U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [390]
such exploits may indicate a dangerous degree of bravado but they display the qualities that made a boy of high school age the acknowledged leader of a gang that has been a thorn in the side of the State of
THE AMERICAN PLAN
Frederick Winslow Taylor (they cal ed him
Speedy Taylor in the shop) was born in Germantown,
Pennsylvania, the year of Buchanan's election. His
father was a lawyer, his mother came from a family of New Bedford whalers; she was a great reader of Emer-son, belonged to the Unitarian Church and the Brown-ing Society. She was a fervent abolitionist and believed in democratic manners; she was a housekeeper of the old school, kept everybody busy from dawn til dark. She laid down the rules of conduct:
self respect, selfreliance, selfcontrol
and a cold long head for figures.
But she wanted her children to appreciate the finer things so she' took them abroad for three years on the
-19-Continent, showed them cathedrals, grand opera, Ro-man pediments, the old masters under their brown varnish in their great frames of tarnished gilt.
'Later Fred Taylor was impatient of these wasted
years, stamped out of the room when people talked
about the finer things; he was a testy youngster, fond of practical jokes and a great hand at rigging up con-traptions and devices. At Exeter he was head of his class and captain of
the bal team, the first man to pitch overhand. (When umpires complained that overhand pitching wasn't in the rules of the game, he answered that it got results.) As a boy he had nightmares, going to bed was
horrible for him; he thought they came from sleeping on his back. He made himself a leather harness with wooden pegs that stuck into his flesh when he turned over. When he was grown he slept in a chair or in bed in a sitting position propped up with pil ows. Al his life he suffered from sleeplessness.
He was a crackerjack tennisplayer. In 1881, with
his friend Clark, he won the National Doubles Cham-pionship. (He used a spoonshaped racket of his own design.)
At school he broke down from overwork, his eyes
went back on him. The doctor suggested manual labor. So instead of going to Harvard he went into the
machineshop of a smal pumpmanufacturing concern,
owned by a friend of the family's, to learn the trade of patternmaker and machinist. He learned to handle a lathe and to dress and cuss like a workingman.
Fred Taylor never smoked tobacco or drank
liquor or used tea or coffee; he couldn't understand why his fel owmechanics wanted to go on sprees and
get drunk and raise Cain Saturday nights. He lived at
-20-home, when he wasn't reading technical books he'd play parts in amateur theatricals or step up to the piano in the evening and sing a good tenor in A Warrior Bold or A Spanish Cavalier.
He served his first year's apprenticeship in the
machineshop without pay; the next two years he made a dol ar and a half a week, the last year two dol ars. Pennsylvania was getting rich off iron and coal.
When he was twentytwo, Fred Taylor went to work at
the Midvale Iron Works. At first he had to take a
clerical job, but he hated that and went to work with a shovel. At last he got them to put him on a lathe. He was a good machinist, he worked ten hours a day
and in the evenings fol owed an engineering course at Stevens. In six years he rose from machinist's helper to keeper of toolcribs to gangboss to foreman to master-mechanic in charge of repairs to chief draftsman and director of research to chief engineer of the Midvale Plant.
The early years he was a machinist with the other
machinists in the shop, cussed and joked and worked with the rest of them, soldiered on the job when they did. Mustn't give the boss more than his money's
worth. But when he got to be foreman he was on the
management's side of the fence, gathering in on the part of those on the management's side all' the great mass of traditional knowledge which in the past has been in the heads of the workmen and in the physical skill and knack of the workman . He couldn't stand to see an idle lathe or an