Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  13. American Whig Review, April 1853, 75; American Phrenological Journal 17 (1853); Vanity Fair, February 18, March 17, 1860, quoted in Zakim, “Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary,” 570.

  14. Quoted in Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the Early Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 109–10.

  15. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), in Poems, Tales, and Selected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1996), 389–90.

  16. Walt Whitman, New York Dissected (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936), 120.

  17. Quoted in Michael Zakim, “Producing Capitalism,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 226.

  18. Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73–74.

  19. Willis Larimer King, “Recollections and Conclusions from a Long Business Life,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 23 (1940): 226, quoted in Ileen A. DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9.

  20. Quoted in Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 264, quoted in Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977), 37.

  21. Michael Zakim, “Producing Capitalism,” 229–30.

  22. Chandler, Visible Hand, 15.

  23. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 83.

  24. Ibid., 95.

  25. Ibid., 116.

  26. Edward N. Tailer, Diary, January 1, 1850, New-York Historical Society.

  27. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 204.

  28. Quoted in Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 78.

  29. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 43.

  30. Quoted by Tailer, Diary, December 2, 1848.

  31. Tailer, Diary, December 15, 1849.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Tailer, Diary, January 17, 1850.

  34. Luskey, On the Make, 129–31.

  35. Tailer, Diary, November 12, 1852, quoted in ibid., 186.

  36. Luskey, 191–93.

  37. Quoted in ibid., 137.

  38. New York Daily Tribune, August 16, 1841, 2.

  39. New York Daily Tribune, September 2, 1841.

  40. Quoted in Luskey, 138.

  41. “Familiar Scenes in the Life of a Clerk,” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 5 (1841): 56, quoted in Margery Davies, Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 21.

  42. See Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 108.

  2: THE BIRTH OF THE OFFICE

  1. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918 [1907]), 445.

  2. William C. Gannett, “Blessed Be Drudgery,” in Blessed Be Drudgery, and Other Papers (Glasgow: David Bryce and Sons, 1890), 2.

  3. Ibid., 7.

  4. Horatio Alger Jr., Rough and Ready; or, Life Among the New York Newsboys (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1897), 262.

  5. Eric Sundstrom, Work Places: The Psychology of the Physical Environment in Offices and Factories (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 33.

  6. Susan Henshaw Jones, preface to On the Job: Design and the American Office, ed. Donald Albrecht and Chrysanthe B. Broikos (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 18.

  7. Jerome P. Bjelopera, City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 26.

  8. As scholars have argued since, Chandler greatly exaggerates the efficiency of the “managerial revolution.” So, too, did he neglect the broader economic changes, such as the depression of the 1890s, which fueled consolidation and price competition in industry. See William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 21–40, and Naomi Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 153–55.

  9. Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 47.

  10. See Lamoreaux, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 85–87.

  11. Ibid., 33.

  12. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 262.

  13. Sinclair Lewis, The Job (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1917), 234.

  14. JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 34.

  15. Mills, White Collar, 189.

  16. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, and Brave New World Revisited (1932; New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 20.

  17. Quoted in Yates, Control Through Communication, 9.

  18. Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 20–22.

  19. Quoted in Sundstrom, Work Places, 31.

  20. James S. Russell, “Form Follows Fad,” in Albrecht and Broikos, On the Job, 53.

  21. Quoted in Sudhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), 168.

  22. Daniel T. Nelson, Frederick Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 29.

  23. The Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management: Hearings Before Special Committee of the House of Representatives to Investigate Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management, Under Authority of H. Res. 90, Vol. 3, 1912: 1414.

  24. Quoted in Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 53.

  25. Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913), 69.

  26. Ibid., 7.

  27. Ibid., 83.

  28. Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Penguin, 1997), 433–34.

  29. Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 34–35.

  30. Quoted in Kakar, Frederick Taylor, 2.

  31. Providence Labor Advocate, November 30, 1913, 1, quoted in David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 221.

  32. Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 221.

  33. John Dos Passos, The Big Money (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000 [1933]), 15, 19.

  34. System, January 1904, 484–85.

  35. Robert Thurston Kent, “Introduction,” in Frank Gilbreth, Motion Study (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1921), xiv.

  36. William H. Leffingwell, Scientific Office Management: A Report on the Results of the Applications of the Taylor System of Scientific Management to Offices, Supplemented with a Discussion of How to Obtain the Most Important of These Results (Chicago: A. W. Shaw, 1917), 214.

  37. Ibid., 16.

  38. Ibid., 35.

  39. Ibid., 33.

  40. Ibid., 19.

  41. Ibid., 7.

  42. Ibid., 11.

  43. Lee Galloway, Office Management: Its Principles and Practice (New York: Ronald Press, 1919), ix.

  44. Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 110.

  45. Kwolek-Folland notes the similarities between the arts and management in ibid., 108.

  46. Upton Sinclair, T
he Brass Check (Pasadena, Calif., 1920), 78.

  47. “When Wall Street Calls Out the Reserves,” BusinessWeek, December 11, 1929, 36, quoted in Daniel Abramson, Skyscraper Rivals: The AIG Building and the Architecture of Wall Street (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 160.

  48. Russell, “Form Follows Fad,” 50; Jack Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building: Myth and Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 44.

  49. Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, 15.

  50. Ibid., 18.

  51. Darwin Martin, app. C, in ibid., 133.

  52. Quoted in ibid., app. G, 144.

  53. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943), 143.

  54. Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, 62.

  55. Quoted in ibid., 156.

  56. Ibid., 44.

  57. Quoted in ibid., 153.

  58. Quoted in ibid., 143–44.

  59. Ibid., 180.

  60. Rodgers, Work Ethic, 88.

  3: THE WHITE-BLOUSE REVOLUTION

  1. Quoted in Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business, 94.

  2. Lewis, The Job, 5.

  3. Christopher Morley, Plum Pudding: Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended and Seasoned (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1922), 232.

  4. Lewis, The Job, 42.

  5. Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 177.

  6. Davies, Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter, 51.

  7. Bjelopera, City of Clerks, 13.

  8. Lisa M. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 31.

  9. Quoted in Wilfred A. Beeching, Century of the Typewriter (Bournemouth, U.K.: British Typewriter Museum Publishing, 1990), 35.

  10. Quoted in Davies, Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter, 54.

  11. William H. Leffingwell, Office Management: Principles and Practice (New York: A. W. Shaw, 1925), 620–21.

  12. Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 189.

  13. National Industrial Conference Board, Clerical Salaries in the United States (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, 1926), 11–21, 29.

  14. Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business, 27.

  15. Kim Chernin, In My Mother’s House (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 47–48, quoted in Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 274.

  16. Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 276.

  17. Bureau of Vocational Information Survey of Secretaries and Stenographers 915 (444), California, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, quoted in Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 323.

  18. Fine, Souls of the Skyscraper, 53–54; Fessenden Chase, Women Stenographers (Portland, Maine: Southworth, 1910), quoted in Fine, Souls of the Skyscraper, 59.

  19. Egmont quoted in Fine, Souls of the Skyscraper, 58.

  20. Ibid., 59.

  21. Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 43–44. My account of the trial draws heavily on Berebitsky’s work.

  22. Quoted in ibid., 103.

  23. Ibid., 108.

  24. Ibid., 87.

  25. Ibid., 88.

  26. Zunz, Making America Corporate, 119–20.

  27. Faith Baldwin, The Office Wife (Philadelphia: Triangle Books, 1929), 91.

  28. Lynn Peril, Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 42.

  29. “ ‘Katie’ Gibbs Grads Are Secretarial Elite,” BusinessWeek, September 2, 1961, 44.

  30. Ibid., 46.

  31. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 27.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Peril, Swimming in the Steno Pool, 42.

  34. Judith Krantz, Scruples (New York: Crown, 1978), 122.

  35. Ibid., 122–23.

  36. Ibid., 126.

  37. Quoted in Peril, Swimming in the Steno Pool, 42.

  4: UP THE SKYSCRAPER

  1. Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White, trans. Francis Hyslop (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 68.

  2. Juriaan van Meel, The European Office: Office Design and National Context (Rotterdam: OIO, 2000), 31.

  3. Hugh Morrison, Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 111.

  4. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Other Writings, trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), 121. Pedants, watch out! The phrase has been influentially mistranslated as “iron cage” (by Talcott Parsons), but the original is stahlhartes Gehaüse.

  5. Quoted in Robert Twombly and Narciso G. Menocal, Louis Sullivan: The Poetry of Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 34.

  6. Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 105.

  7. Ogden to George S. Boutwell, January 27, 1982, Public Building Service Records, RG 121, entry 26, box 8, National Archives, Washington, D.C., quoted in ibid., 112.

  8. Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 29–30. My account of the anarchist influence on skyscraper architecture is indebted to Merwood-Salisbury’s work.

  9. Lucy Parsons, “Our Civilization: Is It Worth Saving?,” Alarm: A Socialist Weekly, August 8, 1885, 3, quoted in ibid., 32.

  10. Henry B. Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers, ed. Joseph A. Dimuro (Toronto: Broadview, 2010), 75.

  11. Editorial, Building Budget, August 1886, 90, quoted in Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890, 37.

  12. Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1890, quoted in Donald Hoffman, The Architecture of John Wellborn Root (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 112.

  13. Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 140.

  14. Henry James, The American Scene, Together with Three Essays from “Portraits of Places” (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 78.

  15. John J. Flinn, The Standard Guide to Chicago (Chicago: Standard Guide Company, 1893), 47, quoted in Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 119.

  16. Faith Baldwin, Skyscraper (1931; New York: Feminist Press, 2003), 13–14.

  17. Ibid., 15.

  18. Edith Johnson, To Women of the Business World (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1923), 40–41, quoted in Strom, Beyond the Typewriter, 318.

  19. Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 141.

  20. “The New Pullman Office and Apartment Building,” Western Manufacturer, March 31, 1884, 41, quoted in Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 141.

  21. “The Pullman Palace-Car Company,” National Car-Builder, February 1873, 38, quoted in Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 141.

  22. Hardy Green, The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 37–41.

  23. Quoted in Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 115.

  24. William Dean Howells, Impressions and Experiences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 3:265.

  25. Ibid.

  26. For a discussion of the “hive” metaphor in architecture, see Katherine Solomonson, The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 208–11.

  27. The standard line, though Sullivan’s actual phrasing was “form ever follows function.”

  28. Jürgen Kocka, White Collar Workers in America, 1890–1940, trans. Maura Kealey (London: Sage, 1980), 156.

  29. Ibid., 174.

  30. Ibid., 164.

  31. Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 87.

  32. Margaret Mather, “White Collar Workers and Students Swing into Action,” New Masses, June 5, 1934, 17.

  33. “What Can the Office Worker Learn from the Factory Worker?,” American Federationist, August 1929, 917–18.

  34. Quoted in Mills, White Collar, 301.

  35. Emil Lederer, Problem of the Salaried Employee: Its Theoretical and Statistical Basis, trans. Work
s Progress Administration (New York: Department of Social Welfare, 1937), 121–22.

  36. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1998), 32.

  37. Ibid., 88.

  38. Ibid., 39.

  39. Ibid., 48.

  40. Ibid., 46.

  41. Ibid., 82.

  42. Val Burris, “The Discovery of the New Middle Class,” Theory and Society 15, no. 3, May 1986, 331.

  43. Charles Yale Harrison, “White Collar Slaves,” New Masses, May 1930.

  44. Stanley Burnshaw, “White Collar Slaves,” New Masses, March 1928, 8.

  45. Michael Gold, “Hemingway—White Collar Poet,” New Masses, March 1928, 21.

  46. Lewis Corey, The Crisis of the Middle Class (New York: Covici Friede Publishers, 1935), 259.

  47. Malcolm Cowley, letter to Edmund Wilson, February 2, 1940, in The Long Voyage: Selected Letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915–1987, edited by Hans Bak (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 163.

  48. See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996).

  49. Whiting Williams, “What’s on the Office Worker’s Mind?,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the National Office Management Association (1935): 98–99.

  50. Harold C. Pennicke, “Important Aspects of the Personnel Problem: Selection and Training,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the National Office Management Association (1936): 40.

  51. See, for example, the comment by Coleman L. Maze in response to W. M. Beers, “Centralization of Office Operations—Why and to What Extent?,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the National Office Management Association (1935): 66.

  52. Williams, “What’s on the Office Worker’s Mind?,” 99.

  53. Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 175–76.

  54. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (1927; New York: Dover, 1986), 270.

  55. Ibid., 288.