American Rifle - Alexander Rose [146]
Crozier’s streak of good luck was boosted by Taylorism’s comeback. The unions’ overly narrow focus on such ephemera as time studies and premium-pay schemes had resulted in poorly defined legislation. Thus the government had actually prohibited only isolated, practical aspects of Taylorism, not the philosophy or principles animating it.
Crozier and other senior managers discovered that so long as men with stopwatches weren’t standing guard over their workers and incentive pay was abolished, there was nothing illegal about analyzing, reforming, and improving manufacturing processes, let alone performing time studies’ more advanced successor, motion studies. Moreover, as Congress had barred only government-paid inspectors from performing time studies, Crozier could integrate data amassed by private industry for similar tasks into his own conclusions. He wasted no time. By the time the United States dispatched doughboys to the Western Front in late 1917, Watertown, as well as the other Ordnance installations at Springfield, Frankford, Watervliet, and Rock Island, had been almost totally Taylorized in all but name.
American entry into the war resulted in an exponential expansion of Ordnance, as its arms-procurement budget broke the $5 billion barrier. To give some idea of the scale of the expansion, consider that before the American declaration of war, some 97 officers worked for the Department; by the Armistice in November 1918—about a year and a half later—there were 5,800 (plus 79,720 civilian clerks). Again, before 1917 there were six government arsenals and two private plants making heavy armaments; by winter of the following year 5,000 factories were producing arms directly for Ordnance.52
Intending to keep pace with the thousands of contracts flooding in, and desperate to hire people who could coordinate the manufacturing process, Crozier Taylorized the staff of the department itself by bringing in newly uniformed members of the Taylor Society (the organization of managers and executives formerly known as Society for the Promotion of the Science of Management). By the beginning of 1918 fully a third of the society’s membership worked for Crozier.53
Taylorism, combined with national industrialization and the mobilization for total war, produced a miraculous ability to raise output far above anything ever before imagined. Upon the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1914, the British contracted with American private companies (Winchester and Remington, primarily) to make their excellent Enfield .303 Model 1914 rifles. To fulfill their contracts, the gun-makers built three large plants and installed $15 million worth of machinery. All of this took time, and progress was relatively slow. By 1917 British factories themselves had tooled up for the switchover to Enfields, and the government scaled down its contracts, thereby leaving Remington and Winchester with excess capacity. When the United States entered the war in April of that year, there were roughly 600,000 Springfields in stock, an admirable total but insufficient to supply the million-man army that Congress thought would be the minimum required to fight. Ordnance then asked the Remington and Winchester factories to produce Enfields rechambered to the American .30-caliber on the Taylorite system. It was a capital plan and explained why a stunning 2,202,429 Model 1917 Enfields would be churned out in roughly eighteen months from just three factories.54
Migraine-inducing it might have been, but Roosevelt adored the Springfield Model 1903. So pleased was he with it that