American Rifle - Alexander Rose [136]
Perceptive observers of the Washington mischianza understood that the Roosevelt-Root team would inevitably drive through major reforms—either by sheer force of character (in Roosevelt’s case) or by craftily indirect means (in Root’s).
Roosevelt had already earned his stripes during his Police Commission days, shaking up sleepy, broken departments. His first victim had been New York Police Department chief Thomas Byrnes, whom he forced to resign on corruption charges; his second was the brutal inspector “Clubber” Williams. (His suspiciously large retirement fund, Clubber claimed, stemmed from land speculation in Japan and had nothing whatsoever to do with shaking down Lower East Side shopkeepers.) Roosevelt soon proved himself no easy roll by closing all the saloons on Sunday—as the law stipulated—and going out on the rounds late at night to catch patrolmen dozing on the job.6
Detail-obsessed and exacting, with a rather strange hairstyle that resembled shortened bangs and with a voice that was always soft and hoarse, Root was a perfect complement to Roosevelt’s booming personality, and the two men rattled along for decades with barely a cross word. When such an incident did occur, it was hardly serious. One time they were in the dining car aboard a train returning from an inspection of West Point and fell into an argument over a particular aspect of army reform. Exasperated and irritated by Root’s wiliness, Roosevelt exclaimed, “Oh, go to the devil, Root!” To which the secretary raised his champagne glass and urbanely replied, “I come, sir, I come.”7
While Roosevelt, the politician, investigated police corruption, chased robber barons, advocated promotion strictly by merit, conserved forests, and broke up price-gouging monopolies, Root, as a great corporate lawyer, immersed himself in the most fashionable business movement of the time: “scientific management,” often better known as Taylorism.
Progressively minded people (such as Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice, and Ida Tarbell, the “muckraking” journalist) saw scientific management as a hypermodern method of liberating workers. Scientific management, it was claimed, would eliminate unnecessary motions during production, reward conscientious employees properly with incentive pay, promote meritocracy, eradicate favoritism, remove sources of friction between management and workers, and improve all-round efficiency and productivity. Later observers would complain that scientific management reduced men to “mere mechanical instruments” (as the novelist D. H. Lawrence put it in Women in Love), but the world’s first management consultant, Frederick Taylor (1856– 1915), countered that he was offering workmen the freedom to exercise their natural abilities with steady employment at regular wages and standardized hours, using the finest machines and tools money could buy.8
Root wanted to bring Taylor’s business methods to the business of army reform. “It does seem a pity,” he argued, “that the Government of the United States should be the only great industrial establishment that cannot profit by the lessons which the world of industry and of commerce has learned to such good effect.”9
Once esconced at the War Department, and puffing on one of his countless daily cigars, Root rapidly whipped his staff into shape along “scientific” principles. No more would they arrive at 10:30; the workday would start at 8:30 precisely. No more would they take leisurely lunches at the Metropolitan Club; coffee and sandwiches would be sent in. No more would they read newspapers all afternoon in comfy chairs; memoranda, directives, and reports would be dealt with the moment they arrived.10
In his own time Root soaked up the military classics so diligently that within months he could out-quote and out-analyze any West Pointer on tactics and strategy.