Work Better, Live Better

Motivation, Labor, and Management Ideology

David A. Gray

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781613767849
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In the United States, a strong work ethic has long been upheld as a necessity, and tributes to motivation abound—from the motivational posters that line the walls of the workplace to the self-help gurus who draw in millions of viewers online. Americans are repeatedly told they can achieve financial success and personal well-being by adopting a motivated attitude toward work. But where did this obsession come from? And whose interests does it serve? Work Better, Live Better traces the rise of motivational rhetoric in the workplace across the expanse of two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Beginning in the early twentieth century, managers recognized that force and coercion—the traditional tools of workplace discipline—inflamed industrial tensions, so they sought more subtle means of enlisting workers' cooperation. David Gray demonstrates how this "motivational project" became a highly orchestrated affair as managers and their allies deployed films, posters, and other media, and drew on the ideas of industrial psychologists and advertising specialists to advance their quests for power at the expense of worker and union interests.

Chapter 1

Motivation, Management, and Industrial Modernity

Emotions may be conditions of stimulation or interference, and no one ought to underestimate the importance of higher motives, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the psychological impulses of the laborer.

—Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 1913

In 1899, Elbert Hubbard, the business writer and founder of the Roycroft arts and crafts society in East Aurora, New York, penned a brief inspirational essay that, to his surprise, would become an overnight sensation and go on to be a model for much of the publicity that employers used in efforts to motivate workers during the next two decades. Although the word “motivation” was little used at this juncture, the essay’s wide circulation and enthusiastic reception among businessmen suggested that communications media could play a powerful role in promoting work discipline.

The essay appeared in the March issue of Hubbard’s “little magazine” of business, the Philistine, which had around one hundred thousand readers, most of whom were businessmen and admirers of Hubbard’s tributes to bootstrap individualism. It took the form of a tribute to Lieutenant Rowan, the soldier whose actions in the Spanish-American War the previous year were widely reported to have been decisive to the war’s outcome. In the much-celebrated incident, Rowan was tasked with delivering a message from President McKinley to General Calixto García, the leader of the Cuban insurrection against Spain, a mission that he performed dutifully, securing the alliance that McKinley desired and aiding the American victory over Spain in the process.

Hubbard contrasted Rowan’s dedication to the job at hand with the attitude of the era’s workers, who, he scoffed, were sorely lacking in such qualities. Rowan “took the letter and did not ask, ‘Where is he at?’” Instead, after being dropped off the coast of Cuba, he “strapped it over his heart” and “traversed a hostile country on foot” for three weeks before delivering the letter. “By the Eternal!” Hubbard exclaimed in admiration, “there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing—‘Carry a message to Garcia!’” Hubbard added ruefully, however, that Rowan’s single-minded commitment to the job was all too rare in the nation’s workplaces where “slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule.” These unmotivated work habits were, he added, regrettably familiar to the nation’s employers, the unsung “other Garcias,” who spent their days struggling to get their workers in line but were “well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.”1

The essay’s stark contrast between the resourceful Rowan—a clear analogy for the ideal employee—and the “slipshod” workers who Hubbard described so disparagingly was embraced by employers far and wide, bringing him and the Philistine widespread acclaim. Hubbard was inundated with requests for copies of the essay from employers across the country and around the world. The New York Central Railroad ordered one hundred thousand copies in pamphlet form for its workers under the new title, “A Message to Garcia.” Many other employers followed the example, and in turn, most workers at large or midsize firms in America received a copy or read it in company publications over the next few years. In 1900 it was translated for all employees of the Imperial Russian Railways, and during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, Russian military leaders supplied copies for all Russian soldiers. For two decades after its publication, schoolteachers assigned the essay to their students as a moral lesson about the importance of self-discipline, and it was eventually translated into all major languages and adapted for the stage and screen. By 1925, over forty million copies had been printed worldwide, making it the third-most-reproduced piece of literature after the Bible and the dictionary.2

“A Message to Garcia” was far from the first inspirational tract that employers circulated to workers—this had occurred since the early days of industrialization—but it made clear to managers as never before that such communiqués presented valuable tools for promoting employee discipline. Hubbard’s sneering admonishments of employees for failing to live up to managers’ idealized visions of work gradually gave way to more positive-toned messaging. However, the dichotomy between the motivated and the unmotivated worker that his essay popularized was to become increasingly prominent in management’s efforts to influence attitudes and behaviors in industry. Indeed, many of the propaganda posters, booklets, and films used to motivate workers in the factory in the decades ahead channeled Hubbard’s comparison between the productive and the unproductive worker and adapted his rhetoric about the virtues of diligent work.

Although Hubbard and his writings faded from view in the 1910s—he was aboard the Lusitania when sunk by a German submarine in 1915—the motivational genre that he helped establish remained highly influential among businessmen.3 Throughout the Gilded Age, the industrial system had been steeped in intermittent conflict as workers asserted their collective hopes for industrial democracy through labor unions and industrialists suppressed labor strife with coercion and violence. Inside the factory, managers maintained control by disciplining workers’ bodies on the production line, but in the early twentieth century they gradually discovered that the mind could be a no less useful route of regulation. This realization opened the door for an idea that was to become central to management quests for control and power in the decades to come: motivation (or, as it was more commonly called at this early stage, motives, meaning the range of factors that impelled an individual to action). Conveniently for industrialists, this insight coincided with the advent of modern communication techniques. Specialists of many stripes—reformers, industrial psychologists, educators, propaganda designers, among others—believed that pamphlets, posters, films, and other media could be an effective means for dispensing motivational sentiments to workers and thereby shaping their minds in “positive” ways.4

This chapter tracks the emergence of motivation as a management idea and charts the spread of motivational rhetoric from the turn of the century to the end of World War I. According to many historians, motivation began to gain influence in industry only in the wake of the high-profile experiments into employee productivity conducted by human relations specialists in the 1920s and 1930s, especially the Hawthorne studies, which revealed that modifications of the working environment, along with workers’ awareness of being observed, led to changes in behavior. Yet managers’ interest in motivation emerged well before these influential studies, albeit in less formal and structured ways. This was the case especially in the discourse that they invoked, both among themselves and in employee communications techniques. Motivational discourse was useful to management in part because it was so wide-ranging and adaptable. Along with closely related concepts such as motive, incentive, and morale, it allowed managers to address a multitude of workplace concerns. The ideal of employee motivation proved useful to them when emphasizing work’s economic and psychological rewards alike, or when trying to impress on workers the benefits they would receive if they embraced company mindedness or adopted a cooperative attitude toward management. In reality, managers intensified their efforts to extract more labor from workers and to suppress labor unions, and work became even more grueling throughout the early twentieth century due to managers’ speedup of the production line. Yet through the concept of motivation they could reframe their calls for increased productivity within oratories about the need to satisfy workers’ needs and aspirations, a tactic that deemphasized the inherent power hierarchies between themselves and the workers who toiled in their factories.

Motivation’s Progressive Era Roots

At the beginning of the twentieth century, efforts to motivate workers, when pursued, were mostly ad hoc. During this time, managers generally regarded workers as a component of the production process—as “labor” or “human capital,” in the terminology of the day. This characterization was informed by the rapid expansion of an industrial system that, as business historian Alfred Chandler explains, prioritized large-scale planning, production, transportation, communication, and bureaucracy.5 Operating from this standpoint, managers thought little about influencing workers’ dispositions. Any worker deemed not productive enough could simply be replaced in the same manner as a machine part. Nor did managers see much point in trying to persuade less productive workers to modify their ways. According to the dominant theories of the day, behavior was determined by one’s instincts or inborn traits, which were believed to be unchangeable.6 These views also informed employers’ responses to industrial conflict. Throughout the late nineteenth century, they met strikes with violent put-downs and coercion.7

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, businessmen began to search for new ways to prevail over the “labor problem.” Many of them believed that industrialization, with its large and impersonal factory system, had severed the close connections that had existed between employers and workers in the preindustrial age. Factory work brought both a deepening sense of alienation in the workforce and ongoing labor conflict as workers asserted their demands for a more humane existence. In the wake of these tensions, many businessmen began to adopt a more benevolent tone in their deliberations about employees. They hoped that by talking about workers as individuals with feelings and aspirations, they could counter criticisms of harsh industrial conditions, diminish labor conflict, and, as Roland Marchand argues, infuse the corporation with “soul.”8 Throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, managers’ assumption that workers’ dispositions were unchangeable waned. Gradually, the door opened for “incentives” and what would later be called “motivation” to enter their thinking.

The emerging notion that workers’ dispositions were malleable was derived from the progressive reform movement, whose influence was felt throughout all areas of American life from the 1890s through World War I. Progressivism embodied a broad-ranging effort to reform politics, industry, and other major areas of society, with the goal of improving Americans’ lives, especially those of the largely industrial working class who lived in the nation’s swelling urban centers. Progressives generally rejected the “survival of the fittest” ethos of social Darwinism that, since the Gilded Age, had insisted that biology and inherited traits were the major determinants to shape the individual’s life. Instead, they emphasized the role of education and social and environmental conditions in shaping experience. These views were a cornerstone of the work of reformers from Jacob Riis to Jane Addams, and they became tenets of industrial psychology, which flourished from the 1910s onward.9

Progressivism had a complex relationship to modern industrial work. At a time when generations of workers were condemned to lives of grueling and repetitive labor, progressives, including many businessmen, worried whether America could remain true to republicanism—the nineteenth-century ideal emphasizing virtuous, independent work—and sustain its claim to be different from the “old world” of Europe with its dehumanizing factory systems. These concerns prompted many progressives to push for workplace reforms. But while progressives wished to make work safer and more enriching, the ideas that they promoted dovetailed with managers’ efforts to discipline workers and increase their productivity. This tendency, as Daniel Rodgers argues, stemmed from progressives’ hopes about the democratizing possibilities of technology and industrial education.10 By championing work enrichment, progressives helped lay the foundations of the motivational ideology that managers used to extend their control over workers, often in highly exploitative ways, for years to come.

The importance of motivation in progressivism is seen in the ideas of some of its leading figures. Jane Addams, one of the foremost proponents of “industrial betterment,” saw factory work as acceptable as long as workers were taught to see their work as part of a collective enterprise.11 While Addams’s beliefs stemmed from a humanistic sensibility, they contained antecedents of the “teamwork” ethos that became central to motivational techniques aimed at disciplining workers and weakening unions. The writings of John Dewey, the most influential educational reformer in America in the first half of the twentieth century, embodied a similarly accommodating stance toward industrial work. Dewey opposed “instrumental” forms of industrial education because they acted to “subsidize industrial capitalists in their need for labor.” Work, he believed, should instead be a vocation that provided workers with access to “self-development and personal growth.”12 As generations of managers discovered, however, this progressive ideal proved useful in encouraging workers to see themselves as members of the “team,” a goal that, in turn, helped managers to impose more stringent forms of control in the factory.

Progressives’ efforts to sustain faith in work’s rewards were not entirely new. In the nineteenth century, American business writers published countless books and pamphlets espousing the virtues of the work ethic, many of them inspired by business writers in England. This literature extolled the “gospel of work,” the nineteenth-century philosophy asserting an inviolable link between hard work and morality. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the gospel’s chief evangelist was Benjamin Franklin, whose best-selling Poor Richard’s Almanack was considered the bible of “good” work values. By the century’s end, Franklin’s writings had been eclipsed by a more unabashed insistence on the necessity of hard work by such authors as Samuel Smiles and the industrial tycoon Andrew Carnegie. Eager to fuse the gospel of work with social Darwinism, these authors couched labor’s rewards in moral terms, proclaiming that self-discipline and initiative would lead to success, a formula exploited to powerful effect by Elbert Hubbard in “A Message to Garcia.”13 After the turn of the century, however, employers perceived the gospel’s “survival of the fittest” reasoning as a hindrance to their efforts to instill “cooperative” attitudes among workers. Progressive ideals like work betterment seemed a more viable means to incorporate the worker into the rhythms of industrial life.

Although they sought to enrich workers’ lives, progressives, like many earlier thinkers, helped businessmen make the brutalizing demands of industrial work more palatable to Americans. Their calls for industrial betterment comprised a sort of proto-motivational ideology that connect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index