At about the same time as reformers were calling for a shakeup of naval shipyards, the phrase “scientific management” was being bandied about. Everyone recognized that the 19th-century industrial system, while highly successful, had to be managed differently to best incorporate 20th-century technology. The most famous of the new management systems was that of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s system called for the strict application of scientific methods to industrial management and organization in order to produce the maximum output. Specifically, efficiency experts would study workers’ tasks and break them down into their smallest components; perform time-and-motion studies to eliminate wasteful motions and determine the optimum time in which a task should be completed; and offer wage incentives and penalties for meeting or falling short of the new standards. There would be no reason for bargaining or for unions since non-debatable scientific principles, rather than human foibles and emotions, would govern management decisions. The workers’ response to Taylorism was speedy and unequivocal. They fiercely resisted any system that would analyze their movements as if they were machines to be fine-tuned (not an exaggeration of Taylor’s stated beliefs). Such a system, they said, would demean them and their skills—robbing them of their autonomy and individuality; eliminating craft from the job; turning workers into mere cogs performing sped-up, repetitious tasks “to the physical breaking point”—not to mention the threat to collective bargaining. So visceral was their reaction to Taylorism that any kind of management system became suspect. Thus when the Navy attempted in 1912 to introduce a British management system—less doctrinaire than Taylorism, though with the same ends of efficiency and increased production—workers at Charlestown were immediately on their guard. The system’s reorganization of the yard’s divisions also upset established power relationships between traditional sea (line) officers and newer and often younger engineering (staff) types, tilting the balance in favor of the latter. Not surprisingly, line and staff were polarized over the merits of the new order, accusing each other respectively of obstructing progress and overmanaging. In this charged atmosphere, when two overzealous junior officers attempted to introduce minute Taylor-like task breakdowns at Charlestown, the metal workers at the yard took action. They asked their congressman to hand-deliver a protest to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Roosevelt agreed in principle with scientific management, he was generally sympathetic to labor and refused to implement a system that the yard workers opposed. [Illustration: _Machine shop workers pose for a group picture in Dry Dock 1, about 1905. At this time a little more than 2,000 employees worked at the Charlestown yard._]