by Jill Lepore
The Progressive era’s conservative campaign to defend, protect, and improve marriage never really ended, either. Marriage is a stage of life in which the state plays a greater role than in any other. In 2009, the name Popenoe came up in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a California case testing the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the state’s 2008 anti-same-sex marriage act, which was modeled on the federal government’s 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Under cross-examination by David Boies, the plaintiff’s attorney, a flustered David Blankenhorn, the founder of the Institute for American Values, exposed as having no scholarly expertise whatsoever, cast about for academic authorities to support his opposition to same-sex marriage. “Popenoe says that same sex marriage will reduce hetero marriage rates,” Blankenhorn told the court. “I cannot prove in exact word formulation what he said. If he were sitting here, I believe that’s what he would say.” “I am asking you to tell us what these people have written,” said Boies, “not what you think they’d say if they were here.” Popenoe wasn’t there, but he wasn’t a ghost, either. Blankenhorn meant not Paul Popenoe but David Popenoe, Paul Popenoe’s son, who once wrote that the institution of marriage “would surely be compromised by incorporating the marriage of same-sex couples.”71
David Popenoe, a sociologist from Rutgers, was best known for his work on single mothers. In his most influential book, Life Without Father, he described what he called “the human carnage of fatherlessness.” The nation, he worried, was at risk “of committing social suicide.” In the “family values” 1990s, his controversial findings about the damage divorce does to children informed everything from Dan Quayle’s attack on Murphy Brown to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act itself.72 Blankenhorn and David Popenoe had edited a book together, and each year, Blankenhorn’s Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project, founded by David Popenoe, published “The State of Our Unions,” a report on marriage in America. In 2010, “The State of Our Unions” warned of a “mancession”: during an economic downturn, more men than usual were working fewer hours than their wives, making for unhappier husbands and angrier rows. A spike in the divorce rate was anticipated.73
Paul Popenoe stepped down as the director of the American Institute of Family Relations in 1976 and died three years later. David Popenoe wrestled, earnestly and openly, with his father’s legacy. “What has puzzled me,” he once wrote, “is how fast my father’s name passed into oblivion.” But, well into the twenty-first century, Paul Popenoe was all over the place, in Sex Weekend, in Cupid’s Coach, in the hereditability of housework, in Proposition 8. David Popenoe, who had served on the board of directors of his father’s American Institute of Family Relations, declined an invitation to take over the institute. In the 1980s, the institute floundered, then disappeared. In 1992, he went out to Los Angeles and drove down Sunset Boulevard, to see the place, near Hollywood and Vine, where his father had worked. Nothing looked familiar, except, on the side of the building, embossed on stucco, the faint shadow of a sign, long gone. He could just make out the letters.74
[CHAPTER 6]
Happiness Minutes
Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October 1910 when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting in an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts, including Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who, at Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “Scientific Management.”1 Everyone there, including Brandeis, had contracted “Tayloritis”: they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years.2 He made work fast, and even faster. “Speedy Taylor,” as he was called, had invented a whole new way to make money. He would get himself hired by some business; spend a while watching everyone work, stopwatch and slide rule in hand; write a report telling them how to do their work faster; and then submit an astronomical bill for his invaluable services. He is the “Father of Scientific Management” (at least, that’s what it says on his tombstone) and, by any rational calculation, the grandfather of management consulting.3
Whether he was also a shameless fraud is a matter of some debate, but not, it must be said, much: it’s difficult to stage a debate when the preponderance of evidence falls to one side. Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success. Why did it appeal to Louis Brandeis, who wasn’t easily duped? Brandeis, born in Kentucky in 1856, was so young when he finished Harvard Law School, in 1876, with the highest grades anyone there had ever received, that Charles Eliot, the university’s president, had to waive a minimum-age requirement to allow him to graduate. Brandeis swiftly earned a reputation as a hardheaded and public-minded reformer, the “people’s attorney.” The man who wrote The Curse of Bigness earnestly believed—and plainly, to some degree, he was right—that scientific management would improve the lot of the little guy by raising wages, reducing the cost of goods, and elevating the standard of living. “Of all the social and economic movements with which I have been connected,” Brandeis wrote, “none seems to me to be equal to this in its importance and hopefulness.”4 Scientific management would bring justice to an unjust world. “Efficiency is the hope of democracy,”5 he believed, and that’s where it’s possible to see what Dean Acheson, who clerked for Brandeis, meant when he said his boss was an “incurable optimist.”6
In October 1910, Brandeis gathered Taylor’s disciples—Taylor, busy man, sent his regrets—because he was preparing to argue in hearings before the Interstate Commerce Committee that railroad companies ought not to be allowed to raise their freight rates.7 Brandeis had met Taylor and had read at least one of his books, Shop Management (1903), and he thought the railroads, rather than raising rates, should cut costs by Taylorizing: hire a man like Taylor, have him review their operations, and teach them to do everything more efficiently.8 Taylor often called what he did “Task Management.” The Gilbreths dubbed their system the “One Best Way.” For the sake of the case, Brandeis wanted, for the whole shebang, one best name. At that October meeting, someone suggested calling it, simply, “Efficiency,” the watchword of the day, but in the end the vote was unanimous in favor of “scientific management,” which does have a nice ring to it, just like “home economics.”
Scientific management promised to replace arbitrary standards—rules of thumb—with accurate measurements. Before the ICC, in a case for which he accepted no fee, Brandeis began by establishing that the railroads had no real idea why they charged what they did. When he questioned Charles Daly, the vice president of a New York railroad, Daly said that setting prices came down to judgment, and when Brandeis asked him to explain the basis for that judgment, Daly fell right into his trap. “The basis of my judgment,” he began, “is exactly the same as the basis of a man who knows how to play a good game of golf. It comes from practice, contact and experience.”
MR. BRANDEIS: I want to know, Mr. Daly, just as clearly as you can state it, whether you can give a single reason based on anything more than your arbitrary judgment, as you have expressed it.
MR. DALY: None whatsoever.
MR. BRANDEIS: None whatsoever?
MR. DALY: None whatsoever.9
Brandeis next set about demonstrating that freight rates could be determined—scientifically—by introducing, as evidence, Taylor’s work at Bethlehem Steel Works. Before Taylor went to Bethlehem, a gang of seventy-five men loaded 92-pound pigs of iron onto railcars, at a rate of 12.5 tons per man per day. By timing the workers with a stopwatch, Taylor established that a “first-class man” could load pig iron at a rate of 47.5 tons per man per day, if only he would stop loafing. A boss could speed up a man, Taylor believed, the same way he could speed up a machine: with oil. Ironworkers, Taylor thought, were as dumb as dray horses, and ought to be dealt with accordingly. Most of them were also, to Taylor, the wealthy son of Philadelphia aristocrats, altogether foreign, something he made
sure to underscore. He told the story of managing a man he called Schmidt.
“Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?”
“Vell, I don’t know vat you mean. . . .”
“You see that car?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will load that pig iron on that car to-morrow for $1.85. Now do wake up and answer my question. Tell me whether you are a high-priced man or not.”
“Vell, did I got $1.85 for loading dot pig iron on dot car to-morrow?”
“Yes, of course you do. . . .”
“Vell, dot’s all right.”10
(“Who is this Schmidt,” journalists asked, “and what ever happened to him?” Taylor wouldn’t, couldn’t say. He had more or less made him up.)
Brandeis’s star witness turned out to be Frank Gilbreth, who, with his wife, Lillian, specialized in motion study. Where Taylor dissected a job into timed tasks, the Gilbreths divided human action into eighteen motions, which they called “therbligs”—it’s an eponymous anagram—in order to determine the One Best Way to do a piece of work. Where Taylor used a stopwatch, the Gilbreths used a motion picture camera. On the stand, Gilbreth, a burly former bricklayer and consummate showman whose enthusiasm was contagious, grabbed a stack of law books, pretended they were bricks, and built a wall, explaining how to eliminate wasted motion. The commissioners, mesmerized, craned their necks and leaned over their desks to get a better view.11 “This has become sort of a substitute for religion for you,” said one of them, awed. (The gospel of efficiency, Taylor called it; some people called it the gospel of hope.)12 With this, Gilbreth could only agree. (In his diary, Gilbreth once jotted down plans to write a book called The Religion of Scientific Management.)13 Then Brandeis hushed the room by making an astonishing claim. The New York Times reported it this way:
ROADS COULD SAVE
$1,000,000 A DAY
Brandeis Says Scientific Management
Would Do It—Calls
Rate Increases Unnecessary.14
One million dollars a day! Suddenly, those theretofore obscure ICC hearings made national news. Brandeis won the case, and Taylor became a household word. In 1911, Taylor explained his methods—Schmidt and the pig iron, Gilbreth and the bricks—in The Principles of Scientific Management, a book the business überguru Peter Drucker once called “the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.”15 That’s either very silly or chillingly cynical, but The Principles of Scientific Management was the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century.16 Taylor had always said that scientific management would usher in a “mental revolution,” and it did.17 Modern life, and not just work life, is Taylorized life.18 Above your desk, the clock ticks; on the shop floor, the camera rolls. Manage your time, waste no motion, multitask: your phone comes with a calendar, your breast pump comes with a stopwatch. “Who is Schmidt?” journalists wanted to know. Vell, ve are.
In 1908, Edwin Gay, a Harvard economics professor, visited Taylor in Philadelphia. Gay had been frustrated in his efforts to start a business school at Harvard. “I am constantly being told by businessmen that we cannot teach business,” he complained. After meeting Taylor, Gay felt vindicated, declaring, “I am convinced that there is a scientific method involved in and underlying the art of business.” If laws, scientific laws, deducible from observation, govern the management of business, then business, as an academic discipline, was a much easier sell. Harvard Business School opened the next year, with Gay as its dean. Taylor came to Cambridge and delivered a series of lectures, which he repeated every year until his death.19
Taylor is the mortar, and the Gilbreths the bricks, of every American business school. But it was Brandeis who brought Taylor national and international acclaim.20 He could not, however, have saved the railroads one million dollars a day—that number was, as one canny reporter noted, the “merest moonshine”—because, despite the parade of experts and algorithms, one million dollars a day was based on little more than a ballpark estimate that the railroads were about 5 percent inefficient.21 That’s how Taylorism usually worked.
How did Taylor arrive at 47.5 tons for Bethlehem Steel? He chose twelve men at random, observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading 23.8 tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten “large powerful Hungarians” and dared them to load 16.5 tons as fast as they could. A few managed to do it in under fourteen minutes; that comes out to a rate of 71 tons per hour. This number Taylor inexplicably rounded up to 75. To get to 47.5, he decreased 75 by about 40 percent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired. Only one—the closest approximation of an actual Schmidt was a man named Henry Noll—loaded anything close to 47.5 tons in a single day, a rate that was, in any case, not sustainable. After providing two years of consulting services, which could have saved Bethlehem Steel a maximum of $40,000, Taylor billed $100,000 for his services (which works out to be something like $2.5 million today), and then he was fired.22
Brandeis, like very many Progressives, believed Taylor, and believed in him. What shocked him was that the unions didn’t. Brandeis had long been a labor hero. Convinced that lawyers, by taking the side of capital, had “allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations,” he had worked to establish the standard of an eight-hour day and had deftly arbitrated labor disputes, including the New York Garment Workers strike of 1910.23 But, early in 1911, delivering a speech called “Organized Labor and Efficiency” before the Boston Central Labor Union, he was heckled. “You can call it scientific management if you want to,” one woman shouted, “but I call it scientific driving.”24
Brandeis, ever hopeful, pressed on. The next year, he wrote the preface for Frank Gilbreth’s Primer on Scientific Management, attempting to explain, once again, why unions should embrace it. “Under Scientific Management men are led, not driven,” he insisted.25 By then, Taylor had come under the scrutiny of the House Committee to Investigate Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management. In the last months of 1911, the committee took testimony from sixty witnesses—workers and experts alike—and in January 1912, it called Taylor himself. Facing the committee chairman, William Bauchop Wilson, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had gone down into the coal pits at the age of nine and joined the union at eleven, Taylor didn’t offer up Schmidt and the pig iron—he had trotted out that story too many times, and people were getting suspicious—but he did tell another of his favorite yarns, the one about the science of shoveling coal. “The ordinary pig-iron handler,” who is as dumb as a dray horse, is not suited to shoveling coal, Taylor said. “He is too stupid.” (“Anything above 85 IQ in the case of a barber probably represents so much dead waste,” Lewis Terman had written, explaining the great benefit of administering IQ tests to people before assigning them to any particular kind of work. This would speed things up, given that, as Terman believed, it had been well established that 15 percent of the “industrially inefficient” were of “the moron grade.”)26 A first-class man, though, Taylor continued, could lift a shovelful of coal weighing 21.5 pounds, and could move a pile of coal lickety-split.
“You have told us of the effect on the pile,” an exasperated committee member said, “but what about the effect on the man?” Wilson wanted to know what happened to workers who weren’t “first-class men.”
THE CHAIRMAN: Scientific management has no place for such men?
MR. TAYLOR: Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing.…
THE CHAIRMAN: We are not … dealing with horses nor singing birds. We are dealing with men who are part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.27
Taylor knew he had performed badly. Asked to proof the transcript of his testimony, he ordered a lackey to steal Wilson’s copy of The Principles of
Scientific Management. Taylor had the idea that he could lift passages from his book and dump them into his testimony—replacing what he had actually said, under oath—but the switch would be too risky if Wilson had the chance to compare the transcript with the book.28 He didn’t get away with it. Speedy Taylor had met his match. The next year, the president appointed William Bauchop Wilson secretary of labor. But, by then, Taylorism had permeated the culture. So had therbligs. In 1913, an American magazine published a cartoon illustrating the fifteen unnecessary motions of a kiss.29
Speeding up production meant that workers came home knackered. Some of the ironworkers Taylor had timed in Bethlehem were so wrecked after a Taylor-sized day’s work that they couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. In 1914, Henry Ford announced a five-dollar, eight-hour workday—generous terms, at the start—but after that, salaries froze while the speed of production increased; meanwhile, Ford kept reducing his workforce.30 As one of Ford’s workers later put it, “Ye’re worked like a slave all day and when ye get out ye’re too tired to do anything.”31 Brandeis hoped that an auto worker might spend his evening at a lecture or a political rally, but more likely, he went home and collapsed on the couch while his wife (who, quite possibly, had put in eight hours at Ford’s, too) made dinner and got the children ready for bed—efficiently. For lots of people, probably for most people, speeding up at work—which you might think would mean slowing down at home, enjoying that promised land of leisure—meant just the opposite: home got sped up, too.32 No one knew that better than Frank Gilbreth’s wife, who had rather a lot to say on the subject of exhaustion, and who understood, better than Taylor and Brandeis did, that scientific management isn’t the kind of thing you can leave at the office, or on the factory floor.