progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
and that Taylor according to Lepore was somewhat of a fraud, the Taylor data it is
alleged was all fabricated, and Galbreth had little if any basis for his facts and
recommendations.
The author has done a superb job at writing the biography. Yet it does have in my opinion
certain weaknesses. In certain parts of the text the sentences are wonderful but the
paragraphs do not hold together, there is jumping around in time and in concepts being
discussed. In contrast, the Lepore article has a style that is quite readable, whereas that of
Urofsky is at times cumbersome and pedantic. As stated in my discussion of privacy and
"management", Brandeis set the gold standard for privacy and I believe Urofsky could
have taken that further, and with Taylor and Galbreth, I believe Brandeis just did not do
his home work, and this was a failing.
I have been a fan of Judge Brandeis for much of what he accomplished especially with
the writing of the classic paper, The Right to Privacy, with his then law partner
Warren 110 . (Two recent works on Brandeis have appeared and are worth note. The first is
an article in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore, a superb piece of critical and historical
analysis 111 . Lepore looks at the field of management and efficiency consultants through
the work of Brandeis 112 .
She starts her article by stating:
"Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to
a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from
Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at
Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “scientific management.”
Everyone there—including Frank and Lillian Galbreth, best known today as the parents
in “Cheaper by the Dozen”—had contracted “Tayloritis”: they were enthralled by an
industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been
ordering people around, scientifically, for years."
The essence of the tale is that Brandeis sitting on a regulatory body which controlled the
monopoly like rates of railroads had gotten enthralled with the less than scientific work of
Taylor and the Galbreth. He then saw that railroads should employ these new
management techniques and then lower their rates. Simple, except as Lepore states the
Taylor results were a fraud! Perhaps there is a lesson here for global warming, telephone
interconnection rates and the like. Brandeis was a brilliant legal scholar, however he had
no expertise in the area of actually running a company. He did however understand the
"books" and as such used this profitably in his law practice. Yet the Taylor approach
assumed you looked forward and not backward, that you understood the business and not
110 See 4 Harvard Law Review 193 (1890)).
111 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/10/12/091012crat_atlarge_lepore
112 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/10/12/091012crat_atlarge_lepore
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