Engineering Power: Hoover, Rand, Pound, and the Heroic Architect

History generally credits the United States with ideological distance from the authoritarian thought that swept Europe after World War I. Not fascism but Taylorism and Fordism serve as catchwords for the American zeitgeist of the twenties and thirties. In our collective mythology, it was Europe that dreamed of force, autocracy, and genocide, while in the United States we worked, endorsing an almost collectivist ethic of efficient production and scientific management through affordable technology; as Germans and Italians worshiped the charismatic leader, we pushed to the top of the world’s economic order through the technological application of visionary science. Cecelia Tichi’s Shifting Gears has established the ways that engineering and architecture came to articulate this dynamic vision of the United States. The first quarter of the century, she argues, saw a remarkable growth in the romanticized figure of the “hero-engineer,” the American exemplar of specifically modern forms of technological power and industrial management. ¹ The hero-engineer ratified the Fordist model of large-scale, assembly-line production and lent emotional force to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s vision of a scientifically maximized, assembly-line factory. As Tichi confirms, the response to Taylorist experimentation was not always enthusiasm; labor unions, in particular, campaigned against what many of their members considered the dehumanization and subjugation of workers. ² The figure of the hero-engineer, however, charged through popular fiction and advertisements with a panache that led the eye away from the grimness of scientifically managed industrial servitude. The popularity of this image of the man in charge—the man who could organize and design, who could make concrete and steel hold the shape of a great vision—is evident in the advertisements, film, fiction, and poetry of the time. And everyone was invited to share his quest for control through efficient design, from small boys encouraged to play with erector sets to housewives who were addressed as scientific managers in charge of technologizing their kitchens. Even in the high-brow circles of poetry, as Lisa Steinman points out, imagist work of the period was self-consciously structured as either resembling or actually being a finely engineered machine. ³

Mark Antliff has shown that in parts of Europe Henry Ford was explicitly celebrated as “exemplary of [the new] collaborative spirit” in industry that would promote a strong and adequately rewarded working class through increased production, lower costs of goods, and higher wages. ⁴ What Antliff finds, however, is that often those European thinkers who celebrated the “collaborative spirit” of Fordism were those who traveled in authoritarian—and sometimes fascist—circles. Similarly, I argue, if we probe for the roots of the American cult of the engineer, we find in Taylorism and Fordism authoritarian tendencies similar to those in European fascist thought. Although Americans claimed to have collectively transformed great ideas into technological wonders, truly great engineers were scarce, apparently surpassing in force, significance, and purity of abstraction the expressive capabilities of the crowd. Taylor himself, mechanical engineer and father of the “cult of efficiency” (1856–1915), did not have the common worker in mind in his plans for the renovation of U.S. production and business; it was the intellectual center of production that Taylor celebrated: the mastermind. The worker was only a unit to be scientifically managed so as to better and more efficiently reflect the will of the man in charge. Similarly, the American need for the mastermind in politics, religion, and issues of morality—a great political engineer or spiritual architect—found expression in the public’s elevation to heroic status individuals like Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Herbert Hoover. Highly conservative in their politics and values, they represented the convergence of individual vitality and authoritarian principles that many Americans believed could lead the United States into a still more efficient, dynamic future. These charismatic leaders are best understood not as either authoritarian or nonauthoritarian (or as fascist or nonfascist) but as points along a spectrum of ideas...