US Military Officers and the Intellectual Origins Of

Managing Men and Machines: U.S. Military Officers and the Intellectual Origins of Scientific Management in the Early Twentieth Century By Copyright 2016 David W. Holden Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ________________________________ Chairperson Jeffery Moran ________________________________ Co-Chair Ted Wilson ________________________________ Beth Bailey ________________________________ John Kuehn ________________________________ Paul Atchley Date Defended: February 8, 2016 The Dissertation Committee for David Holden certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Managing Men and Machines: U.S. Military Officers and the Intellectual Origins of Scientific Management in the Early Twentieth Century ____________________________________________ Chairperson Jeffery Moran Date approved: February 8, 2016 ii Abstract Managing Men and Machines: U.S. Military Officers and the Intellectual Origins of Scientific Management in the Early Twentieth Century. By David Holden Professor Theodore A. Wilson, Advisor The U.S. Army officer corps experienced an intellectual revolution following the experience of WWI that fundamental altered the relationship between man and machines in war. As a result, officers failed to develop the technology gene and began to think of war as being inherently quantitatively and technological based. This dissertation examines the relationship between technology and the U.S. Army and Navy officers specifically between 1900-1925. Furthermore, the treatise addresses the role of Frederick Taylor and the rise of scientific management within the U.S. Army and Navy. iii Acknowledgements In writing this dissertation, I received invaluable assistance and support from a number of people and organizations. Without their help and support, I would have never succeeded in finishing this treatise, nor the course of instruction at the University of Kansas. For these reasons, and many more, I offer my sincere and utmost appreciation to the following: First, I will forever be grateful to my lovely wife Sherri. I could not have succeeded without her support, caring for our four young children Kayla (6), Noah (5), Jeremiah (3), and Isaiah (2) throughout my arduous days of work and research. She graciously endured my isolated hours of reading and the endless stream of books that arrived on the doorstep from Amazon. The books continue to appear mysteriously. I also owe a great debt to Dr. Roger Spiller, a divergent thinker who fired the intellectual curiosity that led me to make this journey. He challenged me to become more than I thought I was encouraging me not to fear failure. Dr. John Kuehn worked tirelessly to form my disparate thoughts into a coherent narrative. Without Dr. Kuehn’s energy this dissertation would never have seen the light of day. He managed to work through hundreds pages of my work while working fulltime as a professor at CGSC. I’m not entirely convinced that he is human. He works more efficiently than any other man I know. Dr. Jonathan House’s honest and insightful suggestions on the many versions he surveyed also contributed significantly to this work. iv At the University of Kansas, Dr. Theodore Wilson guided my studies. He provided valuable editing and commentary regarding the content of this paper and no small amount of wordsmithing. Beyond this dissertation, Dr. Wilson was instrumental in working with the U.S. Army to allow a small cadre of wounded soldiers into the program at the University of Kansas. Thank you Dr. Wilson, in the most Clausewitzian sense, for taking a chance on us. v Table of Contents PAGE APPROVAL PAGE…………………………………………………….………….…… ii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………..………….… iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………….…………….… iv CHAPTER 1. The Technology Gene…………………………..………………….………….… 1 2. Practical Leadership for Empire.…………………………….………….... 40 3. Origins and Context for the Army’s Cultural DNA……………….….57 4. Journals and Professionalization.…..……………………………….……. 77 5. Inroads of Efficiency….…………………………………..…………….……… 97 6. Frederick Taylor, Scientific Management, and the U.S. Army Armories………………………………..………………………………………118 7. The Army by Nurture & the Navy by Nature………………………..140 8. Conclusion: History mattered not, because it changed so much………………………………………………………………….……..….. 180 vi Appendix………………………………………………………………………………193 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………..………………………………………….. 219 vii Chapter I The Technology Gene The U.S. Army today is the most powerful army the world has ever seen. For the last fourteen years this Army has conducted military operations against insurgents armed with assault weapons and primitive explosives. Several trillion dollars have been expended to fight this war. The Army lost-- they lost to an idea. The reason is that technology, in aggregate, produces a particular mindset, a zeitgeist that hinders the Army officer corps from developing an understanding of war. This study examines how the fundamental properties of the Enlightenment and Romanticism contributed to the forming of the Army officer mindset and how ideas of history, time, and heroes evolved, and then shifted, under the light of technology. The material examined is diffuse, and yet compelling. Few works exist that examine the relationship between man and machine. Thus, the thesis starts with a broad examination of ideas, values, and beliefs in order to demarcate the lines of inquiry that follow. The thinking of the Army’s officer corps about man’s role in warfare and the relationship in war between man and technology passed through a turning point during the first quarter of the twentieth century. This turning point saw the machine supplant man. The purpose of this study is to show the nature of this turning point and explain how the new ideas about war, man, and technology gained traction a hundred years ago and continue to shape U.S. military officers thinking today. This study does this by focusing on the methods of Frederick Taylor and how he influenced the U.S. military. Frederick Taylor’s influence in both the Army and the Navy were examined in detail. Letters from the 1 Frederick Taylor archive offer the balance of evidence. The Infantry Journal provides additional material through the critical period of WWI to evaluate the changing views of Army officers towards technology. Taylor’s correspondence with Naval officers demonstrates that this phenomenon was part of a wider cultural shift within the military, if not within the nation. It becomes clear that the experience on the Western Front in WWI combined with massive industrial growth across the United States had a pronounced effect on the zeitgeist of the Army officer corps. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Europe, the period known as the Enlightenment and its successor, sometimes called Romanticism, brought about two of the greatest intellectual shifts in Western history. Another titanic intellectual movement, the abandonment of historicism for what has been termed “technicism,” began with the First World War. Humankind once revered the past for the light it cast on the future; now, the pace of technological change forever altered that perception. This intellectual shift swept with growing momentum and fervency through bureaucratic institutions. This changing perspective especially influenced the U.S. Army from the years just prior to 1914 until it reached maturity in the Second World War. The growth of technicism, social sciences, and the general quantification and measurement of all things, both material and otherwise, encouraged the displacing of man by machine. Complex human problems appeared as a matter of proper organizational and technological application rather than as conceptual questions. War is first and foremost a human endeavor. Motivations in war run from irrational to rational, but in the end that seems to matter little. Ideas are the catalysts for war and the passions of the people provide the fuel. Thinking about the nature of war, Sun Tsu (Sunzi) 2 mused, “…those unable to understand the dangers inherent in employing troops are equally unable to understand the advantageous ways of doing so.”1 Similarly, those unable to understand the nature of war are equally unable to understand the advantages and disadvantages of employing technology. The strategic approach Sun Tzu advocated began by looking at a situation as an eagle peering down from the heavens; technical analysis often advances from the opposite direction by slicing life into discreet subsections, categories, and classifications, a process of micro to macro. The Greek term for technology (techne) included both art and trade.2 Conceptualizations of the term progressed slowly until the early nineteenth century when it entered the lexicon in its more familiar modern connotations. However, not until the American Civil War did the term “technologist” come into common parlance.3 One can follow the steady progress of this concept from its humble beginnings as men who practiced a trade and skill to men who specialized in the invention and operation of machines.4 The evolving terminology closely paralleled advances in society. Technology continues to evolve and defies a single definition; the multiplicity of uses and the nature of technology itself necessitate a flexible definition. Define it too narrowly and it does not adequately include elements within its prerogative, conversely, too broad a definition would

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