He was called in by Bethlehem Steel. It was in Bethlehem he made his famous experiments with handling 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 was as good as ever at the end of the day.
He was a crank about shovels, every job had to have a shovel of the right weight and size for that job alone; every job had to have a man of the right weight and size for that job alone; but when he began to pay his men in proportion to the increased efficiency of their work,
the owners who were a lot of greedy smalleyed Dutchmen began to raise Hail Columbia; when Schwab bought Bethlehem Steel in 1901
Fred Taylor
inventor of efficiency
who had doubled the production of the stampingmill by speeding up the main lines of shafting from ninetysix to twohundred and twentyfive revolutions a minute
was unceremoniously fired.
After that Fred Taylor always said he couldn’t afford to work for money.
He took to playing golf (using golfclubs of his own design), doping out methods for transplanting huge boxtrees into the garden of his home.
At Boxly in Germantown he kept open house for engineers, factorymanagers, industrialists;
he wrote papers,
lectured in colleges,
appeared before a congressional committee,
everywhere preached the virtues of scientific management and the Barth slide rule, the cutting down of waste and idleness, the substitution for skilled mechanics of the plain handyman (like Schmidt the pigiron handler) who’d move as he was told
and work by the piece:
production;
more steel rails more bicycles more spools of thread more armorplate for battleships more bedpans more barbedwire more needles more lightningrods more ballbearings more dollarbills;
(the old Quaker families of Germantown were growing rich, the Pennsylvania millionaires were breeding billionaires out of iron and coal)
production would make every firstclass American rich who was willing to work at piecework and not drink or raise Cain or think or stand mooning at his lathe.
Thrifty Schmidt the pigiron handler can invest his money and get to be an owner like Schwab and the rest of the greedy smalleyed Dutchmen and cultivate a taste for Bach and have hundredyearold boxtrees in his garden at Bethlehem or Germantown or Chestnut Hill,
and lay down the rules of conduct;
the American plan.
But Fred Taylor never saw the working of the American plan;
in 1915 he went to the hospital in Philadelphia suffering from a breakdown.
Pneumonia developed; the nightnurse heard him winding his watch;
on the morning of his fiftyninth birthday, when the nurse went into his room to look at him at fourthirty,
he was dead with his watch in his hand.
Newsreel XLVI
these are the men for whom the rabid lawless, anarchistic element of society in this country has been laboring ever since sentence was imposed, and of late they have been augmented by many good lawabiding citizens who have been misled by the subtle arguments of those propagandists
The times are hard and the wages low
Leave her Johnny leave her
The bread is hard and the beef is salt
It’s time for us to leave her
BANKERS HAIL ERA OF EXPANSION
PROSPERITY FOR ALL SEEN ASSURED
Find German Love of Caviar a Danger to Stable Money
EX-SERVICE MEN DEMAND JOBS
No one knows
No one cares if I’m weary
Oh how soon they forgot Château-Thierry
WE FEEL VERY FRIENDLY TOWARDS THE
TYPEWRITER USERS OF NEW YORK CITY
JOBLESS RIOT AT AGENCY
Ships in de oceans
Rocks in de sea
Blond-headed woman
Made a fool outa me
The Camera Eye (43)
throat tightens when the redstacked steamer churning the faintlyheaving slatecolored swell swerves shaking in a long green-marbled curve past the red lightship
spine stiffens with the remembered chill of the offshore Atlantic
and the jag of framehouses in the west above the invisible land and spiderweb rollercoasters and the chewinggum towers of Coney and the freighters with their stacks way aft and the blur beyond Sandy Hook
and the smell of saltmarshes warmclammysweet
remembered bays silvery inlets barred with trestles
the put put before day of a gasolineboat way up the creek
raked masts of bugeyes against straight tall pines on the shell-white beach
the limeycold reek of an oysterboat in winter
and creak of rockers on the porch of the scrollsaw cottage and uncles voices pokerface stories told sideways out of the big mouth (from Missouri who took no rubber nickels) the redskin in the buffalorobe selling snakeroot in the flare of oratorical redfire the sulphury choke and the hookandladder clanging down the redbrick street while the clinging firemen with uncles’ faces pull on their rubbercoats
and the crunch of whitecorn muffins and coffee with cream gulped in a hurry before traintime and apartmenthouse mornings stifling with newspapers and the smooth powdery feel of new greenbacks and the whack of a cop’s billy cracking a citizen’s skull and the faces blurred with newsprint of men in jail
the whine and shriek of the buzzsaw and the tipsy smell of raw lumber and straggling through slagheaps through fireweed through wasted woodlands the shantytowns the shantytowns
what good burying those years in the old graveyard by the brokendown brick church that morning in the spring when the sandy lanes were streaked with blue puddles and the air was violets and pineneedles
what good burying those hated years in the latrinestench at Brocourt under the starshells
if today the crookedfaced customsinspector with the soft tough talk the burring speech the funnypaper antics of thick hands jerking thumb
(So you brought home French books didjer?)
is my uncle
Newsreel XLVII
boy seeking future offered opportunity… good positions for bright… CHANCE FOR ADVANCEMENT… boy to learn… errand boy… officeboy
YOUNG MAN WANTED
Oh tell me how long
I’ll have to wait
OPPORTUNITY
in bank that chooses its officers from the ranks, for wideawake ambitious bookkeeper… architectural draftsman with experience on factory and industrial buildings in brick, timber, and reinforced concrete… bronze fitter… letterer… patternmaker… carriage painter… first class striper and finisher… young man for hosiery, underwear and notion house… assistant in order department… first class penman accurate at figures… energetic hardworker for setting dies in power presses for metal parts
canvasser… flavor chemist… freight elevator man… house salesman… insurance man… insurance man… invoice clerk… jeweler… laborer… machinist… milling machine man… shipping clerk… shipping clerk… shipping clerk… shoe salesman… signwriter… solicitor for retail fishmarket… teacher… timekeeper… tool and diemaker, tracer, toolroom foreman, translator, typist… window trimmer… wrapper