U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [391]
Production went to his head and thril ed his sleep-less nerves like liquor or women on a Saturday night.
-21-He never loafed and he'd be damned if anybody else would. Production was an itch under his skin.
He lost his friends in the shop; they cal ed him
niggerdriver. He was a stockily built man with a tem-per and a short tongue. I was a young man in years but I give you my
word I was a great deal older than I am now, what with the worry, meanness and contemptibleness of the whole damn thing. It's a horrid life for any man to live not being able to look any workman in the face without seeing hostility there, and a feeling that every man around you is your virtual enemy.
That was the beginning of the Taylor System of
Scientific Management.
He was impatient of explanations, he didn't care
whose hide he took off in enforcing the laws he believed inherent in the industrial process.
When starting an experiment in any field question everything, question the very foundations upon which the art rests, question the simplest, the most selfevident, the most universally accepted facts; prove everything, except the dominant Quaker Yankee (the New
Bedford\ skippers were the greatest niggerdrivers on the whaling seas) rules of conduct. He boasted he'd never ask a workman to do anything he couldn't do.
He devised an improved steamhammer; he stand-ardized tools and equipment, he fil ed the shop with col ege students with stopwatches and diagrams, tabu-lating, standardizing. There's the right way of doing a thing and the' wrong way of doing it; the right way means increased production, lower costs, higher wages, bigger profits: the American plan.
He broke up the foreman's job into separate func--22-tions, speedbosses, gangbosses, timestudy men, orderof-work men. The skil ed mechanics were too stubborn for him, what he wanted was a plain handyman who'd do what
he was told. If he was a firstclass man and did firstclass work Taylor was wil ing to let him have firstclass pay; that's where he began to get into trouble with the owners.
At thirtyfour he married and left Midvale and
took a flyer for the big money in connection with a pulpmil started in Maine by some admirals and po-litical friends of Grover Cleveland's; the panic of '93 made hash of that enterprise,
so Taylor invented for himself the job of Con-sulting Engineer in Management and began to build up a fortune by careful investments.
The first paper he read before the American So-ciety of Mechanical Engineers was anything but a suc-cess, they said he was crazy. I have found, he wrote in 1909, that any improvement is not only opposed but
aggressively and bitterly opposed by the majority of men.
He was cal ed in by Bethlehem Steel. It was in
Bethlehem he made his famous experiments with han-dling pigiron; he taught a Dutchman named Schmidt to handle fortyseven tons instead of twelve and a half tons of pigiron a day and got Schmidt to admit he
was as good as ever at the end of the day.
He was a crank about shovels, every job had to
have a shovel of the right weight and size for that job alone; every job had to have a man of the right weight and size for that job alone; but when he began to pay his men in proportion to the increased efficiency of their work,
-23-the owners who were a lot of greedy smal eyed
Dutchmen began to raise Hail Columbia; when Schwab
bought Bethlehem Steel in 1901
Fred Taylor
inventor of efficiency
who had doubled the production of the stamping-mil by speeding up the main lines of shafting from ninetysix to twohundred and twentyfive revolutions a minute was unceremoniously fired.
After that Fred Taylor always said he couldn't af-ford to work for money. He took to playing golf (using golfclubs of his
own design), doping out methods for transplanting
huge boxtrees into the garden of his home.
At Boxly in Germantown he kept open house for
engineers, factorymanagers, industrialists;
he wrote papers,
lectured in col eges,
appeared before a congressional committee,
everywhere preached the virtues of scientific man-agement