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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to Peoples and Things, where we explore human life with technology. I'm Lee Vincl. Oh, my God. Standards and standardization. Standards. Oh, boy, is there any more beautiful topic under the sun? I mean, really, you know, if someone held a gun to my head and said, lee, you have to choose to focus on just one set of subtopics you've examined in your career. So which is it going to be? The answer is easy standards. But of course, it would also be a cheat, because you quickly discover that setting standards leads you almost anywhere to almost anything. Like, for example, pretend for a moment that you wanted to think about topics like maintenance and repair. Now, I'm not really sure why anyone would want to do that, but you could imagine it as something that could be done. Well, if you think about that theme, you're going to quickly see how important standardized, interchangeable spare parts and subsystems are for, well, the whole functioning of modern economies. As historian Phil Scranton's forthcoming history of spare parts is going to teach us in spades. So I'm a standards nerd. Not everyone knows this, but my romance with historian of technology Andy Russell, who I started the Maintainers and wrote the Innovation Delusion with, began through our joint love of standards. Andy wrote his dissertation and first book on the history of communication standards, particularly the kinds of networking standards that make up things like the Internet, things like tcpip. And I wrote my dissertation and first book about things called performance standards, which are the kinds of standards the US federal and other governments use to regulate things like automotive safety, emissions control, fuel economy and so on. Andy and I fell in love because we loved standards. So you will not be surprised then that I got so excited when I saw announcements about the publication of a new book called Small Medium How Government Made the US into a Manufacturing Powerhouse by Colleen Dunleavy, professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which if not completely clear from the title, is a history of standards and standardization. Folks, among other things, I think one of Colleen's core contributions in this book is teaching us how government is played a far larger role in the diffusion of standards and standardization than, for example, free markety visions might lead us to believe. And we get to hear about figures like Herbert Hoover, ooh la la. One of my absolute faves. And so many other little delicious details. I thought Colleen's book, which is a pleasingly slim and tight volume, was also just a pleasure to read. Folks, you should be excited about standards. That's just the way it is. It's basically a moral dictate. And you should be excited about Colleen's new history of them, Small, Medium, large. I had so much fun talking with her, which is why I say to you, hey, get excited. Colleen, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
- [05:28]
C
Oh, my pleasure.
- [05:30]
B
So Small, Medium and Large is a neat book. And I gotta say, I, as a standardization history nerd, this is like I am your major target market for this thing. When you talk about it with strangers, what do you say it's about? What were you trying to do with it?
- [05:47]
C
Well, I, I wanted to. I sort of got into it in a roundabout way, into the topic myself and what I want people to understand. First of all, I think it's just interesting where these things called standard sizes come from. Not something you'd think about, but once I started thinking about them, I thought, oh, how do they do that? You know, it's kind of my, my default question is how did that happen? And so that kind of took me down the rabbit hole of that ended up in Herbert Hoover's Department of Commerce in the 1920s. So partly it's just to tell the story of where these things called, to show how intriguing they are. How do you come up with these industry wide agreements among competing firms? How does that happen? And to explain the process by which it actually did happen. If my audience is more say business historians or historians of technology, the More. The most interesting thing I think about the story of standard sizes is the dynamics of the process of economic change or political economic change. Right. And that's the thing that really caught my eye and intrigued me because the story I tell in the book is about. About the starting point is a diversity of manufactured products before World War I, which I don't think historians have really appreciated. We kind of assume that, you know, mass production arises in the late 19th century. And so of course by World War I things are pretty much standardized. And it turns out, at least as it appears in trade journals. And when you kind of listen in to what business people were saying, not the case at all, Then comes along World War I, the government steps in to kind of nudge and I won't say force, but entice manufacturers towards mass production as a way of saving resources for the war effort. And then this is the pivotal point comes after the war, and this is the thing that caught my eye and made me kind of sit up was that manufacturers then went back to producing a diversity of products. So here they had learned how to mass produce. That wasn't enough. That was really the thing that caught my eye. And then what happened after that was that within a few years of the end of the war, Herbert Hoover took office as Secretary of Commerce and launched this initiative to. He very seldom put it in those terms because he was what the financier Bernard Baruch called a skillful self promoter. But if you knew the World War I story, you could see what he was doing. He basically recreated that service for business in the 1920s and got them to arrive at these industry wide collective agreements on standard sizes, which took a lot of the. For manufacturers who wanted to move towards mass production as a way of lowering the cost, unit costs of their products, it took a lot of the risk out of the process because everybody agreed to do it and everybody, they had an effective date and everybody did it at the same time. So you didn't have to worry about losing customers to your competitor. And so that process for business and historians and historians of technology, that's. And maybe, you know, just for your average everyday American or person, let's say that's a very different dynamic. Right. It's one that I initially called this when I was conceiving of it as a journal article. I called it the unnaturalness of mass production.
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B
Right, yeah.
- [10:23]
C
You know, to highlight that point that it didn't occur naturally. Naturally. Even after Manufacturers were taught how to, how to mass produce. They went back to doing what they did before.
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B
Yeah, that's nice.
- [10:36]
C
So.
- [10:37]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, I think that scholars, we can rely too much on like the QWERTY keyboard example and things like that. Right. And fall back on market processes as the things that led to this, I think is a big part of your point.
- [10:51]
C
Yeah.
- [10:53]
B
And so how did you fall into writing this book? You said you kind of didn't plan on. How did you get into it?
- [11:04]
C
My overarching interest has always been in the politics of economic change, if you will, by which I mean the ways in which politics in a broad sense has shaped the process of economic change. So I'm kind of attuned to that. That's the way I think and what I notice and so on. And I had worked previously on, I think, a subject very few people in the world ever really understood, but on the way that political structures shaped the process of technological change. Looking at railroads in the United States and Prussia, even to this day, I think most people, scholars and non scholars don't really appreciate the extent to which the political structures, ours and others shape what business people do influence it. So anyway, so that was a starting point. Then I had scoped out this bigger project on industrial policy that I was going to look at antitrust policy, patent policy, et cetera in the US and Germany, late 19th century, early 20th century, to see how they affected corporate strategy and the big strategies at the time being mergers in the US and cartels in Germany. And that got then in the course of this is back in the 90s. And I discovered in that process that there really was then virtually no historical literature on corporate governance. I decided, well, I have to put the bigger project on hold. I need to generate some secondary sources on corporate governance and corporate voting rights in particular, because they affect how easy it is to take over a company. Right. So I did some work on, on shareholder voting rights. And then in the, on the side, in the summers mainly I was doing some consulting work, historical research for a corporation. And it was in the process of that research that one day, and I have a very clear memory of this sitting in my little basement study back in Madison, Wisconsin, reading a primary source from I think 1926 or 1928. And there's a description in a couple of paragraphs, a description of this very process, of how manufacturers had been taught to mass produce during the war. But the war ended and they went back to doing the same old thing. And the commerce Department under Hoover had launched this project, which was just a few years old at that time, to kind of push them back towards mass production. And that just, you know, that, that startled me. I thought, wait, they learned to mass produce? And then they gave it up. And so then I took a closer look at the business history literature that I was very familiar with, you know, and it turned out that there really wasn't much of anything on the process of the diffusion of mass production techniques. If you look at the big works like David Hounshell's book on mass production, practically, I looked at as many as I could think of looking at. And it's like, you know, the story of the 1920s is Ford versus GM in this contrasting strategies, and there's nothing about the diffusion. The most I could find was a statement in Houndshell's book about how American manufacturers had learned to mass produce because Henry Ford not only provided the model, but he welcomed the attention. He promoted publicity about his processes and stuff, and that was enough for American manufacturers. And I thought maybe not right, Right, right, right. Maybe not right.
- [15:23]
B
Like looking at the actual processes. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you.
- [15:26]
C
Yeah. So then I initially planned to do a journal article and I focused that on the 1920s. And then I thought, well, you know, for this really to be. For me to make a persuasive argument of how important this was, I need to go back further in time. And that's really only then that I recognized how important The World War I version of the story was and the first iteration, so to speak. And I thought I also need to go forward in time to show that sort of fill the gap between what we know today as standard sizes and what Hoover was doing in the 1920s. So that made it then this, what I thought was kind of an odd size manuscript. Two journals don't publish two part articles anymore. Too big for a journal. I thought it was too small for a book.
- [16:24]
B
It's like a novella or something. It's like an odd size. Yeah.
- [16:28]
C
And in the meantime, I had promised my publisher to. To do a book on the history of corporations in the US History of the corporation in the US and since I had been working on this instead and hadn't finished that, I sent it to my editor and he was wildly enthusiastic and we had did a zoom call the next day and that's cool. Yeah, yeah, he thought it would work fine as a book. So now I'm back to work on the history of the corporation.
- [17:03]
B
And so what kind of research did you do for this Book.
- [17:08]
C
I did a little bit of archival research at the National Archives and the.
- [17:14]
B
National Bureau of Standards Papers.
- [17:17]
C
Yeah. The Department of Commerce. Have you worked in those? If you've worked in those records.
- [17:22]
B
Yeah, they're lovely. I love. The National Bureau of Standards. Papers are so great.
- [17:27]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I will say the Department of Commerce records at the National Archives are, you know, relatively speaking, a mess.
- [17:38]
B
They are a mess. And they're very. They're very fragmented, you know, like, they're lumpy. You'll get very deep tranches, like in some places. And then things you really want, there'll be nothing at all.
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C
Right, right.
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B
Yeah.
- [17:52]
C
There are a number of reasons for that, but they're just not. They haven't had the attention of, say, Department of State or War Department records. They just are not that well cataloged.
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B
Yeah.
- [18:05]
C
Anyway, so I did find some things that were useful there, but otherwise I relied primarily on published primary sources. So things that appeared in print at the time or published by participants in the events themselves. And that seemed to me to give me enough. I think you could go. I think my study. I kept my focus very tightly as possible around the standard sizes story. But it raises a lot of questions that I hope other scholars will. I say this in the last paragraph of the book. Here's some questions. Feel free. I hope others will. Will pursue those questions. Because it does raise a lot of questions about the impact of this and details. You know, if you could find business records that would get at the business side of it, I think that would be potentially very interesting. The lumber industry was one of the most contentious and lengthy processes of standardizing. So, you know, I'm hoping other scholars will take up some of those.
- [19:23]
B
Yeah, I loved. I was gonna bring that up later. I loved how you had a very chunky paragraph, just full of questions for people. And I was like, you know, I think this is how maybe every book should just end like this. You know, like, let's just be realistic. You know, I've given. You know, each of us has given a picture, but then there's a lot. Always a lot left to say and ask. And so I thought that was great.
- [19:44]
C
And that's. That's leaving aside the comparative.
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B
Right, right.
- [19:48]
C
I think there's. That just cries out for attention, especially, again, especially the United States and Germany. I'm really, really curious. I'm hoping some German scholars will take this up and say, yeah, how does this compare? Because I think without being able to go into much detail in justifying this, but I think basically had it not been for Hoover and Shaw before him. Arch Wilkinson Shaw in the World War I episode and then Herbert Hoover at the Department of Commerce. I think the American variety of capitalism would have been much closer to the German. A handful of very large mass producing companies and then a much more variegated rest of the economy.
- [20:51]
B
Yeah. I wanted to ask you something related to that is, which is I thought something really interesting in your picture was the importance of what you call middling firms. I think that in the business history, you know, there's a kind of Chandlerian Hounchel, others who pay attention to these large firms and then there's the kind of Scran Phillips Scrantonian small firms and then. But you're saying like these middling companies are a very important part of this. So say a bit about that.
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C
Yeah, well there, you know what? Again I think it's something that would benefit further research maybe in the Census. Census records. I don't know. The problem is that the Census Bureau only started collecting a lot of the information that would be useful after the income tax legislation or constitutional amendment. So there isn't maybe a lot of information. But it. But that certainly the sense that you get from reading the trade journals. Right. Electrical what Printers Inc. Which was advertising the Arch Wilkinson Shaw's business magazines. One of them called System, the other one called Factory. Lots of profiles of companies. And they're not little craft producers.
- [22:23]
B
Right.
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C
But they're not the big guys either and that's who populates these publications. And I just found that really interesting too because I always felt like I was kind of listening in on their conversations about problems that they're facing and how to address them and so on. Would be like a forum on the Internet these days.
- [22:45]
B
Right. I want to go ahead.
- [22:49]
C
I just want to say one other thing too about, about Arch Wilkinson Shaw and Herbert Hoover, who are the two pivotal figures in this story. I am not an adherent of a great man theory of history and this is not really what this is about. But I do think there are times when the right. Historically when the right person in the right position of power can make a huge difference. And I think that's what happened in both of these cases. The whole conservation initiative during World War I seems to have been principally Arch Wilkinson Shaw's idea to begin with. He's the one who approached the Council of National Defense about creating this conservation Division. It doesn't seem to have been on their radar beforehand. And they then, you know, they created it. It's wartime. Right. So things get done really fast. They Created it like, you know, in 24 hours and appointed him head of it. And the same with Hoover. You know, there's lots of enthusiasm, as you well know, for standards for efficiency, scientific management and so on by 1921, when he took office. But I still think you could imagine any number of other people becoming Secretary of Commerce. He's the one who really had that engineering background, that focus on waste already coming into office and then was in a position to do something about it.
- [24:35]
B
Yes.
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C
So I do think it's a case where these two guys made a big, huge difference.
- [24:40]
B
Yeah. No, I totally agree with you. I wanted to ask you, before we just hop into the narrative of the book, I wanted to ask you one more kind of big thematic question, which is the picture of the role of state, and I hear you talking like this has been part of your focus throughout your entire career, is kind of the role of the state in political economy and shaping technological change. But I just wanted to hear you. I think in recent years, maybe, maybe kind of partly wrongly, a lot of attention has come to, like, Mariana Mazucato as the entrepreneurial state. And these other pictures of, like, the. There's a lot of work in the last decade and a half or so about the importance of the state for innovation and technological change. And I just wondered if you saw yourself in dialogue with that larger discussion in writing this book.
- [25:36]
C
I would say not specifically. I do think of the reading I have done. I think there's a tendency to think of the entrepreneurial state as a 20th century phenomenon. And I think what we really need is a history of the state and the American economy that goes back to the founding. You could push it back into the colonial period, but then it would be the British state or other states that were involved in the North American continent. But there's a long history there of. Of government promotion. I mean, even, you know, it's really interesting, I think, the way historians themselves kind of poo poo this stuff. Like all the state investment in canals, for example. I mean, it was a tremendous amount of investment, some of which produced revenue. The Erie Canal was profitable for a long time. Technological change kind of switched things out right when the railroads came into the picture. But I mean, this is like, you know, I don't. I just never quite understand why historians, our colleagues, like, don't see the significance of that.
- [27:09]
B
Yeah. The way the 19th century gets cast as like, laissez faire or something like that, and it's like, just not true.
- [27:16]
C
Yeah, right, right. And that. I think that reflects One of the problems with that line of thinking is that historians are not very good about kind of going back to political structures here, seeing the whole of the American state, which ranges from the federal government to the state governments, down to municipalities. William Novak wrote a book about the police power in the 19th century. And really you have to take all of those levels into, into account. Even in the 1990s, for example, Fred Block has written about the developmental state in hiding. Right. It's still there. Right, right, still there at the federal and state level. But it gets kind of submerged in the process.
- [28:09]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, you're reminding me of long discussions with one of my mentors, Richard John, who's been pushing this kind of sane, especially the municipal and state level stuff, which just like the story that you're telling and that I've told in various ways too, is federal level because that's where it happened. But as you're saying in these earlier periods, a lot of times we need to pay attention to these lower levels. And that continues on, obviously.
- [28:35]
C
Yeah, but that's the only way you can talk about the 19th century as laissez faire is to leave the state and local governments out of the picture.
- [28:44]
B
That's right.
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C
And even there, as Richard himself has shown, the federal government was there in the form of the post office and this other aspects of the infrastructural state spreading across the country. So yeah, I'm hoping somebody writes that book. Maybe that's something you should take.
- [29:05]
B
Yes, I can imagine it.
- [29:07]
A
So.
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B
How did you explain to people what product diversity looked like before World War I? You know, I remember. I don't know if this is an important article for you, but when I was kind of getting into standard studies, I found George Thompson's 1954 essay. It's called Intercompany Technical Standardization, the Early American Automobile Industry. And he would show that, you know, you'd have like thousands of types of tubing and then it would go down to like 12 or something like that, you know, and it was just like, I mean, I can, as a standard study nerd, like I can get almost teary eyed reading that Thompson thing because it's just like so amazing this, the simplification. But yeah, I mean, how did you, you know, as a, as a kind of storyteller, how did you try to get across like what product diversity looks like before, you know, before simplification?
- [30:06]
C
Yeah, well, for me, the, the, the, the example I keep coming back to is beds, beds and mattresses. Right. And I remember talking long before I'd written anything about this. I included it in my business history lectures at the UW Madison. And I remember one time asking the students, I said, do you know, where do you think these sizes came from and what do you think of them? And one guy said, well, one student said, well, you know, they just seem like probably the right sizes. And I said, he happened to be tall. And I said, you're a tall guy. Don't you think the beds are a little too short for you? And he said, well, yeah, maybe, but bed sizes. So the number, we don't know how many mattress sizes. I haven't found any numbers anyway of how many mattress sizes and bed frame sizes. So you have a bed frame, a mattress to go on it, sheets and blankets to go on the bed. Right. We don't know how many. And then there are wooden, in this era, wooden beds and metal beds, which are differently constructed. And we don't really know Before World War I how many different bed sizes there were. What we do know is that after the war, and they could have been, you know, reduced during the war. I don't know. After the war, American manufacturers across the nation were making beds in 78 sizes. Right? Now think about that. It means, first of all, in practical terms, no fitted sheets. Right. It means you have to practice. You have to go out of your way to find a mattress to fit your bed frame, maybe have it custom made, even to fit your bed frame. I mean, it boggles the mind to think about facing 78 different sizes.
- [32:17]
B
Yes. Right.
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C
Now, I don't think any consumer had a choice of 78 different sizes. But the point is, whatever there was for sale in their local market, there were different sizes in the mix. Right. And so that to me, and we are so accustomed in the US now to our four main sizes, plus in the 50s and 60s, the addition of two, the twin extra long and the California King were added. But that's just what it is. You go to the store, you don't, you know, all you have to do is decide which. Which bed you have room for in your accommodations, right?
- [33:00]
B
Yeah.
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C
Once you get that, then you get the mattress that fits it, you get the sheets that fit it and blankets that fit it pretty much. And that's. That's all there is to it. And so it's hard, I think, to imagine what it was like without that level of customization. The people who can tell you that, who can verify this is antique collectors.
- [33:26]
B
Okay? Right. Nice.
- [33:28]
C
Collect antique beds. And they can tell you, no, no, they don't yeah. Even now your sheets are not going to fit necessarily.
- [33:34]
B
Oh, that's interesting.
- [33:36]
C
If you buy an antique bed. Yeah, yeah.
- [33:39]
B
And so, you know, part of the tension you play with throughout the book is, you know, capitalism, you know, has this drive to diversity and then there's this, you know, also things that push towards mass production. So I mean, why were products so diverse? I mean, how do you think about that?
- [33:57]
C
Yeah, well, there's, as I say in the book, it's almost when you, when you add everything up, it almost feels like it's over determined. Right. How could they not be diverse? One is that you have those small manufacturers and to some extent craftspeople, but they're really small manufacturers that Phelps Granton has written about. Right. And they produce specialty goods. They change what they're making fairly rapidly. They make it in small batches. They're specialty producers. And as his work shows, they stay around into the 1920s. Certainly that's one element. Another is something called hand to mouth buying, which. So this is the contrast is between what was called forward ordering, which is usually seasonally placing a big order for the products you want. This is retailers placing a big order for the products you want on a maybe semiannual basis, something like that. And then hand to mouth buying is buying in small quantities frequently. Right. Something that we almost associate with the 20th century economy after the 1970s and the so called breakdown of breakup of mass production. Right. But that's what was going on in the United States in the late 19th century. Again, it's one of those things somebody should dive into more deeply. But from what I've read, it seems like there was maybe a period of time around the turn of the 20th century where forward ordering that supports mass production was the norm. But before that, hand to mouth buying, and then after that, by the 1910s, and then definitely in the 1920s, hand to mouth buying became the norm. And hand to mouth buying means buying in small quantities. And that creates an incentive, therefore, for manufacturers to change up their product line rapidly and almost by definition just produce small quantities. Their customers want something else. So that's a.
- [36:31]
B
To fit changing tastes and these other things that are happening.
- [36:35]
C
Yeah, yeah, right, right. And really the idea at the time was that as one of my informants put it, the factory existed to produce what the customer wanted, as opposed to the factory producing what management wanted and then sold to the public, which was Henry Ford's strategy. But the dominant thinking was that the successful manufacturer was one who made what the consumer wanted. They were willing to tailor products Even a company like General Electric was willing to tailor its products to get that order. So that's part of it. Another factor is the American political structure and the regular. The way that the sort of fragmented structure of regulation in the United States. You can see this most clearly in electrical codes and food regulation, for example, food container regulation. There are federal regulations increasingly at the turn of the 20th century, state level regulations, which by definition are. Vary across the states and then also municipal regulations.
- [38:00]
B
What a nightmare for producers, huh?
- [38:02]
C
Exactly, exactly. And you see and you hear echoes of that in the late 20th century and up into our own time, you know, this pushing of regulation back down to the state level, which is kind of one of the things that people. Some policymakers are trying to do now.
- [38:20]
B
Yeah, that.
- [38:23]
C
No.
- [38:24]
B
Right.
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C
Businesses do not like that.
- [38:26]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
- [38:28]
C
Anyway, that's a. That's a whole nother topic. But anyway, so. So there's a. There are a lot of factors at play that encourage this strategy of product diversity before the war.
- [38:43]
B
Yeah. And so what. I mean, tell us a bit about the war and why it kind of emerges as a moment when simplification can come about. And your primary character here is Shaw. Right, right.
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C
Arch Wilkinson Shaw.
- [38:58]
A
Yeah.
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B
And so tell us a bit what's going on that makes it. Simplification make so much sense to folks.
- [39:04]
C
Yeah. Well, the big goal, of course, is to conserve resources for the war effort. And so that means. It means even like freeing up transportation, mainly railroad transportation. It means conserving raw materials. Wool was a big. Wool was a big concern because they needed to wool blankets and wool uniforms and so on for the soldiers. And labor, obviously, especially once the draft came into effect, then they wanted to reduce the amount of labor and raw materials and transportation that this private sector or civilian sector needed to keep going during the war. And so that's what Arch Wilkinson Shaw set up in this conservation division, initially called the Commercial Economy Board and then later the Conservation Division. And he said about. So he was a marketing specialist, had published an article on. He was focused on distribution rather than production in his own life. He was publisher of these magazines, System and Factory, eventually added a system on the Farm magazine and had a British edition of the System as well. So he was well known as a publisher and also connected to the Harvard Business School where he. You probably have heard of an economic historian by the name of Edwin Gay. Is it Edwin Edward? I think it's Edwin Gay who was dean of. The first dean of the Harvard Business School, but also very important in the World War I mobilization of resources. And so Arch Wilkinson Shaw was this marketing specialist, had published a pretty influential article about how the American distribution system needed to be improved and made more efficient to keep up with mass production. So he's appointed the head of this Conservation Division, Commercial Economy Board and sets about making changes first in distribution. One of his first targets is bread returns, which you probably never thought was a problem, but in fact never knew existed. The practice in provisioning of bread, retail sales of bread was that retailers could send back to the baker any loaves they didn't sell. That's what they called bread returns and they didn't have to pay for them. And the baker then sold him off as basically day old bread. Right. And the bakers didn't like doing this. And so they were all in. The big bakers especially were all in favor of the commercial economy boards stepping in and saying stop doing that. Right. And they had to re. Educate consumers about it and so on and so forth. And then. So anyway, I don't want to go into all the details of this, but then there was a reorganization of the war mobilization agencies and the War Industries Board was given more autonomy. And that's when this conservation division came into being. And it's at that point that they shifted focus from distribution to production. And that's when they began working with manufacturers on these, what they called conservation schedules. Agreements of how many sizes they could make, in some cases specific dimensions as a way of saving resources, pushing towards mass production. Because the idea was mass production required less labor, more output, less labor, less in the way of materials because you could do longer runs instead of changing up your equipment and getting special materials for this product or that product. And also save transportation. They instituted changes in how things were packed for shipment, how many, if you have larger sizes than a lot of small sizes, you could save on shipping space and so on. They reduced the size of fabric samples, for example, so fabric salesmen who would travel by rail had less baggage as a result, smaller sample sizes and less fabric used for the really tiny little things. But that altogether made a huge difference in the aggregate.
- [44:09]
B
Right?
- [44:10]
C
Right. When they added them all up.
- [44:12]
B
Yeah. I really loved your section on the kind of the slim silhouette in women's and dresses. You know, like we, you know, like just the role of the state in, you know, you see these kind of Pre World War I styles and there's so many layers and you know, and then you kind of have the very slim dress that we, you know, you know, associate with flappers and things like this. But to See, the role of the kind of the state in this story was really neat. So I really appreciated that.
- [44:42]
C
And I have to say I was really surprised by that myself when I first encountered it in American sources. And then I decided I really wanted to nail it down, and that got me to dabble a tiny bit in French sources that are available online. I was able to confirm that, yes, indeed, the French government did call together the French, the Paris dress designers and get them to agree to this proposal from the American government. So it was very cool. I mean, I'm careful to point out they. They didn't pioneer this look.
- [45:24]
B
Yeah, right.
- [45:25]
C
Of the slim silhouette. It was out there already. What they did is really give it prominence, and especially the way they organized the fashion industry behind it and got them to advertise it. And then if you go and look in the fashion magazines, lo and behold, there it is, the slim silhouette. Conserve wool for the war, et cetera, et cetera. It's really kind of amazing.
- [45:50]
B
It is amazing. I mean, I thought that one of the neatest things about the book overall was just then you pointing out that this product diversity reemerges after the war, which is what you set up earlier. Because, I mean, I think, you know, if we're kind of like, you know, I think that in a lot of our literatures, including in business history, going back to Chandler and others and Columbus, everyone kind of looking to that post war or post world war literature on bureaucracy, there's a kind of a barrier in image, like. And you. You could. You could imagine that, like, all these people get. Get efficiency and rationalization in their head during the war, and then they just see the beauty of it and they keep right on going. Right. And that's not what happens, though. And so what factors do you think drove the reemergence of diversity after World War I?
- [46:43]
C
Yeah, well, I think it's. I don't think you can put too much weight on the kind of chaotic conditions when the war ended. The government demobilized practically overnight, which threw broad swaths of the business community into turmoil and uncertainty. Right.
- [47:13]
B
I don't think I appreciated that until reading your book, as much as I should have, that there was a decision on the part of the administration to not keep it going.
- [47:24]
C
Yeah, right, right. And so armistice comes in what we now celebrate as what, Veterans Day in November, early November. And all of the restrictions were dropped by the end of the calendar year, within two months. Right, done. So there's tremendous economic turmoil. Prices had gone up dramatically during the war as they have historically in every war and not really come down yet. And consumers were up to here with high prices.
- [47:58]
B
You have wonderful stuff on boycotts and stuff like that.
- [48:02]
C
Price so called buyer strike is the way it was referred to at the time. So business people trying to sell their stuff are encountering huge resistance. Then comes the, I would say also inevitable post war contraction delayed a little bit. It comes in 1920, 21. And so businesses are really scrambling in this period. And I mean one of the things that the subsequent chapters on simplification in the 1920s makes clear is that it had to be sold. Yes, right. It had to be sold. And so one could imagine that these limitations on consumer choice instituted during the war weren't very popular with consumers because they hadn't yet been educated to realize this was better.
- [48:59]
B
Right, right, right, right, right.
- [49:01]
C
And so consumers went back to demanding a diversity of products to choose from or they weren't going to spend their money at all. And businesses, the war experience was relatively brief. For the United States.
- [49:16]
B
For the United States, yeah.
- [49:17]
C
A matter of 18 months or something. 19 months. And so less than two years. And so manufacturers went back to what had been their tried and true strategy in the past. So I don't think it's so unusual or so surprising that they did go back to a strategy of product diversity. What is surprising is what happens afterwards with Hoover and this whole decades long push of standard sizes in mass production. In some ways, and this is something I should have raised in my set of questions at the end of the book, but one of the questions I think it's worth exploring, I hope somebody does, is to what extent does the breakdown of mass markets in the 80s, 1980s and 1990s represent? I mean obviously computers are digital technologies are a facet of that story. But to what extent is that really just a reversion to the norm?
- [50:23]
B
That's nice.
- [50:23]
C
Yeah. Does it make sense to see the 1920s to the 1960s as this aberration?
- [50:30]
B
Right.
- [50:31]
C
A period when mass production was elevated unnaturally, if you will, in government policy. And now we're just back to the way things.
- [50:41]
B
I mean that fits other narratives. Like Jefferson Cowie has that book, the Great Exception, which is basically it's a New deal to the 80s moment in covering lots of things. So I think it could fit these larger structures of exceptionalism would make sense. Yeah. So I mean the big story here seems to be the Department of. Is the Department of Commerce in the 20s and Herbert Hoover's role there. I mean Hoover's just such a, you Do a wonderful job writing about Hoover. He's such a fascinating character in so many ways. And you know, the other thing about the Department of Commerce is that it's just like it's relative unimportance before the 20s, you know, I mean, like, I think, like this is something I've read in Hoover biographies that some people were like, questioning why he would do that. Cause it was seen as very low status position for him to take on. But he definitely revolutionized it, the department. And so tell us a bit about how the department of what kind of work it was doing to simplify. I mean, part of it's this marketing story or a promotion. And my favorite story there that I've uncovered in my own work is Hoover selling. Standardization is like masculine because it was seen as like feminizing and like oppressive too. I mean, there's different images of like standardization as problematic. So part of it's marketing, but what else were they up to? To kind of really simplify things?
- [52:20]
C
First thing I think to remember about the Department of Commerce is how new it was at that time, right? There had been. When was the Department of Commerce and labor established? I should know this, 1903, 1907, something like that. And it's only in 1913 that the Department of Commerce and labor are separated into two. Right. So it was not a lot. Not like the State Department or the War Department. It was a relatively new agency when he took it over. And he saw its potential, I think it's fair to say. And he was, you know, as we know, he was very interested in business from an engineering standpoint and had headed up this engineer study of waste in production. So he was like already. That was already on his mental landscape when he took office. And so what he did is he. And as I characterize it in the book, he basically recreated Shaw's conservation division from World War I within the Department of Commerce called the Division of Simplified Practice. And what they did. And so their mission was to help manufacturers reach collective agreement. Hoover sometimes gets a bad rep for being a top down kind of guy. In this instance, he was top down in organizing the process. I never saw any hint that he cared what standards they adopt.
- [54:11]
B
Yeah, right.
- [54:13]
C
That was totally up to business. He just wanted them to agree on standards, Right. Whatever standards businesses thought were best. And so they. And it was in after the war, of course, it was very much a peacetime process. They lost any of the subtle or more overt tools for enforcing it that they had in the wartime. This was an entirely voluntary process. And so, and there were some discussions in the 1930s about that that affirmed that they, as one of them, one of the Division of Simplified Practice, dsp, I call them staff members, said, we were trained to lean back and not talk to individual businesses about this, but wait to be asked to do something. And so they cultivated business, but they always did it through trade associations. So they would approach trade associations, try and get them interested. If the trade association was interested in hearing their pitch, then they would attend annual meetings. And they attended hundreds of trade association annual meetings and gave their pitch for simplified practice and the benefits it would have for producers, for retailers, jobbers, consumers, and so on. So it was just a huge publicity blitz to sell simplified practice. And then if they got a bite, if the association decided to move ahead, they would hold a preliminary conference. Almost all of these took place at the Department of Commerce itself. And then they would, you know, talk about whether there were. Whether. Whether they thought this might fly in the industry, nationwide. And they would then collect data on. And this was. This was based solely on sales data. Right? Sales and production data. What, what, what is the. What sizes or styles is the industry now producing? Paving bricks, for example? Right. How many different shapes and types and sizes are they producing? They would analyze that data, and then they came up with this formula that it was somewhat arbitrary, but they came up with a kind of formula that. That 20% of product varieties accounted for 80% of sales, and then the other 80% of varieties only generated 20% of sales. And so the point of the simplification process was to take those 20% of varieties, make those the standard sizes, and forget about the rest. Manufacturers could still make them, could still offer them as special orders, but the standard products would be this 20% that satisfied 80% of demand. So in a way, they were kind of, as one of my informants put it, standardizing the consumer and leaving out of consideration, the consumers who didn't fit in that 20% box. So they would come up with a proposal. Then they would hold what was called a general conference, which was industry wide. All producers, consumers, jobbers, intermediaries, users of a product were invited to this conference again at the Department of Commerce, where they would consider this proposal. And in a lot of cases, there was enough consensus built into the process of formulating the proposed standard sizes that it just passed, you know, very little discussion. Everybody agreed this was. These were acceptable. In other cases, there was more contention. They had to go back to the drawing board and so on and so forth. But anyway, once they got 80% acceptance by volume of producers and jobbers and consumers. Then it would be published as a simplified practice recommendation. And this was a Commerce Department publication, came with the endorsement of the Secretary of Commerce and the director of the Bureau of Standards. It was characterized as a unanimous agreement of the industry. And that was, wasn't the end of the process. They then the trade associations involved in creating the standards then or the general conference that approved the standards set up a standing committee that would periodically revisit look at sales in the department and this won't surpr. There was dissent in the department, in the Bureau of Standards about whether this division of simplified practice should be in the Bureau of Standards precisely because it just dealt with sales data. It didn't deal with technical requirements. Right. And that's where other associations, the American Standards association and so on, they, that John Yates and Craig Murphy have studied and your friend Andrew Russell has studied in great detail, they dealt with the technical standards. This is purely commercial. And so Bureau of Standards thought that's not what we do.
- [60:06]
B
Right, right, right, right.
- [60:07]
C
But Hoover kept it there and it ended up pretty much staying there. It's still there. If you go to look at the, the National Institute of Standards and Technology website, there's still a voluntary product standards page.
- [60:22]
B
Right. And so I mean we talked a bit about how your book very nicely ends with a bunch of good questions that others can follow up on. But you know, what do you see as kind of upshots of this story if you do like the lessons learned or something like that? I mean, you know, what do you want the take home message to be?
- [60:44]
C
Well, I do want, I do hope that people will appreciate, I mean just the story of standard sizes, of course is provide some entertainment along. You know, I mean there are other books that have been published that do a similar sort of thing. Take a, take a kind of feature of our everyday life and make clear just how interesting it is and make you stop and think about it. But I would hope the bigger takeoff, the bigger takeaway is about the, the way in which government has shaped our economy in the past. And this is, and that's one of the things I say at the end of the book. This is like one very important episode that fits into a long pattern. Right. Into a pattern of government promotion, the twin of regulation.
- [61:44]
B
That's what I was going to bring up next. Right, yeah, yeah.
- [61:46]
C
And this fits into a long pattern that goes back to 1789.
- [61:52]
B
Yeah, right, yeah. And promotion being the many other ways the state can foster a word you use in the Book positive, beneficial, technological and other forms of change without going the regulation route.
- [62:11]
C
Right.
- [62:12]
B
Yeah.
- [62:14]
C
And I think the underlying concern in the 20s is not so different from underlying concern in politics today. And that is the American standard of living. Not to say that we don't have other concerns today besides the standard of living, but that's kind of a through line in the history is that this was seen as a way. Hoover was definitely convinced that this was a way to increase the standard of living by bringing down the cost of manufacturing products, raising real wages as a result. That's how you improve quality of life.
- [62:57]
B
Right. Through all those productivity changes that we kind of take take for granted. Yeah. I just saw Richard John give a really nice paper at the Business History conference on Thurman Arnold in the 30s and one of Arnold in some. I need to get this paper off Richard, because the factoid was just fascinating. But apparently Arnold had this measure of American well being that was tied to what percentage of the population could buy the kinds of goods marketed in magazines. And I don't know how he arrived at the figure, but it was like 13% of the population could buy that kind of stuff that was marketed through magazines. Right, That's. I mean, now think about all the stuff we can buy at Target and Walmart and these things that we just take for granted. I mean, cheap stuff is not the problem in American life right now. We have other kinds of issues around standards of living. Right. But it just goes to, I mean it's just like another recent thing I heard that really supports your story about, you know, how important these changes were for standards of living for most Americans. Yeah. And so I, So you mentioned earlier you're working on. You have another book on the rise of the corporation. Is it, or what is that? What are you working on next? Is the question I usually end with.
- [64:18]
C
Yeah, well, I am working on a history of the corporation in the United States. Again, this one will be somewhat comparative, looking at Europe, but mainly focused on the United States. It really grows out of my teaching and, and the work I've done on shareholder voting rights also because that was comparative, I looked at. And, and I haven't done much with the European side of that. So I want to work some of that into, into the book. But it's, it's, I think one of the. Over one of one of the things I want to contribute. There are a lot of books about corporations, especially in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years. Tremendous number. But I think one of the things that gets overlooked about the history of corporations in the United States is the extent to which the American political structure has affected that history, has shaped that history. And in particular, the fact that the United States is the only nation may be a partial exception for Switzerland, I'm not sure. But it is, to my knowledge, leaving aside Switzerland, the only nation that incorporates companies at the state level rather than the federal level. And that is, I think, hugely important for how the history of corporations has evolved.
- [66:00]
B
Oh, very interesting. Yeah.
- [66:03]
C
Evolved over two centuries. And so that really is the kind of focal point that the main point that I want to make is a lot. And partly it's to counter this kind of assumption that the history we got is the history that somebody wanted.
- [66:22]
B
Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [66:26]
C
And I think when you look at the history of corporations, that's just not the case. The history we got is sort of buffered and shaped by this particular political structure. And the political structure was, of course, created back when corporations were not really on much of anybody's mental landscape. Certainly not the founders. If they did think of corporations, they were thinking about the, you know, the peak corporations, the British East India Company and the big trading companies. But they could not conceive of the world that we live in. But yet we have to live with the structure they created. And so I want to tell the story about how that shaped the history of corporations.
- [67:17]
B
Well, I look forward to that book very much, too. Colleen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. It's been really great.
- [67:23]
C
My pleasure. Been fun. Thank you.
- [67:33]
B
I hope you enjoyed this episode of our podcast. You can reach us with questions, comments and suggestions@leevinselmail.com or by following me on Twitter @stsnews or on YouTube @peoplesthings. Our podcast is distributed by the New Books Network, the leading platform for academic podcasts. So that you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Peoples and things, like most things in this world, depends on the work of many people. I want to thank my brother, Jake Vincl for writing the music for the show. I want to thank my buddy Juliana Castro for designing the logos for the podcast. You can check out her work at julianacastro. Co Joe Fort is the producer for the podcast and Mandy Lam is the production assistant. This podcast and other Peoples and Things programming are produced in affiliation with Virginia Tech Publishing and supported by the center for Humanities and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. For information about other podcasts from Virginia tech publishing, visit publishing vt.edu. for the entire Peoples and Things team, I am Lee Vincl and most importantly, I want to thank you for listening. Thanks.