I dined one night with four or five of the officers, including Mr. Ford, and while I had expected to hear much about mass production and wage problems the only thing I heard was, “How are you getting on with Mary?” “How about John?” “Do you think we can make this housing scheme work?” That is, what I was discovering at Ford’s was that they were not thinking in terms of labor and capital, but in terms of Tom, Dick, and Harry. They were taking men and women, individuals, families, and with patience and sense and humor and determination were putting them on their feet, giving them interest and direction in managing their lives. This was the Henry Ford of 1916. But work like that of Tommy Lynch and Henry Ford depended upon individual qualities of a rare and exceptional kind, also upon the opportunity to test ideas. Neither Lynch nor Ford was willing to let bad situations, a stiff problem alone. It challenged their wits, particularly when it concerned men in mine and factory. They were not hampered by dogmas or politics. They did things in their own way, and if one method did not work tried another; and both had a rare power to persuade men to follow them. They were self-made, unhampered products of old-fashioned democracy, and both were thorns in the flesh of those who worked according to blue prints, mechanized organizations or the status quo. But the success of both with the particular labor problems they tackled was the answer to critics. Only how could men of lesser personality, lesser freedom of action, and lesser boldness in trying out things follow? They could not. They had to have a more scientific practice if they were to achieve genuine cooperation in working out their problems. And what I was seeing in certain plants, as I went up and down the country, convinced me it had come in the Frederick Taylor science of management. I had first heard of Taylor in the _American Magazine_ office. John Phillips had sensed something important on foot when he read that Louis Brandeis, acting as counsel for certain shippers in a suit they had brought against the railroads, had told the defendants that they could afford lower rates if they would reorganize their business on the lines of scientific management which Frederick Taylor had developed. They could lower rates and raise wages. “And who is Frederick Taylor?” asked Mr. Phillips. “Baker, you better find out.” And so Frederick Taylor had come to know the _American_ group, and he had given to the _American_, much to our pride, his first popular article explaining what he meant by scientific management. In the following letter Mr. Taylor tells a protesting friend why he gave it to us: