Jiemin Tina Wei is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University and a 2023-2024 Consortium Research Fellow.
Recent provocations have called for renewed research in a “labor history of science.” This project, which will form the basis of my first monograph, resonates with such proposals but instead triangulates three bodies of literature: business history, labor history, and the history of science. Historians have typically studied industrial medicine, scientific management, and human relations in their silos. By contrast, my dissertation reconnects these movements as divergent responses to a common impetus by chronicling how they were part of scientists’, engineers’, and doctors’ collective attempts to mitigate overwork and quell labor unrest. As the century unfolded, however, researchers began removing industrial fatigue from their self-ascribed research justifications. Tracing the rise and fall of these scientific investigations, my project illuminates industrial fatigue as the buried root of many modern-day human sciences.
The project traces how three communities of researchers attempted to tackle the intractable problem of industrial fatigue through (I) physiology, (II) time and motion, and (III) mind. I argue how this third group succeeded in demonstrating, at least to the business community, that the labor problem lay in workers’ minds, thereby overturning decades of research in the physiology of fatigue and in time and motion studies. In this process, a concern about industrial fatigue, which once animated reform-minded initiatives to protect workers’ health, became a tool for capital to better command its workforce. By pathologizing the mental roots of fatigue, these researchers promised industry a method to ensure peaceful workplaces free from discontent and transformed industrial life.
With potential interest for scholars of business, capitalism, science, labor, and the US, my monograph project is part of a larger history of how the human sciences reshaped modern industrial life. This work also holds interest for general audiences. As fatigue resurges back into contemporary discourses about work amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a particularly good time to reappraise the historical conflicts over the mental, somatic, and hybrid definitions of workplace fatigue. This book, a study of industrial fatigue’s disappearance as a twentieth-century research concern, offers insights for fatigue’s twenty-first-century repopularization. It not only documents a historical transition in the scientific conceptions of industrial fatigue but also probes the nature of modern, capitalist work; meditates on what makes work invigorating, tiring, deadly, or boring; and isolates the levers (in the body, mind, or environment) that the labor union, state, boss, or even the worker herself has historically manipulated to extract greater productivity gains. It is a study for anyone who has wondered why, despite ever-proliferating developments in modern wellness, workers seem more exhausted than ever.
Visiting Columbia University’s Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, I consulted the papers of Frederic S. Lee, a physiologist and physician who made significant contributions in the study of industrial fatigue, including through the US’s Committee on Industrial Fatigue during WWI. The work of Lee and his colleagues is the focus of Part I of my manuscript project. At Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I also consulted the papers of Frederick L. Hoffman, a statistician at the Prudential Insurance Company.
Visiting Yale University’s Medical Historical Library, I consulted the extension collection of visual material (particularly postcards) from mental hospitals of the period contemporaneous with my investigation into the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. Furthermore, I viewed on microfilm the papers of Harvey Cushing, a key colleague, friend, and point of comparison to E.E. Southard, the Director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. Cushing’s materials, in particular, show a contemporaneous approach to collecting neurological material in the career of a physician whose legacy starkly contrasted with Southard’s. At Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I viewed the papers of Robert Yerkes, the psychologist and eugenicist known for his work as a primatologist. Early in his career, Yerkes had also worked at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital as a psychologist. The materials in his collection shed light on the relationship between Yerkes’s intelligence testing on Psychopathic Hospital patients, Army recruits, and non-human primates.
The Hagley Museum and Library holds several collections related to my project. Firstly, several employer-affiliated organizations that directly initiated research on industrial fatigue or had members who participated in such research deposited their documents at the Hagley Library. These organizations included the National Industrial Conference Board and the American Iron and Steel Institute (particularly through the physician Thomas Darlington). On this visit, I was able to focus on consulting the manuscript documents, non-circulating printed materials, and photographs related to these organizations. Moreover, I was able to view the papers of Thomas Lamb, whose career contributed to the design of ergonomic, fatigue-reducing handles for household items such as knives, cookware, and crutches.
At the National Library of Medicine, I focused my attention on the papers of Alan Gregg, a physician and key bureaucrat of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). The manuscript documents in this collection illuminate the broader context of Gregg’s thinking around the role of foundations and other philanthropic organizations in shaping research in health and medicine. The records reveal further information about Gregg’s relationship with religion and spirituality, contrasting with the religious backgrounds of other RF bureaucrats and Rockefeller, Jr. himself. The NLM also held further materials pertaining to fatigue research, which I also consulted, including those located in the Albert Baird Hastings papers, DeWitt Stetten, Jr. papers, Joshua Lederberg papers, Luther L. Terry papers, Tod Mikuriya papers, and John F. Fulton papers.
The Smithsonian Institution’s Archives Center at the National Museum of American History holds important documents and AV material relating to Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who are a focal point of Part II of my book project. During this visit, I focused on consulting their extensive collection of employee motivation and other workplace posters, including those located in the National Industrial Conservation Movement Posters Collection, the Division of Work & Industry Incentive Posters Collection, and the Sheldon-Claire collection. Furthermore, I consulted the papers of Brownie Wise, the famed vice president of the Tupperware Company. In particular, I focused on the training manuals, speech manuscripts, and brochures in the collection that detailed Wise’s approach to coaching employees on motivation, energy management, fatigue, and the pursuit of goals.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s University Archives at Steenbock Library, I focused on materials related to Willis Wisler, Chief of the Bureau of Industrial and Commercial Relations at the University of Wisconsin, University Extension Division. Wisler and his colleagues advanced a hypothesis about the relationship between radicalism and insanity that becomes a focus of Part III of my book project. The materials at UW included the Bureau’s printed circulars and miscellaneous pamphlets, additional UW-Extension publications and manuscripts, and records of UW-Extension’s School of Workers.
At Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, my main focus was on consulting the archive’s enormous collection of Ivy Lee papers. That collection shows the broader context of the career of Lee, the Rockefellers’ public relations advisor, documenting Lee’s early journalism career, his public relations work for clients such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Rockefellers, and public controversies surrounding his visits to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. The activities of Lee, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and colleagues in the aftermath of the Ludlow massacre is a feature of Part III of my book project. Moreover, I was able to consult the papers of Alfred Lotka, a statistician at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
The preceding archival research has given me invaluable access to the manuscript collections of business organizations, university departments, labor advocacy groups, and individual scientists, engineers, and doctors. This project, examining multiple subdisciplines of science as they took disparate approaches to studying the problem of industrial fatigue, has become richer through its ability to incorporate this extensive trove of unpublished sources from fields ranging from mechanical engineering to mental hygiene, from physiology to economics. The research completed in conjunction with support from the Consortium has advanced the project’s ability to tell a fuller history about the attempts to remedy workplace afflictions like industrial fatigue in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States.