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“Psyching” Psycho-History - Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation, by Sudhir Kakar. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970. 221 + xii pp. $6.95 (cloth).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
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- Type
- Essay Review I
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- Copyright © 1971 History of Education Quarterly
References
Notes
1. Manuel, Frank E., “The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History,” in “Historical Studies Today,” Daedalus 100 (Winter 1971) : 206.Google Scholar
2. Alexander, and George, Juliette, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York, 1956); Freud, Sigmund and Bullitt, W. C., Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States: A Psychological Study (Boston, 1967); Erikson, Erik, Gandhi's Truth (New York, 1969), and Young Man Luther (New York, 1958); Febvre, Lucien, Martin Luther: A Destiny, trans. Roberts Tapley (New York, 1929).Google Scholar
3. Kennedy, David, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, 1970); Jardim, Anne, The First Henry Ford: A Study in Personality and Business Leadership (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); Kakar, Sudhir, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).Google Scholar
4. Lytton Strachey, G., Eminent Victorians (New York, 1918); Hibben, Paxton, Henry Ward Beecher, An American Portrait (New York, 1927) and Peerless Leader, William Jennings Bryan (New York, 1929).Google Scholar
5. Ellmann, Richard, “That's Life,” New York Review of Books 16 (June 17, 1971): 7.Google Scholar
6. Viz., Callahan, Raymond E., Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, 1962); Drost, Walter H., David Snedden and Education for Social Efficiency (Madison, Wisc., 1967); Geraldine Joncich, The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike (Middletown, Conn., 1968).Google Scholar
7. Kakar, , Frederick Taylor p. 2. Hereafter, where possible, page citations will be located in the text.Google Scholar
8. Hackett Fischer, David, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York, 1970), p. 188.Google Scholar
9. Ellmann, , “That's Life,” p. 4.Google Scholar
10. Ellmann, , “That's Life,” pp. 3, 7.Google Scholar
11. Barkley Copley, Frank, Frederick W. Taylor, Father of Scientific Management (New York, 1923), 1:59.Google Scholar
12. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).Google Scholar
13. Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor 1: 389, 454; 2:434, 438. Cf. Kakar, Frederick Taylor, p. 136.Google Scholar
14. Erikson, Erik, “Psychological Reality and Historical Actuality,” in Insight and Responsibility: Lectures on the Ethical Implications of Psychoanalytic Insight (New York, 1964), p. 206.Google Scholar
15. Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor 1: 4, 88f, 374. Cf. Kakar, Frederick Taylor, pp. 39, 61.Google Scholar
16. See, for example, the photographs from Exeter and St. Paul's schools in McLachlan, James, American Boarding Schools: A Historical Study (New York, 1970), following p. 101.Google Scholar
17. Haber, Samuel, Efficiency and Uplift (Chicago, 1964). Kakar cites Haber only once — to support his contention that the Exeter crisis was that. Cf. Kakar, Frederick Taylor, p. 11.Google Scholar
18. Merrill, Dana K., American Biography: Its Theory and Practice (Portland, Me., 1957), p. 21.Google Scholar
19. Ellmann, , “That's Life,” p. 4.Google Scholar
20. Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor 1: 64; Kakar, Frederick Taylor, p. 23.Google Scholar
21. Manuel, “Use and Abuse of Psychology,” p. 209. Cf. the psychoanalytic bent in John Dollard, Criteria for the Life History (New York, 1935) and the non-Freudian survey of Allport, Gordon W., The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science (New York, 1942).Google Scholar
22. Ellmann, , “That's Life,” p. 4.Google Scholar
23. Kakar's conclusions about the methods used in the Taylor household rest on the generalization that “in one form or another all the books of child-rearing advice imparted the same message: an infant's nature is depraved, willful, and intensely selfish” (p. 16), citing a parents' guidebook published in Philadelphia in 1855 and quoted in a then-unpublished paper on adolescence by John Demos (1964). He also cites Robert Sunley's brief paper on the early nineteenth-century child-rearing literature in Mead, Margaret and Wolfenstein, Martha, eds., Childhood in Contemporary Cultures (Chicago, 1955) and Damis, Elaine V., “The History of Child Rearing Advice in America from 1800 to 1940” (honors thesis, Radcliffe College, 1960). The extant scholarship on family life is incomplete and contradictory, perhaps itself evidence of wide social and regional variation in practice and of consensus disrupted by intellectual and social change. Nevertheless, a wider perspective would include study of Bridges, William E., “Family Patterns and Social Values in America, 1825–1875,” American Quarterly 17 (Spring 1965): 3–11; Rapson, Richard L., “The American Child As Seen by British Travelers, 1845–1935,” American Quarterly 17 (Fall 1965) : 520–34; Wishy, Bernard, The Child and the Republic (Philadelphia, 1968); Miller, Daniel and Swanson, Guy, The Changing American Parent (New York, 1958). See also the references in Ryerson, Alice J., “Medical Advice on Child Rearing, 1500–1900,” Harvard Educational Review 31 (Summer 1961): 302–23, and Strickland, Charles, “A Transcendentalist Father: The Child-Rearing Practices of Bronson Alcott,” Perspectives in American History 3 (1969) : 5–73; and the projected series of volumes of Robert Bremner et al., Children and Youth in America, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).Google Scholar
24. Ellmann, , “That's Life,” p. 3. Cf. A. Zalenznik in Kakar, p. ix, and Kakar, pp. xiii, 15, 149. Copley (Frederick W. Taylor, 1:v) does not so describe himself. Kakar may have correctly deduced this from the existence of a committee that Copley says assisted him. But Taylor did not select him, nor aid his labors, and the granting of permission to consult private papers and the “full cooperation” of family and associates in no wise thereby makes a study “official” — as this reviewer's own experiences in biography testify.Google Scholar
25. Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor 1: 3: “… and this seeming misfortune must assume for us the aspect of an intervention by that Potter in whose hands men's destinies are clay.” Here Copley's language is vastly different. (One difficulty in determining whether Kakar is quoting or paraphrasing Copley stems from the unfortunate layout of the Kakar book, whose vast bottom margin comes at the expense of a crowded and confusing text; the lengthier quotations are seldom set off by a blank line, are imperceptibly indented, and are printed in a type hardly enough different to be noted.)Google Scholar
26. McLachlan, , American Boarding Schools p. 363: “More than at most schools, Exeter's library and administrative staffs are conscious of the school's historical importance and of the value of their records.”Google Scholar
27. One such is Lamont, Thomas W., My Boyhood in a Parsonage (New York, 1946). Lamont was at Exeter a decade after Taylor. His letters and recollections largely support McLachlan's analysis of the Academy although its academic standing in the 1880s was higher than McLachlan made explicit: Lamont credits his brother's recommendation with his being at Exeter because “the best prepared boys in his class at Harvard” were Exeter boys (pp. 111f, 130).Google Scholar
28. Anderson, Pauline, A Selected Bibliography of Literature on the Independent Schools (Milton, Mass., 1959), McLachlan calls “exhaustive”: Williams, Myron R., The Story of Phillips Exeter (Exeter, N.H., 1957); Bell, Charles H., Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, A Historical Sketch (Exeter, N.H., 1883) and History of the Town of Exeter, New Hampshire Exeter [Boston], 1888); Crosbie, Lawrence M., The Phillips Exeter Academy, A History (Exeter, N.H., 1923).Google Scholar
29. McLachlan, , American Boarding Schools p. 226 et passim.Google Scholar
30. Copley, , Frederick W. Taylor 1: 74.Google Scholar
31. McLachlan, , American Boarding Schools pp. 223–25, 228.Google Scholar
32. Manuel, “Use and Abuse of Psychology,” p. 199.Google Scholar