Harry Truman’s Scientific Management

Having just gotten through an election this week, it’s fun looking back at the Democratic Party from a century’s perspective. I finished reading Thomas Heed’s 1975 doctoral dissertation titled Prelude to Whistlestop: Harry S. Truman the Apprentice Campaigner. I’ve seen this unpublished manuscript referenced in several biographies I’ve read of President Truman, and I finally read this influential work.

One thing that makes Truman so interesting is that he’s from such a different America, and he was a Democrat. So, it can be hard to place him in today’s donkey party. This comparison was often made on foreign policy four decades ago, because, long predating the Vietnam War, Truman was an unmistakable national security conservative who more resembled the views of a California governor by the name of Ronald Reagan than the two Democratic nominees for president in 1980 and 1984.

In Heed’s brief history of Truman’s first two political campaigns for the equivalent of what we in Oregon call a county commissioner, Truman ran in 1922 and 1924 for a seat on the Jackson County Court in  Missouri on the issue of bringing rational principles of business administration to government. This was a novel concept back in the 1920s, a century ago. Heed explains: “In those pre-1929 years, the business ethos was the magical elixir of American fantasy. No problem was seen beyond solution if just the rigid analytical tools of a far-sighted modern, scientific business manager could assess it and act decisively.”

Inspired by engineers like Frederick Taylor, universities began creating programs in business administration. This transformed the auto industry from the charismatic leadership of Henry Ford to the bureaucratic leadership of Alfred Sloan’s General Motors. So, it’s interesting to see this taken on as a campaign theme by a young Truman running for local office. Heed writes:

While Truman’s campaign was rather lackluster it still exposed several consistent patterns evidenced in the Judge’s earlier political outings. One was his lingering love affair with the business world. It was apparent in both his press releases and his political ads. He had succumbed totally to the current faith in business efficiency as the be-all and end-all. The ideal model for governmental affairs was seen to be the cold scientific objectivity of a Taylor.

There’s this great line in a 1924 press release when Truman was running for reelection:

They [the voters] wanted a business administration and they have before them the audit of the County’s books by Aurthur Young & Co. the famous Kansas City Expert Accountants. Their report is exactly such as they make for a railroad, for a packing house, or any other “big business” — cold-blooded mathematical statement of facts.

I’m having a hard time imagining a Democrat today proudly citing big business as his inspiration. Sadly, I don’t recall a single county commissioner race this year in either party’s primary that focused on operating efficiency as the reason to earn votes. We may be living in a post-1929 world, but I’d still prefer to be governed by a “cold blooded mathematical statement of facts” than by the strange agendas that prompt folks to run for local office today.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.