The prosperity of the twenties was indebted, in part, to the legacy of efficiency engineer Frederick W[inslow] Taylor (1856-1915), nicknamed "Speedy," considered the father of "scientific management." Many ideas about the scientific management of work and the work place current during the twenties had evolved in the three preceding decades under Taylor's leadership. He was the author in 1911 of Principles of Scientific Management and Shop Management (neither of them in this collection). "Taylorism, adaptations of Taylor's ideas about management methods for shops, offices and industial plants, supplied the motor driving the 1920s economy to fruition in production and distribution of goods on a mass scale. (INTRO NOTE Taylorism) The term "Taylorism" supplanted "Fordism," although Ford's focus was on efficiency through machines while Taylor bent his attention on efficient management of labor.
Taylor himself worked as laborer, then foreman, at the Midvale Steel Company. As Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and Richard S. Tedlow tell it, in The Coming of Managerial Capitalism (1985), "Convinced from his experience as a machine operator that his fellow-workers 'soldiered' on the job to protect themselves from pressure and from rate-cutting, he set out to devise a system of work control that would facilitate maximum output per man and a wage-payment plan that would give men an incentive to work at the maximum speed consistent with health" (p. 466). Analysis of the optimal amount of time required to perform a given task was calculated by means of a stop watch (time-motion study), based on the actual time it took a competent worker to do it. By means of management control the most efficient flow of work was planned and implemented.
Among the trade journal selections offered in Coolidge-Consumerism is the June-August 1926 issue of The Bulletin of the Taylor Society, which devotes its entire issue to a reprint of Taylor's 1912 testimony before the House of Representatives regarding scientific management. Readers thus have the opportunity to hear Taylor presenting his theories in his own voice.