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._]
[Illustration: _U.S.S._ Whitney _rises amid a forest of scaffolding. The keel of the 484-foot destroyer tender—the largest vessel ever built at Charlestown—was laid down in 1921. It took two and a half years to build. After surviving the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor_, Whitney _served in the Pacific during World War II_.]
Roosevelt’s visit to the yard in 1913, during which he let it be known that certain junior officers were being reassigned, focused national attention on the controversy and encouraged other yard workers around the nation. A delegation representing them lobbied against Taylorism, eventually persuading Congress to outlaw such management systems in navy yards. Yet when it was all over, the Charlestown yard was organized quite differently than in the 19th century, making it a more efficient builder and repairer of modern naval vessels and helping it to perform as it did during World War I.