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Virtue via Association: The National Bureau of Standards, Automobiles, and Political Economy, 1919–1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2016

LEE VINSEL
LEE VINSEL*
Affiliation:
Lee Vinsel is Assistant Professor in Science and Technology Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology. Contact information: Stevens Institute of Technology, College of Arts and Letters, 1 Castle Point Terrace, Hoboken, New Jersey, United States, 07030. E-mail: lee.vinsel@gmail.com.
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Abstract

During the 1920s, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) greatly expanded the kinds of activities it undertook, leading to a sense that the agency was ubiquitous. Some of the agency’s new activities were quasi-regulatory: they sought to shape markets and make products safer. The bureau was a part of the Department of Commerce, and its expansion of market-shaping activities took place when Herbert Hoover was Commerce Secretary. In Ellis Hawley’s influential, oft-repeated interpretation of the bureau’s actions during this period, Hoover pioneered an “associational” mode of governance that emphasized industry self-regulation and rational coordination via conferences, trade associations, and other gatherings. In this essay I show how the NBS under Hoover went well beyond fostering industry self-regulation, thus suggesting the need to revise Hawley’s interpretation. This essay is divided into two main sections: the first section examines the thinking of George K. Burgess, who rose to head the NBS in the early 1920s and who put forth an ambitious vision for the bureau’s role in society, particularly around its potential to improve products on the market. The second section then examines one case of the agency’s proliferation of new organizational routines, namely those around the automobile. A close consideration of Burgess and the NBS’s new routines indicates that the NBS extended its reach far beyond its traditional bounds. Most of these novel efforts were aimed at increasing the market’s virtues.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 809 - 838
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. 

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References

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Illuminating Engineering Society. Specifications of Laboratory Tests for Approval of Electric Headlighting Devices for Motor Vehicles, approved November 11, 1922. (Government Printing Office, 1924).Google Scholar
National Bureau of Standards, Standards Yearbook , Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927.Google Scholar
Records of Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Papers, Herbert Hoover Library.Google Scholar
Records of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 1830–1987. Record Group 167, National Archives at College Park, MD.Google Scholar
Records of the National Research Council, Committee on the Psychology of the Highway Archive of the National Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Balogh, Brian. A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Burnham, John C. Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, Sally H. Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Cochrane, Rexmond C. Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards. Washington, DC: National Bureau of Standards, 1966.Google Scholar
Daston, Lorraine J. and Galison, Peter. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2010.Google Scholar
Dupree, A. Hunter. Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.Google Scholar
Flink, James. America Adopts the Automobile, 1895–1910. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Hoover, Herbert. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1952.Google Scholar
John, Richard R. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Knowles, Scott Gabriel. The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Leslie, Stuart. Boss Kettering. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Luger, Stan. Corporate Power, American Democracy, and the Automobile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Mihm, Stephen. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Mohun, Arwen. Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Nelson, Richard R. and Winter, Sidney G.. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Russell, Andrew L. Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Seely, Bruce E. Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policymakers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Slotten, Hugh R. Radio and Television Regulation: Broadcast Technology in the United States, 1920–1960. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Steen, Kathryn. The American Synthetic Organic Chemicals Industry: War and Politics, 1910–1930. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Van Vleck, Jenifer. Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Wise, M. Norton, ed. The Values of Precision. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Yates, JoAnne. Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Balleisen, Edward J. “Private Cops and the Fraud Beat: The Limits of Business Self-Regulation, 1895–1932.” Business History Review 83, no. 1 (2009): 113–160.Google Scholar
Burgess, George K. “Review of The Organization of Industrial Scientific Research.” Journal of the Optical Society of America IV, no. 5 (September 1920): 405–6.Google Scholar
Burgess, George K. “Governmental Research.” The Scientific Monthly 11, no. 4 (Oct., 1920): 341–352.Google Scholar
Burgess, George K. “The Government Laboratory and Industrial Research.” The Scientific Monthly 13, no. 6 (Dec., 1921): 523–530.Google Scholar
Burgess, George K. “The Scientific Work Which Our Government is Carrying on and its Influence Upon the Nation.” The Scientific Monthly 19, no. 2 (Aug, 1924): 113–119.Google Scholar
Burgess, George K. “The National Bureau of Standards.” The Scientific Monthly 36, no. 3 (Mar., 1933), 200–212.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Hawley, Ellis W. “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928.” The Journal of American History 61, no. 1 (1974): 116–140.Google Scholar
Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Raff, Daniel M. G., and Temin, Peter. “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History.” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (2003): 404–433.Google Scholar
Lassman, Thomas. “Government Science in Postwar America: Henry A. Wallace, and Edward U. Condon, and the Transformation of the National Bureau of Standards, 1945–1951.” Isis 96 (March 2005): 25–51.Google Scholar
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Kui Shen, Yuan, Presser Aiden, Aviva, Veres, Adrian, Gray, Matthew K., Brockman, William, The Google Books Team, Pickett, Joseph P., Hoiberg, Dale, Clancy, Dan, Norvig, Peter, Orwant, Jon, Pinker, Steven, Nowak, Martin A., and Aiden, Erez Lieberman. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Science 331, no. 6014 (2011): 176–182.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State.” The American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 752–772.Google Scholar
Pickering, Andrew. “From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice.” In Science as Practice and Culture, edited by Pickering, Andrew, 1–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Raff, Daniel M. G. “How to Do Things with Time.” Enterprise and Society 14, no. 3 (2013): 435–466.Google Scholar
“Road Tests for Comparing Fuels.” Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering 27, no. 22 (November 29, 1922), 1062.Google Scholar
Star, Susan Leigh and Griesemer, James R.. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–1939.” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387–420.Google Scholar
Thompson, George V. “Intercompany Technical Standardization in the Early American Automobile Industry.” The Journal of Economic History 14, no. 1 (Winter, 1954): 1–20.Google Scholar
Wang, Jessica. “Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association, State Power, and the Politics of Animal Control in New York City, 1850–1920.” The Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (2012): 998–1024.Google Scholar
Winter, Sidney G. “Habit, Deliberation, and Action: Strengthening the Microfoundations of Routines and Capabilities.” The Academic of Management Perspectives 27, no. 2 (2013): 120–137.Google Scholar
Automobile Headlights.” Report no. 11 of the Committee on Glare, Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society 11 (1916): 29–35.Google Scholar
Greenshields, B. D., Thompson, J. T., Dickinson, H. C., and Swinton, R. S.. “The Photographic Method of Studying Traffic Behavior.” Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Highway Research Board Held at Washington D.C. December 7–8, 1933. Part I: Reports of Research Committees and Papers, 382–9.Google Scholar
Illuminating Engineering Society. Specifications of Laboratory Tests for Approval of Electric Headlighting Devices for Motor Vehicles, approved November 11, 1922. (Government Printing Office, 1924).Google Scholar
National Bureau of Standards, Standards Yearbook , Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927.Google Scholar
Records of Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Papers, Herbert Hoover Library.Google Scholar
Records of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 1830–1987. Record Group 167, National Archives at College Park, MD.Google Scholar
Records of the National Research Council, Committee on the Psychology of the Highway Archive of the National Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar