U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [361]
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 idle man.
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