Dreamers of a New Day (36 page)

However, Tarbell found herself isolated in her efforts to spin a more ethical capitalism. To her ‘chagrin’ she was dismissed as a ‘muckraker’ by President Roosevelt, who believed her exposure of capitalism’s flaws might entice people towards socialism, while her reformer friends wanted clear-cut denunciations of capital and did not feel her criticisms went far enough.
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Tarbell’s friendship with Lillian and Frank Gilbreth led her to see Taylorism as a means of reforming industry. In
New Ideals in Business
(1917), she proposed that scientific management constituted an alternative to corrupt monopolies. In 1917 Tarbell served on the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense. This experience convinced Tarbell, who opposed the political enfranchisement of women, of the need for economic and social planning. Wartime welfare measures appeared to confirm the optimistic approach she and Lillian Gilbreth took to scientific management.
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Both women were convinced of the liberating potential of machine production. Lillian Gilbreth believed that the harmonious merging of the worker with the machine was necessarily beneficial, while the expansion of production would mean higher wages and more affordable mass-produced commodities. To Gilbreth, the ‘Machine Age’ in home and factory meant a better life for all. Tarbell shared this sanguinity about technology. She recalled in her autobiography:

Machines were not devils to me as they were to some of my reforming friends, particularly that splendid old warrior Florence Kelley, then in the thick of her fight for ‘ethical gains through legislation’. To me machines freed from heavy labor, created abundance . . . I was able to understand what the enemy of the machine rarely admits: that men and women who have arrived at the dignity of steady workers not only respect, but frequently take pride in, their machines.
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Kelley’s colleague from the Consumers’ League, Josephine Goldmark, who had helped to formulate the Brandeis brief on protective legislation, took a more sceptical attitude towards modern industry and technology in her impressive study
Fatigue and Efficiency
in 1912. Drawing on Ruskin and Morris as well as contemporary studies of psychology and labour relations, Goldmark examined conditions in industries which ranged from canneries to textiles and criticized the stress, monotony and fatigue experienced by workers. She saw labour relations and productivity as integrally connected. Describing the stress experienced by ‘telephone girls’ as a result of overloading, shift work and overtime, Goldmark linked the operators’ point of breakdown to a breakdown in efficiency.
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In contrast to Gilbreth, she also remarked how the ‘fixed and mechanical’ nature of the rhythm of machinery was at variance with ‘the individual’s natural swing or rhythmic tendency’.
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Observation of modern production methods led Goldmark to conclude: ‘The injury of highly speeded machine work lies . . . in this, that the mechanical, rapid rhythm of machinery dominates the human agent, whatever be his natural rate or rhythmic tendency. The machine sets the tempo; the worker must keep to it.’
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Goldmark documented how American capitalism in recent decades had been able to ignore the consequences of pressing ‘all workers to their physical limits, and to dismiss them as soon as efficiency shows signs of failing’.
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The endless flow of young immigrant workers provided a
renewable source of labour. She feared that this remorseless exploitation would have negative consequences in the long run, inasmuch as it would affect reproduction. Goldmark was making a case for a more social form of capitalism designed to perpetuate itself effectively. More immediately, her findings that shorter hours of work resulted in higher productivity would strengthen arguments for reducing the time spent at work.

An unintended consequence of Taylorism’s preoccupation with measuring time would be a stronger sense of entitlement to ‘time off’. This was expressed not only in terms of political demands, but also became part of the cultural assumptions of young American factory workers, shop workers, clerks and ‘typewriters’ in the early twentieth century. As Kathy Peiss shows, they were beginning to regard leisure as ‘a separate sphere of life to be consciously protected’.
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Similar attitudes were appearing among some university graduates. Elizabeth Hawes had learned about Ruskin, the Fabians and social housekeeping from her teachers at college, but joining the post-war bohemian exodus to Paris where she worked for a couturier, she and her fellow Americans raced against time: ‘We got our jobs so boiled down that we never had to work more than half a day, sometimes not even that. . . . The idea was not like the French, that life is leisurely and work may be done slowly. We did our work with utmost speed so that in one day we could easily do three days’ tasks.’
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This new generation did not believe people should live only to work; they wanted to work less and spend more, rather than celebrate the dignity of labour. To their elders, reared on the merits of thrift and denial, they appeared frivolous – but theirs was a negotiation with a productive system they had no hope of reshaping. Instead they sought ways of evading its reach.

In the post-war era, several women theorists did engage critically with the new circumstances of work while retaining transformatory hopes. In Britain Barbara Drake struggled, in
Women in Trade Unions
(1920), to combine the ideals of labour as craft with the reality of mass production stimulated by wartime industry. Contesting the assumption that scientific management necessarily had to reduce the ‘mechanic . . . to a common measure with the machine’, Drake remained nonetheless concerned with a transition to a society that was not geared to profit: ‘As control of industry passes eventually from the hands of an autocratic employer into those of a workers’ democracy, indeed, these methods, from being mechanical, may become co-operative; and they may express, if not the
passion of the artist, at least the human instinct to share in the common service of humanity.’
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The American Mary Parker Follett moved from community work to writing about the workplace. Her interest in the dynamics of groups had its origins in her experience of doing vocational guidance work in Boston, and serving in 1912 on the Boards which fixed minimum wage rates in Massachusetts. Contact with forward-looking capitalists, such as the store owner Edward Filene and the manufacturer Henry Dennison, introduced her to Taylorism; then, during the war, she observed the operation of the War Labor Boards. In the 1920s she adapted her knowledge of organizing small neighbourhood groups to the world of business, becoming a lecturer on personnel administration.
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In her influential book
Creative Experience
(1924), Follett advocated self-governing teams in the workplace. Though she stressed the human factor in production, she believed in the need for leadership as well as participatory teams.
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Her innovatory insight was that instead of trying to iron out conflict, management should see it as potentially useful. In her 1925
Constructive Conflict
, Follett put forward the idea that personnel administrators should embrace conflict and ‘set it to work for us’.
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Conflict in psychological terms could be seen as the ‘interacting of desires’.
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Follett, who had a critical interest in Guild Socialism, lived in Britain from 1928 until 1933 with her partner Katherine Furst. Forgotten in the US during the 1930s, she was taken up by the 1980s advocates of ‘new’ management, who were interested in her work teams as a means of identifying potential problems in the production process. Those who wanted to tap into individual workers’ attitudes in order to alter the culture of organizations also drew on Follett. It was a curious mutation to emerge from late nineteenth-century social housekeeping.

In a book with the fashionably Bergsonian title,
The Creative Impulse in Industry
(1918), socialist Helen Marot wrestled more directly with devising an approach to production which was neither Taylorist or state-led, and yet avoided the anarchists’ absolute rejection of the state. Influenced by the Fabians, Marot was familiar both with the discussions on industrial democracy taking place in the British Labour Party, and with anarcho-syndicalist ideas of direct action. Whereas Follett was a reformer tinged with participatory democracy, Marot was shaped by the eclectic and dynamic currents of libertarian social thought swirling through progressive circles between 1912 and 1920. After working with the Women’s Trade Union League, she edited the magazine
The Dial
with John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, absorbing Dewey’s connection of democracy to ‘self-realization’ and Veblen’s social critique of industrial capitalism. Like the future writer on technology and cities, Lewis Mumford, who also worked on
The Dial
, Marot was influenced by the British planner Patrick Geddes’s appreciation of the need to take account of lived experience in sustainable social planning.
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Marot’s criticism of scientific management focused on its preoccupation with measuring workers’ energy in order to harness human capacity. She argued with extraordinary prescience that the Taylorists failed to grasp that ‘the real incentive to production was . . . a realization on the part of the worker of its social value and his appreciation of its creative content’.
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In Marot’s view, ‘the economic organization of modern society, though built on the common people’s productive energy, has discounted their
creative potential
.’
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Marot also foresaw that while scientific management would initially bring industrial stability, it would lay a new basis for longer-term conflict; an insight which would be borne out by the clashes of the 1930s led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
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She discerned too that while a state-led socialism might ‘curb’ exploitation, it did not automatically follow that it would ‘of itself induce creative effort’. Simply securing ‘sufficient leisure and food for general consumption’ did not enable ‘the creative impulse’ to ‘operate’. Marot predicted: ‘The signs are that a socialist state would lean exclusively on the consumption desire for production results, just as the present system of business now does.’
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By 1919, Marot was aware that the reliance of social reformers on ‘state machinery’ during the war had left them without an effective strategy for post-war circumstances. With the government withdrawing, the attempts at legislative reform were in peril, their roots ‘too tender to penetrate beyond the surface of our political and industrial institutions’.
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But her efforts to present an alternative perspective fell on stony ground. Marot herself was targeted in the post-war paranoia about a spider’s web of subversion extending from the extreme left to social reformers. By the end of 1919 she had abandoned her attempts to graft a deeper form of democracy and creative self-actualization onto modern industry and machine production. She developed instead an interest in psychology, but was not able to find a new career as an industrial pundit.
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Nonetheless she had pinpointed a key weakness in Taylorist theories of production.

Radicals and reformers of the 1920s focused on improving conditions within existing structures, rather than transforming how work was done
and what was made. Utopian dreamers who opposed mass production were apt to appear somewhat cranky, elitist and out of touch. Enthusiasm for craft persisted, bringing many women into design and encouraging handicrafts in schools. But these developed on the margins; they did not constitute a critique of the economy as a whole, and mainstream opinion on the left continued to assume that increased production could potentially offer workers a better life.

A broader approach to the economy did, however, linger on. Hazel Kyrk’s
A Theory of Consumption
(1923) accepted that mass production brought benefits, but argued that the unequal distribution of wealth created a distortion in the deployment of human energy, by concentrating on the production of commodities desired by the rich. She thought that a greater degree of equality would increase demand for differing types of goods and also benefit the economy as a whole.
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Questioning whether the ‘material means of life and culture’ should be left simply to ‘the distribution of purchasing power’, Kyrk argued that people on lower incomes should be able to enjoy commodities and services.
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She also attempted a fundamental rethinking of what constituted ‘the economy’, by taking into consideration consumption, standards of living, housing and household labour as well as production. Ironically this attempt to integrate social and economic existence eventually resulted in a subtle demotion. Instead of reinventing economics, the study of consumption and domestic labour would be redefined as ‘home economics’.
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Not only was this assigned a lower status as an academic field, it tended to be corralled into cookery instead of mounting an assault on capital.

During the 1920s, critiques of work were more likely to appear within culture than in politics. A minority of artists and writers recoiled from standardization, which they regarded not only as an economic phenomenon but as a takeover of human consciousness, entering deep into institutions and the psyche. Rebellion against Taylorist fragmentation and standardization inflected the search for new ways of imagining which preoccupied the international avant-garde. In Nella Larsen’s critique of a black educational institution she called ‘Naxos’ in her 1928 novel
Quicksand
, scientific management served as a metaphor for internalized subordination to white power in social relationships and cultural conformity:
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