by Jill Lepore
Chapter 6. HAPPINESS MINUTES
1. The story of the meeting at Henry Gantt’s apartment and the decision to use “Scientific Management” is described in just about every account of these heady days, but see, especially, Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997), 431–42; Frank Barkley Copley, Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management (New York: Taylor Society, 1923), 2:372; Jane Lancaster, Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth, a Life Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen” (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 116; and Lewis J. Paper, Brandeis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 152. Brandeis attempted to set the record straight in 1914 in a letter to a Columbia University graduate student writing a history of scientific management: Louis Brandeis to Horace Bookwalter Drury, January 31, 1914, Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, edited by Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973), 3:240–41.
2. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 132.
3. “Speedy Taylor”: Kanigel, One Best Way, 7. Taylor is buried in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. His tombstone reads, “Frederick Winslow Taylor. Born 1856—Died 1915. Father of Scientific Management.”
4. Brandeis quoted in Kanigel, One Best Way, 433. Brandeis’s brief is most easily read in Louis D. Brandeis, Scientific Management and Railroads (New York: Engineering Magazine, 1911). For more on Brandeis’s infatuation with scientific management, see Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 161–62.
5. Louis Brandeis, “Efficiency and Social Ideas,” 1914, in Brandeis on Democracy, ed. Philippa Strum (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 33.
6. Acheson is quoted in Strum, Brandeis on Democracy, 12.
7. On Taylor too busy to come, see Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor, 174.
8. On Brandeis having read Shop Management in 1903, see Strum, Brandeis, 160.
9. Portions of the transcript are reproduced in Kanigel, One Best Way, 431, but the original can be found in Evidence Taken by the Interstate Commerce Commission in the Matter of Proposed Advances in Freight Rates by Carriers. August to December, 1910, 61st Cong., 3:2022–24 (1911) (statement of Louis D. Brandeis, attorney).
10. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911), 42–45; quote from 44–45.
11. Edna Yost, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth: Partners for Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 185–88.
12. Taylor wrote a series of essays called “The Gospel of Efficiency” for American Magazine in 1911; “gospel of hope” comes from the preface to Brandeis, Scientific Management, n.p.
13. Kanigel, One Best Way, 434. Lancaster, Making Time, 146.
14. “Roads Could Save $1,000,000 a Day,” New York Times, November 22, 1910.
15. Kanigel, One Best Way, 11.
16. On the Principles’ publishing history, see Daniel Nelson, “Taylor, Frederick Winslow,” in American National Biography Online (2000).
17. Kanigel, One Best Way, 472.
18. Ibid., 14.
19. Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: Norton, 2009), 39–41.
20. After Brandeis said scientific management could save the railroads $1 million a day, a group of railroad presidents sent him a tongue-in-cheek telegram offering him a job, at a salary of his own naming. Brandeis cabled back, straight-faced: Sure, but keep your money; I never accept payment when serving the public interest. Both telegrams are reproduced in Strum, Brandeis, 163. Brandeis actually paid his firm out of his own pocket to cover the time his pro bono work took from his billable hours. Philippa Strum, “Brandeis, Louis Dembitz,” in American National Biography Online (2000).
21. Paper, Brandeis, 153.
22. Stewart, The Management Myth, 48–50.
23. Strum, “Brandeis, Louis Dembitz.”
24. Strum, Brandeis, 166–67.
25. Louis D. Brandeis, foreword (dated May 1912) to Primer of Scientific Management, by Frank B. Gilbreth, 2nd ed. (1912; repr., New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1914), vii–viii. Citations come from the 1914 edition.
26. Terman’s results were as dodgy as Taylor’s. And he stood by them just as faithfully, thereby launching an industry: “The present methods of trying out new employees, transferring them to simpler and simpler jobs as their inefficiency becomes apparent, is wasteful and to a great extent unnecessary. A cheaper and more satisfactory method would be to employ a psychologist to examine applicants for positions and to weed out the unfit.” Lewis M. Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 17–18; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (1981; repr., New York: Norton, 1996), 212. Citations come from the 1996 edition. For Terman’s own jury–rigged study of the IQ of “hoboes,” see Gould’s analysis at 182–83.
27. The Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management: Hearings Before Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management, H.R. 90, 3:1398–1400, 1478, 1456 (1912) (statement of Frederick W. Taylor, creator of scientific management).
28. Kanigel, One Best Way, 481–82.
29. Ibid., 514.
30. Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).
31. Edmund Wilson, American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 51.
32. See Ruth Schwartz Cohen, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), and Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
33. Michael R. Haines, “Table Ab1–10—Fertility and Mortality, by Race: 1800–2000,” in Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition Online, ed. Susan B. Carter et al. (1949; 1960; 1975; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
34. On the birthing intervals, see Lancaster, Making Time, 97–98; on Mary’s death as a result of diphtheria, see 123–24. On Cheaper by the Dozen, see also Jane F. Levey, “Imagining the Family in U.S. Postwar Popular Culture: The Case of The Egg and I and Cheaper by the Dozen,” Journal of Women’s History 13 (2001): 125–50.
35. Lancaster, Making Time, 101.
36. Ibid., 162.
37. Ibid., 150.
38. Frank Gilbreth to Lillian Gilbreth, [1922], Box 11, Folder 2, Gilbreth Papers, Purdue University.
39. Lancaster, Making Time, 117, 164–65. For more on the question of Lillian doing most of the writing, see Laurel D. Graham, “Domesticating Efficiency: Lillian Gilbreth’s Scientific Management of Homemakers, 1924–1930,” Signs 24 (1999): 639.
40. Lancaster, Making Time, 127, 129. They lived at 71 Brown Street. Lillian M. Gilbreth, As I Remember: An Autobiography (Norcross, GA: Engineering and Management Press, 1998), 121.
41. Gilbreth’s “Mother’s Daily Schedule” is reprinted in Lancaster, Making Time, 130.
42. Hugh G. J. Aitken, Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action, 1908–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). “Rough guess” is from 137. Regarding timing, etc., see especially 140–50. The petition is reprinted on 150.
43. Lancaster, Making Time, 143.
44. L. M. Gilbreth, The Psychology of Management: The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1914), 3.
45. Lancaster, Making Time, 161–62.
46. The biography is Copley’s (1923); the reference to Gilbreth’s marginalia comes from Kanigel, One Best Way, 548. Gilbreth’s copy of Copley is at Purdue. More evidence of the falling-out: Frank B. Gilbreth and L. M. Gilbreth, “Time Study and Motion Study as Fundamental Factors in Planning and Control: An Indic
tment of Stop-Watch Time Study” (paper, Taylor Society, New York, December 16, 1920), Box 27, Folder 4, Gilbreth Papers.
47. Brandeis writes about attending the service in a letter to his brother, Alfred, on October 22, 1915; Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, 3:617.
48. Louis D. Brandeis, “Testimony Before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, January 23, 1915,” in Strum, Brandeis on Democracy, 96–104.
49. Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., Time Out for Happiness (New York: Crowell, 1970), 114.
50. Aitken, Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 161.
51. Remarks by Louis D. Brandeis in Frederick Winslow Taylor: A Memorial Volume (New York: Taylor Society, 1920), 72–76.
52. Gilbreths’ labor policy: Graham, “Domesticating Efficiency,” 639–40.
53. Said one member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “The real crime of which this man is guilty is that he has exposed the iniquities of men in high places in our financial system.” Strum, Brandeis on Democracy, 15.
54. Strum, Brandeis, 293–95.
55. Strum, Brandeis on Democracy, 17.
56. Lancaster, Making Time, 164, 15. Frank B. Gilbreth and Lillian M. Gilbreth, Fatigue Study: The Elimination of Humanity’s Greatest Unnecessary Waste; A First Step in Motion Study (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1916), 157, 100–102. The Gilbreths’ emphasis on reducing fatigue also led them to develop devices to aid the handicapped. See especially Frank B. Gilbreth and L. M. Gilbreth, “Motion Study for Crippled Soldiers” (paper, meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ohio, December 27, 1915, to January 1, 1916), Box 27, Folder 2, Gilbreth Papers.
57. Remarks by Brandeis in Taylor: A Memorial Volume, 72–76; quote from 73.
58. Gilbreth and Gilbreth, Fatigue Study, 149–50.
59. Lillian M. Gilbreth to Frank B. Gilbreth, January 14, 1918, Box 11, Folder 10, Gilbreth Papers.
60. Lancaster, Making Time, 176.
61. Ibid., 191, 182–83. See also Edna Yost, in collaboration with Lillian M. Gilbreth, Normal Lives for the Disabled (New York: Macmillan, 1944).
62. “Following her husband’s orders, she sent his brain to Harvard Medical School.” Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., Time Out for Happiness, 179.
63. Lancaster, Making Time, 237, 244, 247. Vern L. Bullough, “Merchandizing the Sanitary Napkin: Lillian Gilbreth’s 1927 Survey,” Signs 10 (1985): 615–27.
64. Cohan, More Work for Mother, 5, 43–44; quote from 43.
65. Home economics entered the curriculum from grade school through graduate programs between 1914 and 1917. See, e.g., Mary S. Hoffschwelle, “The Science of Domesticity: Home Economics at George Peabody College for Teachers, 1914–1939,” Journal of Southern History 57 (November 1991): 659–80, especially 661, and Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti, eds., Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); the introduction explains the history of the term.
66. Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., Time Out for Happiness, 127.
67. Ibid., 1.
68. Ibid., 209.
69. Lillian Gilbreth’s decision to make this switch is in Graham, “Domesticating Efficiency.” On Frederick, see all of Frederick’s books, but especially the introduction to The New Housekeeping. Gilbreth considered Frederick a rival and seems to have been reluctant to help her out. Lillian M. Gilbreth to Frank B. Gilbreth, January 9, 1918: “I have attempted a ‘foreword’ for Mrs. Christine Frederick’s book. Is it business to do one for her? I can’t decide” (Box 93, Folder 1, Gilbreth Library of Management, Purdue University). Frederick made money by endorsing products, which Lillian refused to do.
70. Coffee cake: Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., Time Out for Happiness, 213. “Making a Lemon Meringue Pie: Original Layout of Kitchen Distance Walked, 224 Feet” and “Making a Lemon Meringue Pie: Improved Layout of Kitchen Distance Walked, 92 Feet” (blueprints), Box 71, Folder 1, Gilbreth Library of Management. On the Kitchen Efficient, see Carroll W. Pursell, White Heat: People and Technology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 104–5.
71. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “Gilbreth, Lillian Evelyn Moller,” in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 271–73.
72. Jeffrey Cruikshank, A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School, 1908–1945 (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1987), 165–66. For more on the Kitchen Efficient, see “Fatigue Laboratory: Agency History” (unpublished manuscript), Baker Library, Harvard Business School.
73. David Bruce Dill, “Fatigue Studies Among Mississippi Sharecroppers,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin (October 20, 1939): 113–19. Offprints of this and several other papers reporting on this series of experiments are filed in Fatigue Laboratory: Collected Publications, 1924–1946, Box 2, Folder 190–201, Baker Library, Historical Collections, Harvard Business School. D. B. Dill et al., “Properties of the Blood of Negroes and Whites in Relation to Climate and Season,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 136 (November 1940): 449–60 (Folder 210–222). W. H. Forbes et al., “Leukopenia in Negro Workmen,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 201 (March 1941): 407–12 (Folder 223–233). S. Robinson et al., “Adaptations of White Men and Negroes to Prolonged Work in Humid Heat,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine 21 (March 1941): 261–87 (Folder 223–233). S. Robinson et al., “Adaptations to Exercise of Negro and White Sharecroppers in Comparison with Northern Whites,” Human Biology 13 (May 1941): 139–58 (Folder 234–243). J. W. Thompson, “The Clinical Status of a Group of Negro Sharecroppers,” Journal of the American Medical Association 117 (1941): 6–8 (Folder 244–250).
74. Lillian M. Gilbreth, The Home-maker and Her Job (New York: D. Appleton, 1927), 23.
75. Ibid., 96.
76. Cowan, “Gilbreth, Lillian Evelyn Moller.”
77. Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., Time Out for Happiness, 148; on Grieves’s duties, see 193; the icebox, 210–11; the rolling cart, 213.
78. Ibid., 213.
79. Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Belles on Their Toes (New York: Crowell, 1950), 225–26. Lillian decided not to sell her house, calculating that “people who could afford to run such a large house didn’t have families that size any more.”
80. Brandeis, foreword (dated May 1912) to Gilbreth, Primer of Scientific Management, viii.
81. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), 6.
82. Lancaster, Making Time, 348–50.
83. Ibid., 227. Lillian Gilbreth’s best statement of a philosophy of work is in her “Work and Leisure,” in Toward Civilization, ed. Charles A. Beard (London: Longmans, Green, 1930): 232–52.
Chapter 7. CONFESSIONS OF AN AMATEUR MOTHER
1. Steven Schlossman, “Perils of Popularization: The Founding of Parents’ Magazine,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 50 (1985): 65–77, and Diane Looms Weber, “Hecht, George Joseph,” in American National Biography Online (2000). George Hecht, The War in Cartoons: A History of the War in 100 Cartoons by 27 of the Most Prominent American Cartoonists (New York: Dutton, 1919).
2. “Prospectus,” Mother’s Magazine 1 (January 1833): 4.
3. The best history of American magazines remains Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–1968); but see also John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
4. Isaiah Wilner, The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 83–87, 132. On the prehistory of the magazine, including naming, etc., see especially Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Knopf, 2010), 99. For more on Time’s history, see also Angeletti Norberto and Alberto Oliva, Time: The Illustrated History of the World’s Most Influential Magazine (New Yor
k: Rizzoli, 2010), and John Kobler, Luce: His Time, Life and Fortune (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
5. Brinkley, The Publisher, 138.
6. Time’s prospectus appears in Wilner, The Man Time Forgot, 85–86. The New Yorker’s prospectus is reprinted in Gigi Mahon, The Last Days of The New Yorker (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 14–16. “Of All Things,” New Yorker, February 21, 1925. That the New Yorker would not be written for an old lady in Dubuque was a dig at Time, but it was a dig at a lot of other magazines, too. Edmund Wilson once wrote to James Thurber that a certain Iowan was an “old cliché of New York editorial offices.” Wilson had been on the staff of Vanity Fair between 1920 and 1923, when its editor was Frank Crowninshield: “Crowninshield used to say, when confronted with something that he feared was too esoteric: ‘Remember, there’s an old lady sitting in Dubuque, and she has to be able to understand everything we print.’ ” Wilson always figured he was kidding. Wilson is quoted in Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000), 48. On the rivalry between Ross and Luce, see also Jill Lepore, “Untimely,” New Yorker, April 12, 2010.
7. Clara Savage Littledale (hereafter CSL), “And George Did It!” undated typescript, Box 2, CSL Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe.
8. A useful summary of available data is Michael Caines, “Fertility and Mortality in the United States,” EH. Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples, March 19, 2008; http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demography. See also Michael Caines and Richard H. Steckel, eds., A Population History of North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
9. The literature on demographic transition is vast, but a valuable account of this transition in the United States, along with a summary of the scholarship, can be found in Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); the Essex Almanac for 1771 is quoted on 103. Histories of contraception include Norman E. Hines, Medical History of Contraception (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1936); Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990); and James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978). But the most important account is Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Viking, 1976), and her revision of that work, Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Gordon argues that “birth control has always been primarily an issue of politics, not of technology” (2). On the folklore of birth control from antiquity to the twentieth century, see Gordon, Moral Property, 13–21.