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Enormous technological advances aided the growth of offices. By 1860, iron frames permitted the construction of taller buildings; by 1870, elevators assisted the climb. The Remington typewriter entered the office in 1874; Bell’s telephone was patented two years later; Morse telegraphs had been in use for several years earlier.5
In 1860, the census recorded the existence of 750,000 people engaged in “professional service” work; by 1890, this number had more than doubled to 2,160,000; twenty years later, the census registered the same leap: by 1910 there were 4,420,000 office workers in America.6 And—most startling of all, for the observers who lived through it—nearly half of them were women.7
What had befallen America that it suddenly needed so many offices?
The small world of the countinghouse had corresponded to the small, disconnected world of the United States, which had innumerable towns but was mostly made up of a patchwork of farms. But by the late nineteenth century, a burgeoning system of railroads had scythed through this pastoral landscape. The Pennsylvania Railroad; Michigan Central; Union Pacific; Chicago, Burlington & Quincy—these names overlaid an entirely new geography of the American imagination. The railroads lowered transportation costs, expanded markets and therefore the cost of goods and products. Telegraphs and telegraph companies had made instant communication across hitherto unfathomable masses of land possible for the first time. By connecting the eastern and western halves of the continent, they had—in one colossal, world-bestriding stroke—annihilated the old concepts of space and time.
Parker Brothers’ Office Boy (1889). Courtesy of the Carson Collection of the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress
In the analysis of Alfred Chandler, the railroads precipitated an organizational change which proved as consequential as the technological revolution that had powered the trains. To coordinate a network of trains required managers who could control the activities of disparate units, who would have to be housed in their own structures across the country. Partnerships that were adequate to manage shipping, a plantation, or a textile mill couldn’t handle a railroad. Even the speculators and capitalists whose names otherwise fill the headlines and polemics of the period did little to change the form of companies; instead, it was a new stratum of managers, who began to occupy the “middle” between workers and the top executives, that determined the changes in organizational form—which in turn formed the core of the offices that would soon dominate the American landscape.8
The railroads adopted a seemingly simple but in fact pathbreaking organizational form, based on the division of a company into departments. At the top, a board of directors held sway; under them lay the president. But beneath him, the chart of responsibilities begins to spread, in the classic M-form. Finance, freight, and construction were divided, and these in turn split into separate divisions with managers helming various departments—purchasing, machinery, accounting—spread across the various regional offices that coordinated the activities throughout the country. The state had a significant role to play in the organizing of American life: the legal fiction of the “corporation” famously made the ownership of a firm separate from its management. Gone were the multifarious responsibilities that attended clerks and partners; in their place came career managers, who spent years ascending a now highly articulated ladder, themselves hiring and directing employees picked to ascend the very same ladder. (In fact, the use of the word “ladder” to indicate the levels of a company came into use around this time.)
The change between the latter years of the cozy world of “Bartleby” and the vast, cavernous halls of the new office can be seen in the career of a single person. Like Edward Tailer, E. P. Ripley got a job working as a dry goods clerk in Boston immediately after high school, at age seventeen. Four years later, in 1866, he joined the Union Railroad as a contracting agent in its Boston office. In 1870 he was hired by a different railroad, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, as general freight agent in its Chicago office. In Chicago he became traffic manager. The next year he became general manager and helped to crush the railroad strike of 1888. In 1890, he became a vice president of yet another railroad company, rising to the presidency of the Santa Fe Railway in 1896, at age fifty-one. In the place of two positions—clerk and partner—there were now seven. And this picture doesn’t even indicate how much clerks had become differentiated: file clerks, shipping clerks, billing clerks, among other “semiskilled” laborers (as the census classification had it). Many other railroad executives followed similar trajectories—even if most dry goods clerks didn’t become railroad executives.9
In fact, as companies expanded, it became less and less likely that clerks would “apprentice” themselves in anything like the manner that their forebears did. The specialization of clerical work meant that most workers only knew one thing—be it accounting or filing or billing—and had little incentive or opportunity to learn the entire business. The bottom of a vast and impersonal machinery, the clerk who entered the world of business as E. P. Ripley had was more likely to have seen his intimate world dismantled and reapportioned among hundreds of desks.
What the trains had also destroyed were the old merchants’ networks that had sustained the small partnerships of the countinghouses. Merchants had depended upon their special knowledge of isolated regions and markets, which, when opened by quick access to other regions and markets with rail access, lost their isolation and therefore their dependence on merchant oligarchies. Depression hit the United States, first in the 1870s, and then once again in the 1890s; this prompted manufacturers to consolidate, and to integrate vertically, in order to lower prices.10 The only way to keep earning money in this new system of competition—what really felt, in the Gilded Age, like open warfare—was to merge. A wave of mergers swept through business in the 1890s, consolidating industries in steel, oil, tobacco, food, and meatpacking. Between 1897 and 1904 alone more than 4,000 firms collapsed into 257 combinations, trusts, and corporations.11
The invention of telecommunications allowed offices to be separated from factories and warehouses and in turn expanded the range of jobs available to office workers. Consider a mail-order company and its warehouse. Bosses and errand boys no longer had to conduct transactions in person; aside from the occasional messenger, it was now possible to send and receive information from your warehouse, or factory, or printing house, using Morse code or by picking up the phone. Within the office itself, the use of pneumatic tubes made it possible to run material between levels of a company, while Dictaphones, which could carry a smoke- and bourbon-ragged voice from a snug top-floor executive suite down to a harried typist marooned in the steno pool, made transcription rational and smoothly impersonal.
Paradoxically, this new capacity to communicate speedily and efficiently resulted in more and more work for workers to push through—more physical products, but also more paperwork (invoices, receipts, contracts, memos, profit-and-loss statements), which meant more typewriters, which meant more typists, which in turn meant more messages and therefore more messengers.
Things that were heralded as “laborsaving” devices gave rise to a whole new industry, and to more labor. As the great theorist of technology Marshall McLuhan put it in Understanding Media, “It was the telephone, paradoxically, that sped the commercial adoption of the typewriter. The phrase ‘Send me a memo on that,’ repeated into millions of phones daily, helped to create the huge expansion of the typist function.”12 In Sinclair Lewis’s office novel The Job (1917), his protagonist, Una Golden, suffers a sublime kind of dread when she confronts the expanse of supposedly laborsaving machines: “machines for opening letters and sealing them, automatic typewriters, dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes.” But she’s surprised to discover that “the girls worked just as hard and long and hopelessly after their introduction as before; and she suspected that there was something wrong with a social system in which time-saving devices didn’t save time for anybody but the owners.”13
Less heralded than the t
ypewriter and the telegraph, though no less consequential, was the invention of the vertical file cabinet. Though filing, as in organizing company papers, was as old as the office itself, file cabinets only began to appear in the 1880s. Initially, these were wooden and wardrobe-like, with drawers that stored box files or held loose papers with a metal clamp. Before that, files were stored in pigeonholes in a clerk’s desk, making them largely inaccessible. Incredible as it seems now, it took many years until the notion of storing papers flat—first horizontally and then on edge—became widely accepted. Once it became apparent that the immense volume of internal correspondence could be stored more easily in a vertical file, the system became ubiquitous.14 As office buildings grew taller, and flammability became a problem, steel file cabinets replaced wooden ones—the tall cabinets mimicking the shape of the skyscraper, such that the “file” seemed to be a metaphorical stand-in for the office itself. “Each office within the skyscraper,” C. Wright Mills would argue some years later, “is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbolic factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.”15 Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, could imagine no more powerful symbol of a totally bureaucratized world than the idea of each person having his or her name on a file:
No longer anonymous, but named, identified, the procession [of test tubes] marched slowly on; on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room.
“Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index,” said Mr. Foster with relish, as they entered …
“Brought up to date every morning,” added the Director [of hatcheries].
“And co-ordinated every afternoon.”16
A more subtle requirement that changed the form of the office, however, was the new need to design spaces that could distinguish between the now-multiple levels of management. The informal, easy consensus of the countinghouse had meant that a clerk could sit just a few feet away from his partner, who might have only bettered his clerk in visible prestige because his desk was of marginally better quality. But the proliferation of senior managers and vice presidents suddenly meant that power relationships were at once plainly hierarchical and confusingly similar. How much separated a manager from a senior manager, besides a few hundred dollars in their salaries? The office, ever more refined in its distribution of status rewards, would make the difference plain as daylight—giving desks to some and private spaces to others; mass-produced metal chairs competed with the chocolate richness of hand-carved mahogany; even the quality of carpeting or the finish on a table leg could distinguish one kind of worker from another.
The most obvious difference lay in the clerical desk. The classic desk of the old countinghouse was the Wooton—a massive, high-backed, grandiose affair riddled with cubbyholes and with foldout wings that seemed to reach around and clasp the sitter in warm embrace. This was a desk you could burrow into, a desk you could lose yourself in—one that truly signified a home. And at the end of the day, you could shut it up and lock it closed. All your papers would be waiting there expectantly for you the next morning.
But once the clerk was no longer the omnicompetent handyman of the office, relegated instead to the wide expanse of the floor, it seemed a touch expensive to give him such a fancy desk. The executives who essentially did no work—or hardly any paperwork, anyway—got to keep the wood-trimmed Second Empire furniture, while the clerks were handed the Modern Efficiency Desk. Invented in 1915 by the Steelcase Corporation (then called the Metal Office Furniture Company), it was a flat metal table, occasionally outfitted with file drawers. The key was that it gave clerks and their papers nowhere to hide. The new class of managers loved it: as they passed slowly and ominously down the long aisles it was easy to watch what clerks were doing.
The expansion in the range and scope of the office, in the specialization and refinement of its activities, happened so quickly, netting so many new workers eager to get in on the managerial binge, that at a certain point a problem became obvious and ineluctable. The problem was people didn’t know what to do with offices. “The old slipshod way of our forefathers,” as one writer in the 1890s had it, prevailed in office design; in other words, there was no design at all.17
By the turn of the century, the question had acquired a particular urgency. Institutions, both public and private, were considered by many to be seriously out of control. It started on the shop floor. Factories were not running at their best: rising labor strife was leading to frequent equipment sabotage, walkouts, and massive strikes; even on a daily level, managers complained, workers tended to malinger and dawdle, deliberately slowing down operations, a practice that became known as soldiering. A common feature of any workplace, workers especially liked to deploy it when managers would red-facedly scream for more speed.
Not that management had any idea what it was doing either. The adoption of organizational hierarchies hadn’t always resulted in greater efficiency, as Chandler had argued; companies often merged out of expediency, and they imitated organizational forms that weren’t always appropriate. The size of organizations had gotten so unwieldy that it wasn’t clear who was responsible for what. Before World War I, General Motors had tons of disparate factories and distribution facilities, but it hadn’t diversified its management properly; a single executive, William C. Durant, made virtually all the decisions. In an example of his infinite wisdom, he had decided that since automobiles were a growth industry, there was no need for cash reserves. When a downturn hit the economy in 1910, the company nearly went bankrupt. Meanwhile, Standard Oil had tons of cash but didn’t know what to do with it, because the company didn’t know how much it had. It hadn’t standardized its accounting practices over its long existence; none of the books matched up. The American states, too, had lost track of themselves. One California legislator described his state’s finances (apparently a problem since time immemorial) in 1909: “There was little short of chaos as far as any orderly provisions for state expenditures were concerned. There had been no audit of the state finances for over twenty years. The finance committees of the two houses were scenes of a blind scramble on the part of the various institutions and departments of the state in an endeavor to secure as large a portion as possible of whatever money might happen to be in the treasury … Logrolling and trading of votes on appropriation bills was the common practice among members of the legislature.”18
It didn’t help that the offices where everything was done were, by and large, dismal. One worker in 1894 asked readers to descend with him into the depths:
Imagine a room with its floor some steps below the level of the sidewalk; a small and dusty room, ill-lighted by an abortive skylight, and two windows upon one side; worse ventilated by one door opening into an equally dismal office, and another communicating directly with the foundry, whence drifted in a dull and heavy air, laden with smoke and evil odors, ornamented with graceful festoons of cobwebs, thrice magnified by accumulated grime and soot. The side windows, facing the west, opened upon a narrow driveway, on the opposite side of which were a dirty boiler-room and a noisy engine … This unattractive picture, far from being overdrawn, really serves to give but a faint idea of the … office of a large and famous establishment in New York city.19
Clerical workers, no longer enjoying the easy rapport with their two or three fellow workers and their bosses, were now massed together in highly regimented rows, to mimic—for lack of another precedent—the factory floor. From any viewpoint in the room, the world appeared to be an endless and innumerable sea of desks. Their bosses were usually out of sight, on a floor above them—the one that contained the sole bathroom, which workers had to take several flights of stairs to get to.
To the Gilded Age’s reputation for nonchalant corruption at every level of government, literally murderous corporations, and a yawning black gap of inequity between the classes should be added the sense that sheer chaos was taking hold over the country’s organs of administra
tion, public and private. From an elite perspective, America could seem a hopeless, even dangerous case: revolutionaries seemed to be crawling out from every corner of the Republic, sometimes rushing into executive offices with guns trained, other times lobbing bombs at presidents, all in the hopes of inspiring those restless and uneasy masses of laboring men in fields and factories; the offices from which they were supposed to be directed were sinking under mounds of paperwork—lost orders, missing receipts, smudged and totally faked accounts, which added up to millions of dollars that would, when checked, be found missing. Managers didn’t know how to manage. If industrial life in America were to be kept alive, the salvation would have to come from the controlling heart of the American economy—the office, and its new class of managers. To rationalize the office, and improve the efficiency of American business, management would have to become a science.
In 1898, the Bethlehem Iron Company, a supplier of domestic armaments to the U.S. Navy and, despite its name, a steel producer, hired Frederick Taylor as a consultant. Taylor was a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and he had quietly begun to distinguish himself with a series of papers addressing common problems of incentives and the efficiency of the manufacturing process, which had earned the attention of a few executives who happened to get their hands on them.