January 2011

In the early 1840’s a visiting surgeon approaching the main building of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, an imposing granite structure designed by Charles Bulfinch, could consider that he was about to enter one of the foremost temples of his art. From a parklike garden he ascended a flight of stone steps that led him through a portico of eight towering Ionic columns, then continued his climb inside the building up a gracefully winding cantilever staircase. On the fourth floor he entered the surgical amphitheater, located in the great dome with which Bulfinch had capped his architectural achievement. Here, in terms of facilities, he was virtually at the top of the surgical world.

At his reception in Chicago, he spotted two young female cousins of his whom he hadn’t seen in years, stepped forward, and kissed them. Other women immediately demanded the same privilege. He complied. It became a vogue, and by the time he reached Denver, five hundred girls crowded around for a kiss.

All this might seem a curious reward for heroism, but it was probably no more than was deserved by the man who, according to a contemporary correspondent, “had become the best known living exponent of personal intrepidity in the service of the nation.”

Several years ago Thornton’s Mortuary, an Atlanta funeral home, announced a new service available to its customers. It had installed a large plate-glass window facing onto its parking lot so that families who wished to could now avail themselves of a drive-by viewing ceremony.

Rarely has the link between a culture’s way of life and its way of death been shown more graphically. And yet it is a link that always has existed.

The Reverend L. Francis Griffin sat in a metal folding chair in the basement assembly hall of the First Baptist Church in Farmville, Virginia. His modified Afro, bushy eyebrows, and Vandyke beard were flecked with gray. Behind horn-rimmed glasses, his brown eyes seemed to suggest a mixture of attentiveness and fatigue, of serenity and sadness.

People who have never been to New Orleans usually can name several things that it’s famous for (Mardi Gras, jazz, A Streetcar Named Desire , the Superdome, jambalaya, red beans and rice), but they are apt to have only a hazy notion of what the city looks like. Iron-lace balconies may come to mind, but little else. And yet, for many years—particularly during the ante-bellum era—New Orleans produced some of the most charming, distinctive, and varied architecture in the nation.

The watercolor drawings which are reproduced on the following pages testify to this remarkable heritage. They are part of the public records at the New Orleans Notarial Archives, where they are rather casually kept, folded, in bulky, hard-to-handle volumes. Other cities have archives containing architects’ renderings, elevations, and blueprints; but, as far as we have been able to determine, only New Orleans has an architectural documentation that resembles a collection of folk art.

Toward the end of the last century an idea took form in the mind of a Philadelphia factory engineer that was destined to change, in profound and troubling ways, the nature of work in the modern world. The engineer was Frederick Winslow Taylor, a brash and eccentric young man whose most notable prior accomplishment had been the invention of a crook-handled tennis racquet, shaped like a giant teaspoon, with which he had taken the measure of a number of the leading players of the day. The idea that came to Taylor was that just as there was a science of metals (metallurgy) and a science of machines (mechanics), there must be a science and technology of work, whose laws could be discovered by observation and experiment. He was soon convinced—and he was to spend the rest of his life trying to convince others—that only by requiring workers to submit to the authority of those laws, and thereby to surrender all claims to autonomy or discretion in their work, could the full potential of the industrial revolution at last be realized.

In 1898 Taylor was hired as a consultant by Bethlehem Steel. At the time several gangs of laborers were employed by the company to pick up ninety-two-pound iron pigs, carry them up a ramp, and deposit them in railroad cars. In the course of a ten-hour day each man was expected to load 304 pigs, weighing twelve and a half tons. After a series of experiments, Taylor concluded that a reasonably strong man—”a man of the type of the ox, ” as he put it—should be able to load not twelve and a half tons a day, but forty-seven tons. Taylor proposed to raise by 62 per cent the wages of any man reaching this goal.

There remained the task of persuading the loaders to go along with Taylor’s plans, which included paying them by the piece—that is, by the ton—instead of by the day. In time Taylor succeeded in getting some loaders to meet the new standard, and his often-repeated and colorful account of how he brought this to pass, using as his bellwether a laborer whom he called Schmidt, is part of the folklore of scientific management.

In the summer of 1786, an advertisement heralding the appearance of a revolutionary new institution appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet: “ MR. PEALE , ever desirous to please and entertain the Public, will make a part of his House a Repository for Natural Curiosities—The Public he hopes will thereby be gratified in the sight of many of the Wonderful Works of Nature which are now closeted but seldom seen. The several articles will be classed and arranged according to their several species; and for greater ease to the Curious, on each piece will be inscribed the place from whence it came, and the name of the Donor, unless forbid, with such other information as may be necessary.…”