Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,197

This is the grave of Henry Gantt.

Born in 1861 in Calvert County, Maryland into a slaving family, Gantt did not grow up with slaves, thanks to the Civil War ending the most evil of American institutions. The family was certainly downwardly mobile after that but he was just a kid and didn’t really know any different. They ended up selling their plantation land and moving to Baltimore, where Gantt grew up. He went to good local schools and then to Johns Hopkins, where he graduated in 1880. At first, Gantt went back to his old high school, McDonogh School in Owings Mills, to teach. He did this for three years, but this was not what he was going to be doing for his life. He became interested in engineering and went back to college, to the Stevens Institute of Technology, for a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, which he got in 1884.

Gantt took a job at an iron foundry in Baltimore, doing the drafting and the like. This is where his life begins to get interesting to a historian. See, the late 19th century was such a period of massive transformation in the American workplace. The machines were getting so big and systems of capitalism were growing by leaps and bounds. Could traditional American workways continue? The answer was no, not if efficiency and profit were the goals. What’s important as we go forward is to understand that this belief that we had to transform the American workplace for greater efficiency was increasingly shared across the political spectrum as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Not only was this held by the capitalists who wanted to increase their profits–though they certainly drove the changes, I assure you–but on the right and even on the left as ideas of state socialism rose. This was not held by the anarchists, who, broadly conceived as they should be during this era where being on the left meant a gazillion varieties of socialism in a pre-Soviet age, who had romantic visions of society that valued workers’ independence from these systems. But increasingly, leftist intellectuals got on board here too as building the future required the end of romantic ideas about work and getting serious about how the working class could create an efficient future that moved the profits into their pockets instead of the capitalists.

Gantt moved into the world of scientific management. This usually gets associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor and for good reason. Taylor saw workers as dumb machines and believed they could be trained to be better dumb machines, but that you didn’t have to worry about them as individuals so much. The worst version of this kind of thing was the use of stopwatches to time workers’ activities and make them work faster. This caused enormous resentment when it happened and even strikes, such as at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts in 1911. And Taylor was a fanatic for his ideas and kind of a weird guy. But even Taylor said he really didn’t have any problems with workers organizing into unions so long as they understood the future of work was not the old ways of artisan craft, but rather industrial production that would benefit all. And a lot of union leaders got on board with this, understanding the future was the future and not the past.

Taylor’s ideas of scientific management had a lot of acolytes. Gantt became one of the most prominent. He took a job with Taylor in 1887 to learn the founder’s methods. Taylor was hired at the big steel furnaces in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and in the Philadelphia area. Gantt worked closely with Taylor to rethink production there to increase efficiency. They jointly filed six patents between 1887 and 1893 on their methods. Gantt later went out on his own and became perhaps the most prominent of the next generation of scientific managers.

Gantt became most famous for the Gantt Chart. This is something you’ve probably never heard of but which you have seen so often in your life without thinking about that you just assume it has been around forever. He came up with this around 1910 and it’s real simple: create a chart of your goals. Then chart how close they are to completion based on the time you had planned for it. Are you reaching those goals? If not, why not? It’s just a project schedule. But someone has to think of these things and in this case, it was Henry Gantt. There was an early version of this in Russia, but it’s unclear whether Gantt knew about it and in any case, those were never translated into English.

How influential were Gantt charts and people such as Gantt? Huge. They were critical to create the Soviet Five Year Plans for one thing. Gantt was a hero to Soviet planners. And this gets back to Gantt’s future as well. See, if business was going to be rational in efficiency, it also needed to be rational in how it treated its workers. So unions were an outright good thing for Gantt. He felt that workers needed to be able to negotiate over pay and hours, especially if they were getting so much work done in such a short period of time thanks to him. Gantt was a pioneer in the idea of corporate accountability and socially responsible business practices.

Then, in 1916, Gantt began an alliance with Walter Polakov, another scientific manager from Russia, to promote Marxism. Gantt and Polakov broke from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to start an openly Marxist vision of engineering that would take these profits and move them toward worker control over the means of production. After all, why was the capitalist even necessary in the newly rationalized economic system? In fact, it was Polakov, who went back to the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, which he fully supported, who brought the Gantt Chart with him.

None of this meant Gantt wasn’t going to use his powers for whatever means necessary. He was pretty happy to work for the Emergency Fleet Corporation during World War I to defeat the Germans. There was no major opposition by a Marxist elite not really associated with the nationalities within the Central Powers (or Irish) to not see the defeat of Kaiserism as a good thing.

Unfortunately, Gantt died shortly after the end of World War I, in 1919. He was 58 years old. I’m not sure why, but this sure continues this series profiling people who died way too close to my age or younger than me. It would have been interesting to see how he would have responded to the Soviet Union.

Henry Gantt is buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery, Montclair, New Jersey.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with scientific management, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frank Gilbreth is in Fairfield, Maine and Carl Barth is in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.