All in the Day's Work: An AutobiographyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Journalists -- United States -- Biography; Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva), 1857-1944
I have no doubt that the Atlantic Monthly would give us a better
audience from a literary point of view than we could get from the
American Magazine. But the readers of the Atlantic Monthly consist
probably very largely of professors and literary men, who would be
interested more in the abstract theory than in the actual good which
would come from the introduction of scientific management.
On the other hand, I feel that the readers of the American Magazine
consist largely of those who are actually doing the practical work
of the world. The people whom I want to reach with the article are
principally those men who are doing the manufacturing and
construction work of our country, both employers and employees, and
I have an idea that many more persons of that kind would be reached
through the American Magazine than through the Atlantic Monthly.
In considering the best magazine to publish the paper in, I am very
considerably influenced by the opinion I have formed of the editors
who have been here to talk over the subject; and of these Ray
Stannard Baker was by far the most thorough and enthusiastic in his
analysis of the whole subject. He looked at all sides in a way which
no other editor dreamed of doing. He even got next to the workingmen
and talked to them at great length on the subject. I cannot but
feel, also, that the audience which reads the work of men of his
type must be an intelligent and earnest audience.
Mr. ——, who has just been here, suggested that among a certain class
of people the American Magazine is looked upon as a muckraking
magazine. I think that any magazine which opposed the
“stand-patters” and was not under the control of the moneyed powers
of the United States would now be classed among the muckrakers.
This, therefore, has no very great weight with me.
Taylor believed like Henry Ford that the world could take all we could
make, that the power of consumption was limitless. “To give the world
all it needs is the mission of industry,” he shouted at me one day I
spent with him at Boxley (his home near Philadelphia)—shouted it with
many picturesque oaths. I have never known a man who could swear so
beautifully and so unconsciously.
Mr. Taylor’s system in part or whole had been applied in many factories
which I visited in my four years. You knew its outward sign as soon as
you entered the yard. Order, routing, were first laws, and the old
cluttered shops where you fell over scattered material and picked your
way around dump heaps were now models of classified order. A man knew
where to find the thing he needed, and things were placed where it took
the fewest steps to reach them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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