
English and American Tool Builders (New Haven, 1916). For recent treatments see
especially: Brown, Baldwin Locomotive Works; Thomas R. Heinrich, Ships For the
Seven Seas: Philadelphia Shipbuilding in the Age of Industrial Capitalism (Baltimore,
33
1997); and Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American
Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton, 1997), 97-107.
26 1870 MCM, PSHP, 401. Most firms were less diversified than Sellers. The
proportion of tools in total output was sixty-two per cent among all the city’s tool
builders. Ibid., 289, 385, 393, 418, 362, 397, 401, 366, 467.
27 For New England engineering and the American System see: Wayne G. Broehl,
Precision Valley (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1959); Felicia J. Deyrup, Arms Making in the
Connecticut Valley (Northampton, MA, 1948); George S. Gibb, The Saco-Lowell
Shops (Boston, 1950); David A.. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass
Production 1800-1932 (Baltimore, 1984); Thomas R. Navin, The Whitin Machine
Works Since 1831 (Cambridge, 1950); Nathan Rosenberg ed., The American System
of Manufactures (Edinburgh, 1969). Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post eds., Yankee
Enterprise (Washington, 1981).
28 Nelson believes that the character of Philadelphia machine building was much like
that of New England. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, chapter one.
29 Bruce Laurie and Mark Schmitz, “Manufacture and Productivity: The Making of
an Industrial Base, Philadelphia, 1850-1880,” Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia
(New York, 1981), especially 78.
30 Baldwin Locomotive Works, History of the Baldwin Locomotive Works
(Philadelphia, 1923), 182.
31 Dun & Co., Credit Reports, 3/2: 676.
32 I.P. Morris Company, Minute Book of the Board of Directors 1876-1912, 24, 41,
William Cramp & Sons Collection, Independence Seaport Museum, Philadelphia.
33 The Union League of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1962), xxii.
34 Robert Ellis Thompson, Hard Times and What to Learn From Them (Philadelphia,
1877), 7.
35 Patricia F. Clement, "The Transformation of the Wandering Poor in NineteenthCentury Philadelphia," in Eric H. Monkkonen ed., Walking to Work (Lincoln,
Nebraska, 1984), 65.
36 Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1983), 176.
37 J. Richards, "The Principles of Shop Manipulation for Engineering Apprentices,"
Journal of the Franklin Institute 67 (June, 1874): 395; ibid., 68 (August, 1874): 30,
34
33; Henry Metcalfe, “The Shop Order System of Accounts,” ASME Transactions, 7
(1885-6): 440-68; Brown, Baldwin Locomotive Works, 111-2.
38 Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, especially chapter 5.
39 Henry R. Towne, “The Engineer as An Economist,” American Society of
Mechanical Engineers, Transactions, 7 (1885-6): 428-9.
40 Ray M. Fuller, 'Through the Years': A Historical Outline of the Engineers' Club of
Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Engineers' Club, 1970), x. Taylor joined in April, 1878.
Kanigel, One Best Way, 180.
41 Henry R. Towne, “Gain Sharing,” ASME Transactions, 10 (1888-9): 600-26; F.A.
Halsey, "The Premium Plan of Paying for Labor," ibid., 12 (1891): 759. Both
embraced current work norms as the basis for piecework calculations.
42 Brown, Baldwin Locomotive Works, 115-6.
43 Charles D. Wrege and Ronald G. Greenwood, Frederick W. Taylor, the Father of
Scientific Management: Myth and Reality (Homewood, Ill., 1991),19, 204.
44 "The Machine Tool Industry," American Machinist, 2, 28 June, 1879: 8-9; Dun &
Co., Credit Reports, 6: 290; ibid., 17: 149.
45 Census figures understate the cyclical decline in production as output reached its
peak not in the enumerated years but in 1873. 1870 MCM, PSHP 401; 1880 MCM,
PSHP 217.
46 J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 3
(Philadelphia, 1884), 2264. Even though the Midvale business was expanding, the
works were heavily mortgaged and the financial situation in the eighties and nineties
remained strained. "Midvale Steel," Philadelphia Magazine, 38 (October, 1951): 53.
47 Taylor’s activities at Midvale can be followed in Copley, Taylor, 1: 178-351;
Nelson, Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 33-46, Kanigel, One Best Way,
151-241, and Wrege and Greenwood, Frederick W. Taylor, 31-62.
48 Fred W. Taylor, “A Piece-Rate System: Being A Step Toward Partial Solution of
the Labor Problem,” American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Transactions, 16
(1895): 871.
49 Nelson, Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 37.
50 Nelson, Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 42-3.
51 Isabel Easton, research assistant for W.E.B Dubois’ study of African Americans in
Philadelphia, visited Midvale and interviewed a member of the firm, probably Charles
35
Harrah Jr., sometime after Taylor had left. Dubois recounts that “There came some
time since to the Midvale Steel Works a manager whom many dubbed a “crank;” he
had a theory that Negroes and whites could work together as mechanics without
friction or trouble.” In his introduction to the 1967 edition of The Philadelphia Negro
Digby Baltzell identifies the crank as Taylor. (W.E.B. Dubois, The Philadelphia
Negro, NY, 1967; first published 1899, xxxvii, 129- 31; the quotation is on 129.) It is
impossible to accurately date the interview or the precise point at which the new
recruitment policy was introduced, although the latter could have been in 1889-90.
More recently scholars have suggested that African-Americans found work at
Midvale only after Taylor’s departure. (Robert Kanigel, “Communications,” Labor
History, 37 (Spring, 1996): 300. Also see Howell Harris, “Was Frederick Taylor A
Good Guy?” 8 August, 1996, and reply by Andrew Dawson, 28 August, 1996, on HLabor discussion list. Harris suggests that the case for Taylor is “not proven” and
promotes Charles Harrah as the more likely candidate. My reason for returning to
Baltzell’s earlier interpretation rests on Dubois’ use of the word “crank”: Harrah
believed Taylor to be “insane” and said so to his face (Copley, 1:120). No doubt he
shared this opinion with Easton who reported it to Dubois. The difficulty with the
interpretation advanced by Harris and Kanigel is that Harrah, or some other Midvale
manager, now becomes the “crank.”
52 Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 33. Sudhir Kakar suggests that in
the dominating personality of William Sellers Taylor was searching for a father
figure. (Frederick Taylor, 43.) But distant Midvale was a poor substitute for Sellers’
own workshop.
53 Henry Roland, "Six Examples of Successful Shop Management,” 835;
William Sellers & Co., A Treatise on Machine Tools (4th ed., Philadelphia, 1877), 1219.
54 Kanigel is unsure of the precise motives for Sellers financial support for Taylor
and suggest three possible explanations: that he admired his determination in facing
up to skilled workers; to solve a longstanding debate in the trade; or because as his
business was now prospering that he had money to tackle a problem that might pay
off in the long term. One Best Way, 177.
36
55 Taylor never joined the Union League, to which all the city’s successful workshop
owners belonged. Chronicle of the Union League of Philadelphia 1862 to 1902
(Philadelphia, 1902), 517.
56 Copley, Taylor, 2: 175-6.
57 Copley, Taylor, 1: 427, 429-44.
58 Nelson, Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management, 121-2.
59 “Report on Cramp's Shipbuilding and Engineering Works,” 283. Microfilm R307.
“1900-01. USA Land and Property For Sale,” Vickers Archive, Cambridge University
Library. I would like to thank Glenn Calderwood for this information.
60 Copley, Taylor, 2: 171-2.
61
US Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony
(Washington, 1916), 3: 2831.
62 Egbert P. Watson, “Obsolete Methods and Current Practice in Shop
Administration,” Engineering Magazine, 28 (1904-5), 211, 219; US Commission on
Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony, 3: 2831.
63 Watson, “Shop Administration,” 212; Scranton, Endless Novelty, 103.
64 Howell J. Harris, Bloodless Victories: The Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the
Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000). For discussion of workshop owners’ responce to Taylorism see especially 4958.
37