Why the HR Office Works for the Boss
And more on how the first "Big Men on Campus," Herbert Hoover and friends, kept charge in the university, in the workplace, and on the national stage
Welcome to Making History, a newsletter about how historians make history. Also sometimes a newsletter, as in this series on the origins of “leadership,” that doesn’t so much go behind the scenes of history-making as it offers a preview of some of the latest arguments and findings in the field. For the beginning of the series, go here. And to subscribe, go here. It’s free!
As the previous posts in this series show, the proudest product of the new collegiate and research sides of the university in the early twentieth century, and the figure most sought after by big business, was no simple jock. He was the “big man on campus,” the “well-rounded” scholar–athlete, the expert with a big personality.
In the 1910s and 1920s, the big man on campus strode onto the national stage. Student manager of the football team and star graduate of the mining school; rough-and-ready frontier engineer and master of bureaucracy in the midst of war; running a hiring hall for professors and college graduates as cabinet secretary and first presidential candidate to come from the new ranks of big business. “You will find the [college] graduate in mining in California working … in the mines of Angel’s Camp or Nevada City,” Stanford’s president noted, with the early career of his favorite graduate in mind, “but … faithful service in the ditch will carry him at one bound past all his untrained competitors.” The apotheosis of expertise and leadership. And the name of this paragon? He was Herbert Hoover.
What the integration of academics and athletics, expertise and personality, typified above all in the figure of Hoover, suggests was the way that the discourses of leadership and systematic management came together. The engineers and social scientists whose ideas undergirded systematic management were technocratic masterminds, obsessed like Hoover with efficiency. But the champions of systematic management were also people marked by the mores of their time, and they almost always left some kind of opening to the worldview that saw a need for character, personality, and leadership. Engineering educators, professional societies, and corporate engineering recruiters placed great emphasis on character. One survey of 9,000 practicing engineers found that “character” outranked “mind,” “force,” “knowledge,” and “technique” in importance, with “physique” and “personality” identified as the top “character” attributes. For Hoover himself, early in his career, the engineer was no functionary but a “leader” whose work of “creation and construction” could not help but gradually reveal the “personality” of the modern world’s “real creator.” Instead of quantifiable abilities, Hoover much later emphasized the “vital sparks of leadership.”
For Hoover and the thousands of engineers, managers, and administrators that followed in his train, the task of improving society was not a matter of treating people like Pavlovian automata who could be brought into line through amoral social engineering — the ideas of top-down social control through behaviorist social science were only just coming into view. Rather, Hoover and his cohort saw social reform as a matter of “moral engineering,” a project of democratic reform, with experts as handmaidens of an active public, not rulers of a passive mass society. In this understanding, many who embraced the engineers’ worldview also believed, much like Wilson had argued, that the “hard-headed cult of efficiency” had to be subordinated to “idealism.” Frederick Winslow Taylor, for instance, might have discounted the importance of “personality” in scientific management. But the power of this more humanistic approach in the engineers’ worldview is clear from how quickly Taylor’s followers began extolling personality’s importance to leadership. On the playing fields of discourse, the champions of leadership achieved their victory not by destroying science but by putting it in its place.
No domain better illustrated the developing relationship between the world of ownership and that of engineering than the new approach that, far more than the schemes of Taylorism, became the favorite form of managerial science in the 1920s and 1930s. This was personnel management — a managerial technique promoted by no less than Hoover himself as Secretary of Commerce. Where engineers like Taylor and social scientists like Veblen sought to displace owners and management, whether for their own sake or that of the larger society, the champions of personnel management sought to keep challenges to superiors to a minimum. It is well known that the introduction of the “personnel” or “human relations” approaches to management, together with the growing corporate welfare states that these departments administered, was a crucial element in resistance to the labor movement in the early twentieth century. Just as much as a way to stop the labor movement, though, executives and owners turned to the personnel department as a way to put a stop to the engineers’ own technocratic movement, and to keep leaders like them in charge.
Consider the career of Channing Dooley. In the 1900s, Dooley trained as an electrical engineer before becoming the first personnel director at one of the most cutting-edge companies of the early twentieth century, Westinghouse Electric. By the 1920s he had become head of personnel at Standard Oil of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil), at that time perhaps the largest company in the world. Despite his engineering background, however, Dooley avoided quantification. Like many of his peers, he believed that “every field of industrial activity is calling for the man” who “produces facts, not opinions.” But although this engineer could take his trade far beyond the factory — “he need not engines with which to ply his art” — Dooley also insisted that “man is not a machine,” that the “forcible conformity to system” of highly quantified systematic management threatened to kill unquantifiable human “initiative.” The claims of efficiency, he argued, worked against those of originality: “there is not anything so efficient as a bee hive, but it never changes in a thousand years.” Although Dooley might find some use for the rapid quantification provided by systematic tests, he preferred to focus on signs of “originality and personal initiative,” “co-operation” and “personality.” A potential employee needed to know the “fundamentals of his profession,” but “all modern writers are putting [such fundamentals] at the end of the list no matter how long and complex.” Instead “moral character and good fiber come fundamentally first,” Dooley believed, and such qualities had become so rare that he sometimes thought “it might be well to abolish all technical schools” and instead “teach people how to behave.” It was real higher education, typified by a liberal arts institution, that provided just such training, graduating “a fellow of pretty high moral fibre, clean, sober, honest.” Even then, though, Dooley found that less than half of the college graduates he interviewed proved to have sufficient “originality and initiative.”
An entire academic industry arose in the 1910s and 1920s to compete for the attention, and dollars, of personnel managers like Dooley. Now known as “industrial psychology,” this field first went by the name of “human engineering.” Like scientific management, the field’s early promoters promised a science of humans, but one based on “humanly [sic] scientific standards.” In practice, a “human” approach entailed neither the bottom-up evocation of workers’ own point of view, nor the top-down creation of statistically validated standards by which to categorize the workforce. Instead, like so many of the new professionals administering the masses, the industrial psychologists occupied a middle position: they formalized the “human” desires of managers and communicated the “human” needs of workers.
Beginning in the 1910s, accelerating during World War I, and metastasizing during the 1920s, the tools of industrial psychology promised to measure both workers and managers. The project, as Dooley put it, was one of “perfecting a plan of fitting men to their work,” slotting everyone in a company, perhaps eventually an entire society, into a predetermined structure. Crucially, the star “psychometric” method was not, as in many popular accounts, the intelligence test, that love affair of academic psychologists and object of fascination of the wider public. Although frequently used in education in the 1920s, men like Dooley in industry were careful to keep intelligence tests at arm’s length. This was despite the best attempts of the early intelligence researchers, who published surveys based on the opinions of college faculty that suggested a “great merchant or magnate” boasted a higher intelligence (score: 18.06 on a 20 point scale) than a “university administrator” (score: 17.81) much less that of a mere “college professor” (score: 16.64). The early intelligence researchers also promised that native-born WASPs would prove more capable than their foreign-born competitors, above all Jews, whose success in schoolwork, researchers believed, was a matter of “overachievement,” hard work but not real intelligence.
Actual results proved difficult to reconcile with these early promises. Surveys soon found that the children of professionals had the highest IQs, while, in the words of one Columbia University official, the “endless thousands of ambitious men and women,” i.e. Jewish immigrants, proved “ready to meet any test.” This is not to mention findings that cast doubt on the biological basis of the black–white test score gap — or the shocking findings that men scored no higher on intelligence tests than women. The chief promoters of the new tests in the academy, meanwhile, made no secret of their desire to replace student athletes and fraternity brothers with child IQ prodigies, or their belief that the “exact science” of intelligence testing would allow the new “Human Engineer” to solve the problem of “wages and labor” by restricting high wages to those who tested high in intelligence. The early testing promoter Henry Goddard could not have made clearer the threat posed by the tests to management. “Why should we not ascertain the mental level of people in various activities,” he asked, “and when we find any inefficient … on account of their lack of intelligence or other qualities, why should not society have the right to transfer that individual to some other line of work?”
Rather than the abstruse methods of the intelligence test, over which outsiders could exercise little control, managers in business preferred a method so simple that, as with talk of “leadership,” it may be difficult to believe that there was ever a time when it did not exist. This is the rating scale. Visual scales for the measure of physical properties such as temperature date back centuries, and found occasional application in the study of humans from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. But it was only with the rise of both systematic management and professional psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the ranking of individual qualities on a numerical spectrum from, say, one to ten entered the everyday world.
The individual “rating scale,” essentially unknown before 1915, burst on the scene amid the US military’s sudden need to sort over 3 million recruits with the onset of the First World War. In this task, the advantage of the rating scale over the intelligence test was simple. Rather than leave judgment in the hands of the professional psychologist or the systematizing engineer, the rating scale borrowed the techniques of these professionals to re-empower the men on top. The qualities rated — “energy,” “initiative,” “leadership” — were not new technical terms but the favorite qualities of existing managers. And while the new industrial psychologists may have created the rating instruments, it was managers themselves who by and large conducted the rating. The result was a way to “systematize” employment, but one where what mattered was not the independent judgment of a professional but, as one early industrial psychologist happily observed, the “agreement of the bosses.” Although the use of the new rating scales had to be spelled out in detail to managers, those on top could rest assured that the ratings simply formalized the same old tasks of “comparing salesmen with other salesmen, … foremen with other foremen.” The task of the professional psychologist could be reduced, in large part, to tallying up the scores and normalizing the results across those of other managers.
A major part of these developments was a rearguard male reaction to the growing prominence of women in post-secondary education and elsewhere.