Work Better, Live Better Motivation, Labor, and Management Ideology

i
n the United States, a strong work ethic has long been upheld as a
GRay
WorK BETTEr
necessity, and tributes to motivation abound—from the motivational
posters that line the walls of the workplace to the self-help gurus who
draw in millions of viewers online. Americans are repeatedly told
they can achieve financial success and personal well-being by adopting
a motivated attitude toward work. But where did this obsession come
Live BETTEr
from? And whose interests does it serve?
Work Better, Live Better traces the rise of motivational rhetoric in the
workplace across the expanse of two world wars, the Great Depression,
WorK BETTEr Live BETTEr

and the Cold War. Beginning in the early twentieth century, managers
recognized that force and coercion—the traditional tools of workplace
discipline—inflamed industrial tensions, so they sought more subtle means
of enlisting workers’ cooperation. David Gray demonstrates how this
“motivational project” became a highly orchestrated affair as managers
and their allies deployed films, posters, and other media, and drew on
the ideas of industrial psychologists and advertising specialists to advance
their quests for power at the expense of worker and union interests.
“Work Better, Live Better provides invaluable insight into how

corporate management attempted to refashion the American
work ethic in the twentieth century. An ambitious, intelligent, and
thoughtful account of work and its ideological management that is
essential reading for anyone interested in the history of capitalism.”
—Tim Strangleman,
author of Voices of Guinness: An Oral History of the Park Royal Brewery
“By focusing on the idea of ‘motivation’ and the level of effort, energy, and
engagement that managers have historically put into attempting to shape
the inner psychic lives and experiences of workers, Gray renders strange
and unusual some of the most familiar tropes of economic culture.”
—Kim Phillips-Fein,
author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal
DaVID GRay is teaching assistant professor of American studies

and history at Oklahoma State University.
MOTIVATION, LABOR,
Cover art by Packer (poster artist), “We’re
Ready for the Challenge Tomorrow, Let’s do AND MANAGEMENT IDEOLOGY
the Job Together!”. c 1941–1945. Courtesy
National Archives and Records Administration
DaVID GRay
(NAID) 516115.
www.umasspress.com Cover design by Frank Gutbrod
Gray_softcover.indd 1 10/15/20 3:46 PM

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WoRK BETTER
LIVe BETTER
WoRK BETTER
LIVe BETTER
MOTIVATION, L ABOR,
AND MANAGEMENT IDEOLOGY
DaVID GRaY
University of Massachusetts Press

Amherst and Boston
Copyright © 2020 by University of Massachusetts Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-62534-534-9 (paper); 533-2 (hardcover)
Designed by Jen Jackowitz
Set in Minion Pro and Cache
Printed and bound by Books International, Inc.
Cover design by Frank Gutbrod
Cover art by Packer (poster artist), “We’re Ready for the Challenge Tomorrow, Let’s do the
Job Together!,” ca. 1941–1945. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration
(NAID) 516115.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gray, David (Ph. D. in American Studies), author.
Title: Work better, live better : motivation, labor, and management
ideology / David Gray.
Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2020] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020019274 | ISBN 9781625345332 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781625345349 (paperback) | ISBN 9781613767832 (ebook) | ISBN
9781613767849 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Management—United States—Psychological aspects—History.
States—Psychological aspects—History. | Psychology, Industrial—United
States—History. | Success in business—United States—History.
Classification: LCC HD70.U5 G687 2020 | DDC 658.3/14—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019274
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
A portion of chapter 2 was previously published as “Managing Motivation: The Seth
Seiders Syndicate and the Motivational Publicity Business in the 1920s,” Winterthur
Portfolio 44, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 77–122. A portion of chapter 4 was previously pub-
lished as “New Uses for Old Photos: Renovating FSA Photographs in World War II
Posters,” American Studies 47, no. 3 (2006): 5–34. Used by permission.
for Sarah
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1
Motivation, Management, and Industrial Modernity 18
CHAPTER 2
Quests to Shape the Worker’s Mind 51
The Rise of Psychological Motivation
CHAPTER 3
Visions of Striving 81
Debating Work’s Promises in the Great Depression
CHAPTER 4
The War over Motivation 119
Prosperity Rhetoric and the Remaking of Work’s Rewards during World War II
CHAPTER 5
Selling Workers on Their Jobs 160
Consumption-Based Motivation and Management Dominion in the Postwar Era
CHAPTER 6
The New Hucksters of Cooperation 203
Cold War Consensus Campaigns and the American Way of Work
vii
viii | Contents
EPILOGUE
Motivation in an Age of Diminishing Rewards 250
NOTES 275
INDEX 329
PREFACE
Although this book centers on work and motivation in America, its inspi-
ration reaches back to my preacademic life in northern England in the
1980s. At the core of the era’s dominant political ideology—Thatcherism—
was a relentless quest to transform how people thought about work and its
rewards. Inspired by conservative free market theorists, Margaret Thatcher
and her government focused much of their energy on dismantling the com-
munitarian values that for years had underpinned attitudes about work.
That goal was distilled in Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such
thing as society; there are only individuals and families.” The Thatcher gov-
ernment’s efforts to recast work in individualistic terms formed a major
pillar of its larger mission to define market-based capitalism—or neolib-
eralism, as we now call this ideal—as the irrefutable core of modern life.
Work, according to Thatcher, was a route to the entrepreneurial sense of self
needed for the individual to flourish and succeed.
Years later, having embarked on an academic path in the United States,
I began to research similar developments in American work ideology. The
Reagan era, given its assault on the labor movement and endless assertions
of work’s individual rewards, seemed a logical entry point. Yet my interest
in history drew me to the ideology’s roots and longer-term trajectory. The
massive propaganda campaigns of World War II, one of the twentieth cen-
tury’s most visible attempts to promote work’s rewards, became a central
focus in my research. What role did the U.S. government’s wartime motiva-
tion efforts play in the larger ideological contestations around work and citi-
zenship that took place between the Depression and the early Cold War era?
ix
x | Preface
Once I began to dig into boxes in research archives across the coun-
try, however, a more layered history emerged. It revolved around not just
propaganda but also the subjects that eventually became the focal points
of this book—motivation and motivational ideology. Attempts to develop
and use motivation involved not only designers and coordinators of pro-
paganda but also a host of specialists in and on the fringes of the manage-
ment community. Among them were industrial psychologists, economists,
management theorists, business organizations, communications experts,
human relations and employee relations professionals, independent ven-
dors of motivational posters and films, and often managers and supervi-
sors. Although these individuals did not necessarily know one another,
they nonetheless participated in a collective enterprise, even a loosely knit
motivational “movement” of sorts. While specialists’ theories about work-
place motivation were far from singular or unified, their goals invariably
converged around the same impulse: to grease the wheels of management
control in the factory by selling employees on work’s rewards. The “moti-
vational project,” as I call this protracted quest, is this book’s central focus.
As we will see, the motivational project has many strands, and tracing its
emergence and development takes us into an array of histories—of work,
management, propaganda, and communication techniques—and into var-
ious kinds of work ideology. Ultimately, this is a story about how managers
and their ideological allies constructed managerial visions of work and its
rewards and promoted them in efforts to extend their control over workers,
diminish the labor movement, and further their own power. That quest, it
turned out, was remarkably successful. Today, over a century after indus-
trial psychologists and economists began to think seriously about how to
exploit motivation in the workplace, and decades after the assaults on the
labor movement ramped up in the 1980s, the managerial mission to sell
work’s promises and rewards is flourishing more than ever, albeit via tech-
niques that are more extensive and sophisticated than those of the past.
The goal of this book is to provide an accounting of the emergence and
historical development of motivational ideology in the workplace. But I
hope that it can be just as useful in helping us understand the power of
today’s motivation ideologies. In an era when corporations and educational
institutions continually cast work as a route to personal fulfillment, and
Preface | xi
when older rewards such as economic security and collective well-being

have been eclipsed by managerial jargon about self-discovery through
work, an assessment of motivational ideology and why it matters seems
long overdue.
Tulsa, 2020
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have incurred many debts while writing this book. My thanks to the hard-
working archivists and curators at the Archives Center at the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., who, during
two summer-long research fellowships, were unflagging in their assistance.
I am grateful to Harry Rubenstein, Larry Bird, and Peter Liebhold, who
generously opened their research files to me, and to Craig Orr, who intro-
duced me to the Sheldon-Claire Company Records and took me to one of
the Smithsonian’s off-site storage repositories for a daylong trawl through
piles of posters under a suspended airplane. I also thank Kay Peterson, who
fielded requests for image reproductions. My appreciation also goes out to
Barbara Gilbert at the University of Chicago Special Collections for her
assistance with my exploration of the Charles Rosenfeld Collection during
several research visits and to Laura Alagna, who conducted additional
searches of the collection.
Archivists at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware,
aided my research into the National Association of Manufacturers collec-
tion during two residential fellowships. Thanks especially to Lucas Clawson
and to Marge McNinch, as well as Roger Horowitz and Carol Lockman,
who made my research and my monthlong stay at the Hagley’s eighteenth-
century blacksmith shop on the banks of the Brandywine Creek so reward-
ing. My gratitude to Patrizia Sione and Melissa Holland at the Kheel Center
for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University
who provided invaluable assistance during my research on General Motors.
Thanks also to John Pollack and Eri Mizukane who offered equally vital
xiii
xiv | Acknowledgments
help with my research into Lemuel Boulware and General Electric at the
Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania. My
appreciation to Chris Hunter at the Museum of Innovation and Science in
Schenectady, New York, and Katie Levi at the Chicago History Museum
for fielding requests for various documents, images, and permissions, and
to the research librarians at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.,
who supplied images and fielded research queries. A big thank-you also to
Rick Prelinger for generously obtaining frames of From Dawn to Sunset and
to Jamie Edford for assistance managing some of the digitized images in
chapter 4. I am grateful also to former motivational poster salesmen David
Bernstein and the late Sheldon Shalett for supplying important insights
into how Sheldon-Claire’s poster campaigns were sold and implemented
in the factory after World War II; the late Wanda Shalett for her rec-
ollections about her husband, Lew Shalett; and Sharon Rogers, who
kindly shared memories about the work of her father, poster salesman
Ralph Rogers.
I began this project in a highly supportive academic community—the
American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. The depart-
ment provided a wonderful base from which to develop the research.
I thank Thomas Augst, Paula Rabinowitz, Elaine Tyler May, and the late
David Noble, all of whom were model mentors and unflagging support-
ers of my work. I am especially grateful to Lary May, whose mentorship
was integral in getting the project off the ground and shaping its develop-
ment. I hope I came through on his advice not to lose sight of the “big pic-
ture.” Thanks also to Jennifer Pierce and Dave Roediger, whose teachings
helped shape some of the core ideas in the early stages. Many friends pro-
vided critical readings of early versions of the chapters that follow. I thank
Megan Feeney, Mary Rizzo, Jennifer Gowen, Scott Laderman, Melissa
Williams, Sharon Leon, Stephen Young, Yuka Tsuchiya, Mary Strunk,
Dave Monteyne, Jason Stahl, Jeff Manuel, and others who participated in
the Mays’ writing group during my years in Minnesota. My appreciation
also to Amy Tyson, Jennifer Beckham, Adam Barrows, Marie-Therese Sulit,
Julia Bleakney, Dave Wehner, Melanie Brown, Ebony Adams, David Slater,
and Dorthe Trofen for their insightful feedback. I also thank Jonathan
Munby for setting me on my early academic path at Lancaster University
before I hauled my life off to Minnesota.
Acknowledgments | xv
My sincere thanks go to Liam Kennedy and Catherine Carey at the

Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin, both
of whom provided fabulous support and friendship during a yearlong fel-
lowship in 2007–8, and to the members of the institute’s writing group that
I and fellow scholars founded that year. Thanks especially to Madeleine
Lyes, Marisa Ronan, Barry Shanahan, and Wendy Ward for their insightful
critiques on my work and their camaraderie that year. While at the Clin-
ton Institute, I had the opportunity to organize a conference that brought
together academics from around the world to discuss their research on
work and emotion. The conference supplied opportunities to develop some
of the book’s core ideas. My everlasting gratitude goes out to Jacqueline
O’Reilly, Alan McCoy, and wee Maitiu for showing me the beauty of Irish
hospitality that year. I also thank the American Studies Program at the
University of California–Davis, which supplied employment in slightly
warmer climes in 2008–9, as well as Laura Grindstaff, Ryken Grattet, and
the delightful Chella for taking me into their home, lending me a bike, and
allowing me to live in Davis on the cheap.
Feedback at talks at various conferences and workshops was helpful in
shaping the book’s arguments. Particularly useful were presentations at the
Department of Work and Organization at the University of Minnesota’s
Carlson School of Management hosted by John Budd in 2006; the Busi-
ness History Conference in Columbus, Ohio, in 2013; the Hagley Museum
and Library’s public lecture series hosted by Roger Horowitz in 2014; and
Lancaster University’s Management School hosted by Bogdan Costea in
2017, who, along with his colleagues Kostas Amiridis and Norman Crump,
offered insightful critiques. I also thank Neil Wilson for his perceptive feed-
back at the latter event and for his insights in our subsequent conversations
at the Storey Institute about managerial ideologies, work, and the happiness
industry.
Two of the book’s chapters include significantly revised material from
academic journal articles. Part of chapter 2 appeared in longer form as
“Managing Motivation: The Seth Seiders Syndicate and the Motivational
Publicity Business in the 1920s,” Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 1 (Spring 2010),
and a section of chapter 4 appeared as “New Uses for Old Photos: Renovat-
ing FSA Photographs in World War II Posters,” American Studies 47, no. 3
(2006). Thanks to Amy Earls at Winterthur Portfolio and Sherrie Tucker at
xvi | Acknowledgments
American Studies for granting permission to include the respective article

pieces in revised form here.
Over the last decade I have had the good fortune to work with wonderful
colleagues in the American Studies Program at Oklahoma State University.
I thank Laura Belmonte, Stacy Takacs, and John Kinder for their invaluable
collegiality. Thank you John for being the best writing partner I could have
hoped for and for never letting anything slide, and Stacy for your insight-
ful critiques of several chapters and vital technological savvy with digital
images at the eleventh hour. Thanks also to Andrew Rosa for your help-
ful feedback on several chapters. I am grateful as well for research fund-
ing from the American Studies Program, without which this book would
have only three chapters. My appreciation goes out as well to the History
Department, especially to Susan Oliver for her work on acquiring many of
the book’s images, and to the hardworking librarians at OSU-Tulsa for their
diligent research assistance. Friends beyond OSU have also offered invalu-
able support. Thanks to Cheryl K (she knows why) and to Andrew Grant
Wood for his friendship, his critiques in the latter stages of the project, and
sharing his wonderful family with me. Friends in England have supplied
much moral support during my lengthy absence. Thank you especially to
my dear friends, Jon Carter and Jenny Atkinson, for your friendship from
afar and during my visits home to Lancaster over the years and for helping
me maintain my connections to the city of my youth.
My editor at University of Massachusetts Press, Matt Becker, and pro-
duction editor Rachael DeShano made the publishing process a pleasure.
Thanks to you both for shepherding the project from the manuscript to
the book so supportively. I hope that I delivered on Matt’s advice to avoid
excessive endnotes. My eternal gratitude goes out to Nancy Raynor, whose
copyediting skills improved the book immensely. Any mistakes are mine,
of course. Thanks as well to Sally Nichols for her work on the book’s pro-
duction and design, not least its illustrations, and to Frank Gutbrod for the
terrific cover design. My appreciation goes out also to UMP’s director, Mary
Dougherty, for backing the book’s publication and to Courtney Andree for
her work on marketing it. I also give my sincere thanks the two anonymous
readers whose insightful critiques of the manuscript helped me sharpen the
book’s ideas and arguments.
Acknowledgments | xvii
My biggest debt of gratitude is reserved for Sarah McKemie, whose love

and patience sustained me throughout the project. I’m no longer mad about
you bursting in and interrupting all those times while I was trying to write
my “little book report.” I also appreciate that you figured out some sneaky
ways to motivate me that did not feel like the manipulative techniques I
discuss in the book (but that were no less effective in motivating me to get
the work done). Your love, laughter, and wisdom continue to nourish me.
WoRK BETTER
LIVe BETTER
INTRODUCTION
In the United States, a motivated attitude is often characterized as a require-

ment for existence. Tributes to motivation are all around us. Posters exhort-
ing motivational sentiments are ubiquitous on the walls of workplaces, bill-
boards touting similar messages line our highways, and motivation-themed
videos receive millions of hits online. Bookstores dedicate ever-expanding
shelf space to motivational literature, while Get Motivated! seminars have
enticed hundreds of thousands of Americans to listen to speakers sermon-
ize about how to achieve financial success and happiness. Fueled by a self-
improvement industry that is projected to grow to nearly $14 billion by
2023, motivational aphorisms—“determination,” “perseverance,” “achieve-
ment,” and so on—have become an unofficial national language. Such sen-
timents pervade the spiel of daytime talk show hosts and internet self-help
gurus who posit motivation as a solution to everything from family dis-
putes to low self-image, career failure to cancer and infectious diseases.1
Motivation has always been linked especially to work. Exponents of moral
authority in America have long touted the virtues of cultivating a motivated
attitude toward productive labor. The belief that the United States possesses
an exceptional capacity for motivated work has been upheld as decisive in
the nation’s triumph over adversity in the Great Depression and World War
II. Likewise, the nation’s rapid economic growth and rise to global domi-
nance during the Cold War era were interwoven with bold assertions about
the supremacy of the American work ethic.2 This faith in Americans’ apti-
tude for motivation is embodied in many of the iconic images that shape col-
lective memory. Photographs portraying gritty common men and women
1
2 | Introduction
striving for a better life during the Depression; Rosie the Riveter’s (now
endlessly mimicked) “We Can Do It” pose from a World War II poster;
and advertisements and films depicting workers reaping the rewards of
the “American way of life” in the postwar era: these and other images have
helped sustain a seductive story about a people united in their belief in the
virtues of a motivated attitude toward work.
Although a strong work ethic has long been central to perceptions of
American life, in reality, the idea that motivation is virtuous and that we
should devote ourselves to it is the result of a lengthy and determined cru-
sade to sell us on work’s rewards. The roots of this effort took shape in
the “gospel of work” literature of the nineteenth century. Such bestsellers
as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1860) and Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of
Wealth (1899) asserted an idea that later became the unifying principle in
the concept of motivation: by believing in the character-building properties
of diligent labor and adhering to a strong work ethic, one could achieve a
more fulfilling life. Throughout the Gilded Age, exponents of the gospel
of work espoused the virtues of competitiveness, an ideal drawn from the
Darwinist theories ascendant during the era. Their rhetoric laid founda-
tions for the assertions about work’s rewards that proliferated in the twenti-
eth century. From Elbert Hubbard’s 1899 inspirational essay “A Message to
Garcia,” which was issued to millions of workers over the next two decades,
to the propaganda disseminated during the world wars and the Cold War
era, and to today’s self-help books, disciples of the work ethic have long
preached that a motivated attitude will yield economic and psychological
benefits.3
Despite these claims, the goal of motivation’s devotees has always been
to render workers more acquiescent to management control and, in turn,
to allow management greater leverage to impose its will. Whether couch-
ing their assertions in patriotic sentiment, calls for teamwork, or promises
of economic or psychological rewards for workers, their goal has been to
grease the wheels of the organization by encouraging workers to adopt a
managerial perspective. The concept of motivation, steeped in assertions
about to the meritocratic nature of the industrial system and the freedom-
granting qualities of capitalism, offered managers a powerful instrument
through which to craft their visions of the ideals to which workers should
ascribe (figure 0.1).
Figure 0.1. Posters like this one, created by the Sheldon-Claire Company during World
War II, played on a long-held parable in which Americans, by believing in the work ethic
and adopting a motivated disposition, could gain entrée to the rewards of meritocratic
capitalism. Sheldon-Claire Company Records, 1942. Archives Center, National Museum
of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
4 | Introduction
The work ideology that became so prolific throughout the twentieth cen-
tury was neither limited to rhetoric nor restricted to the workplace. It was
part of a broader effort by managers and their allies to realize the powers
associated with the concept of motivation. The motivational project, as I call
this quest, serves as the focus of this book. Although the roots of the moti-
vational project reach back to the gospel of work, it began to cohere as a
distinct undertaking in management around 1910. From this point forward,
a growing cadre of specialists—industrial social scientists, economists,
communications experts, and management theorists, among others—
came to regard the then-emerging concept of “motives” as a valuable tool
in management’s perpetual quest to make workers more productive and
acquiescent. These specialists pushed back against the prevailing belief that
workers’ attitudes and behaviors were determined by economic incentives,
emphasizing instead the role of instincts (whether innate or learned) and
emotions, arguments that drew in part on Freud’s writings.4
Galvanized by World War I, specialists honed modern communica-
tions techniques, including booklets, poster campaigns, film screenings,
and speeches. For decades to come, these and other media provided a
wide-ranging apparatus for advancing managerial visions of work’s mean-
ing and rewards in the factory and—through home mailings, community
film screenings, and other public relations techniques—beyond the factory
walls. During the 1950s, the motivational project became a central pillar
of management, buoyed by the human relations movement and large cor-
porate organizations headed by managers who believed communications
techniques were essential in making workers more amenable to control.
The main themes underlying motivational discourse throughout the post-
war era—the virtues of individual striving and reward, labor-management
cooperation, and consumer- capitalism— helped propel business’s larger
crusade against labor and the New Deal. In infusing such sentiment in the
factory, managers and their allies helped pave the way for later neoliberal
assaults on the labor movement.5 Thoroughly integrated into dominant
understandings of work and democracy for much of the twentieth century,
motivational rhetoric formed part of the foundation of American capital-
ism’s ideology of individual striving.
This book charts the motivational project from the early twentieth cen-
tury to its apex in the early Cold War era before tracing its development
Introduction | 5
into our own day. The discussion centers mainly on the factory but also
moves beyond its walls as we explore specialists’ efforts to advance work
ideology in the public sphere. The first part of the book’s title, Work Better,
Live Better, taken from the name of a 1955 workplace poster (figure 6.7),
reflects the central idea associated with motivation during the twentieth
century: by embracing work’s promises as defined by employers (or the spe-
cialists who developed the messaging), workers would enjoy a more reward-
ing life. Motivational propaganda is today largely associated with wartime.
Yet, from World War I onward, it was a constant presence in the workplace
during war and peace. As we shall see, it was shaped by numerous individ-
uals and organizations, many of whom had different aims, and it therefore
took on various forms. In its array of expressions, motivation became an
indispensable weapon through which management asserted control over
workers and shored up their own power.
Motivation and Management Power

Throughout the period examined in this book, managers modified their
approach to disciplining workers as new theories about motivation
emerged. Until World War I, managers generally believed that the worker’s
productivity was determined by economic incentives, a view that informed
scientific management. Its proponents believed that calibrating workers’
bodies and their physical actions with the machinery of production would
incentivize them to work faster because of the prospect of earning higher
wages. However, as psychologists’ theories about human agency gained
influence, managers gradually came to believe that the worker’s mind, not
the body, was a more direct route for establishing control. This belief was
pivotal in galvanizing managerial interest in psychological-based motiva-
tion for decades to come.6
One of the major developments to emerge in the wake of this shift was
that managers began to deploy images far more extensively in their com-
munications techniques. Like many businessmen, managers had tradition-
ally shunned images, believing that appeals to viewers’ emotions embodied
“irrational” impulses. However, encouraged by the influence of advertis-
ing and the visual education movement, each of which flourished in the
early twentieth century, managers eventually came to see practical value in
6 | Introduction
images. Posters, films, image-laden booklets, and other visual communica-

tion forms, they realized, could help promote “good” attitudes and behav-
iors via either reason-or emotion-based appeals. Low literacy rates among
the largely immigrant industrial workforce, coupled with the elitist per-
ceptions among many businessmen and managers that immigrant workers
were captivated by visual images, opened the door for an influx of visual
communications into the factory.7
As this book shows, motivational rhetoric proved to be a powerful appa-
ratus for advancing the ideological ambitions of managers, businessmen,
and their allies during their lengthy campaigns for authority. After World
War II, communications specialists in industry couched their workplace
motivational messaging within the creeds of the “consensus” ideology that
permeated American life throughout the postwar era. As well as promot-
ing consumption and anticommunism, consensus ideology was, at its core,
concerned with expunging class from American life. As journalist God-
frey Hodgson notes, “No tenet of the consensus was more widely held than
the idea that revolutionary American capitalism had abolished the working
class or . . . that everybody in America was middle class now or that Ameri-
can society was rapidly approaching economic equality.”8 Directly and indi-
rectly, this effort to erase the specter of class became the central logic of
management’s efforts to exploit motivation after the war. Management spe-
cialists at such large corporations as General Motors and General Electric
arrived at a slick synthesis of psychological and economic motivation. Their
employee communications campaigns blended the emotionally manipula-
tive capacities of images with a finely tuned use of rhetoric extolling the
virtues of the free market and the dangers of government and labor union
influence. By infusing the factory with such sentiment, corporate manag-
ers found a means to counter the more class-and communitarian-based
motivational sentiment voiced by labor unions and to weaken the effects
of the New Deal liberalism in industry. Aided by communications special-
ists, managers also extended their motivational rhetoric into the culture at
large, blending it with sophisticated public relations (PR) and advertising
techniques that portrayed a rising consumer-based standard of living as the
reward for workers who embraced managerial ideals.
While motivational rhetoric was invoked primarily in efforts to pre-
vail over class tensions in industry, it was from the outset steeped in
Introduction | 7
assumptions about race and gender. Many of the management specialists

who first brought attention to motivation in the 1910s characterized immi-
grant workers and workers of color as “maladjusted.” They claimed that
“foreign” and nonwhite workers were prone to acting on instinct rather
than reason and sought out the camaraderie of the irrational “herd” instead
of aspiring to individualism. Specialists believed that motivation, rooted as
it was in prized Anglo-Saxon virtues of self-discipline and personal ambi-
tion, could be a powerful salve for these perceived problems. This linkage
between motivation and the civilizing effects of Anglo-Saxonism reinforced
assumptions that the white worker was the natural embodiment of moti-
vated labor. Such beliefs endured in motivational rhetoric for decades to
come. Even as racial segregation in the factory was outlawed through legis-
lation during World War II, managers continued to assume that motivation
could most effectively be conveyed through images of white—and usually
male—labor. Such thinking explains why such a large proportion of work
motivation publicity produced throughout the twentieth century deployed
such depictions, including the poster on the cover of this book, which was
distributed by the federal government’s Office for Emergency Management
during World War II. This tendency endured well into the postwar era in
employee communications campaigns waged by industrial corporations
that emphasized work’s consumer-based rewards. While framing motivated
work as white and male, the specialists who designed these campaigns
habitually depicted women as homemakers and consumers despite the fact
that many women were engaged in paid labor. This practice reflected the
demographic makeup of the field of industrial communications, which was
largely male.9
For many managers, the concept of motivation was advantageous because
it provided a means to disassociate themselves from the coercive connota-
tions of propaganda. After World War I, “propaganda” became a byword for
manipulative misinformation and outright lies as many Americans came to
view the war as a “racket” spurred by greedy munitions makers and power-
hungry politicians.10 Interest in motivation gathered steam in the 1930s in
the wake of the influential human relations research in industry by Elton
Mayo and his Harvard colleagues. Steeped in the therapeutic language of
social psychology and espousing a commitment to improving workers’
mental health and morale, motivation helped managers define themselves
8 | Introduction
as agents of workers’ well-being even as in reality they became more dogged

in their efforts to perfect discipline and control in the factory.
Although motivational rhetoric has not been examined extensively, sev-
eral historians have addressed business leaders’ efforts to advance their
agendas through communication techniques during the period explored
in this book. Motivational rhetoric paralleled corporate public relations,
which, by promoting images of businesses as benevolent, helped big busi-
ness acquire a sense of what historian Roland Marchand calls “corporate
soul” during the early twentieth century. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf ’s book Sell-
ing Free Enterprise demonstrates that in the post–World War II era, corpo-
rations and business organizations like the National Association of Man-
ufacturers used communications techniques to powerful effect in their
mission to weaken the labor movement and the New Deal. More recently,
Kim Phillips-Fein has extended this line of analysis by linking business-
men’s crusade against the New Deal to the revival of conservatism. Work
Better, Live Better explores similar terrain to these studies but brings to
the table a different set of insights, revealing that the struggles for power
by managers and businessmen relied not only on partisan political cam-
paigns but also a protracted use of motivation in the workplace aimed at
anchoring work’s meanings and rewards in a classless ideal. Moreover, it
shows that propaganda campaigns were but one part of a larger ideologi-
cal apparatus used by management beyond the workplace: the motivational
project. Spilling into industrial social science, economic and labor policy,
positive-thinking literature, and corporate public relations, motivation was
an amorphous idea with surprisingly wide influence.11
As the preceding discussion suggests, this book operates from the stance
that management’s investments in motivation are purely concerned with
controlling the prevailing definitions of work and its rewards so that it can
extend its dominion over workers and subject them to its desired production
regimens with greater agility. Sometimes these objectives involved speeding
up production for the nation’s military victory, as during the world wars,
or to boost the firm’s competitiveness. Yet while motivation is always pre-
sented as being in the worker’s own interest, it was and still is an instrument
designed to help management achieve its principal goals—higher produc-
tivity and profit. Born at the dawn of the industrial revolution as a way
to “manage men,” management practice focused increasingly on making
Introduction | 9
workers more acquiescent. The motivational project became a powerful

means for advancing this goal, a reality that today is largely obscured by
claims about the personal rewards and sense of empowerment that work
provides. As Miya Tokumitsu has detailed, such ideals have recently been
given new life through the “do what you love” mantra that many employers
tout when urging us to pursue “meaningful” (and often poorly compen-
sated) work.12 In tracing the rise and development of the motivational proj-
ect in industry, this book shows how management consolidated its author-
ity through image and word and how the motivational idioms that saturate
the workplace and much of public life today came into being. The motiva-
tional project provides, in other words, a roadmap for understanding the
roots of the motivation-infused culture that continues to bombard us with
illusory promises about work.
Accounting for Motivational Rhetoric

My goal in using the term “motivational rhetoric” throughout this book
is twofold. First, it serves as a catchall for the many ways in which man-
agers and various specialists in industry used communications techniques
in efforts to make workers more amenable to their objectives within the
broader scope of the motivational project. Second, I invoke the term to
emphasize that the many forms of publicity disseminated in the workplace
were components of a larger apparatus. While the rhetoric was not singular
and its forms and sentiments fluctuated over time, its core ideas and goals
remained quite consistent. Its devotees were principally interested in help-
ing management instill work discipline, boost productivity, and firm up its
control. They always hoped that motivation would result in workers’ identi-
fication with the ideals promoted, but controlling the official definitions of
work’s rewards usually took precedence.
Although this is a cultural history, my discussion is informed partly by
theories about how power relations are influenced by the control of lan-
guage or discourse. I draw inspiration especially from historian Michel
Foucault’s writings. Foucault argues that discourse plays a decisive role in
how such organizations as prisons, schools, hospitals, the military, and gov-
ernment agencies govern their subjects and, in turn, how power relations
are constituted in those organizations. Foucault was not himself especially
10 | Introduction
focused on the workplace, but analysts of organizations have since extended

his arguments to the workplace and to management, though usually with
a contemporary rather than historical focus. In tracing the decades-long
efforts by managers and their allies to better govern workers through moti-
vational discourse, this book contributes fresh insights into power relations
in the factory. A key insight offered by Foucault and those who draw on his
theories is that, in Western liberal democracies like the United States, sub-
jects are disciplined and controlled not by restraining their freedoms, as was
once believed, but by defining them and addressing them as autonomous
individuals. Motivational discourse, I argue, acted precisely in this manner.
Couching communications with workers in a language of empowerment—
for example, in posters and films that expressed an investment in workers’
emotional needs, psychological well-being, and standard of living—allowed
managers to obscure their efforts to instill discipline and shore up their
own power. Because the concept of motivation was steeped in democratic-
sounding sentiments about the virtuousness of work, managers could claim
that their messages were in keeping with traditional American work ideals.
The task of governing workers could be achieved more easily, they believed,
if they emphasized the freedom-granting properties of motivated labor.13
Motivation has always been a means to regulate the emotional dimen-
sions of work and, in particular, workers’ affects—their outward displays
of emotions. Industrial social scientists initially became interested in emo-
tional conditioning because they thought it to be a useful tool for combat-
ing group solidarity. They believed that the “group mind” was dangerous,
being rooted in the irrational instincts and emotions of the masses. Such
concerns paradoxically prompted managers to deploy emotion-laden mes-
saging in efforts to channel workers’ affects in what they regarded as more
“constructive” ways. Drawing from the techniques of advertising, manag-
ers and their allies could use motivational publicity to frame ideas in emo-
tional terms, emphasizing the psychological and material rewards available
if employees adhered to the visions of work presented.14
Posters, films, pamphlets, speeches and other forms of management
communications are usually associated with wartime propaganda. The field
of propaganda emerged during World War I. The Creel Committee, the
government agency chiefly responsible for disseminating such information,
waged a massive campaign aimed at selling Americans on the merits of U.S.
Introduction | 11
involvement in the war and urging them to throw their support behind
industrial production.15 My analysis of motivation involves discussions of
wartime propaganda, but I employ a broader lens than is available when we
employ the now familiar emphasis on propaganda’s powers of “persuasion.”
Instead, I draw on propaganda theorist Jacques Ellul’s concept of “socio-
logical propaganda.” Ellul argues that, whereas political propaganda aims
to instill in the service of a specific goal, often by attempting to convince
its audience, sociological propaganda taps dominant societal myths and
trains individuals to adopt not only beliefs but also new behaviors, largely
through an unconscious process. In this way, sociological propaganda acts
as a form of social conditioning and paves the way for conformity on a
large scale. Sociological propaganda, Ellul adds, is espoused continuously
through channels that are not typically perceived as propaganda, such as
advertising, public relations, and human relations, and via such methods
acclimatizes us to new perceptions and circumstances indirectly regardless
of the degree to which we identify consciously with the ideas presented.16
Motivational rhetoric was informed not only by the field of propa-
ganda, but also by advertising and salesmanship, each of which absorbed
Freudian ideas in the 1910s and 1920s. Vendors of motivational posters and
other publicity, most of whom were centered in Chicago, a major hub of
the advertising industry, presented their product as a form of advertising
for the factory. The owners of these firms and many of their copywriters,
artists, and sales managers had formerly worked in advertising and drew
heavily on its conventions. Similarly, managers, when administering moti-
vational poster campaigns or film screenings in the factory, approached
these tasks in the manner of advertisers, pitching and merchandising their
ideas to their “customers”—workers. Like advertisers, producers of motiva-
tion drew on the concept of visualization, which was premised on the belief
that images, being steeped in emotion, influenced viewers’ behaviors sub-
consciously via a process of suggestion regardless of what they “thought”
about them. From World War I onward, propaganda experts and vendors
of employee educational films used this principle to promote their claims
about work’s rewards to factory employees.17
Ironically, after World War II, as management specialists developed
more systematic techniques for regulating emotions, scholars who studied
work and organizations—mainly social scientists at this time—became less
12 | Introduction
attentive to emotion in the workplace. As Helena Flamm notes, at the center

of postwar social science was a belief that emotions were nebulous and thus
not amenable to rational scientific study. This declining attention to emo-
tions is ironic given that some of the era’s major studies of organizational
life—including C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, David Riesman’s The Lonely
Crowd, and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man—emphasized that
regulating emotions was central to management techniques. Paradoxically,
then, social scientists who wrote about work soured on studying emotions
at the very moment when managers were beginning to more fully exploit
and master the art of emotional conditioning in industry.18 Until quite
recently, historians of work and the workplace have been just as disinclined
to examine management efforts to manipulate emotion in the workplace.
According to the empirical tenets that traditionally informed labor history,
emotions were considered too amorphous to be subjected to scholarly scru-
tiny, which also applied to discourse. Due to these views, as well as a long-
standing respect for workers’ agency, labor historians have dwelled little
on management efforts to shape workers’ minds through propaganda and
other communication forms.19
Since the 1980s, social scientists have shown that emotional condition-
ing is a core part of management’s strategy for achieving discipline and
control. In the wake of the publication of Arlie Hochschild’s 1983 book,
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, social scientists
brought emotions to the center of studies of work. Today, little doubt exists
that what Hochschild famously termed, “emotional labor” is a core compo-
nent of work.20 Moreover, emotional conditioning, touted by industrial psy-
chologists since World War I, is widely recognized by managers as a basic
function of management. Aided by a growing array of consultants, man-
agers today deploy an abundance of emotion-based techniques aimed at
inducing habits and conduct that make workers more acquiescent to man-
agement control. Increasingly, these techniques focus on shaping behav-
iors via modifications of the workplace’s aesthetic and sensory dimensions.
Gamification—the use of digital and Web-based games to increase employ-
ees’ productivity—is just the latest manifestation of management’s quest to
hone motivational tools that center on emotional conditioning.21
In this book, I argue that management’s use of motivational discourse in
the twentieth-century factory, though not as sophisticated as it is today, was
Introduction | 13
no less consequential. Tracing the motivational project—bringing to bare

on the history of work what the sociologist Simon Williams calls the “secret
history” of emotions—is an important task if historians are to account for
how managerial ideologies shaped the course of industrial modernity.22
This task is all the more pressing given that, for years, management spe-
cialists in business and academia, as well as management consultants, have
been working ceaselessly to advance employers’ holy grail—to make moti-
vation more effective and thus render workers more acquiescent to man-
agement’s goals.
As should be clear, the main characters in this story are managers and
their allies (industrial social scientists, management theorists, and suppliers
of motivational posters and other communications). Although the goal of
motivational communications was in part to indoctrinate workers, manag-
ers and management specialists made relatively few efforts to assess work-
ers’ perceptions of or reactions to them, and such efforts were usually fleet-
ing and inconclusive. The absence of such assessments may appear strange,
but it reflected practices used in many other communications fields. Much
like advertising and PR specialists, devotees of motivation did not believe
it necessary to prove that posters, films, literature, and other communi-
cation mediums had their intended effects on workers. Taking cues from
the well-established influence of advertising in the culture at large, they
believed that exposing workers to modern communications techniques was
a self-evidently useful enterprise. Like human resources specialists in large
organizations today, they mostly assumed that workers’ habits and disposi-
tions could be improved without conscious acceptance of messages.23 After
World War II, large corporations like General Motors and General Electric
did begin to solicit workers’ feelings about their jobs in a more methodical
way, often using the resulting surveys as evidence of the company’s good-
will toward workers and vice versa. Where available, I discuss these materi-
als, but I read them not as insights into how workers truly felt or how they
reacted to management messaging but for what they are—components of
management’s communications arsenal.
In exploring the managerial quest to exploit motivation, we must put
aside any assumption that workers were impervious to the emotion-laden
messaging used in the factory. As Ellul observed pointedly in 1965, Amer-
ican social scientists were resistant to believing “that the individual—that
14 | Introduction
cornerstone of democracy—can be so fragile” as to be influenced by pro-

paganda, a view that led them to disregard propaganda as a subject of anal-
ysis.24 This book rubs against the grain of the tendency that Ellul pointed
to. By detailing the role of the motivational project in managers’ efforts to
control workers and shore up their own power, it aims to stir further con-
sideration of managerial uses of motivation past and present.
Organization and Goals

The book’s discussion proceeds chronologically, tracking the development
of the motivational project and motivational rhetoric throughout their key
stages of formation. Most chapters trace changing understandings of moti-
vation among management specialists, businessmen, and managers before
turning attention to the use of messaging in the workplace. To minimize
repetition, I sometimes use the term “motivational discourse,” “motiva-
tional sentiment” or just “motivation,” but I always have in mind the ideol-
ogy described above.
The first two chapters examine the rise of motivation as an influential
idea in management thought and the industrial arena from the turn of the
nineteenth century through the 1920s. Three developments were integral to
the growing interest in motivation among managers: the ideas of such busi-
nessmen as Elbert Hubbard that emphasized the value of employee com-
munications publicity; the influence of industrial social science, which, via
its growing interest in psychology and the “mind” of the worker, stressed
the link between instinctive drives and productivity; and the increasing
use of motivational films, posters, and other visual media in the factory.
Although their efforts to deploy such media were initially stymied by their
elitist assumptions about workers, communications specialists and manag-
ers learned to deploy emotion-based messaging and thus laid groundwork
for later efforts to craft motivational ideology.
Changes in motivational discourse during the Depression and World
War II comprise the focus of chapters 3 and 4. Amid the mass unemploy-
ment of the Depression, politicians, businessmen, and management spe-
cialists turned to motivation as a way to promote faith in the system. Elton
Mayo and other human relations specialists advanced the insight that emo-
tion was central to motivation in the workplace. The New Deal brought
Introduction | 15
motivational sentiment to the center of public life in the form of political

oratory and photographs of rural Americans striving to survive the dust
bowl. The realities of the Depression prompted industrial leaders to aban-
don the appeals to individualism that dominated in the 1920s in favor of
emotion-based appeals to groups, a tendency reflected in the culture at
large, not least in popular films. The challenges of the Depression and the
war allowed designers of motivational media to define their messages as
vital to the attainment of higher productivity and American victory. The
mobilization of millions of industrial workers during the war prompted
motivational propagandists to pioneer more sophisticated approaches to
design. Most consequentially, they used advertising techniques to link the
rewards of war work to postwar consumption, an approach that helped
management promote its image as an agent of workers’ economic progress.
In chapters 5 and 6 I chart the deepening influence of the motivational
project in the postwar era, a process that culminated in the early 1960s.
During this period, motivation outgrew its earlier functions as a tool for
increasing discipline. While it continued those functions, it also expanded
to encompass a larger framework for translating the ideas of postwar con-
sensus policies that emphasized consumption as a salve to class conflict. In
the workplace—and increasingly beyond the workplace via corporate PR
campaigns and Cold War discourse—motivational sentiment became fused
with the rhetoric about the superior virtues of the “American way of life”
familiar to mainstream advertising. Motivation also emerged as a thriving
field of research at large corporations where management specialists pro-
moted Cold War ideologies emphasizing labor-management cooperation
and consumer-based rewards. Many smaller employers, meanwhile, turned
to the expertise of motivational publicity firms, which supplied them with
posters and literature. At large and small firms alike, the result was a new
regimen of highly orchestrated, image-driven campaigns that touted the
rewards that workers and their families would receive if embracing the ideal
of labor-management cooperation. The Cold War’s antilabor and anti–New
Deal credos, meanwhile, lent the disciples of motivation further leverage in
their crusade to define America as a “classless” nation.
In tracking the development and uses of the amorphous discourse of
motivation from the turn of the nineteenth century through the early Cold
War era, this book provides a historical framework for analyzing one of
16 | Introduction
the most ubiquitous yet underanalyzed ideologies of industrial modernity.

I argue that motivation became entrenched not because it is a natural out-
growth of work but because motivational sentiment in its array of forms
was designed, sold, and proselytized with determination and, at times,
evangelical zeal.
As I detail in the epilogue, the motivational ideology that was used to
sell work’s rewards in the twentieth-century factory laid foundations for
management’s more recent motivational efforts. The motivational rhet-
oric familiar to the workplace today has mostly abandoned the emphasis
on work’s long-term economic and material rewards that characterized its
twentieth-century iterations. Since the 1980s and 1990s, motivational senti-
ment has been more apt to espouse ideals such as personal empowerment
and self-discovery, which help shore up neoliberal management ideals.
Tributes to inspirational living and work’s capacity to deliver individual ful-
fillment have thus replaced economic rewards in work motivation. Even
so, today’s rhetoric bears the indelible stamp of the twentieth-century
motivational project. The long-touted managerial promise that this book
examines—“work better, live better”—remains as powerful as ever.
This book examines motivation as a broad field of endeavor whose devel-
opment has been shaped by numerous individuals and organizations.
Understanding its development sometimes requires us to take what may at
first blush feel like a detour but that is, in fact, an essential part of the task
at hand. Motivation cannot be understood sufficiently if we look only to its
raw materials—posters, films, speeches, and other propaganda forms. As
we shall see, it was and still is the product of a great deal of activity by spe-
cialists both in and outside the workplace. For this reason, the forthcoming
chapters often center on the work of industrial social scientists, manage-
ment experts, and other specialists who left their mark on the motivational
project. Also at the heart of the story in two chapters are the owners of
poster companies and the “foot soldiers” of motivation—the salesmen who
sold their products across the country. These men (their employers only
employed men, echoing the traditionally male-dominated nature of trav-
eling sales work) pitched poster campaigns to managers in their territo-
ries across the country. I examine their activities, including their sales tech-
niques and their interactions with managers and supervisors, because their
Introduction | 17
work was pivotal to the proliferation of motivational campaigns at indus-

trial firms and thus to the deepening reach of the motivational project.
For some, the fact that employers try to make us work harder in exchange
for rewards might not seem especially troubling. After all, what’s so wrong
about feeling good, even enthusiastic, about our work? This may seem rea-
sonable enough, especially when we consider that one of the most pressing
problems throughout the history of work is that people have too frequently
been compelled by circumstances beyond their control to perform jobs that
leave them feeling unappreciated or exploited. Yet while workers gener-
ally desire meaningful and rewarding work, motivation always has strings
attached. Motivation is transactional, and what workers have received from
the transaction has historically been far less than what management has
reaped. This was as true for workers in the industrial workplace of the
twentieth century as it is for those in the service, healthcare, or educational
workplace today.
Motivational ideology is amorphous. Its power derives from its similar-
ities to other widely espoused ideals associated with American capitalism,
such as individualism, consumer-based prosperity, and personal fulfill-
ment, each of which have at particular times provided fodder for manage-
ment’s motivational techniques in the workplace. To grasp the ideology’s
implications, we must abandon the belief that we already know what there
is to know about motivation. This book shows that, far from being lim-
ited to wartime or the workplace, the motivational project was a powerful
force throughout the course of industrial modernity, inside the factory and
beyond the factory walls. Only by tracing its roots and development over
time can we understand how managers and others who sought to grease the
wheels of organizational life reframed work’s meanings and rewards and, in
the process, advanced their quests for control.
CHAPTER 1
Motivation, Management, and Industrial Modernity
Emotions may be conditions of stimulation or interference, and no one

ought to underestimate the importance of higher motives, intellectual,
aesthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the psychological
impulses of the laborer.
—Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 1913
In 1899, Elbert Hubbard, the business writer and founder of the Roycroft
arts and crafts society in East Aurora, New York, penned a brief inspira-
tional essay that, to his surprise, would become an overnight sensation and
go on to be a model for much of the publicity that employers used in efforts
to motivate workers during the next two decades. Although the word
“motivation” was little used at this juncture, the essay’s wide circulation and
enthusiastic reception among businessmen suggested that communications
media could play a powerful role in promoting work discipline.
The essay appeared in the March issue of Hubbard’s “little magazine”
of business, the Philistine, which had around one hundred thousand read-
ers, most of whom were businessmen and admirers of Hubbard’s tributes
to bootstrap individualism. It took the form of a tribute to Lieutenant
Rowan, the soldier whose actions in the Spanish-American War the previ-
ous year were widely reported to have been decisive to the war’s outcome.
In the much-celebrated incident, Rowan was tasked with delivering a mes-
sage from President McKinley to General Calixto García, the leader of the
Cuban insurrection against Spain, a mission that he performed dutifully,
18
Motivation, Management, and Industrial Modernity | 19
securing the alliance that McKinley desired and aiding the American vic-
tory over Spain in the process.
Hubbard contrasted Rowan’s dedication to the job at hand with the atti-
tude of the era’s workers, who, he scoffed, were sorely lacking in such qual-
ities. Rowan “took the letter and did not ask, ‘Where is he at?’ ” Instead,
after being dropped off the coast of Cuba, he “strapped it over his heart”
and “traversed a hostile country on foot” for three weeks before delivering
the letter. “By the Eternal!” Hubbard exclaimed in admiration, “there is a
man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed
in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor
instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will
cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their ener-
gies: do the thing—‘Carry a message to Garcia!’ Hubbard added ruefully,
however, that Rowan’s single-minded commitment to the job was all too
rare in the nation’s workplaces where “slipshod assistance, foolish inat-
tention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule.” These
unmotivated work habits were, he added, regrettably familiar to the nation’s
employers, the unsung “other Garcias,” who spent their days struggling to
get their workers in line but were “well-nigh appalled at times by the imbe-
cility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on
a thing and do it.”1
The essay’s stark contrast between the resourceful Rowan—a clear anal-
ogy for the ideal employee—and the “slipshod” workers who Hubbard
described so disparagingly was embraced by employers far and wide, bring-
ing him and the Philistine widespread acclaim. Hubbard was inundated
with requests for copies of the essay from employers across the country and
around the world. The New York Central Railroad ordered one hundred
thousand copies in pamphlet form for its workers under the new title, “A
Message to Garcia.” Many other employers followed the example, and in
turn, most workers at large or midsize firms in America received a copy
or read it in company publications over the next few years. In 1900 it was
translated for all employees of the Imperial Russian Railways, and during
the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, Russian military leaders supplied copies
for all Russian soldiers. For two decades after its publication, schoolteachers
assigned the essay to their students as a moral lesson about the importance
20 | Chapter 1
of self-discipline, and it was eventually translated into all major languages

and adapted for the stage and screen. By 1925, over forty million copies had
been printed worldwide, making it the third-most-reproduced piece of lit-
erature after the Bible and the dictionary.2
“A Message to Garcia” was far from the first inspirational tract that
employers circulated to workers—this had occurred since the early days of
industrialization—but it made clear to managers as never before that such
communiqués presented valuable tools for promoting employee discipline.
Hubbard’s sneering admonishments of employees for failing to live up to
managers’ idealized visions of work gradually gave way to more positive-
toned messaging. However, the dichotomy between the motivated and the
unmotivated worker that his essay popularized was to become increasingly
prominent in management’s efforts to influence attitudes and behaviors in
industry. Indeed, many of the propaganda posters, booklets, and films used
to motivate workers in the factory in the decades ahead channeled Hub-
bard’s comparison between the productive and the unproductive worker
and adapted his rhetoric about the virtues of diligent work.
Although Hubbard and his writings faded from view in the 1910s—he was
aboard the Lusitania when sunk by a German submarine in 1915—the moti-
vational genre that he helped establish remained highly influential among
businessmen.3 Throughout the Gilded Age, the industrial system had been
steeped in intermittent conflict as workers asserted their collective hopes for
industrial democracy through labor unions and industrialists suppressed
labor strife with coercion and violence. Inside the factory, managers main-
tained control by disciplining workers’ bodies on the production line, but in
the early twentieth century they gradually discovered that the mind could
be a no less useful route of regulation. This realization opened the door for
an idea that was to become central to management quests for control and
power in the decades to come: motivation (or, as it was more commonly
called at this early stage, motives, meaning the range of factors that impelled
an individual to action). Conveniently for industrialists, this insight coin-
cided with the advent of modern communication techniques. Specialists of
many stripes—reformers, industrial psychologists, educators, propaganda
designers, among others—believed that pamphlets, posters, films, and other
media could be an effective means for dispensing motivational sentiments
to workers and thereby shaping their minds in “positive” ways.4
This chapter tracks the emergence of motivation as a management idea

and charts the spread of motivational rhetoric from the turn of the cen-
tury to the end of World War I. According to many historians, motivation
began to gain influence in industry only in the wake of the high-profile
experiments into employee productivity conducted by human relations
specialists in the 1920s and 1930s, especially the Hawthorne studies, which
revealed that modifications of the working environment, along with work-
ers’ awareness of being observed, led to changes in behavior. Yet managers’
interest in motivation emerged well before these influential studies, albeit
in less formal and structured ways. This was the case especially in the dis-
course that they invoked, both among themselves and in employee com-
munications techniques. Motivational discourse was useful to management
in part because it was so wide-ranging and adaptable. Along with closely
related concepts such as motive, incentive, and morale, it allowed manag-
ers to address a multitude of workplace concerns. The ideal of employee
motivation proved useful to them when emphasizing work’s economic and
psychological rewards alike, or when trying to impress on workers the ben-
efits they would receive if they embraced company mindedness or adopted
a cooperative attitude toward management. In reality, managers intensi-
fied their efforts to extract more labor from workers and to suppress labor
unions, and work became even more grueling throughout the early twenti-
eth century due to managers’ speedup of the production line. Yet through
the concept of motivation they could reframe their calls for increased pro-
ductivity within oratories about the need to satisfy workers’ needs and aspi-
rations, a tactic that deemphasized the inherent power hierarchies between
themselves and the workers who toiled in their factories.
Motivation’s Progressive Era Roots

At the beginning of the twentieth century, efforts to motivate workers,
when pursued, were mostly ad hoc. During this time, managers generally
regarded workers as a component of the production process—as “labor”
or “human capital,” in the terminology of the day. This characterization
was informed by the rapid expansion of an industrial system that, as busi-
ness historian Alfred Chandler explains, prioritized large-scale planning,
production, transportation, communication, and bureaucracy.5 Operating
22 | Chapter 1
from this standpoint, managers thought little about influencing workers’

dispositions. Any worker deemed not productive enough could simply be
replaced in the same manner as a machine part. Nor did managers see much
point in trying to persuade less productive workers to modify their ways.
According to the dominant theories of the day, behavior was determined
by one’s instincts or inborn traits, which were believed to be unchange-
able.6 These views also informed employers’ responses to industrial conflict.
Throughout the late nineteenth century, they met strikes with violent put-
downs and coercion.7
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, businessmen began
to search for new ways to prevail over the “labor problem.” Many of them
believed that industrialization, with its large and impersonal factory system,
had severed the close connections that had existed between employers and
workers in the preindustrial age. Factory work brought both a deepening
sense of alienation in the workforce and ongoing labor conflict as workers
asserted their demands for a more humane existence. In the wake of these
tensions, many businessmen began to adopt a more benevolent tone in their
deliberations about employees. They hoped that by talking about workers as
individuals with feelings and aspirations, they could counter criticisms of
harsh industrial conditions, diminish labor conflict, and, as Roland March-
and argues, infuse the corporation with “soul.”8 Throughout the first quarter
of the twentieth century, managers’ assumption that workers’ dispositions
were unchangeable waned. Gradually, the door opened for “incentives” and
what would later be called “motivation” to enter their thinking.
The emerging notion that workers’ dispositions were malleable was
derived from the progressive reform movement, whose influence was felt
throughout all areas of American life from the 1890s through World War I.
Progressivism embodied a broad-ranging effort to reform politics, industry,
and other major areas of society, with the goal of improving Americans’
lives, especially those of the largely industrial working class who lived in
the nation’s swelling urban centers. Progressives generally rejected the “sur-
vival of the fittest” ethos of social Darwinism that, since the Gilded Age,
had insisted that biology and inherited traits were the major determinants
to shape the individual’s life. Instead, they emphasized the role of educa-
tion and social and environmental conditions in shaping experience. These
views were a cornerstone of the work of reformers from Jacob Riis to Jane
Addams, and they became tenets of industrial psychology, which flourished

from the 1910s onward.9
Progressivism had a complex relationship to modern industrial work. At
a time when generations of workers were condemned to lives of grueling
and repetitive labor, progressives, including many businessmen, worried
whether America could remain true to republicanism—the nineteenth-
century ideal emphasizing virtuous, independent work—and sustain its
claim to be different from the “old world” of Europe with its dehumaniz-
ing factory systems. These concerns prompted many progressives to push
for workplace reforms. But while progressives wished to make work safer
and more enriching, the ideas that they promoted dovetailed with manag-
ers’ efforts to discipline workers and increase their productivity. This ten-
dency, as Daniel Rodgers argues, stemmed from progressives’ hopes about
the democratizing possibilities of technology and industrial education.10 By
championing work enrichment, progressives helped lay the foundations of
the motivational ideology that managers used to extend their control over
workers, often in highly exploitative ways, for years to come.
The importance of motivation in progressivism is seen in the ideas of
some of its leading figures. Jane Addams, one of the foremost proponents
of “industrial betterment,” saw factory work as acceptable as long as work-
ers were taught to see their work as part of a collective enterprise.11 While
Addams’s beliefs stemmed from a humanistic sensibility, they contained
antecedents of the “teamwork” ethos that became central to motivational
techniques aimed at disciplining workers and weakening unions. The writ-
ings of John Dewey, the most influential educational reformer in Amer-
ica in the first half of the twentieth century, embodied a similarly accom-
modating stance toward industrial work. Dewey opposed “instrumental”
forms of industrial education because they acted to “subsidize industrial
capitalists in their need for labor.” Work, he believed, should instead be a
vocation that provided workers with access to “self-development and per-
sonal growth.”12 As generations of managers discovered, however, this pro-
gressive ideal proved useful in encouraging workers to see themselves as
members of the “team,” a goal that, in turn, helped managers to impose
more stringent forms of control in the factory.
Progressives’ efforts to sustain faith in work’s rewards were not entirely
new. In the nineteenth century, American business writers published
24 | Chapter 1
countless books and pamphlets espousing the virtues of the work ethic,
many of them inspired by business writers in England. This literature
extolled the “gospel of work,” the nineteenth-century philosophy assert-
ing an inviolable link between hard work and morality. In the first half of
the nineteenth century, the gospel’s chief evangelist was Benjamin Frank-
lin, whose best-selling Poor Richard’s Almanack was considered the bible
of “good” work values. By the century’s end, Franklin’s writings had been
eclipsed by a more unabashed insistence on the necessity of hard work by
such authors as Samuel Smiles and the industrial tycoon Andrew Carne-
gie. Eager to fuse the gospel of work with social Darwinism, these authors
couched labor’s rewards in moral terms, proclaiming that self-discipline
and initiative would lead to success, a formula exploited to powerful effect
by Elbert Hubbard in “A Message to Garcia.”13 After the turn of the century,
however, employers perceived the gospel’s “survival of the fittest” reasoning
as a hindrance to their efforts to instill “cooperative” attitudes among work-
ers. Progressive ideals like work betterment seemed a more viable means to
incorporate the worker into the rhythms of industrial life.
Although they sought to enrich workers’ lives, progressives, like many
earlier thinkers, helped businessmen make the brutalizing demands of
industrial work more palatable to Americans. Their calls for industrial bet-
terment comprised a sort of proto-motivational ideology that connected
the image of virtuous work in nineteenth-century republicanism with
work in the new factory system. Industrial labor, in this formulation, was
as rewarding as preindustrial work, but managers would need to remind
workers of it continually to sustain this belief.
Motivation and the “Human Face” of Industry

At the same time that progressive reformers were helping pave the way
for motivational ideology in industry, managers were beginning to imple-
ment ideas that later formed the basis of a motivational apparatus in the
workplace. Managers became aware of motivation owing to the rise of the
“human factor.” Invoked by employers increasingly in the first two decades
of the century, the human factor was part of an effort to recast industry’s
image in more humane terms and to build familial bonds between workers
and their managers. As Bruce Kaufman argues, it became a byword for a
variety of reforms in the workplace during the first quarter of the twentieth
century, including increased safety regulations, improvements in working
conditions, insurance plans, and employee counseling.14
The human factor appealed to mangers because its emphasis on workers’
needs and desires offered a useful counterbalance to the harsh demands
associated with their main method for instilling discipline in the factory—
scientific management. The most influential advocate of scientific manage-
ment, Frederick Taylor, as well as the efficiency engineers inspired by him,
used stopwatches, production flow charts, and time and motion studies
to determine the “correct” amount of time that each task should take on
the production line. Using this method, they set the pace at which each
employee was expected to work on a particular task. The “piece-rate sys-
tem,” as this practice was known, gave managers a benchmark from which
to set bonus rates for higher output and to determine when production was
too slow. Its advocates argued that it would alleviate “soldiering,” whereby
workers collectively adopted a comfortable pace of work, impeding man-
agers’ desired productivity levels. Taylor and his followers touted scientific
management as mutually beneficial all parties. For managers, it increased
efficiency, whereas for workers, its proponents asserted, it would result in
higher wages, a claim that was much disputed by workers who found them-
selves working harder for the same or even less pay as management sped
up production.15
The worker incentive or motivation efforts that proliferated through sci-
entific management did not aim only to increase efficiency. They were part of
a larger managerial quest for control. At their center was an attempt to insti-
tute a highly individualized ideal of motivation that would weaken workers’
social bonds and collective sense of workmanship. The goals included the
appropriation of the knowledge and skills that underpinned the craft labor
traditions built by workers for generations; the specialization of produc-
tion (the breaking down of the production process into discrete, individual
tasks that required less and less craft knowledge); and the implementation
of a management-orchestrated system of production that made clear that
managers, as the holders of rational expertise, should organize and admin-
ister production. In reality, scientific management had pernicious effects on
workers. Not only did it intensify an already harsh work regimen by teth-
ering workers’ bodies to the ever-faster machinery of production, but the
26 | Chapter 1
much touted promises of higher earnings also proved illusory as managers

sped up the line. For managers, these outcomes were of limited concern
because workers, they reasoned, were as replaceable as were machine parts.
However, scientific management had some clear limitations for managers,
not least that it reinforced their image as harsh disciplinarians who had lit-
tle regard for workers’ welfare.16
The human factor, in advancing the perception that management had a
stake in workers’ feelings, helped counter this image. An amorphous, catch-
all phrase for an array of management ideas, it was vague enough to mean
anything its advocates desired. Espousing the Progressive Era ideal that
individuals’ behaviors could be improved by modifying their environment,
a reversal from nineteenth-century management precepts, the human fac-
tor helped imbue management with a more forward-thinking image. It also
paved the way for motivational ideals of our own day—witness the cease-
less proliferation of “employee wellness” initiatives in corporations, univer-
sities, and the health care sector—that help obscure the power hierarchy
between management and workers through lingo about the rewards of self-
discovery, personal fulfillment, and similar managerial ideals.17
Among the most prolific expressions of the human factor was welfare
work, the philosophy that shaped the policies of many large and midsize
firms from the late nineteenth century through to the early 1910s. Welfare
work encompassed an array of activities and schemes aimed at encour-
aging emotional bonds between workers and the firm. Large companies,
such as Ford, International Harvester, and National Cash Register, created
departments that administered employee welfare activities. Typically, these
initiatives focused on education, health services, transportation, entertain-
ment, and sometimes profit-sharing schemes.18As historian Sanford Jacoby
notes, welfare work focused mainly on workers’ lives away from the factory
floor and was “frequently condescending and manipulative,” attempting
to “recast the intemperate, slothful worker or the ignorant immigrant in a
middle-class mold.”19 Even so, in defining the firm as a “good” employer and
asserting that the rewards of working there were “worth it,” welfare work
provided a powerful motivational tool. The Ford Motor Company’s Socio-
logical Department, founded in 1912, comprised the most far-reaching of
these initiatives. Ostensibly an effort to improve workers’ quality of life
by deepening connections between their home lives and the factory, the
department amounted to an apparatus for monitoring workers and pro-

moting company mindedness. Although it ceased operation in 1915 amid
workers’ criticisms that it was a front for managerial “snooping” and anti-
union activity, the experiment nonetheless served as inspiration for moti-
vational efforts at other firms and was itself later revived.20
Motivation and Visual Communication
Innovations in workplace communications and management theory fur-

ther elevated motivation’s importance in the modern factory. Motivation
depended increasingly on visual communication. Most managers were
skeptical about images because, according to the rationalist values of their
profession, they embodied the irrational sensibilities of the lower classes.21
Even so, managers’ skepticism began to soften as the value of images grew
more apparent, especially in the face of advertising’s growing influence on
consumption, which was noted increasingly in the press. From the 1880s
onward, employers, anxious to mitigate labor conflict and the problems
of scale associated with industrial expansion, used photographs to define
the firm as a human community and a “family.”22 Photographs in employee
magazines depicting workers participating in baseball, dances, picnics, and
other company-sponsored leisure activities helped firms counter percep-
tions that they were indifferent to their employees’ needs (figure 1.1). Indeed,
as historian Andrea Tone emphasizes, in the early twentieth century, “com-
pany photographs encouraged employees to shift their locus of self-worth
from the increasingly monotonous rhythms of labor to the unpredictable,
‘exciting’ world of company-controlled leisure.”23
Most of the large corporations that practiced welfare work used images
to visualize their humanistic policies toward workers. Images enabled firms
to portray themselves as agents of the human factor—benevolent organiza-
tions committed to improving the emotional well-being of their employ-
ees.24 Photographs published in employee magazines and public relations
(PR) materials helped produce what historian Larry Peterson calls “tradi-
tions of seeing,” whereby workers were trained to see the firm as it wished
to be seen.25 In encouraging workers to perceive the firm as an organization
built on emotional bonds—as a “family” and a community—welfare work
photographs embodied an early form of motivational communications,
28 | Chapter 1
Figure 1.1. In the early twentieth century, many firms used photographs portraying
aspects of welfare work. Such images embodied a belief that, by modifying environ-
ments, employers could improve workers’ dispositions toward their work and the firm,
an increasingly common tactic in early motivational techniques. This 1906 photograph,
created for the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, depicts the firm’s recreational facili-
ties. Workers play snooker and checkers, and one plays the piano, while the kitchen at
the rear supplies beverages. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, transfer from the
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Social Museum Collection, 3.2002.2309, Cam-
bridge, MA. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
emphasizing the rewards that workers would supposedly receive if they

adopted the company’s values. At the center of this use of photography
was an implicit realization that workers’ attitudes and behaviors could be
changed through a strategic modification of environments, activities, and
aesthetics. The value of images was reflected in the progressive-minded
Pittsburgh Survey, a multivolume study of industrial life in Pittsburgh from
1907 through 1914, which used photography and illustration to promote
reform. Included in the study were photographs by Lewis Hine and illustra-
tions by Joseph Stella, which presented dignified portrayals of workers and
immigrant communities. The genre of images that came out of the Pitts-
burgh Survey embodied a type of motivational representation in that their
portrayals of dignified workers engaged in specific work types invoked the
virtue and integrity of work. These qualities led to many of the images being
used throughout the interwar period in the Survey (a periodical produced
for social workers) and economic textbooks for a general audience, a devel-
opment that foreshadowed a more widespread usage of motivational pho-
tography and other images during the New Deal.26
Although welfare work fell out of favor as workers came to associate it
with management surveillance and antiunionism, its emphasis on benev-
olence lived on in literature read by managers themselves. Management
magazines advised that the best way to counter the tensions arising from
workers’ alienation was for managers to become better listeners and to hone
their morale-boosting skills. These ideals were emphasized regularly in Sys-
tem, the Magazine of Business. When launched in 1900, System was firmly
focused on increasing efficiency by using the economic incentives of sci-
entific management. By 1910, however, it had begun to embrace the idea
that managers should “inspire” and “enthuse” workers. A common trope
in System’s illustrated articles was the scenario of the “heart-to-heart talk”
between a manager and worker. Typically in these stories, a manager takes
a worker under his wing and teaches him the value of determination, dili-
gence, or some other motivational trait.27 System also carried regular pieces
urging managers to be attentive to workers’ “feelings,” accompanied often
by illustrations of managers in contemplative poses, ruminating in dream-
like scenarios over what their workers were “thinking about” (figure 1.2).28
Like the heart-to-heart talk stories, these articles reminded managers that
the route to cooperation and better productivity lay in boosting workers’
morale so that they would perform their work more efficiently—motivating
them, in other words. As the illustration emphasizes, however, the lesson of
motivation was not only for workers; managers too had to change.
The proliferation of motivational rhetoric and imagery in the 1910s
reflected a subtle change in managerial discussions about workers. To be
sure, this rhetorical shift was aimed at advancing familiar management
objectives—efficiency, discipline, and control—not at improving work or
giving workers more autonomy. Moreover, industrial work was no less gru-
eling, and workers regarded rhetoric about management benevolence as lip
Figure 1.2. Throughout the Progressive Era, discussions about the importance of the
human factor in industry encouraged managerial interest in motivation. The above
illustration from System conveys a popular theme in early deliberations over motiva-
tion: the assertion that managers should be more mindful of workers’ “thoughts” and
“feelings.” This tactic, the accompanying article claimed, would increase cooperation
and efficiency. System, the Magazine of Business, September 1915.
service or plain propaganda. Yet gradually the belief that increased pro-
ductivity was linked to boosting morale and satisfying workers’ needs and
motives gained traction.
Industrial Psychology, Motivation, and Emotional

Conditioning
Managers’ interest in motivation grew stronger throughout the 1910s owing
to the rise of behavioral psychology. Rooted in the work of late nineteenth-
century German psychologists, behaviorism upheld two ideas that were
highly compatible with management efforts to harness motivation: first,
that human behavior was determined by environmental conditions, and
second, that humans had the capacity for adaptation. These theories left
few areas of American life untouched in the 1910s, influencing everything
from medicine to education, urban planning to prison reform. However,
they were especially consequential in the industrial arena where psycholo-
gists were developing techniques for conditioning workers to the demands
of mass production and for harmonizing worker-management relations in
large impersonal organizations.
As Elspeth Brown argues, behaviorism was attractive to managers in part
because it challenged the still-lingering Darwinian view of some industrial
psychologists that conduct was determined by inborn traits, a belief that
was at odds with managers’ efforts to condition workers to factory life.29
Like the human factor, behaviorism also encouraged managers to consider
how workers’ attitudes and behaviors were influenced by emotions. Behav-
ioral psychologists themselves had little interest in emotions, which they
deemed nonobjective and thus not deserving of empirical study. However,
for many management specialists, behavioral arguments about the positive
effects of environmental conditioning and human adaption in the factory
seemed to go hand in hand with the emerging idea that the worker’s moti-
vation was bound up with his or her emotions.
Managerial interest in environmental conditioning rubbed against the
view of scientific managers that economic incentives were the most import-
ant component of motivation at work. That said, despite its emphasis on
economic- based motivation, scientific management did not altogether
32 | Chapter 1
dismiss the influence of emotions on workers’ job performance and pro-

ductivity.30 Indeed, Taylor argued that to succeed, scientific management
must include “the accurate study of the motives which influence men” and
produce “a complete revolution in the mental attitude and the habits of
all of those engaged in the management, as well of the workmen.” Many
researchers who conducted studies on workers after World War I were even
more attentive to the role of emotions in shaping workers’ performance
than was Taylor.31
Environmental conditioning and emotional regulation increasingly con-
verged during the 1910s. Each gained traction as the writings of psycholo-
gists, influenced by the pioneer of American psychology, William James,
found their way into management discourse. The work of Walter Dill Scott,
a professor of psychology and advertising at Northwestern University in
Chicago, is illustrative. In his 1911 book, Increasing Human Efficiency in Busi-
ness (much of which was serialized in articles in System), Scott argued that
workers’ behaviors could be positively affected by the use of “suggestion,”
a tactic used in advertising to influence consumers. By adjusting the mood
of the workplace, he argued, managers could improve workers’ attitudes
and enhance teamwork, boosting productivity. With this insight, Scott fur-
thered the idea that motives could be used to instill cooperative attitudes
and behaviors among workers. Motivation, Scott argued, was rooted in
“competition” (which could be established by implementing contests and
games); “concentration” (which could be increased by modifying the phys-
ical and sensory environment); and “wages” (which would induce greater
productivity if work was made more satisfying). The employer, meanwhile,
should “transmit his enthusiasm to his managers and subordinates” and
maintain workers’ “interest in work” via “the injection of new motives to
action.”32
What distinguished Scott from many of his contemporaries was his
interest in the practical application of psychology in business, a step that
most psychologists, favoring theoretical-based research, rejected. His claim
that workers’ motives were integral to efficiency and productivity also
diverged from the views of most management specialists, many of whom,
despite growing interest in emotions, believed that workers were incentiv-
ized chiefly by pay. In advancing the idea that applied psychology could
induce motivated attitudes and behaviors, Scott encouraged managers to
conceive the factory as an emotional arena.33 In the decades that followed,

this perspective would become pivotal in motivational techniques. From
this thinking emerged the game-or ludic-based motivation later common
to the factory and the office.
Emotional and environmental conditioning through motivation gained
further prominence through the research of Hugo Münsterberg, a Ger-
man émigré and pioneer of American industrial psychology. Münsterberg’s
studies were focused not on motivation per se but—like Taylor, whose work
inspired his own—on increasing efficiency and productivity.34 Münsterberg
placed greater importance on the psychological dimensions of industry
than did Taylor, including fatigue and the physical and social aspects of
work, ideas already emphasized by the industrial betterment movement.
In his 1913 book Psychology and Industrial Efficiency Münsterberg sought
to bring applied psychology’s insights out of the laboratory and to the cen-
ter of “practical life” in industry. Increasing productivity, he argued, was
no mere rational affair; it would require managers to attend to the “higher
motives, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral motives, in their bearing on the
psychophysical impulses of the laborer.”35 Working from this view, Mün-
sterberg brought attention to the influence of motivation on job placement
and productivity.
Münsterberg’s research was pivotal in establishing the idea that aesthet-
ics, in conjunction with emotions, helped to shape workers’ dispositions.
The harmonization of industrial life, he argued, was closely related to the
“instincts,” “impulses” and “sensations” that prevailed in the society at large.
In the workplace, such aesthetic matters as color, music, and even the adop-
tion of cats in the factory had favorable effects on workers. Likewise, the
provision of educational and recreational amenities and entertainment sat-
isfied the worker’s “reservoir of psychophysical energies.”36 Management
textbooks today often note that Münsterberg and other industrial psychol-
ogists performed little research on motivation and emotion, each of which
only became subjects of study in the field decades later.37 Yet while Münster-
berg did not develop his arguments into a procedure for motivating workers,
his ideas, like Scott’s, encouraged managers to approach the workplace as
a human environment where workers’ dispositions could be influenced by
images, language, sounds and other sensory factors. In encouraging man-
agers to see workers as adaptable to changing conditions, Münsterberg laid
34 | Chapter 1
groundwork for the motivational techniques that managers and their hired
consultants use to this day to induce cooperation and increase productivity.
Attempts to condition workers became systematized through the estab-
lishment of personnel departments at large corporations in the 1910s.
Founded to organize hiring, job placement, and production, these depart-
ments proliferated rapidly, especially after the United States entered World
War I. While they were designed to meet bureaucratic demands, personnel
departments also served to bring discussions of workers’ motives to the fore-
front at many firms because they were informed by the motivation-oriented
theories associated with the human factor, welfare work, and industrial psy-
chology. Among the companies that founded personnel departments were
Ford Motors, AT&T, Westinghouse, National Cash Register, International
Harvester, and Standard Oil. For leaders at these firms, the solution to the
“labor problem” lay in emphasizing the human factor and addressing work-
ers’ grievances on an individual level. This approach spurred the use of
employee counseling and prompted a greater emphasis on “mental health.”
Although managers characterized such measures as evidence of their com-
mitment to employee well-being, their individualizing tactics were largely
aimed at undercutting the collectivist approach of unions to grievances.
The proliferation of personnel departments encouraged interest in moti-
vation in industry, even as many companies scaled back these departments
after the war.38
Claims about the value of motivation also gained traction due to man-
agement efforts to redefine the role of foremen. Since the late nineteenth
century, foremen had been responsible for hiring and firing, and their role
on the production line had typically been to “crack the whip” to impose
discipline. The factory, as management historian Daniel Nelson argues, was
the “foreman’s empire,” and the foreman was often a feared figure among
workers. To allay criticisms about the dictatorial foreman, many firms began
to transfer hiring and firing duties to personnel departments and to cast
foremen in a more humane light by referring to them as “team leaders,”
“facilitators,” and similarly munificent sounding designations.39 In reality,
authoritarian supervision methods changed little.40 Yet this recasting of the
foreman’s image, illusory as it was, became central to the development of the
motivational project. Toward the end of the decade, the view that foremen
should be trained to adopt a more motivational, personality-driven approach
to workers was upheld routinely in management magazines (figure 1.3).41
Figure 1.3. This illustration in Industrial Management asserts that management’s fail-
ure to attend to workers’ human needs through supervision practices undermined their
morale, a core element of motivation. At the top we see what the magazine deemed the
positive results achieved by the idealized supervisor who uses an emotionally supportive
approach to motivation, and below we see the negative effects of the supervisor who uses
“senseless” authoritarian methods. Industrial Management, November 1918.
Industrial psychology’s emphasis on workers’ adaptability and emo-

tional needs did little to improve workers’ experiences on the shop floor.
The “foreman’s empire” remained intact throughout the interwar period,
and work remained as brutalizing as ever as management continued to
36 | Chapter 1
rationalize production. Managers’ esteem for “humane” foremanship

reflected their efforts to reassure foremen that their authority was secure
at a time when managers were continually trying to bring planning and
decision-making on the production line (responsibilities typically over-
seen by foremen) further under their own control. Regardless of its illusory
nature and its true goals, however, the advocacy for a “gentler” approach to
foremanship provided managers with a powerful rhetorical tool through
which to invoke a more humane image of industrial work. In this version
of industry, the foreman—the pivotal link between managers and the rank
and file—was defined as a motivator rather than a tyrant (a figure who was
supposedly disappearing amid the spread of a more enlightened model of
management).
The idea that motivation could play a significant role in influencing
workers’ attitudes and behaviors gained traction in the wake of the federal
government’s backing of industrial reforms. In 1912, Congress established
the Commission on Industrial Relations, a body that investigated industrial
problems and promoted reforms aimed at improving working conditions.
After coming to office in 1913, Woodrow Wilson’s administration took a
forceful approach to industrial reform. Wilson continued a Cabinet-level
Department of Labor (instated by his predecessor, William Taft, on his last
day in office), which formed a warm relationship with labor leaders. Wil-
son also enacted workers’ compensation, health and safety regulations, and
restrictions on child labor. As the labor historian Joseph McCartin shows,
at the heart of Wilson’s first term was an emphasis on the virtues of “indus-
trial democracy.” Since the 1890s, industrial democracy had been a rallying
cry among workers, embodying their collective hopes that unions would
gain greater influence over industrial planning and thus curtail the brutali-
ties of rationalized production. Wilson’s stance stoked belief that industrial
democracy might become a reality. Although Wilson’s support for labor
was a tactical measure aimed at securing power (and reelection in 1916),
his administration, in championing workers’ rights and lending support
to unions, boosted anticipation of radical change. In the process, the state
emerged an agent of motivational discourse in industry.42
By the time the United States was fully embroiled in World War I, the
idea that emotions were integral in shaping workers’ productivity had been
taken up widely in management discourse. Years before emotions received
widespread study, the need to shape and control them was invoked habit-
ually by management specialists. In the process, motivation, which figured
only vaguely in managers’ minds at the start of the decade, became central
in their efforts to condition workers and to make them more acquiescent
to desired goals.
“Selling the War to the Working Man”: World War I

and Motivational Propaganda
The United States’ entry into World War I turned motivation into a national
cause célèbre and an expedient mechanism through which the federal gov-
ernment and industrial leaders could advance wartime objectives. Indus-
trial workers were deeply skeptical toward American involvement in the
war, worrying that business leaders would use it as an excuse to undermine
union activity, a concern that was borne out in the wartime crackdowns on
strikes. In the face of such widespread skepticism, government and busi-
ness leaders mounted a massive propaganda campaign to rally support for
the war effort among workers and the broader citizenry. The largest in the
nation’s history until then, this campaign was waged with particular inten-
sity in the factory, where emotionalized appeals to cooperation and team-
work became all-pervasive.43
The nation’s participation in a war widely touted as one to “make the
world safe for democracy” gave employers and business organizations
unparalleled opportunities to define themselves as devotees of a fairer
industrial order who were committed to advancing industrial democracy.
The organization tasked with orchestrating the government’s propaganda
following the U.S. entry to the war, the Committee on Public Information
(CPI), waged a relentless crusade to drum up public support for the war
effort. Under the leadership of its director, George Creel, the CPI produced
an immense communication apparatus. The CPI’s campaign used a multi-
tude of media, including posters, radio, films, newsreels, advertisements,
billboards, wage packet inserts, and home mailings, as well as speeches,
comprising what Creel later described as a “vast enterprise in salesman-
ship.” During the year and a half that the nation was at war, the CPI dissem-
inated around seventy-five million items of propaganda, infusing public
and private spaces with motivational sentiment. The challenge of selling
38 | Chapter 1
workers on what the CPI called a “people’s war” was especially acute given
that many workers dismissed the conflict as “capital’s war.”44 Believing that
industry was “part of the intricate mechanism of war” and anxious to avert
a slowdown in production, the CPI threw massive resources into the cru-
sade to induce support for the war among workers and labor unions.45 To
gain support for this “people’s war,” the CPI, along with many other gov-
ernment agencies, tapped the rhetoric of industrial democracy, casting
workers as “partners” (along with the troops) in a war to preserve freedom
(figure 1.4).46
While the CPI’s propaganda crusade helped sell Americans on a war
that was later viewed by large swathes of the public as one drummed up by
profit-hungry munitions makers, it had another, less noted effect: it helped
make motivation—an idea that was only hazily conceived before the war—a
broadly accepted aspiration in industry. During the war, morale became
a national obsession, touted by military planners, government propagan-
dists, and industrial leaders alike as vital to the nation’s success. The fervor
for morale boosting also had more lasting effects on the ways that business
leaders and managers framed discussions of work. From this time on, pub-
licity aimed at workers defined loyalty, cooperation, and other motivational
traits not only as obligatory but also as symbols of a higher sense of purpose
among workers (an objective upheld by disciples of motivation from Elbert
Hubbard to Hugo Münsterberg and Walter Dill Scott). This higher purpose
was a mutable concept and could, depending on the needs of the moment,
include the nation’s victory in the war, a commitment to a company’s goals,
the success of capitalism, or some other ideal that managers or businessmen
defined as necessary for workers. Simply put, the war made motivation a
standard weapon in industrial leaders’ arsenal and established the state as
an agent of motivation, a role that it would reprise in the Depression and
World War II.
Throughout the war, the federal government, continuing its prewar
stance, pursued policies that were broadly supportive of workers, giving rise
to state-sanctioned motivational rhetoric linking freedom and industrial
work. The final report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, released
in 1916, set the tone, concluding, “The question of industrial relations
assigned by Congress . . . is more fundamental and of greater importance to
Figure 1.4. This poster, produced by James Montgomery Flagg for the United States
Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation in 1917 and displayed widely throughout
the war, typifies the emotion-laden calls for teamwork and cooperation that character-
ized wartime propaganda. Linked in a spirit of patriotic unity, his fists clenched, the
worker at center is portrayed as a hero whose participation in war work is vital to the
United States’ victory. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduc-
tion no. LC-USZ62–19926, Washington, D.C.
40 | Chapter 1
the welfare of the Nation than any other question except the form of gov-
ernment.”47 President Wilson also expanded his earlier support for labor
by establishing the National War Labor Board (NWLB) in April 1918. The
NWLB protected workers’ right to join a union and participate in collective
bargaining, undermined antiunion tactics by employers, and gave workers
at firms with antiunion stances new leverage to challenge management in
the form of shop committees. State-orchestrated labor reforms set the stage
for a significant expansion of workers’ power. More than a million work-
ers joined unions during the eighteen months that the nation was at war,
swelling union membership to around 3.5 million, more than the number
serving in the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.48
Yet while the government’s broadly supportive wartime position toward
labor stirred workers’ hopes for industrial democracy, its campaigns to
mobilize the armed services and the industrial workforce were ultimately
more accommodating to management. The CPI’s campaigns castigated as
“slackers” those workers perceived as insufficiently committed to the cause,
and though it mostly depicted them honorifically, its insistence on labor-
management cooperation was at odds with workers’ class-conscious aspira-
tions. In bringing psychologically manipulative communication techniques
to the factory, propaganda campaigns helped unify the various strands of
management’s motivational efforts in industry that had been forming for
years before the war, including the Progressive Era belief that labor should
be connected to a higher purpose; the human factor’s insistence on the need
for meaningful connections between workers and their employers; and
industrial psychologists’ calls for managers to use emotional conditioning
to influence motives. Each of these ideas came together in an avalanche
of emotion-laden appeals to workers in wartime propaganda. The change
occurred not only because motivation was now espoused continually and
loudly from all directions but also because it was inextricably fused with
the idea that an individual’s commitment to the organization—the firm or,
as much propaganda insisted, the nation—was nonnegotiable for “good”
workers.
In 1917, in efforts to rally workers’ support for the war, CPI director
George Creel and American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gomp-
ers founded the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy (AALD).
Operating under the auspices of the CPI and headed by Gompers, a vocal
Figure 1.5. Workers at the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation pose for a photograph
around a Liberty Loan display in April 1918. During World War I, employers used slo-
gans, posters, flags, and other patriotic imagery to invoke emotion-laden motivational
sentiment in and around the factory. Displays of this kind, including, in this case, a
slogan atop the factory facade, became focal points in employers’ motivational efforts.
They also allowed managers to exploit the factory’s aesthetic and sensory features for
motivational purposes, tactics advocated by industrial psychologists. Library of Con-
gress, Prints and Photographs Division, lot 5351, Reproduction no. LC-DIG-ds-12366,
Washington, D.C.
supporter of the war, the AALD became a powerful force in suppressing

antiwar sentiment among workers and the broader public. From the CPI’s
perspective, the AALD was imperative in winning the battle for workers’
hearts and minds, a view that prompted Creel to describe it as the CPI’s
“most important body.” In its first six months, the AALD established a hun-
dred and fifty branches across the country, disseminated nearly two mil-
lion pamphlets, held two hundred mass meetings, and published ten thou-
sand newspaper columns. The AALD’s campaign helped strengthen calls by
industrialists for a wartime suspension of the right to strike and for labor
unions to set aside their own interests and throw their full support behind
42 | Chapter 1
the war effort. Typifying these calls was Henry A. Wise Wood, chairman of
the Conference Committee on National Preparedness, who insisted, “Labor
must be shown the necessity of rising above its technical rights, and that
instead of doing its duty in a merely perfunctory manner, it must put all of
its might into the work of producing.”49 Along with the CPI’s other propa-
ganda initiatives, the AALD helped undercut the power of labor opposition
to the war.50 Moreover, the creation of the AALD established a tactic that
the state and business would use at many times in the decades to come,
namely, the enlistment of labor leaders and labor rhetoric for motivational
purposes in industry.
Equally dedicated in advancing wartime motivational ideology were
powerful business organizations such as the National Association of Manu-
facturers (NAM). A staunch defender of business and a fierce opponent of
labor unions, NAM became a potent ally to employers. In 1917 NAM estab-
lished the National Industrial Conservation Movement (NICM), an anti-
union body that espoused the mantra of labor-management cooperation. In
a February 1918 article entitled “Selling the War to the Working Man,” the
trade magazine Printers’ Ink enthused that NICM had disseminated over
1.5 million wage envelope fliers via fourteen hundred employers across the
country, aiming “to refocus the public’s industrial perspective.” The enve-
lopes likened workers to soldiers, extolling them as “Industrial Patriots” who
were bravely manning “Fort Factory.” The campaign also targeted the gen-
eral public, securing over sixty thousand columns of publicity in newspapers
and magazines.51 Puff pieces authored by NICM’s representatives and pub-
lished in newspapers countrywide formed a continual wave of motivation-
infused rhetoric linking patriotism with business leadership and condemn-
ing those (by implication, unions) who did not adhere unquestioningly
to labor-business cooperation. As one proponent of NICM’s campaign
asserted, “Most of the evils inside of industry are the by-products of the
class feeling that has been created and stimulated by the false public attitude
on the outside.”52 Displayed in thousands of factories throughout the war,
NAM’s posters extended this theme visually, depicting workers as partners
of employers and the nation in the war for industrial freedom (figure 1.6).
Motivation gained further traction through government efforts to instill
morale in the armed services. In August 1917 the government established
Figure 1.6. The National Association of Manufacturers adapted wartime rhetoric about
industrial democracy in pro-business communication media. Via speeches, newspaper
articles, wage packet inserts, and posters like this one, NAM schooled workers and the
general public in the virtues of “industrial cooperation” in the name of victory, an ideal
represented here by an alliance between Uncle Sam, an employer, and a worker. Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction no. LC-USZC4–7848,
Washington, D.C.
44 | Chapter 1
the Committee of Classification and Personnel (CCP), a body that con-

ducted psychological tests on enlistees, and appointed as its director Wal-
ter Dill Scott, a leading proponent of motivation for a decade by this time.
Under Scott’s leadership, the CCP tested over three million men by the end
of the war.53 While the CCP’s work was focused on servicemen, its methods,
which included aptitude tests, counseling, and employee interviews and
attitude surveys, were soon deployed by managers in efforts to boost work-
ers’ morale. The growing status of psychological testing owing to research
by Scott and other devotees helped make motivation a centerpiece of “per-
sonnel management” at large industrial firms.54
The influence of propaganda hardly ended once the war was over.
Although posters and literature disseminated by the CPI disappeared from
factories at war’s end, the wartime propaganda crusade had made clear that
visual media was a powerful form of motivational communication. It con-
firmed the view that had been developing among managers over the previ-
ous two decades: the worker’s mind was amenable to emotional condition-
ing and, therefore, emotion-based messaging about work’s rewards could
aid discipline and managerial control. In advancing such objectives, war-
time propaganda laid the foundations for the techniques that many manag-
ers would adopt in the factory for years to come.
Motivation and Visual Education: Industrial Films

in the Factory
During the five-year period following the war, managers discovered
another motivational tool: industrial films. These films were produced by a
cluster of companies centered mainly in Chicago, including the Industrial
Film Company, the Independent Motion Picture Company, the Universal
Manufacturing Film Company, and the DeVry Corporation, all of which
employed salesmen to sell their films across the country. Industrial films
focused on subjects ranging from production line techniques to workplace
safety and Americanization to moral guidance. For managers, these films
offered many benefits. In addition to their practical utility in the realm of
employee induction and training, they helped communicate the familiar
claim that workers’ livelihoods were linked inextricably to the economic
performance of the firms for which they were employed. As a medium
that influenced the viewer by way of the senses—vision, often with the
accompaniment of sound in the form of instruction by managers during
screenings—industrial films, advocates believed, could influence workers’
emotions in positive ways and thus help managers to mitigate labor ten-
sions and increase productivity.
The rise of industrial films was an outgrowth of the Visual Education
movement, which became prominent in the 1900s. Its advocates, who
included educational reformers and teachers, believed that visual-based
communication forms could play a valuable role in educating Americans.
Companies specializing in collections of educational photographs and slides
and, from around 1905, films, sent their agents into the nation’s schools to sell
their products. After 1910, schoolteachers used images to teach history and
science, and instructors at vocational schools and YMCAs used them when
teaching about industrial production and workplace safety. After the war,
visual education became a full-fledged movement with a growing number of
devotees and several trade magazines, including Reel and Slide (established
in 1918), Moving Picture Age (1919), and Visual Education (1920). Through
these magazines, advocates encouraged managers to use films and other
visual communication forms to enhance employee training and education.55
Proponents of visual education argued that visual communications
worked through a process called visualization. A well-known concept in
advertising and selling, visualization embodied the idea that people could
infer deeper or associated meanings more readily through images than they
could through the written word. Advertisers exploited this technique, as
they do today, to impress upon customers the meanings associated with, say,
a brand of soap or a make of car. According to advocates, industrial films
worked in the same way: films emphasizing the importance of teamwork
helped workers to “visualize” how their work served the larger objectives
of the firm. Holding industrial film screenings in the factory could, they
claimed, help managers train workers to be more cooperative and company
minded or identify with capitalist ideals, a goal that complemented busi-
ness’s endeavors to weaken workers’ attraction to unions.56 Such sentiments
were common in advertisements by DeVry and other suppliers of industrial
films and screening equipment (figure 1.7).57
Organizations like the Bureau of Commercial Economics performed
an influential role in the dissemination of industrial films. After its 1913
46 | Chapter 1
Figure 1.7. After World War I, suppliers of industrial slide and moving image films
and screening equipment generated a thriving trade to employers. This DeVry adver-
tisement emphasized the utility of industrial films by portraying a film screening in
the factory. Reel and Slide, January 1919. Library of Congress, Moving Image Research
Center, Washington, D.C.
founding, the bureau worked in conjunction with the Universal Film Man-
ufacturing Company to loan its films to organizations across the country.
By 1919 it owned eight motion picture theaters that were built into motor
trucks that traveled the nation screening industrial (and other types of
educational) films in factories and communities at large. The organization

supplied questionnaires to managers and other authorities asking them to
state their preferences for film content. As described in an article in the trade
magazine Furniture Manufacturer and Artisan, the trucks carried a projec-
tor, an electricity generator, and a portable screen, allowing the bureau to
show films in workplaces in “an isolated western ranch center as well as in
a city.”58 The magazine emphasized the bureau’s value in combating com-
munism, a growing concern among employers in the wake of the Russian
Revolution and amid the era’s simmering labor-capital conflict. It informed
readers, “If the masses of Russia had been as educated as the American peo-
ple, Bolshevism never would have raised its head.” It also praised the bureau
director, Francis Holley, who, it claimed, “knows that there are thousands of
workmen in this country who really believe that the shortest cut to a fatter
pay envelope is through the destruction of the present employers.” In the
face of “professional agitators,” it concluded, the bureau’s “21,000,000 mil-
lion feet of educational film are at the ready . . . Sitting in the silence of an
improvised theater in a workshop, the employes [sic] can take their pick—
the American plan or the Soviet Plan.”59
As Heide Solbrig argues, while industrial films were, at this stage, mainly
of an instructional nature, they were informed by social science theories
that were concerned with training the individual—schoolchildren, voca-
tional school students and workers being core audiences—in the atti-
tudes and behaviors that industrialists deemed necessary for citizenship.
Although it was not until the 1930s that managers used industrial films in
more programmatic fashion when seeking to motivate workers, their ear-
lier use was thus inseparable from quests to instill managerial values among
workers (and future workers in the case of schoolchildren and vocational
students).60 Such goals were emphasized frequently by visual education pro-
ponents, many of whom, in their enthusiasm to spread the word to man-
agers, left little room for doubt about the value of motivational films. One
such advocate, H. L. Clarke, wrote in 1920, “The best education in industry
is that which stimulates a workman to produce more for both himself and
his employer. The ideal way to impart such an education is by means of the
screen. It is a thoroughly tactful way. It does its work without creating antag-
onisms. Whether schoolboy or schoolgirl or factory worker, few will pick a
quarrel with the motion picture’s story, provided only it is the truth.” Echo-
ing a claim made by film producers, Clarke added, “It is obvious that visual
48 | Chapter 1
methods—especially where there is only limited knowledge of English, as

in the case of the foreign labor so largely employed in our factories and
mines—will materially increase the rate of return on the money invested in
industrial education.”61 Such confident claims about visual communication’s
effectiveness reflected the assumptions of advocates more than reality, but
their frequent reiteration after the war raised the status of images as a form
of conditioning in the factory among managers.
Chicago’s role in the proliferation of industrial film was no coincidence.
Not only were the leading educational film companies centered there, so too
were the major visual education magazines and organizations. The growing
interest in the movement turned Chicago into what film historian Anthony
Slide calls “the non-theatrical film capital of the world.”62 The city’s pivotal
role in the effort to market visual education in industry also emerged, in
part, because of its influence on salesmanship. Chicago’s hosting of the 1893
World’s Fair, followed by its rapid emergence as a hub of midwestern and
national commerce, helped make it a marketing mecca. No less import-
ant, Chicago was home to the field of American sociology. After the war,
the Chicago school of sociology became the epicenter for the sociological
study of industrial life.63 In turn, the city became a fertile ground for entre-
preneurs who hoped to profit from industrial films and other workplace
motivation media.
Industrial films were appealing to managers in part because workers
were already familiar with them. When managers screened films in the fac-
tory, they did so in the knowledge that many of their workers had seen
such films while at school or at vocational colleges or clubs. Among the
institutions that exposed working-class men to industrial films, none was
more active than the YMCA. As part of its mission to expand its influence
in industrial areas, the organization’s staff worked with DeVry, Universal,
and other film suppliers to host screenings, not only at the YMCA but also
in factories and other venues patronized by industrial workers. Writing in
Reel and Slide, George Zehrung, secretary of the YMCA’s Industrial Depart-
ment, noted that its films were “rapidly becoming a regular part of the mod-
ern factory,” with nearly eighty thousand workers having seen its programs
to date. The successful integration of its films in the workplace, he added,
was due to “the whole-hearted support of our captains of industry and fac-
tory superintendents who have learned the value of keeping their employes
entertained and therefore satisfied and efficient.” Among the goals of the
films, he added, was “to bring capital and labor into greater sympathy with
each other” and to inform “the workman in one branch of an industry con-
cerning another branch by means of visualization, a language all can under-
stand.” The YMCA employed “industrial secretaries” who collaborated with
employers to coordinate film screenings in factories, and staff also worked
with city associations to schedule screenings and accompanying lectures.
Zehrung listed over fifty such associations whose representatives regu-
larly attended film screenings. Reel and Slide’s editors echoed his enthu-
siasm, announcing in the article’s byline, “YMCA’s Industrial Secretaries
Work with Capitalists to Reach Employes. Educational Programs Exhibited
Between Shifts in Big Plants, Day and Night.”64
By the early 1920s, businessmen at large corporations were ebullient
about visual communication. Capturing this mood, Stewart Ewen notes,
was AT&T’s public relations director, William J. Banning, who, rejecting
the reason-based sensibility used in employee communications previously,
called for “a more pictorial and impressionistic notion of persuasion.” From
now on, Banning stated, “emotionally directed vernacular” and “calculated
optical seduction” would comprise the corporation’s major PR approach.65
The zeal for images was echoed at the National Cash Register Company,
whose publicity managers proclaimed, “Sight is far the most important of
the senses. It has been proved that 87 percent of what we know is learned
through the sense of seeing. Only 7 percent of our knowledge is gained
through the sense of hearing.”66 These exaggerated claims reflected manag-
ers’ eagerness to discipline workers more than anything else. Nonetheless,
managers would turn increasingly to visual-based motivation in the years
ahead, finding it a potent tool through which to promote work’s rewards
and encourage workers’ cooperation with management.
As the war receded and they set their sights on cementing control in indus-
try during the New Era, managers and business leaders increasingly relied
on the motivational discourse that had taken root during the previous two
decades. Unlike their turn-of-the-century predecessors, they had at their
disposal an array of motivational media through which to promote their
visions of industrial work and a vocabulary through which to communicate
50 | Chapter 1
motivational messaging to workers. The main factors driving this change—

progressive industrial reform, the human factor, industrial psychology,
propaganda, and visual communications—comprised a new framework for
management’s drive to shape workers’ minds. Two decades earlier, busi-
nessmen’s main responses to industrial problems were to use force and
bemoan inefficient and undisciplined workers (a tactic embodied in Elbert
Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia”). But now a different conversation about
workers had emerged, one framed by oratories about workers’ needs and
aspirations and assertions about the value of emotional conditioning and
visual communications. These ideas soon became pivotal in managers’
efforts to counter what human relations specialists deemed workers’ “mal-
adjusted” attitudes and behaviors.
The rise of motivational discourse in no way blunted managers’ endeav-
ors to instill discipline and extract more labor from workers. Nor did all
managers embrace motivational ideas, which prompted industrial psychol-
ogists and sociologists to continue promoting them for years to come. Yet
managers and their allies were increasingly cognizant that motivational
rhetoric could play a powerful role in advancing their ambitions. Motivation
would gain even deeper influence in industry as psychological approaches
to motivation gained traction in management and in the culture at large in
the years ahead.
CHAPTER 2
Quests to Shape the Worker’s Mind
THE RISE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL MOTIVATION
Human conduct tends to become not only more intelligible but more
amenable to control as we view it in the light of an understanding of the
instinctive mainsprings of action.
—Ordway Tead, Instincts in Industry: A Study of Working-Class
Psychology, 1918
[Our posters must] create favorable action in [the worker’s] mind,

whether he be conscious or unconscious of this action taking place.
—Poster design manager, Mather & Co., 1927
From the end of World War I until the onset of the Great Depression, many
experts in industry came to see psychological-based approaches to motiva-
tion as a useful instrument for encouraging workers to adopt a cooperative
attitude toward management. As a number of experts saw it, the assump-
tion among many managers that workers were motivated by wages alone
and their failure to recognize the role of psychological needs in shaping
motivation only served to weaken workers’ morale and compound indus-
trial tensions. Building on the ideas of industrial psychologists and oth-
ers who advocated motivation in the preceding decade, postwar industrial
social scientists rejected economic models of motivation and argued that
workers’ attitudes and behaviors were rooted in a complex web of psycho-
logical motives.1
Although such arguments had circulated since around 1908, the behav-
ioral psychology initiatives of World War I prompted a new wave of research
51
52 | Chapter 2
into the connections between psychological motives and work. At the cen-
ter of the research was a belief that workers’ motivation was based on their
instinctive drives, a view that took its cue from the writings of behavioral
theorists such as Hugo Münsterberg and Thorstein Veblen. The industrial
social scientists who advocated this view not only challenged arguments
about economic motivation but, in a modification of the Darwinian the-
ory that instincts were fixed at birth, also insisted that workers’ instincts
and motives were malleable and could thus be directed in “positive” ways,
aiding management objectives.2 Interest in molding workers’ motives was
not confined to industrial social science. It was also taken up by opportu-
nistic entrepreneurs who recognized that the idea could be adapted into
communications devices for the workplace. Inspired by the swelling influ-
ence of consumer advertising, the visual education movement, and the new
field of public relations (PR), these entrepreneurs developed posters and
booklets containing emotionally stimulating messages designed to encour-
age “positive” attitudes and behaviors among workers. In channeling PR’s
use of visual, emotion-based messaging to the factory, entrepreneurs in
the emerging motivational business took cues from PR’s founder, Freud’s
nephew Edward Bernays. Drawing on his uncle’s theories about humans’
hidden emotional desires, Bernays used imagery and the written word to
sell everything from cigarettes to political opinions and insisted that “the
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opin-
ions of the masses” was necessary to the well-being of democracy.3
This chapter charts this deepening interest in psychological motivation
in two ways. First, I briefly trace its rise in industrial social science and
management. Many researchers believed that the worker’s instincts were an
important factor in motivation. By influencing workers’ instinctive impulses
and drives, they argued, managers could habituate them to new attitudes and
behaviors. Second, I discuss a corporation that attained considerable suc-
cess supplying motivational posters and literature for workplace use—the
Seth Seiders Syndicate. Although little known today, the syndicate enjoyed
significant success supplying employers across the country throughout the
decade, helped by its network of salesmen who sold the products coast to
coast. The syndicate’s arresting posters and emotional-based messaging
drew on ideas about motivation originating from industrial social science
Quests to Shape the Worker’s Mind | 53
and PR to encourage workers and foremen to adhere to what managers

of the period considered to be “good” work values. Although social scien-
tists and businessmen like Seth Seiders had different goals, they embodied
the deepening realization during the period that motivation, to be effective,
must focus on workers’ psychological needs and aspirations.
As prolific as managerial interest in motivation was, industrialists would
address it in halting and uncertain fashion throughout the decade. Employ-
ers remained fearful of the possible resurgence of labor unions and renewed
class conflict, and some were torn over whether to respond to labor’s chal-
lenges with force or appeasement. Their uncertainty caused them to embrace
conflicting approaches to motivation. On the one hand, they continued to
channel elitist visions of workers as a conflict-prone “rabble,” a view that
encouraged a continuation of bodily discipline and Taylorist “carrot and
stick” incentives in industry. On the other hand, emerging theories about
workers’ psychological needs prompted managers to enlist mental manipu-
lation in the form of motivational discourse steeped in emotional sentiment
and images. However, although managers remained ambivalent in their
approaches to motivation, mental manipulation gradually gained traction.4
Managerial interest in motivation reflected a more general societal uncer-
tainty over the effects of modernization after World War I. In the wake of
the most destructive war in human history, many prominent critics believed
that industrial modernity, with its emphasis on standardization and confor-
mity, had fueled alienation and discontent. From F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest
Hemingway, and other writers associated with the Lost Generation to Rob-
ert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s influential study of middle-class life, Mid-
dletown, ambivalence toward industrial modernity was widespread.5 This
anxious mood was hardly lost on managers and management specialists.
In the wake of massive strike waves that engulfed the country in the after-
math of the war and widespread criticism about the dehumanizing effects
of industrial labor, many came to regard psychological-based approaches to
employee motivation favorably. Such ideas, they recognized, might not only
help quell industrial tensions but, given their emphasis on workers’ hopes
and aspirations, also infuse management with a more benevolent image, a
tactic that they considered no less useful in management’s larger mission to
control workers and shore up their own legitimacy and power.
54 | Chapter 2
Managing Instincts: Motivation and Industrial

Social Science after World War I
During the early postwar years, little consensus existed among industrial
social scientists, management specialists, and employers about what moti-
vation should entail. The word “motivation” had still not entered wide usage,
and specialists continued to debate how best to boost the worker’s incentive,
a term that was associated mainly with Taylorism. Monetary reward was
still understood to play a significant role in incentivizing workers, but Tay-
lorism had lost ground as a model for employee incentive during the pre-
ceding decade. Even so, researchers who believed that psychology was cen-
tral to effective motivation were of many minds concerning how it worked.
In the wake of widespread labor-capital conflict in the immediate postwar
period and given the absence of an authoritative view about how to mitigate
industrial tensions and cultivate employee goodwill toward employers, the
emerging idea of motivation remained in flux.6
However, if no consensus existed about motivation, one thing was to
remain consistent throughout the decade: the worker’s psychology would
be increasingly understood as the major terrain on which motivation oper-
ated. While specialists continued to believe that monetary incentives were
significant, the view that management must take into consideration work-
ers’ larger hopes and aspirations and their sense of self in order to moti-
vate them gradually gained traction. This view prompted much soothsaying
about management’s professed investments in the worker’s emotional needs
and general well-being. Although such claims were illusory—managers
remained committed to squeezing out as much productivity as possible
from their “human capital”—this stance nonetheless prompted a significant
shift in management discourse about motivation. This strategic managerial
interest in psychological motivation was to continue for decades to come.7
Thus, a brief discussion of some of the core ideas that informed this shift
will be helpful.
From the end of the war until the early 1920s, researchers who believed
that workers’ instincts were decisive in shaping their behavior gained con-
siderable influence in debates about motivation. “Instinct theorists,” as they
were called, included psychologists, sociologists, labor economists, among
other specialists. Like industrial social scientists more generally, their
research was focused on advancing ideas that would aid workers’ integra-
tion into industry and help management to maximize their productivity.
They also shared the elite view common to management specialists that
workers were prone to dangerous impulses and hostility. Where they dif-
fered from other industrial social scientists and most management special-
ists was their stance that instincts were malleable. If the worker’s instincts,
impulses, and urges were actively molded, they could be made more com-
pliant and cooperative, instinct theorists believed.8
The writings of one of the era’s most noted instinct theorists, labor econ-
omist Carleton Parker, are illustrative of the duality that informed theo-
ries of motivation after the war. In his influential 1918 article, “Motives in
Economic Life,” Parker levied a blistering critique of industrialists’ failure
to grapple with workers’ “psychological motives.” He declared, “The first
quarter of this century is breaking up in a riot of economic irrationalism.”
“Why,” in the face of such conflict, he asked, “does an agitated officialdom
search today in vain among our writings for scientific advice [about] labor
inefficiency or industrial disloyalty, for prophecies and plans about the rise
in our industrialism of economic classes unharmonious and hostile?” The
answer, Parker believed, was clear: economists and other industrial spe-
cialists were disinterested in human motives and behavioral psychology’s
insights into “the instinct stimulus.”9
Although Parker condemned industrialists’ failure to recognize the
importance of workers’ human motives, he did not reject biological expla-
nations of behavior wholesale. Similarly to other instinct theorists, he also
borrowed from turn-of-the-century ideas about biological determinism.
The result was a blend of social Darwinism and progressive reform aimed
at improving industrial conditions while also sustaining elitist manage-
ment views of workers as maladjusted and of labor unions as a menace that
should be subdued. Even as Parker lambasted industrialists for failing to
recognize the importance of psychological motives, he claimed that during
strikes, workers resorted to an instinctive capacity for “hysteria” and “vio-
lence.” Calling labor conflict “psychopath-logical,” he concluded, “Instinct
perversion rather than freely selected habits of instinct expression” were
rife in “modern labor-class life.”10
Among the specialists whose ideas encouraged the spread of psycho
logical-based motivation in the early postwar period, none was more
56 | Chapter 2
influential than organizational theorist Ordway Tead. At the center of Tead’s

writing was the assertion that the worker’s irrational motives and impulses
could be productively influenced by management. In his 1918 book Instincts
in Industry: A Study of Working-Class Psychology, he argued that workers
possessed an instinctive attraction to the group, or the “herd,” a view drawn
from crowd psychologists, who, since the turn of the century, had warned
about the destructive effects of the crowd’s primal urges. The herd instinct,
Tead asserted, caused workers to seek the protection of labor unions, which
were “more intense, fickle, and primitive than are their constituent mem-
bers as individuals.”11
Tead nonetheless warned against suppressing negative instincts, which,
he argued, would “smother” workers’ aspirations and fuel their antagonism
toward managers. Instead, managers needed to grasp more fully “the con-
tent of [workers’] mental life and the impulses by which they are moved”
and thus channel workers’ instinctive behaviors in productive directions
while inhibiting “destructive” ones, a process he called sublimation. Tead
noted that the task of sublimating employee instincts was made easier
because they possessed instincts that made them amenable to construc-
tive suggestions. These included “self-interest,” which caused workers to
seek economic security, distinguish themselves from peers, and emulate
behaviors they believed would aid their success; the “parental instinct,”
which encouraged them to seek security and status for their families; and
the instinct of “possession” (especially of one’s own home), which “satisfies
family pride and connotes prosperity and distinction.” Tead claimed that
workers also had an instinctive “desire to be led and to have aims and ends
imposed upon them or at least defined for them.” Because “independence”
was “wearing on the common man,” he added, the worker “longs for peace
and protection in the shadow of a trust-inspiring leader. To submit under
the right conditions is not only physically pleasant, but much of the time to
be leaderless is definitely distressing.” Managers, Tead advised, use “person-
ality” to secure workers’ “acquiescent submissiveness.”12
The 1920 publication of Whiting Williams’s book, What’s on the Worker’s
Mind: By One Who Put on Overalls to Find Out, brought the psychology
of motivation to greater prominence among businessmen and managers.
After working for a year as a personnel director of a Cleveland steel com-
pany, Williams decided to embark on an experiment aimed at deepening
his insights into worker aspirations. For the first seven months of 1919, he
went undercover and “became” a hobo, traveling the country in search of
unskilled work so that he could observe workers’ experiences and feelings
firsthand. He worked as a laborer in mines, steel and iron mills, shipyards,
and oil refineries and wrote his field notes at night. The resulting book was
a kind of undercover exposé that, in humanizing the industrial masses and
their struggle for a better life, sought to arouse the empathy of middle-class
readers.13
What’s on the Worker’s Mind argued that managers must realize that work-
ers were not antagonists of capitalism but human beings with hopes and
aspirations who, like middle-class readers, acted largely from an instinctive
desire to advance security for themselves and their families. In emphasiz-
ing workers’ strivings for psychological and economic well-being, Williams
found a way to elicit readers’ empathy for a group that many middle-class
Americans regarded as a maladjusted and conflict-prone “herd.” Williams
encouraged managers to reject their “universal assumption that putting
men into the group called Labor or Management or Capital changes them
even down to the bottom of their souls where life’s motors are set upon the
piers of their foundation desires.”14
The writings of Parker, Tead, and Williams typify the blend of elitism
and progressivism that characterized management assessments of workers
and the emerging ideal of motivation after World War I. The duality in their
assessments would continue to frame management approaches to motiva-
tion for years to come.
Although instinct theorists’ arguments about the role of psychology in
motivation were not universally embraced, they had a wide influence in
industry.15 They formed a pillar of institutionalism, which became a major
school of thought about organizations in the 1920s. Institutionalism empha-
sized that the firm and the workplace, not abstract economic forces, were
the most influential factors in shaping labor relations. This view in turn
provided a social-scientific rationale for the view that workers’ motivation
derived from psychology and could thus be “improved” if managers mod-
ified the social aspects of the factory.16 Efforts to motivate workers via psy-
chological means also informed welfare capitalism, the mechanism used by
many employers to instill company loyalty throughout the decade. As well
as workers’ insurance, healthcare, and other provisions, welfare capitalism
58 | Chapter 2
involved the use of practices that were broadly motivational, including

employee literature, films, PR campaigns, picnics, sports, musical bands,
employee contests, and open days and hobby shows during which workers’
families and the public were invited into the factory. Such corporations as
International Harvester, National Cash Register, Western Electric, and U.S.
Steel made ample use of such practices throughout the decade.17
The view that workers’ sense of motivation was rooted in psychology also
informed many of the experiments into workers’ productivity conducted
by human relations specialists beginning in the middle of the decade. The
most influential of these studies were those run by researchers from the Har-
vard Business School (HBS), especially the Hawthorne studies, a protracted
research project run by several HBS specialists at Western Electric’s Cicero
Plant near Chicago between 1924 and 1933. The Hawthorne studies were not
focused especially on motivation, but the researchers’ findings would have a
profound effect on management approaches to motivation. In 1927, in what
was to become one of the most consequential experiments—the relay assem-
bly test room—researchers experimented with changes in lighting in the fac-
tory, hypothesizing that workers’ productivity would increase or decrease
according to the level of lighting in their work area. Workers’ productivity
did increase, but it did so whether lighting was increased or decreased. Better
productivity, the researchers concluded, was therefore due not to fluctuations
in lighting but to the heightened attention workers’ received as participants
in the study. This realization gave birth to the view that productivity was
intrinsically linked to the degree to which managers paid attention to work-
ers’ feelings. The “Hawthorne effect,” as this insight came to be known, later
became a cornerstone of motivation research, paving the way for the prolif-
eration of employee counseling and other techniques aimed at instilling pos-
itive affect among workers.18 Although claims that the Hawthorne research-
ers discovered the importance of emotions in the workplace are exaggerated,
the studies had considerable influence in management after their findings
became known in the 1930s.19 Regardless, by the mid-1920s, psychological-
based motivation had gained significant currency in management.
While industrial researchers emphasized the psychological dimensions
of motivation, one of the era’s leading political figures took a more tradi-
tional approach to motivation—boosting morale. As secretary of commerce
from 1921 through 1928, Herbert Hoover, deployed motivational rhetoric as a
weapon in the crusade to resolve labor-business disputes and impose indus-

trial order. He also strove to cultivate widespread voluntary cooperation
between businesses, private institutions, and experts with the goal of gen-
erating prosperity through a consumer-driven economy. Often regarded as
an antiunion ideologue today, Hoover in fact believed that unions and shop
committees could play an important role in engendering cooperation. He
insisted that the industrial conflict be addressed “from the bottom, not the
top,” with unions installed as full partners with management in resolving dis-
putes.20 Yet while Hoover was no antiunion crusader, his approach to labor-
business relations represented mixed fortunes for workers. His proposals for
works councils failed to materialize owing to the suspicions of industrialists
and union leaders alike that they would undermine their respective inter-
ests.21 Hoover’s strategy offered workers little in the way of substantive gains
and mostly amounted to a form of “harmonious coercion.”22 The tributes
to growing prosperity that Hooverites liked to tout also belied increasing
unemployment throughout the decade as employers responded to greater
efficiency by engaging in indiscriminate hiring and firing.23
Yet while Hoover’s larger vision failed to materialize, his promotion of
labor-management cooperation nonetheless left an indelible mark on moti-
vational discourse and ideology for the next two decades. Hooverite rhet-
oric established a framework through which politicians, businessmen, and
sometimes labor leaders would talk about work’s rewards in the years ahead.
Morale-boosting tributes to “prosperity”—an ideal that became prominent
in national discourse from the Depression through the post–World War
II era—first received broad airing through Hoover’s campaign to promote
labor-management negotiations. Unsurprisingly, the rhetoric about the
rewards of a highly individualistic work ethic and consumer-based citizen-
ship that Hoover helped popularize also formed a core strand of the moti-
vational propaganda then being sold across the country by a new wave of
specialists based in the nation’s capital of salesmanship, Chicago.
Modernizing Motivation: The Rise of the

Motivational Publicity Business
Management preoccupations with shaping workers’ minds established a
fertile environment for turning motivation into profit in the 1920s. Sensing
60 | Chapter 2
opportunity, a cluster of enterprising salesmen began to develop a new

market in motivational posters and literature for the factory. Exploiting
the visual-based emotional appeal that informed advertising and PR, these
entrepreneurs adapted the core theories of motivation ascendant in man-
agement to the purposes of workplace communications.
Unsurprisingly, Chicago—the center of the visual education movement
and a hub of industrial social science, instinct theory, and institutionalism—
became the base of this new venture. Since the 1910s, Chicago had been
home to several small firms that sold incentivizing publicity aimed at sales-
men. In 1923, the Seth Seiders Syndicate began adapting these materials for
motivational posters and booklets aimed at workers. Founder Seth Seiders,
an ambitious salesman from Ohio, was himself the product of motivational
ideals. After a decade selling everything from soap to advertising space, fol-
lowed by a stint designing workplace safety campaigns for DuPont during
the war, Seiders had earned enough money to take control of two small
Chicago firms that specialized in motivational publicity. His first acquisi-
tion, Mather & Co., sold wage envelope inserts carrying motivational illus-
trations and mottoes that managers could place in workers’ wage packets,
as well as “pep” booklets for motivating salesmen. The second firm, C. J.
Howard, Inc., sold illustrated pamphlets called “pivot man letters” that
advised the foreman—the “pivotal man” in the workplace—how to promote
good attitudes and behavior among workers. Working with a small team of
designers and copywriters, Seiders reworked the assorted products of both
firms into a series of posters and pivot man letters that the firm marketed to
employers as aids for character building, an ideal venerated by businessmen
since the nineteenth century as a means to uplift “uncivilized” workers and
immigrants.24
Operating independently, but coordinating their products and sales
closely, Mather and Howard established the first operation to sell work-
place motivational publicity from coast to coast (figure 2.1).25 Each firm’s
publicity emphasized the rewards that workers would supposedly receive
if they adopted the “positive” traits modeled in the posters and pivot man
letters. Among these traits were loyalty, discipline, efficiency, ambition, and
teamwork. Attributes that workers should avoid included laziness, lack of
initiative, failure to work well with others, and similar “destructive work
practices,” as defined in each firm’s marketing materials. In delineating
Figure 2.1. Seth Seiders Syndicate photograph album, Receiving and Shipping Depart-
ment, 1924 or 1925. The syndicate’s two concerns, Mather & Co. and C. J. Howard, Inc.,
disseminated hundreds of thousands of posters and pivot man letters from here between
1923 and 1930. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chi-
cago, IL.
these traits and their likely outcomes, the posters and pivot man letters pre-
sented a dichotomy between the motivated (and therefore disciplined and
cooperative) worker and his undisciplined counterpart who failed to adopt
a motivated attitude. By producing publicity that used modern advertising
techniques to address familiar workplace problems, the syndicate discov-
ered a winning formula that had significant appeal for many managers.
Only a partial record of the firm’s sales exists, but available documen-
tation underscores its success in selling publicity to a wide variety of busi-
nesses, especially in the second half of the decade. Larger companies whom
it supplied sometimes purchased scores of copies of the posters and pivot
man letters so as to install them company-wide. Smaller firms, on the other
hand, often purchased double-or single-digit orders. A sampling of nota-
ble orders filled by Mather in 1927 included 900 copies of that year’s poster
62 | Chapter 2
campaign to the Employers’ Liability Assurance Corporation in Boston;

500 to the Gillette Safety Razor Company in Boston; 400 to the Mutual
Trust Life Insurance Company in Chicago; and 150 to the Seiderling Rubber
Company in Barberton, Ohio, and scores of double-digit orders to compa-
nies in the industrial and commerce sectors in New York, Chicago, Seattle,
and Georgia.26
A money-making venture run by opportunistic salesmen, the syndicate
made no efforts to undertake research to ascertain the effectiveness of its
products, even as it made such claims in its marketing materials to boost
sales. For these reasons, my focus here is the firm’s approaches to designing
and selling motivational propaganda.
Much of the syndicate’s publicity revolved around the dichotomy
between the productive and unproductive worker that Elbert Hubbard had
popularized at the turn of the century in “A Message to Garcia.” The firm’s
adaptation of Hubbard’s ideas was no coincidence. Seth Seiders appointed
as the syndicate’s sales manager none other than Felix Shay, who had been
Hubbard’s second- in-
command and sometime ghostwriter at Roycroft
from 1911 until Hubbard’s death in 1915, then manager of Roycroft until 1918.
In hiring Hubbard’s protégé as one of his right-hand men, Seiders adapted
Hubbard’s rhetoric for the modern age. Shay remarked on the adaptation of
Hubbard’s ideas in a 1926 biography of his former boss, written during his
employ at the syndicate. No doubt with the syndicate in mind, he observed
that in the years since the sensational reception of “A Message to Garcia,”
“American business discovered [the] Roycroft booklets and appropriated
them” with the goal of instilling discipline among workers.27
Materializing at a moment when interest in psychological approaches
to motivation was gaining traction in industry, the syndicate enjoyed sig-
nificant success. By 1925 it employed a sales staff of eighty-eight that sold
its products across the country. In the second half of the decade, its sales
exploded, reaching projected sales of around $12 million in 1928, its most
successful year, bringing motivational publicity to thousands of firms in
the process.28 The syndicate nonetheless faced challenges, not least the fact
that many managers were skeptical of posters on account of their emotion-
based messages, which were at odds with the rational values associated with
management. In efforts to overcome this obstacle, Seiders and his associates
designed visual messaging that emphasized “practical” solutions to work-

place problems.
The syndicate’s efforts to hone design did not occur in a vacuum. The
firm borrowed heavily from the tactics of modern advertising. As Stuart
Ewen argues, the rapid proliferation of advertising throughout Ameri-
can life during this time was fundamentally aimed at pacifying the public
and quelling class conflict by instilling the desire for consumption.29 The
syndicate borrowed from these tactics and, indirectly, from ideas associ-
ated with instinct theory, providing managers with tools through which to
direct workers’ attitudes and behaviors in “constructive” directions. It also
tapped into broader discourse about the power of modern communication
forms to address societal problems, a goal touted widely, albeit in different
ways, by leading intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey.
Although the syndicate was motivated by profit rather than a desire to
improve democracy, the widespread assertions about the educational func-
tion of communications made its marketing job much easier.30
By the 1920s, many large companies had begun to use films, posters, and
other modern communication forms in the workplace, but thousands of
smaller firms and even many larger ones had not. As Seth Seiders and his
associates recognized, there was a ripe market for workplace motivational
publicity. However, they faced a dual challenge—how to create publicity
that, for managers, successfully distilled the values that they hoped to instill
among workers and that could be presented to managers as credible edu-
cational tools. In tackling these challenges, the syndicate brought the era’s
motivational theories squarely into workplace communications.
Honing Motivational Posters
The design efforts of the syndicate’s poster wing, Mather & Co., illustrate
the difficulties involved in surmounting these challenges. At the center of
this new style was a strategic use of “suggestion,” a concept heralded since
the 1910s by Walter Dill Scott and other advertising specialists as a tactic for
inducing consumption. Because its influence was widely recognized among
businessmen, suggestion provided Seiders and his associates with a use-
ful rationale for how the posters “worked.” Mather’s posters also echoed
64 | Chapter 2
the views of Hooverite politicians and businessmen of the day who called
for a practical application of resources to boost production and combat
the scourge of “waste.” Such sentiments were upheld not least by Herbert
Hoover, who proclaimed that advertising was the “hand-maiden of mass
production.” Seiders expressed a similar view in a number of articles in
business magazines in the middle of the decade. The solution to “waste” and
“loafing,” he informed readers, was to “sell” the worker by appealing to his
“self-interest.”31 Employers, he argued, should identify the firm’s “strongest
talking points” and convey them “as simply, as convincingly, as constantly as
you know how. Advertise to your men.”32
As alive as Mather was to managers’ needs, its designs involved con-
siderable trial and error. At a time when there was little consensus among
managers concerning how they should influence workers’ attitudes and
behaviors, Mather found itself adjusting its posters constantly in hopes of
distilling what was believed to be the ascendant vision of motivation and
thus arriving at the most marketable product.33 Mather’s first series after
incorporation into the syndicate in 1923 had a unified design that included
a horizontal format (just over three feet by two feet), three-color illustra-
tions and a conveyance of the character-building theme through pithy
captions. The posters in the series treated a wide array of subjects that
included affirmations of “positive” behaviors such as “teamwork,” “loyalty,”
and “employee suggestions,” as well as warnings against “negative” ones as
“waste,” “tardiness,” “loafing,” and “spreading rumors.”34 These subjects col-
lectively echoed many of the concerns of industrial social scientists and
managers during this time.
Even so, Mather’s early posters had significant limitations. Most nota-
bly, they were steeped in an elitist vision of work that was frequently out of
step with the perspectives of the industrial workers who comprised their
audience. This limitation is evident in “There’s Only One Way To Become
Manager” (figure 2.2). The scenario that it depicts—a manager reclining
in his chair examining technical documents—revolves around the fanciful
claim that any worker who adopted a managerial disposition and a strong
sense of individualism could rise through the ranks and attain a manage-
ment position, aided by the meritocratic nature of industry. For most of the
immigrant workers toiling in American factories at this time, this and sim-
ilar messages were far-fetched. Mather’s posters warning workers against
Figure 2.2. Mather and Co., “There’s Only One Way To Become Manager.” Mather and
Co., 1923. Emanuel Gerard Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American
History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
“negative” behaviors were steeped in similar limitations, as is seen in “What

Are Loafers Paid?,” a veiled condemnation of union organizers. The poster
depicts a suspicious-looking man lurking at the factory gates and states in
its caption that such “loafers” received “harsh looks from their fellow work-
ers who are on to them.”35 With their moralizing warnings against involve-
ment with groups—a major obsession of instinct theorists—such posters
revived a World War I–style rhetoric regarded by many workers as conde-
scending propaganda.
Mather’s high-minded messaging was largely owing to the values of
Seiders and his team, who together came up with the posters’ messages.36
For them, a disciplined and success-oriented outlook was essential for
career advancement. Like many white professional men, they assumed that
working-class immigrants would benefit by being exposed to these same
values. Guided by this assumption, Mather invoked images of work more
reminiscent of the nineteenth-century small workshop and the office than
of the factory. At the center of the firm’s output was a nostalgic vision of
the affectionate bonds that supposedly characterized relations between
workers and managers in the past. In anchoring its posters in an idealized
66 | Chapter 2
nineteenth-century milieu, Mather glossed over the realities of modern

industry.
The firm also perpetuated the practice, common among elites for
decades, of assuming that white male workers were the self-evident sym-
bols of virtuous and productive labor.37 At the center of elites’ worldview in
the 1920s was a sustained disparagement of “foreigners” (based in part on
race-based theories of intelligence) and unions, which elites deemed antag-
onistic to Americanism. These antiforeigner and antilabor sentiments com-
prised a core strand of the post–World War I crusade to preserve 100 per-
cent Americanism. From schools to youth clubs, the YMCA to the church,
and throughout industry, leaders of all stripes invoked images of white
manliness when esteeming the virtues of productive work, while imply-
ing that immigrants and nonwhites lacked the capacity for self-disciplined
labor. For the era’s elites, rhetoric about discipline and national vitality thus
went hand in hand with the kind of motivational discourse espoused by
industrial social scientists and firms like Mather.
The firm also channeled the era’s success-laden business rhetoric. Many
of its posters asserted that workers could climb the company ranks by cul-
tivating managerial traits. One stated that a worker had “no future” at his
firm unless he “inspires and deserves Confidence.” Another proclaimed, “If
you owned this business you would promote the serious, honest minded
man who was filling his job, who knew his job and the job higher up.”38 That
personality-fueled motivation would yield success was a powerful middle-
class ideal in the 1920s, one that businessmen touted regularly. This ideal
was a core theme in the era’s popular literature, no more so than in Sin-
clair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt. As well as savaging standardized middle-
class lifestyles and values, Lewis lampoons the era’s motivational dis-
course. Throughout the novel, the pompous businessman George F. Babbitt
espouses the virtues of “pep,” “right thinking,” and other motivational pre-
cepts in hopes of acquiring an aura of manly success. His oratories, steeped
in the canned language of salesmanship, would be at home in Mather’s
posters. At one point, he cautions an employee that he “ain’t the kind of
upstanding, energetic young man, with a future—and with Vision!—that
we want here. How about it? What’s your Ideal, anyway? Do you want to
make money and be a responsible member of the community, or do you
want to be a loafer, with no Inspiration or Pep?”39 Like real-life disciples
of motivation, George F. Babbitt regards personality as a powerful form of

motivation, which, if channeled effectively, can lead to distinction and suc-
cess at work, a middle-class fantasy that the syndicate and its ilk were busy
marketing to those further down in the class hierarchy.
While Mather’s motivational messages were informed by elitist visions
of work, their tone shifted during the middle of the decade. From 1924
through 1926, its designers deployed advertising techniques more strategi-
cally, adopting a tabloid format along with eye-catching images and urgent
captions that allowed for a more immediate conveyance of message. A series
included seventy-eight posters, each of which Mather marketed as a solu-
tion to a specific workplace “problem” when displayed for one week. The
posters channeled the mantras of salesmanship. They included “Say it with
Snap!” (which depicted a domineering salesman-like figure to encourage
workers to aspire to a managerial demeanor); “Leaders Get There” (which
used a disciplined group of rowers winning a race to remind workers that
“Laggards Never Lead”); and “Say it and Smile” (one of a small number of
posters that depicted women, in this case, using a smiling female worker
to underscore the importance of adopting a positive attitude). Emphasiz-
ing the rewards of self-interest and the power of “personality,” the posters
offered ways to redirect workers’ emotions in a more “constructive” fashion,
an ideal embodied in Tead’s theory of sublimation.40
In the second half of the decade, Mather, inspired by advertising princi-
ples, adopted an increasingly uniform design. Its posters included an ornate
wallpaper-like border, allowing for a unified aesthetic throughout the series.
This invocation of the soothing tones of home life paralleled employers’
efforts at this time to draw connections between the home and the factory, a
tactic aimed at emphasizing the rewards of consumption.41 This wallpaper-
like motif is typified in “I Am Responsible” (figure 2.3), which depicts a
worker visiting his boss’s office to own up to damaging a company vehicle
(visible through the window behind the boss with a smashed windscreen
and twisted fender). With cap in hand and bowed head, the worker adopts
a respectful demeanor toward his boss and, by admitting culpability for his
“mistake,” acquires an aura of integrity. The scene evokes the virtues of close
worker-manager relations, even as it reminded the worker who viewed the
poster of his boss’s authority. The scenario echoes a device used in Elbert
Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia” whereby the individual prioritizes the
68 | Chapter 2
Figure 2.3. Mather and Co., “I Am Responsible.” Poster Photo Archives, Rennert’s
Gallery, New York, NY.
needs of the organization above his own, thereby placing himself in his
boss’s good graces. Mather channeled Hubbard’s ideals in other posters,
including “Drifters Never Harvest” (which rebuked workers who drifted
from job to job, a practice criticized frequently by Hubbard).42
Seeking to appease doubts about the value of the posters among rational-
minded managers, Mather developed scientific-sounding justifications for
its products. Marketing copy declared that its posters were scientifically
proven to affect workers positively, asserting, “80 per cent of a person’s
intellect comes through the sense of sight. SEEING IS BELIEVING. Sci-
ence tells us that there are 23 optical nerves registering on the brain through
the eyes against one registering through the ears, so a piece of advertising
matter through the printed word, has an opportunity 23 times greater to
sell thoughts than the spoken word.” Mather claimed that its posters, with
their colorful and arresting designs, held particular appeal for industrial
workers, an approach that echoed elite assumptions that the era’s largely
immigrant workforce, having a weak command of the written word, had a
special fascination with images.43
In reality, Mather’s assertions that its publicity could alter workers’ atti-
tudes and behaviors embodied savvy marketing rather than scientific evi-
dence. Like many businessmen who touted the powers of visual commu-
nication, the firm possessed little understanding of the capacity of images
to induce “positive” behavior. And yet its claims did capture the general
consensus of the research on motivation—albeit one understood only
abstractly by its devotees—that motivation was rooted more in emotional
desires and environmental conditions than in rational incentives. Although
Mather’s claims about the effectiveness of its posters were weakly substanti-
ated, the firm was able to point to the dramatic proliferation of advertising
and PR as testimony of the power of visual communications.
During its final two years of poster production in 1928 and 1929, evi-
dently recognizing the limitations of the high-minded approach used to
date, Mather embraced “popular” imagery. The posters’ themes once again
lauded individualism and success but now offered a riot of brightly colored
designs and an even more eye-catching, action-packed feel. This livelier tone
was reinforced in the use of characters that included clowns, wild animals,
hunters, lion tamers, and speedboat drivers, figures associated with popular
entertainment. In place of the earnest messages of the mid-decade posters
were bright yellows and pinks and simpler images that filled the entire sur-
face area of the poster. This approach evoked aspects of French poster design
and the influential German Plakatstil, or “poster style,” as well as mainstream
entertainment and adventure-type stories popular at this time.44
70 | Chapter 2
In using “exciting” subject matter to couch its motivational messages,

Mather tapped sensibilities that had been expressed in adventure stories since
the nineteenth century and, more recently, popular movies. Posters depict-
ing animals offered ways to allegorize the specific “destructive work prac-
tices” listed in Mather’s catalog. A brooding rhinoceros emphasized the need
to face troubles, asserting that of having “half your mind on worry and half
on work gets you only ‘half ’ results”; an annoyed bear symbolized the neg-
ative effects of “growling,” which “keeps at a distance those who could help
you along”; and a vulture embodied “waste,” which should be “starved.” Less
ostensibly, these posters depicting wild beasts echoed the assumption of
many businessmen that workers were driven by animalistic impulses that
needed to be managed, a view encouraged by instinct theorists.45
A similarly strategic effort to encourage self-discipline informed post-
ers depicting climbers, speedboat drivers, airplane pilots and other adven-
turers who were extolled as models of success in the 1920s. This approach
was echoed in Mather’s sports-related posters. From the determined foot-
ball team that won through solid teamwork to the boxer whose disciplined
work led to a knockout, its sports-based posters suggested that a manly
sense of motivation would boost the worker’s success. “Over the Plate!” typ-
ifies this formula, invoking baseball’s connotations of individual achieve-
ment (figure 2.4). The pitcher’s performance, it informed workers, was cru-
cial to the team’s success. The middle caption, “Winners never have to say
they’re good—their work proves it,” implies that the good worker was one
who adopted a managerial disposition.
Mather’s embrace of a more popular poster style reflected a belated real-
ization that the high-minded approach of its earlier output was out of sync
with workers’ values and that a more unrestrained approach to emotion-
based communications was in the ascendance. Although the new posters
were no less rooted in pep-infused success rhetoric, their breezy designs
and condensed captions allowed for a less didactic approach to motiva-
tional messaging. This design shift mirrored a growing recognition among
industrialists that the task of influencing workers would require a more
robust use of emotion-based techniques. Mather’s quest to hone its posters,
despite lingering elitism, had gone some way to achieving that end and had
established principles that later motivational poster designers would con-
tinue to adapt.
Figure 2.4. Mather & Co., “Over the Plate!” Internationalposter.com, Boston, MA.
Indoctrinating Foremen: The Pivot Man Letters
The syndicate’s other main concern, C. J. Howard, Inc., strove for a similar
sense of aesthetic unity in its second main product: the pivot man letters.
The letters comprised four-page, eight-inch-by-eleven-inch booklets that
offered the “pivotal man” in the workplace, the foreman, a moral lesson that
could be digested in one sitting. The letters were sold to managers by How-
ard salesmen and espoused the notion that business efficiency depended on
72 | Chapter 2
foremen seeing their interests and those of their employer as the same.46 For
managers who purchased them, the letters were a highly didactic commu-
nications tool that could aid their efforts to indoctrinate foremen in man-
agement values, a major preoccupation at this time.47 Those managers who
also purchased a Mather poster campaign (as did most who bought the
letter) had the benefit of a synchronized campaign, as foremen and rank-
and-file workers were exposed to similar motivational messaging.
Early versions of the letters consisted mostly of text and were sold in
conjunction with data- driven publications offering foremen “the best
thoughts and quotations, and the valuable Economic and Human Element
facts that appear from month to month in the Magazines, Newspapers and
books of this country.”48 By 1926, Howard was including images in the let-
ters, a change that reflected the syndicate’s interest in visual communica-
tions. Each letter offered a moral tale highlighting the rewards of good con-
duct, loyalty, or some behavior associated with the “good” pivot man. Like
Mather’s posters, the letters revolved around a good/bad employee (in this
case, a foreman) dichotomy, usually depicting him encountering a chal-
lenge that threatened to undermine belief in the company or “the American
system of business.” By the end of the didactic tale, the pivot man always
overcame this challenge by internalizing a management disposition, thus
restoring order.49
Typical stories in the letters include that of the initiate pivot man who
makes a mistake that undermines productivity or damages the employer’s
reputation; the foreman who uses poor judgment and makes a “mountain
out of a molehill”; the cavalier foreman whose blasé attitude sours worker-
manager relations; and the foreman who undermines morale by unduly
criticizing or failing to praise the worker who tries his best. Other letters
illustrated foreman foibles through adventure-theme stories. Each letter
utilized a standard format and displayed on its cover a large color illustra-
tion that symbolized the lesson of the story. With their uniform appearance
and serialized format, the letters exposed foremen to a regular stream of
motivational messaging aimed at encouraging them to adopt managerial
values.
One letter, “Yourself, Incorporated,” exemplifies the subtle managerial
ideology at the heart of the pivot man letter genre. It narrates the story
of Charlie Young, a troubled young foreman who voices envy for the
independence of his friend, a local storekeeper. An older foreman, a men-

tor figure, helps Charlie see that that he already has independence as well
as the support of a larger community, which the storekeeper does not have.
The mentor explains: “Every Pivot Man’s department is a business in its
own right . . . its real name is: ‘Yourself, Incorporated.’ To make that busi-
ness a genuine success, you need invest no capital; you need worry about
no competition springing up in the next block; you have, instead, the co-
operation of the management ahead of you, and with the right handling of
your workers, can count on having their own co-operation back of you.”50
By the end of the story, Charlie comes round to the elder’s way of thinking,
referring to himself as “Myself, Incorporated.” Charlie’s internalization of
the letter’s refrain embodies one of the major tactics of motivational com-
munications: management’s efforts to get foremen to view themselves as
members of the “team.”
The thematic similarities between the letters and Mather’s posters pro-
vided consistency between the two products and meant that foreman and
rank-and-file workers were exposed to the same kinds of messages. The
serialized nature of the letters, like Mather’s posters, allowed managers to
expose foremen to a highly rationalized form of social conditioning that
de-emphasized class-based bonds. By the mid-1920s, workers had been
exposed to serialized literature and entertainment in movie theaters and
newspaper comic strips for at least a decade. In this sense, the pivot man
letters put into practice formulas already used in the culture at large.
The rationalized nature of the letters extended also to their integration
into the workplace. Howard provided instructional literature to manag-
ers explaining how to effectively blend the letters with their training and
communication practices. This literature included the “Secretary’s Record
Book,” which managers issued to the secretary appointed to distribute the
letters to foremen. The booklet hailed the secretary as a vital player in the
administration of the “Pivot Man Service,” stating, “You, as Secretary to the
Official in your Firm supervising this Service, play a most important part in
the success it will attain. While your work may seem merely a bit of detailed
routine, it is highly influential.” This motivational rhetoric was followed by
detailed instructions, reminding the secretary to send foremen the special
binders and the various publications explaining the objectives of the ser-
vice. By following these and other instructions, the secretary would help
74 | Chapter 2
“reduce costs, increase profits and make better managers of the Pivot Men
of your firm.”51 This systematized distribution method extended the ideo-
logical reach of the letters beyond their primary audience—foremen—and
into the work of secretaries.
The serialization of pivot man letters and their harmonization with
Mather’s posters reflected a more generalized endeavor to hone the com-
municative capacities of imagery and rhetoric in the workplace. Through-
out the era, topical magazines encouraged managers to come up with their
own motivational rhetoric. Typical was a 1927 article in Industrial Psychol-
ogy Monthly that advised, “Get a slogan for your factory! If workers lack
morale, give them a catchy phrase which will focus their interests in the
right direction, or present them with an idea simple enough and general
enough for everyone to grasp with a sympathetic grip.”52
The ideological import of the pivot man letters, like that of the motiva-
tional genre more generally, lay less in the extent to which foremen con-
sciously accepted the letters’ messages than in shaping the routines and
norms in the environments in which they worked. Regardless of how indi-
vidual foremen perceived the letters, they were exposed to a regular stream
of copy that positioned them as members of a management community,
reminding them that they must adopt a managerial demeanor if they were
to be seen in a positive light by their managers and employers.
Selling Motivation to Factory Managers
While the syndicate’s products were well-suited to prevailing managerial

notions of motivation, its success depended on an effective sales strategy. Its
marketing operation was based on the pyramid structure familiar to sales
firms since the advent of scientific selling. At head of the operation was the
syndicate’s sales manager, Felix Shay, who oversaw the Mather and Howard
sales forces. Each firm consisted of two divisions, which covered the east and
west of the country, respectively, both under the direction of its own divi-
sion manager. All four division managers directed a sales team of twenty-
two men, comprising two field managers and twenty salesmen. Hence,
although the sales force fluctuated to a higher or lower number owing to
newly added territories and turnover, Shay strove to maintain a force of
eighty-eight salesmen, each of whom was responsible for his own region.53
Figure 2.5. A salesman training session at the syndicate’s Chicago offices. At these
sessions the firm’s sales specialists drilled Mather and Howard salesmen in the scripted
sale talks and motivation-infused sales pitches that they would use when selling posters
and pivot man letters to factory managers across the country. Charles Rosenfeld, the
architect of the syndicate’s sales techniques, stands at the back of the room to the right
of the column. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chi-
cago, IL.
This hierarchical organization offered the syndicate a powerful motiva-

tional metaphor that emphasized the idea that salesmen could advance up
the ranks as they made higher sales and impressed their managers.
The firm’s selling techniques were based on meticulously scripted talks
that salesmen had to deliver using personality-driven pitches. Written by
Charles Rosenfeld, architect of the syndicate’s sales strategy, the talks were
designed to dominate the customer, in this case, the manager or whoever
was responsible for buying outside products. At the same time, sales man-
agers encouraged a highly competitive sales culture in which salesmen were
under continual pressure to increase sales and outperform one another.
The combination of rationalized and emotion-based techniques that the
76 | Chapter 2
syndicate used to motivate salesmen echoed the formula used in the post-
ers and pivot man letters sold out on the road. Thus, the products and the
techniques used to sell them revolved around a similar preoccupation with
motivation.
To encourage competitiveness, the syndicate paid salesmen on a
commission-only basis of 25 percent on sales.54 Seiders set a high sales bar,
defining the “three-in-one” (three sales per day) as the salesman’s target,
and deemed one salesman’s attainment of three sales in a week “mediocre.”55
The syndicate incentivized salesmen through bonuses, including a prize
of $500 to the man who sold the most contracts each month. Mather and
Howard also offered their own bonuses. In 1924 Mather promised to award
any salesman who sold triple his annual quota a Packard automobile and
sent letters to salesmen’s wives asking them to encourage their husbands to
work harder to increase sales. No one achieved this improbable target, and
like other bonuses, its primary purpose was to stoke competition among
salesmen.56 The syndicate also deployed motivational rhetoric at induction
and training sessions, where salesmen were drilled in Seth Seiders’s “Big
Vision” of “Financial Independence.” This “Big Vision” comprised Seiders’s
own longtime dream of making a million dollars and retiring early with eco-
nomic security and acted as a motivational mantra at the firm.57 Although
no salesmen achieved such lofty ambitions, some made high bonuses or
even became field managers, aiding the syndicate’s claim that a motivated
attitude would bring salesmen financial and personal rewards.
When out selling, salesmen were expected to use a highly scripted sales
talk written by Rosenfeld. The sales talk typified those used at other scien-
tific selling organizations at this time. Consisting of several stages—sub-
opener, opener, pitch, and closer—and running at several pages, it provided
the entire spiel for the salesman in meticulous detail. Built into the sales talk
were numerous contingencies so that in the event a prospect challenged any
of the salesman’s claims about the product or tried to shrug him off, sales-
men had a canned response that, if used effectively, could nullify the objec-
tion and get the talk back on track. Designed to guarantee the salesman’s
total domination of the prospect and get him to buy, the sales talk embod-
ied a subtle blend of scientific and emotional selling techniques.
By far the most important tool that salesmen had at his disposal was
the “Verbal Proof Story.” The V.P.S. was a testimonial letter or quote from a
customer that attested to the effectiveness of the posters or pivot man let-
ters. The syndicate supplied salesmen with reams of V.P.S.s that detailed a
multitude of benefits offered by its products: if a prospect raised a specific
objection, the competent salesman could pull out his binder and read aloud
a few statements from satisfied customers that invalidated the prospect’s
case, quashing his resistance.58 In reality, V.P.S.s were a bricolage of old and
current customer responses, anecdotes, and salesman hearsay. In response
to some salesmen’s concerns about the questionable nature of V.P.S.s, sales
managers reassured them that the practice was “not new as it has been
in religious books for hundreds of years. It has been used by prominent
writers, newspapers, and by your very own preacher, minister, priest or
rabbi.” Thus, salesmen should realize that at “church on Sunday” was heard
“V.P.S.s, all through the services . . . The mere fact that you change the name
of the Prospect and the name of the salesman makes no material difference,
because after all, you are talking about what someone said about our ser-
vice.”59 This rationale comprised a subtle form of arm-twisting whose goal
was to secure the salesman’s belief in his work and in the product.
Objections to the products took on many forms. Managers at firms
undergoing economic troubles often stated that they could not afford the
posters. Likewise, some at heavily unionized firms rebuffed salesmen on
the basis that unionized workers would condemn the posters as propa-
ganda, whereas others objected that their firm was too small to warrant
the posters or that the specific type of work carried out at the firm was not
portrayed in the posters or letters. If a salesman had mastered his V.P.S.
file, he could read aloud statements from clients that verified the product’s
positive effects in any of these circumstances.60 One of the most commonly
raised objections by managers was that the posters would not be effective
because “foreign-born” workers lacked basic literacy skills.61 Upon encoun-
tering such objections, salesmen informed the prospect that immigrant
workers were attracted to the posters due to their “brilliant colors” and
the “action of the illustrations.” Moreover, they added, on seeing allegor-
ical posters depicting a football player, flaming airplane, or leaping tiger,
the “foreign born worker” “asks someone who knows, generally his boss or
straw-boss. The picture is explained—the text of the Poster is read to him.
His inquiry gives a better opportunity to drive home the message through
personal explanation.”62 Howard’s salesmen used similar tactics, telling
78 | Chapter 2
hesitant prospects that foreign-born foremen’s “desire to learn” led them to

implement the ideas of the pivot man letters far more readily than English-
speaking workers.63
Managers at firms that employed a high number of black workers often
rebuffed Mather salesmen based on similar concerns about low literacy. In
such instances, salesmen were instructed to “put across to [the prospect] the
thought that the human brain works about the same in a black skull as in a
white skull and is just as responsive to constructive ideas and positive sug-
gestions.”64 Sales managers supplied salesmen with a canned response based
on this reasoning, which were added to the sales talk binder. The salesman
was advised to “sit down with this Section of your Binder. Absorb all the
information thoroughly. Tomorrow morning you will be hoping your first
Prospect’s payroll is loaded with the names of Negroes . . . Black or white, it
makes no difference, when you know how to meet this Objection—except
the difference in the size of your commission checks.”65 Like the syndicate’s
designers, its sales specialists appear not to have seriously considered incor-
porating representations of nonwhite workers.66 Only in later decades—
beginning during World War II—would designers begin to depict workers
of color, and even then, their attempts were meager.
The syndicate kept the pressure up on salesmen through a weekly “pep”
letter. Each letter was one to two pages long and concerned a specific
theme challenging the salesman to improve his performance. Letters often
revolved around contrasts between the effective salesman who cultivated
self-discipline and confidence and the ineffective salesman who failed to
adopt these traits. The syndicate reinforced this theme via cartoons that
contrasted the “go-getter” salesman who studied his sales talks meticu-
lously with his ineffective alter ego who was depicted as a failure, both as a
salesman and a man.67
The syndicate’s fixation with the line between success and failure as touted
in its sales-boosting techniques helps explain why it embraced similar rhet-
oric in its products. The success-driven ideals espoused in its posters and
pivot man letters were an extension of the obsessions of salesmen—Seiders
and his associates—who reflexively assumed that their own ideals would be
fitting for publicity aimed at workers. The links between salesmanship-type
values, manliness, discipline, and what would later be called “impression
management” are evident in the posters reproduced above.
The parallels between the syndicate’s approaches to design and selling

made for a highly unified culture of motivational messaging. The worker
who saw a poster in the factory, the foreman who read a pivot man letter,
and the salesman who sold the product were exposed to a singular ideology.
This ideology, revolving around assertions of the virtues and rewards of
hard work, repackaged sentiments that had been invoked by businessmen
for workers’ edification since the nineteenth century. In blending work ethic
rhetoric with Elbert Hubbard’s pithy contrasts between self-disciplined and
undisciplined workers and the sensibilities of modern advertising, the syn-
dicate synthesized the main strands of post–World War I motivational dis-
course. As the first firm to market modern motivational publicity nation-
wide, it also established a model that later firms would emulate and refine.
Ultimately, the Seth Seiders Syndicate’s brand of motivation was unable
to survive beyond the 1920s. Amid the economic belt-tightening that fol-
lowed the onset of the Depression, managers had less money to spend on
communication products sold by outside specialists. The firm’s decline was
also compounded by internal conflict between Seiders and some of his asso-
ciates due to a tax avoidance scheme that resulted in Seiders being sued.68
The company eventually broke up, and its remaining stocks of posters and
pivot man letters ended up in the hands of a few of its diehard salesmen,
who struggled on for a while after the Depression hit, eking out a meager
living by selling them to schools as character-building aids for seventy-five
cents each.69 Seth Seiders himself wound up with a rosier future, retiring
to a ranch in New Mexico, where, according to local legend, he sometimes
entertained Al Capone.70
The syndicate’s failure symbolized the decline of the much-idealized
managerial hope, inherited from the turn-of-the-century writings of Elbert
Hubbard and his ilk that employees could be made to work harder by
exposing them to continual reminders that doing so would lead to per-
sonal success. Seiders and his associates were too enthralled by the hope of
realizing their fortunes to see that their brand of success-infused rhetoric
spoke little to the workers who comprised their audience. Nonetheless, the
syndicate’s impressive sales indicate that many managers were becoming
more accepting of psychological-and emotion-based motivation as well as
the use of motivational images, and its success helped open the door wider
for the continued spread of motivational propaganda in industry in years
80 | Chapter 2
to come. Although independent sellers of motivational publicity would not

reemerge on the national scene until World War II, the syndicate had paved
the way for the spread of motivational propaganda in the industrial arena.
The 1920s brought mixed fortunes for the businessmen, economists, poli-
ticians, and entrepreneurs who were drawn to the promise of psychologi-
cal motivation. On the one hand, the idea that united them—that workers’
pathological instinctive drives and emotions could be “improved”—had
serious limitations. Despite challenging Darwinist models of human behav-
ior, this view was rooted in the assumption that emotions could be modi-
fied by scientific methods, a claim that reflected the overconfident mood of
social science more than reality. On the other hand, those who believed that
emotions were integral to workers’ behaviors helped reframe motivation in
more psychological terms, advancing ideas that first bloomed in the writ-
ings of Thorstein Veblen, Hugo Münsterberg, Walter Dill Scott, and instinct
theorists.
The Wall Street crash in October 1929 and its devastating effects made
clear that work’s rewards were fragile, even if one could find work. Yet as
the Depression began to add millions to the unemployment lines, devo-
tees of motivation grew even more convinced that psychological-based
approaches to motivation could help stifle class antagonisms and sustain
faith in the promises of work and American capitalism.
CHAPTER 3
Visions of Striving
DEBATING WORK’S PROMISES IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Better methods for the discovery of an administrative élite, better meth-

ods of maintaining working morale. The country that first solves these
problems will ineffably outstrip the others in the race for stability, secu-
rity, and development.
—Elton Mayo, Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 1933
Men are out of work. Our men. Our neighbors. Our citizens. Honest,
hard-working folk. They want jobs. They’re eager to work. But there
aren’t jobs enough to go round. Somebody’s got to tide them over . . .
We’re going to share our luck with the folks out of work, aren’t we?
Remember—there’s no National fund they can turn to for relief. It’s up
to us!
—Poster published by the President’s Organization on
Unemployment Relief, 1931
We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll
go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
The Great Depression is not usually regarded as an era of motivation. In

collective memory, the period often brings to mind mass unemployment,
breadlines, and poverty-stricken farmers and rural migrants living hand to
mouth, images that invoke struggles for survival and the decline of hope
and suggest that all sense of motivation had eroded. However, amid the
81
82 | Chapter 3
era’s spiraling unemployment and mass suffering, motivational ideology

took on new form. As the Depression destroyed jobs and, with it, hopes that
work could deliver on its promises, interest in motivation deepened among
industrial social scientists, management specialists, politicians, business-
men, and public relations specialists. Tributes to motivation of varying
kinds also abounded in business culture, New Deal publicity, and Holly-
wood films depicting the strivings of the downtrodden. In a wide array of
visual and written forms, motivational sentiment touting work’s rewards
became a pillar of national life.
While motivational discourse was multifaceted, it revolved largely
around two distinct strands, a trend that was encouraged in part by the
stark economic realities of the Depression. The first strand was rooted in
elite conceptions of workers and the “labor problem” and was chiefly asso-
ciated with industrial social scientists and businessmen. Elton Mayo, the
most influential management theorist of the era, argued that workers were
irrational and prone to conflict. By deploying an “elite” corps of human
relations experts skilled in interviewing and counseling, he claimed, man-
agement could shape the worker’s emotional life and induce cooperative
attitudes. A similar view of motivation informed the policies of the era’s first
president. Herbert Hoover crafted a distinct kind of motivational discourse,
one overlapping with that of management specialists but relying on trib-
utes to bootstrap individualism. Believing that self-sufficiency was the basis
of prosperity, Hoover rejected government intervention in the economy in
favor of voluntary, state-level efforts to motivate the unemployed and insti-
tute cooperation between business and labor, measures he believed would
help stave off class conflict.
The second strand of motivational discourse emerged outside the work-
place and was grounded in the populist language that characterized the
New Deal and much Depression-era culture, each of which emphasized the
transcendent power of communal bonds. At its heart, the New Deal upheld
the virtues of workers and labor. This stance informed New Deal policy, not
least the Wagner Act of 1935, which granted workers the right to establish
unions and required employers to recognize them. The New Deal’s support
for labor was reflected in Roosevelt’s oratories to the “forgotten man” and
New Deal photographs of the rural poor struggling for a better life amid the
Depression.1 In endeavoring to put the nation back to work, New Dealers
Visions of Striving | 83
positioned the state as a powerful agent of motivation, a stance that busi-

nessmen found objectionable because, they believed, it undermined self-
sufficiency, bred dependency on government, and empowered unions.
This chapter traces the shifting discourse about motivation throughout
the Depression, charting its role in shaping ideas about work and democ-
racy. In an era when work became a major preoccupation in national life,
discussions about motivation rapidly spilled over from industry into other
arenas. Although debates over motivation had always cross-pollinated
between the workplace and other spheres, this process intensified during
the Depression as work became a central concern in politics and mass cul-
ture. Given that the populist strand of motivation proved the most endur-
ing as the New Deal gathered steam, one might expect that the era ulti-
mately embodied a triumph for workers and others who rallied around a
more democratic vision of work and industry. After all, as Michael Denning
argues, the era produced a new “laboring of American culture” whereby
American life became infused with working-class imagery and rhetoric.2
However, while motivation acquired a more populist tone, industrialists
and their allies were quick to adapt its tributes to “the people” and their
struggles to more conservative goals in their communications techniques.
The appropriation of populist motivation also helped lay groundwork for
businessmen’s campaigns to weaken the New Deal and labor in the post-
war era.
Human Relations and the Rise of “Therapeutic”

Motivation in Industry
In the shadows of the Depression’s more visible events, ideas about work
and motivation underwent a far-reaching shift as management specialists
continued to abandon economic models of motivation in favor of those
that deployed psychology. Although Taylorism remained central to strat-
egizing production, its claim that workers were motivated chiefly by earn-
ings continued to lose authority. Psychological-based theories of motiva-
tion, in emphasizing workers’ “needs” and “desires,” helped management
to cast itself as an agent of democratization, which in turn veiled its core
goals—to assuage labor conflict, marginalize unions, and secure its domin-
ion over workers.
84 | Chapter 3
These changes gathered steam partly because of the proliferation of

corporate-sponsored research studies into industry as well as the rising
status of human relations in academe. The era’s most influential industrial
research initiative was the Hawthorne studies, conducted by researchers
from Harvard Business School (HBS) over a period of nine years at Western
Electric’s Hawthorne plant outside Chicago. For its first five years, the proj-
ect focused on issues relating to productivity and remained largely unknown
beyond management circles. In the late 1920s, however, the prominence and
influence of the studies grew as HBS received financial support from a pow-
erful new sponsor: the Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation had deep
roots in antiunionism and motivational ideology. During a 1914 strike at a
Rockefeller-owned mine in Ludlow, Colorado, the mine’s management sent
in police and state militia. The brutal put-down that followed left eleven
children and two women dead. The Ludlow Massacre and the massive pub-
lic outrage that followed prompted the Rockefellers to look for more subtle
approaches to suppressing unions, including employee representation plans
(company “unions” that offered little real protection for workers). These
plans, which barred collective bargaining, were implemented throughout
Rockefeller-owned companies and were taken up by many other companies
during the 1920s.3
The foundation’s escalating financial support for HBS extended the
Rockefellers’ antilabor ambitions into academe. Beginning with a $155,000
grant to launch an industrial psychology program in 1927, the foundation
made additional annual grants to Harvard of up to $125,000 and multiyear
grants of $875,000 and $360,000 in 1930 and 1937, respectively. Amounting
to over $1.5 million between 1923 and 1943—the most extensive corporate
effort to advance research into motivation and other workplace issues until
that time—these monies funded HBS’s research well beyond the conclusion
of the Hawthorne studies.4
At the center of HBS’s contributions to motivational research was the
highly influential work of Elton Mayo. An Australian émigré, Mayo gained
recognition as the figurehead of the field of human relations after joining
the faculty of HBS in 1926. Over the next fifteen years, Mayo’s reputation
swelled owing to his association with the Hawthorne studies. His achieve-
ments were not all that they seemed, however. Not only did he smooth his
career path by passing himself off as a physician, but his involvement in
the Hawthorne studies was also more limited than he implied. It was not
until spring 1928—several years into the studies—that Mayo first visited the
Hawthorne plant, and even then, his role was mainly to interpret the find-
ings for Western Electric’s executives, not to conduct research.5
Despite his exaggerated claims, however, Mayo’s writings had a lasting
influence on motivation. Most important, he popularized within manage-
ment the idea that “undesirable” attitudes and behaviors (labor conflict, for
example) were the result of the worker’s individual and irrational maladjust-
ments. In turn, these maladjustments could be remedied only by the “thera-
peutic” approaches of psychopathologists and other medical experts. Given
Mayo’s far-reaching influence on managerial conceptions of motivation in
the 1930s, a discussion of the formation of his theories is essential here.
Mayo’s perceptions of workers and industry were shaped by his upbring-
ing in Adelaide’s highbrow culture. Adelaide was the hub of the educated
and professional classes who disdained the industrial working class, which
regularly engaged in strikes in Australia in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Like many of Adelaide’s upper echelon, Mayo regarded
the industrial class as pathologically prone to conflict and in need of civiliz-
ing. No less influential in shaping his outlook was his family, several of who
were noted physicians. His parents had high hopes that he would continue
that tradition, and with their support, he embarked on medical degrees
three times between 1899 and 1903 in Adelaide, Edinburgh, and London but
failed each time. Mayo nonetheless continued to regard himself as a medi-
cal specialist, and he couched his theories about motivation largely through
the lens of psychopathology. Returning to Australia, he began to find his
niche by taking a degree in psychology and philosophy. He graduated in
1911 with a thesis that emphasized the irrelevance of socialism and unions,
arguing that only an elite of experts could resolve industry’s problems.6
Mayo refined his theories about motivation over the next decade during
lecturing positions in philosophy at the University of Queensland in Bris-
bane. There he adapted Freud’s theories on neurosis to argue that indus-
trial problems were due to the worker’s individual maladjustment. No less
influential for Mayo was the work of the Polish anthropologist Bronisław
Malinowski, whom he met in 1914 and whose research among the Trobriand
Islanders on “primitive” kinship networks Mayo drew inspiration from in
his arguments about workers’ pathologies.7 A second theme to emerge in
86 | Chapter 3
Mayo’s early writings—one emphasized in his 1919 book, Democracy and

Freedom—was his critique of the state. He argued that democracy, by rous-
ing the hopes and desires of the masses, had given rise to “irrational” forces,
not least labor unions, which threatened civilization. Because the individual
was irrational and prone to self-interest, neither the state nor political par-
ties, he asserted, could manage democracy. Only experts trained in psycho-
pathology could resolve these problems. Mayo developed these arguments
in several articles on Australian industrial relations, in which he drew on
Pierre Janet’s theories about “hysteria” as well as his own research on soldiers
suffering from shell shock after World War I.8 Like Janet’s patients and shell-
shocked soldiers, he posited, workers were neurotic and dissociated from
reality. Extending his earlier critiques of the state, he argued that classical
economics was incapable of resolving industrial conflict because it assumed
incorrectly that “human motives are based upon clear reasoning and logic.”9
Mayo was far from the first to make such arguments about motiva-
tion—as we have seen, instinct theorists made similar ones after World War
I—but it was he who would popularize them in America. In 1922, Mayo
took academic leave and embarked for London, hoping to launch his career
there. The journey included a layover in San Francisco, where he planned
to give paid lectures to fund the rest of his trip. The lectures failed to mate-
rialize, however, and penniless and stranded, Mayo resigned himself to
returning to Australia. One lead proved fruitful, however—an invitation to
speak to the National Research Council (NRC) in Washington, D.C. Mayo
impressed the NRC’s leaders with his insights into industrial psychiatry and,
with their support, was hired a few months later by the Industrial Relations
Research Department of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School
to conduct studies into Philadelphia factories. By 1924, with support from
the NRC, Mayo was receiving funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.
In his research on fatigue and monotony in Philadelphia, Mayo continued
to make the case that labor problems were rooted not in work itself but in
the worker’s individual maladjustment to it. Alienated from his work, the
worker was prone to “reveries”—daydreams—that encouraged his hostil-
ity toward management and fueled radicalism. These problems could be
resolved only via a therapeutic treatment of these “abnormalities.” The insti-
tution most capable of this task, he added, was the corporation. This con-
clusion, unsurprisingly, was well received by the Rockefeller Foundation,
which granted three additional years of funding, allowing him to resign

from his position in Brisbane.10
The timing of Mayo’s arrival at Harvard Business School in 1926 was for-
tuitous. The school’s dean, Wallace Donham, was at this point attempting
to shift its focus from applied economics to human relations in industry.
An admirer of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Donham had a deep
affinity with the sense of civilizing mission that swept through conserva-
tive academic circles after World War I, one that Mayo’s theories comple-
mented. Mayo brought to Harvard a Rockefeller grant of $12,000—the first
of many over the next decade. These monies allowed the school to cast itself
as a hub of scientific research into industrial problems, not least by setting
up experimental labs and large research studies, which proved invaluable
in inoculating it from criticism.11
In 1933, Mayo published what would become one of the most influential
management books of the mid-twentieth century: The Human Problems of
an Industrial Civilization. The book offered little that was new, mainly dis-
tilling his previous ideas, but three of its arguments would have long-lasting
influence on management conceptions of motivation. First, Mayo claimed
that industrial fatigue and monotony, which depleted workers’ morale,
were not caused by industrial work itself as many management specialists
believed. Rather, they were rooted in the pathologies of an industrial soci-
ety that weakened the individual worker’s ability to cooperate. Second, sci-
entific management, by offering workers economic incentives, addressed
only the symptoms of poor morale, not its causes, and merely encouraged
them to seek the solidarity of coworkers and unions. What was needed, he
claimed, were therapeutic techniques like employee counseling and inter-
views. Pointing to the results of the Hawthorne studies (and slyly implying
a more central role for himself in the research than was the case), he held
that such methods were vital because they neutralized workers’ antago-
nisms toward management by allowing them to air grievances about work.
Finally, Mayo argued that the state was incapable of creating cooperation in
industry because it was too “centralized politically and geographically” and
thus “too remote morally and spatially.” Therefore, it was necessary to cre-
ate an “elite” of administrators skilled in therapeutic techniques. Of unions,
Mayo said barely anything, believing that they were completely unneces-
sary and undeserving of management’s attention.12
88 | Chapter 3
Although such arguments had been made by industrial social scientists

for over two decades by this juncture, they had failed to break the hold
of economic-based theories of motivation. But with such influential orga-
nizations as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harvard Business School
throwing financial support behind human relations research, the door was
effectively opened for psychological-based theories about motivation to
receive a warmer reception. By implying that he was the “leader” of the
Hawthorne studies (and a medical doctor to boot), Mayo found himself in
the right place at the right time.
Generations of management theorists have described Mayo’s work as a
major departure from Taylorism because it was rooted in a more holistic
understanding of the worker and defined the worker’s psychological and
emotional needs as the core focus of management. The shift from Taylor
to Mayo is still invoked in many management textbooks and popular busi-
ness books as a democratizing one. Yet the two theorists were aligned in
their belief that workers were pathological and that management had a
divine right to “cure” them. The difference, as Gerard Hanlon argues, was
that Mayo insisted that the mind was the route to this objective, not bodily
discipline as Taylor believed. Mayo was also in agreement with Taylor’s
belief that labor unions were an irrelevancy.13 Although Mayo obscured his
antiunion views in his writings to make his theories more palatable to his
Rockefeller Foundation sponsors (who wished to disassociate the Rockefel-
lers from harsh antiunionism in the public mind), he was clear in his earlier
articles in Australia that labor agitation was irrational. As he wrote in one
such article, “Socialism, Guild Socialism, Anarchism and the like are very
largely the phantasy constructions of the neurotic.”14
The theories of motivation advanced by Mayo and other human rela-
tions specialists were gradually adapted in the factory by managers from
the 1930s onward.15 At many large firms, personnel departments became a
means to formalize human relations techniques like employee interviews
and counseling. By blending these motivational techniques with older wel-
fare capitalism methods (such as company unions, pensions, and social
events), many managers found ways to assuage workers’ grievances and cre-
ate a buffer against the era’s increasingly powerful labor unions. As Loren
Baritz argues, “By ‘capitalizing’ and ‘integrating’ [workers’] wants ‘into the
life of the business,’ managers could funnel human behavior into the most
profitable channels.” Between 1932 and 1935, the proportion of companies

employing over five thousand workers that had a personnel department
rose from around a third to over three quarters.16 Firms that created such
departments or continued them after the onset of the Depression experi-
enced relatively little labor-management conflict.17
Managers’ interest in psychological-based motivation did not origi-
nate solely in the industrial arena or from theorists like Mayo, however.
It emerged also through the era’s politics and culture. Moreover, when the
federal government, along with management and its allies, developed their
motivational arsenal during World War II, it was from the imagery and lan-
guage of Depression-era culture that they drew inspiration. Before continu-
ing to explore workplace motivation, we must therefore trace the era’s core
developments in motivational discourse.
The Last Hurrah of “Bootstrap” Motivation:

Morale Boosting in Hoover’s America
The crisis of the Depression prompted widespread discussion about work
and motivation in the political sphere. While motivation took on many
meanings when invoked in politics, it became central to debates over
national recovery and political policy throughout the decade. The signifi-
cance of these deliberations becomes clear when we consider the responses
of the era’s two most prominent political figures, Herbert Hoover and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the Depression, as well as the era’s most
important political event—the New Deal.
Herbert Hoover’s presidency is widely regarded as a failure, not least due
to his ineffectual response to the suffering caused by the Depression. His
refusal to offer unemployment relief—which he dismissed as a “socialis-
tic dole”—betrayed a disregard for the human devastation wreaked by the
crisis.18 Recognized less, however, is that under Hoover, the federal gov-
ernment began to adopt a more active role in orchestrating motivation.
Although few would consider Hoover a “motivational” president—that
mantle would be claimed by Roosevelt during the New Deal—history
shows that he was nonetheless a transitional figure who, ironically, helped
pave the way for the state’s robust deployment of motivation. Hoover’s stiff-
upper-lip oratories marked the last gasp of the high-minded motivational
90 | Chapter 3
rhetoric invoked by elites since the nineteenth century. Yet his main tactics
for combating the Depression—he asked businessmen to support stabili-
zation measures and encouraged the public to contribute to local unem-
ployment relief initiatives voluntarily—signaled a grudging acceptance that
the federal government could be used as an instrument for orchestrating
motivation. While Hoover’s influence on motivational discourse became
evident only with the passage of time, he turns out to have been one of its
most influential architects.
Hoover’s rhetoric invoked the tributes to individualism and self-
sufficiency invoked customarily by “successful” men in the early twentieth
century. These beliefs reflected his unusual path to prominence. Orphaned
at age nine, he surpassed expectations by becoming the most celebrated
engineer of his day. In the 1900s he worked all over the world and built
a $4 million fortune, gaining widespread acclaim as “the Great Engineer.”
During World War I, he headed the U.S. relief effort in Belgium and, after
the armistice, became U.S. food administrator and director general of the
American Relief Administration in Europe. His experiences instilled in
him a belief that success was a matter of individual determination.
As president, with unemployment swelling and millions living meagerly,
Hoover upheld self-sufficiency as an article of faith. Even as he lent sup-
port for the banks, he refused to provide government relief for the unem-
ployed, adhering to his presidential campaign stance that relief would “stifle
initiative and invention” and “cramp and cripple the mental and spiritual
energies of our people.”19 When the bottom fell out of the market shortly
before the Wall Street crash, his response was to dismiss it. “The funda-
mental business of the country,” he stated blithely, “is on a sound and pros-
perous basis.”20 He continued to dismiss concerns about the unemployed,
remarking, “No one is actually starving” and scoffed that “the Hoboes are
better fed now than they’ve ever been.”21 Indeed, he claimed, “many persons
left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”22 Hoover’s efforts
to minimize rather than tackle suffering were reflected in his use of the
term “depression,” a word chosen because it sounded less frightening than
“panic” or “crisis” and implied that recovery would follow.23
While Hoover shrank from offering aid to ordinary Americans, he
was glad to play the role of motivator when seeking businessmen’s help
in stabilizing industry. He urged employers to do their part to shore up
industry by maintaining wages and implementing job sharing instead of

firing workers. He also encouraged railway and utilities owners to continue
with expansion plans while pledging that the federal government would
fund construction, advising state governors to do the same.24 Because these
measures depended on voluntarism and were implemented unevenly, they
did little to improve the livelihoods of workers or the unemployed. Many
firms eventually cut wages and engaged in erratic hiring, worsening work-
ers’ situations. Hoover’s morale boosting amounted mostly to impression
management. As journalist Caroline Bird notes caustically, “Optimism was
deliberate policy. The wisest and most learned believed that the country
would become rich if businessmen could be made to believe that every day
in every way they were getting closer and closer to prosperity.”25 And yet,
though Hoover’s attempts to rally businessmen did nothing to arrest the
Depression, they marked a significant development: for the first time since
World War I, the state was becoming an agent of motivation.
This shift became clear in 1931. With millions living in desperate condi-
tions amid the deepening Depression, Hoover reluctantly began to advo-
cate aid for the unemployed. Still staunch in his distaste for federal relief, he
instead endorsed local-and state-level voluntary relief initiatives. The most
prominent of these efforts was the President’s Organization on Unemploy-
ment Relief (POUR), a program established by Hoover in late summer 1931.
The organization echoed earlier Hooverite ideals of voluntarism but also
involved a robust media campaign using billboards, radio, and magazine
ads. While encouraging relief at lower levels, POUR publicity was careful to
stress that the federal government was not itself funding relief. Hoover reaf-
firmed this position in radio addresses in the following months. As he told
the nation in October, “No governmental action, no economic doctrine,
no economic plan or project can replace that God-imposed responsibility
of the individual man and woman to their neighbors.” A better course, he
noted, was “a spirit of mutual self-help through voluntary giving, through
the responsibility of local government.”26
The high-minded language of POUR, like Hoover’s, championed the
moral imperative of middle-class aid and was at pains to suppress the
specter of federal intervention. This tactic is typified in an ad published in
Good Housekeeping on New Year’s Day, 1932 (figure 3.1). The text explains
that, though unemployed, the man depicted is “combating adversity with
92 | Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. This POUR

ad embodies the Hoo-
verite principle that
voluntary state-level aid,
coupled with an individ-
ualistic sense of striving,
was sufficient for the
unemployed to “come
through” the Depres-
sion. Managers would
adapt this rhetoric after
World War II in quests
to counter the commu-
nitarian motivational
discourse associated with
the New Deal and labor
unions. Good Housekeep-
ing, January 1, 1932.
courage” and “has retreated step by step but fighting.” These sentiments
evoke an image of the embattled, heroic soldier of World War I, a tactic that
deftly linked the man’s resilience to national resolve during wartime, neatly
avoiding suggestions of working-class agency. The ad’s title, “Keep his head
up and we’ll all come through!” underscores POUR’s core tactic: to placate
calls for government relief and stave off anger toward government. Depict-
ing a worker cheerfully waving his newspaper (suggesting perhaps that he
was chasing up job ads?), he embodies an elite fantasy of the respectable and
amenable worker who strives to improve his lot without complaint. Despite
the hardships he faces, he symbolizes the essence of the upstanding striver
whose qualities—not least his unthreatening demeanor—businessmen had
extolled since the nineteenth century.27
Other POUR ads sought to enlist the support of middle-class readers
by invoking a gutsier tone that recalled that of World War I propaganda.
Typical was “Of Course We Can Do It!,” which was published in Literary
Digest in November 1931. It depicted a middle-class man, with rolled-up
sleeves and tightening his belt, who urged readers to do their part to help
the unemployed. The text appealed to readers’ patriotism, again touting the
nation’s past glories: “We dug the Panama Canal didn’t we? And they said
we couldn’t do that. We put an army in France four months after we entered
the World War didn’t we? And surprised the world. Now we’ve got a tough
one to crack right here in our own yard. Men are out of work. Our men.
Our neighbors. Our citizens. Honest, hard-working folk. They want jobs.
They’re eager to work. But there aren’t jobs enough to go ’round. Some-
body’s got to tide them over. Who’s going to do it? The people who dug that
ditch. The people who went to France, or bought Liberty Bonds, or went
without sugar—Mr. and Mrs. John K. American. That means you–and you
and Y O U—every one of us who is lucky enough to have a job. We’re going
to share our luck with the folks out of work, aren’t we?”28
Despite its more robust motivational language compared with that of the
first ad, workers are once again rendered passive recipients of aid, and any
hint of their grievance is smothered by tributes to national perseverance.
And to ensure that readers understood that the state was merely encour-
aging voluntary action, not federal relief, it added, “Remember—there’s no
National fund they can turn to for relief. It’s up to us!”29
With its calls for voluntary cooperation and its resistance to unemploy-
ment relief, POUR brought the elite-minded motivational sentiment famil-
iar to industrial social science in the 1920s to the center of government dis-
course. Minor adjustments of attitude, not fundamental change, were the
order of the day. Hooverites, like many social scientists and economists of
the previous decade, believed that the system would endure as long as peo-
ple believed in it. POUR amounted to a slick advertising campaign, aimed
at pushing responsibility for relief onto the states, one inspired largely by
Hoover’s desire to avoid “a socialistic dole,” the effects of which, he claimed,
would be “to lower wages toward the bare subsistence level and to endow
the slackers.”30 These sentiments laid bare the logic that underwrote the
campaign and, indeed, the Hooverite stance on labor relations and the role
of government.
While affirming that the federal government would not provide relief,
Hoover’s acceptance that government should play a role in aiding economic
94 | Chapter 3
recovery—albeit a limited one—cracked the door open a little wider for

government to become an agent of motivation. No less consequential was
his faith that the “science of advertising” (which had helped secure his 1928
election victory) was vital for instilling confidence and stimulating recov-
ery. Yet Hoover’s brand of motivation found few admirers beyond business-
men and elites. By summer 1932, POUR had run its course. It had become
the source of ridicule, lampooned by the press as a grossly inadequate and
callous response to the nation’s suffering.31 The ideals of individual self-
interest and voluntary cooperation between labor and business that Hoover
promoted did not disappear. Much of the publicity unleashed by FDR’s New
Deal in efforts to boost morale during the Depression contained echoes
of his pep-driven vernacular, as did the consumer-driven motivational
ideology that proliferated after World War II.32 Although a political fail-
ure, Hoover thus turns out to have been one of the architects of twentieth-
century motivational ideology, one whose visions of industrial progress
would echo in the motivational discourse invoked by management and its
allies in the decades ahead.33
Populist Motivation in the New Deal

and Depression
The 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the coming of the New
Deal signaled not only a political sea change but also the rise of a very dif-
ferent kind of motivational discourse. Whereas Hoover’s morale boosting
was badly out of step with the realities of the Depression, the soaring moti-
vational sentiment that issued forth through the New Deal’s communica-
tions channels spoke meaningfully to them. At the center of the New Deal
was a sustained tribute (one invoked regularly by politicians, artists, and
visionaries) of the heroic struggles of “the people.” While the era’s spiraling
unemployment meant that motivational messages touting material rewards
receded, rhetoric about striving—an ideal related closely to motivation—
was invoked widely. Such accolades formed the nucleus of New Deal art
programs and much of the era’s popular culture, supplying a sharp con-
trast to Hooverite rhetoric. Even so, New Dealers did not altogether dis-
card the accolades to individualism common in the past. Instead, the older
individualism was absorbed into them, supplying reminders that tradi-

tional routes to success remained open.34
The New Deal made ample use of motivational language linking collec-
tive striving to national recovery. This language was central to the National
Industrial Recovery Act and such programs as the Public Works Admin-
istration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Civilian Conservation
Corps, each of which framed recovery in visions of communitarian work,
a stance that informed the New Deal’s support for labor unions.35 For Roo-
sevelt, motivational oratory was a political weapon, one that he deployed
to powerful effect in his inaugural address, whereupon he famously
assured Americans, “All we have to fear is fear itself.”36 He honed it also
in the intimate space of radio, especially during his “fireside chats,” where
he addressed listeners as “my friends” and spoke to them as members of a
community whose destinies were bound together.37 Pivotal to his command
of motivational vernacular was his own struggle to overcome polio. For
many Americans, Roosevelt’s recovery provided a motivational metaphor
about the power of resolve in overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.
Portrayals of Americans as virtuous strivers circulated widely in mass
culture throughout the Depression. Everywhere—in journalism, radio pro-
grams, novels, plays, music, and photography—images of Americans strug-
gling against economic and social forces beyond their control formed the
core of popular narratives. Such stories were especially prominent in the
era’s popular films, many of which concerned the struggle to find or keep
work. The most successful films valorized the difficulties of ordinary Amer-
icans in the face of the Depression and mocked elites. In backstage dramas,
paeans to the “common man,” as well as stories about dust bowl migration,
the formula remained consistent: the emotional crux revolved around sur-
vival through work.
These tendencies were typified by the popular backstage drama Gold
Diggers of 1933. When a group of showgirls becomes unemployed after their
show is shut down owing to lack of funds, its producer conceives of a musi-
cal that blends spectacular dance scenes with Depression-era commentary.
Its rousing finale, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” an homage to the “for-
gotten man” of World War I, with its cavalcade of injured soldiers and out-
of-work men on the breadlines, made an impassioned plea for a collective
96 | Chapter 3
response to the Depression’s suffering. Charles Chaplin’s 1936 film, Modern

Times, offered a different take on work and motivation, dramatizing the
dehumanizing effects of technological modernization on the worker’s mind
and body. The film follows Chaplin’s Tramp as he endures the Depression’s
realities: the alienating effects of rationalized labor, unemployment, pov-
erty, and hunger. Work’s brutalities are captured viscerally in the factory
scenes where he suffers mental and physical exhaustion and in the iconic
moment in which he is literally sucked into the giant cogs of the machine
(figure 3.2). John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of
Wrath, published a year earlier, offered a more ostensibly critical take on
work and striving. Like the novel, the film emphasizes the brutalities vis-
ited on tenant farmers by the agriculture business and the dustbowl. When
researching the novel, Steinbeck visited migrant labor camps in Califor-
nia and talked with a Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp manager,
Tom Collins, whose notes he consulted. Steinbeck also drew on “group man
Figure 3.2. Charles Chaplin, Modern Times. Modern Times Copyright © Roy Export
S.A.S.
theory,” an ideal adapted from philosophy that emphasized the superior

collective power of the group as opposed to the individual.38
Despite dramatizing the Depression’s human costs, however, the solu-
tions to economic troubles that mainstream films offered mostly revolved
around individualistic quests for prosperity, not collective defiance of an
unfair system.39 In Gold Diggers of 1933, working-class dignity and critique
of elites is subsumed by the girls’ hopes for traditional yearnings, including
consumer goods (clothes and fancy dinners) and marriage. The broader
message of the film was thus conservative: the crisis of joblessness can be
overcome by remaining motivated and teaming up with elites. Modern
Times, although a damning indictment of modern work, offers an optimis-
tic if ambiguous conclusion. Its finale, in which the Tramp and his female
companion walk toward the sunrise accompanied by the rousing tones of
“Smile though Your Heart Is Aching,” while underscoring the profound
uncertainties of the moment, suggested that individual pluck and conjugal
arrangements would see them and, it implied, the film’s viewers through
hard times.
The Grapes of Wrath invokes a similarly individualistic response to the
Depression and, given its strong imprint on the era’s iconography of virtu-
ous striving (not least in FSA photography), is worth dwelling on briefly.
The film’s individualizing tactic is signaled in the opening text, which states,
“This is the story of one farmer’s family driven from their fields by natural
disasters and economic changes beyond anyone’s control,” before describ-
ing the forthcoming story as a “great journey in search of peace, security
and another home.”40 Despite its austere-looking shots, barren environ-
ments, and references to the unfairness of the system, the film reminds
viewers that a gritty sense of determination will carry the family through.
Whereas the novel closes bleakly with the Joads marooned in a railroad
boxcar after Rose of Sharon has delivered a stillborn baby, at the end of
the film she is still pregnant as the family heads into the horizon and, it is
implied, a brighter future, symbolized by the impending birth. This feeling
is reinforced by Ma’s rousing speech that affirms, “We’re the people that live.
They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re
the people.” Like the novel, the film reinforces another familiar tendency in
Depression-era motivational narratives—it limits the effects of rural labor
exploitation to whites. As Michael Denning argues, the novel and the film
98 | Chapter 3
position a white Protestant family as the symbolic victims of rural labor

exploitation, obscuring the fact that the majority of agricultural workers
swept up in that system were Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese.41
Although Steinbeck and Ford were far from the first to invoke romanti-
cized visions of white motivation—such assumptions had been common
for years in economists’ studies of labor—The Grapes of Wrath reinforced to
its viewers the notion that white workers were the natural standard-bearers
of virtuous motivation.
The fact that Hollywood films exhorted romanticized forms of individ-
ualism and deemphasized the racial complexities of Depression-era suffer-
ing and striving does not invalidate their explorations of alienation aris-
ing from work and its absence. The era’s popular films exposed millions of
Americans to examinations of economic disparities that they may not have
otherwise encountered. Yet they also resolved such problems by reinforcing
one of the most troubling claims of motivational ideology: they encouraged
audiences to believe that work would pay off if they summoned up enough
determination and got on with it. The very absence of work, in fact, allowed
romantic visions of motivation to flourish because people could be depicted
as noble strivers tenaciously seeking a means of existence. In crafting such
narratives, Hollywood dramatized grievances about work in ways that pre-
served existing modes of authority and reinforced the legitimacy of capital-
ism. Although Hollywood tributes to motivation upheld the virtues of New
Deal liberalism rather than the top-down visions of businessmen, in the
years to come management specialists would prove highly capable in adapt-
ing the era’s paeans to common struggle to sophisticated motivational pro-
paganda designed to sell employees on work’s rewards. The populist morale
boosting that proliferated through the New Deal and Depression-era films
thus provided raw materials out of which management later reinvigorated
its propaganda apparatus.42
“People with a Little Spirit”: Visualizing Virtuous Striving in

FSA Photography
New Deal tributes to virtuous striving found their strongest expression

through visual images, not least the widely circulated photographs created
by the Historical Section of the New Deal’s Resettlement Agency (RA, later
the FSA). Established in 1935 and directed by economist Roy Stryker, the
section was tasked with documenting the Depression’s effects on the land,
though its focus soon shifted to the rural poor. Photographs of struggling
farmers and migrant workers and, later, resilient small-town communities
conveyed the New Deal principle of collective determination in the face of
catastrophe. During its nine-year existence, the section’s dozen or so pho-
tographers produced over a quarter of a million photographs, comprising
the largest collection of images of American life then created. Printed in
newspaper and magazine articles on the Depression’s effects, these portray-
als of endurance during hard times became a powerful means for enlisting
public support for New Deal programs aimed at alleviating rural poverty.
Photographs, Stryker believed, could induce action—the literal definition
of motivation.43
The FSA’s efforts to leverage the emotional power of photographs were
an outgrowth of the post–World war I endeavor to infuse economics with
rhetoric about workers’ needs and aspirations. Stryker became interested
in photography’s communicative potential while studying economics at
Columbia University during that time. There, he was hired as a research
assistant by his mentor, Rexford Tugwell, mainly to gather images for inclu-
sion in a textbook. Published in 1925, American Economic Life and the
Means of Its Improvement made the case that enhancing the living stan-
dards of the working class was not just an economic matter; to succeed, this
goal would require a synthesized understanding of the array of economic
and social factors that shaped people’s lives. Containing scores of images of
industrial and rural work gathered by Stryker, the book typified the view
of a growing number of economists and social scientists that images could
enrich understanding of labor economics.44
As director of the Historical Section—in 1935 he was again hired by
Tugwell, who had been tapped to head the RA—Stryker adapted his belief
in the power of photographs for a new purpose: to encourage Americans
to support the New Deal’s rural reform agenda. Photographs of struggling
farmers and migrant workers, he believed, could humanize economic prob-
lems and, in so doing, enlist public support for programs that tackled rural
blight. While Stryker believed that such goals could be served by images of
men and women alike, he invoked men’s struggles in particular. Especially
potent, he believed, were the “faces” of the subjects. As he explained, “When
100 | Chapter 3
a man is down and they have taken from him his job and his land and
his home—everything he spent his life working for—he’s going to have the
expression of tragedy permanently on his face. But I have always believed
that the American people have the ability to endure . . . You see something
in those faces that transcends misery.”45 Just as Lewis Hine’s photographs
urged support for industrial reforms by giving a “human face” to the harsh
realities of factory work, images of the rural poor striving nobly in the face
of the Depression could advance the cause of federal rural reform.
The section’s early photographs depicting those who bore the brunt of the
Depression’s effects were marked by two recurring tropes, which together
formed the thrust of its portrayals of honorable striving. First, the suffer-
ing caused by the Depression was represented largely through images of
the white rural poor. This tendency stemmed from prevailing assumptions
among New Dealers like Stryker that images of poverty-stricken whites
would be the best means to induce the sympathies of the photographs’ pre-
dominantly white and middle-class viewers.46 Second, the photographers
represented suffering and resilience mainly through portrayals of individu-
als and families. This practice reflected Stryker’s view (and that of many of
the photographers) that such images, in conveying the Depression’s human
costs, could help enlist public support for New Deal rural relief programs.47
An emphasis on the enduring capacity to struggle on in the face of over-
whelming circumstances was an underlying strand of some of the FSA’s
most well-known photographs. This feeling informs the photograph that
has gone down in history as the symbol of the American people’s suffering
during the Depression, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.48 While the pho-
tograph’s portrayal of the mother and her children gives visual testimony to
suffering, her protective embrace of her children and her poignant stare also
suggest an aura of resilience amid overwhelming challenges. Idealizations
of striving amid crisis informed photographs of families, whether walk-
ing along the roadside searching for work; making their way to California
on ramshackle trucks; or eking out a living on infertile land amid the dust
bowl. Idealized striving was an underlying trope in another widely viewed
photograph, Arthur Rothstein’s Fleeing a Dust Storm (figure 3.3). Depict-
ing a father and his two sons making their way to a cabin as a dust storm
appears to swirl around them, the image, like much of the section’s early
output, portrays family members (in this case a homosocial representation)
Figure 3.3. Arthur Rothstein, Fleeing a Dust Storm, 1936. Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, Reproduction no. LC-USZ62–11491,
Washington, D.C.
struggling on amid threats. As several historians have noted, the section’s

images reinforced idealized notions of whites as the “deserving poor,” a
characterization that was rooted in assumptions that whites were more
capable of becoming “self-sustaining” and that deemphasized the racial
dimensions of rural poverty.49 In turn, the section’s photographs offered
visual corroboration of the idea that whites were more naturally predis-
posed to motivation, a belief ingrained in social science.
From 1937 onward, the section’s portrayals of rural suffering receded as
Stryker, seeking to emphasize the positive effects of the FSA, encouraged
102 | Chapter 3
photographers to show the hope and resilience of the people.50 Increas-

ingly common in the section’s output for the next few years were images
depicting FSA migrant camps that helped displaced farm families get back
on their feet; farm families who had begun to turn their struggling farms
around owing to FSA loans; small-town life rooted in community and com-
merce; and families enjoying the rewards of home. Inspired by suggestions
by sociologist Robert Lynd at a meeting in 1936, Stryker began to supply
photographers with “shooting scripts” for their assignments. Conceived
as a way to bring the sociological approach of the Lynds’ Middletown to
the FSA project, the scripts provided broad guidelines that encouraged the
photographers to document everyday life and traditions. The first script
that Stryker circulated following his meeting with Lynd called for pictures
of “home in the evening.” His suggestions included “photographs show-
ing the various ways that different income groups spend their evenings,
for example: Informal clothes; Listening to the radio; Bridge; More precise
dress; Guests.” The script also called for pictures of “the effect of the depres-
sion in the smaller towns of the United States [which should] include such
things as the growth of small independent shops, stores, and businesses in
the small towns; for example, the store opened up on the sun porch, the
beauty shop in the living room.”51
The guidelines that Stryker issued to photographers from 1940 onward
underscore the shift to an even more upbeat portrayal of striving. In fall
1940, Stryker wrote to ask Jack Delano for some “autumn pictures” and to
“emphasize the idea of abundance—the ‘horn of plenty’—and pour maple
syrup over it—you know mix well with white clouds and put on a sky blue
platter. I know your damned photographer’s soul writhes, but to hell with
it. Do you think I give a damn about a photographer’s soul with Hitler at
our doorstep? You are nothing but camera fodder to me.”52 These optimistic
qualities became increasingly common, not least in images of productive
farmwork. Arthur Rothstein, the youngest of the section’s photographers,
who was known to be the most amenable to Stryker’s requests, excelled in
creating the more positive, motivation-laden images that Stryker favored.
His photographs depicted farm families relaxing in their homes and wives
posing with jars or cans of produce (figure 3.4). Rothstein was hardly alone
in taking hopeful, bouyant photographs. Russell Lee, for example, pro-
duced a much celebrated series entitled Pie Town that depicted the cultural
Figure 3.4. By 1939, the FSA’s images had adopted a more hopeful tone, emphasizing
the fruits of family-based striving, a theme that would later be invoked in home front
motivational propaganda during World War II. Arthur Rothstein excelled in this genre.
Above, Arthur Rothstein, 1939. “Mrs. Alfred Peterson, wife of tenant purchaser bor-
rower, with preserved food. Mesa County, Colorado.” Library of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, Reproduction no. LC-USF34–028632-D,
Washington, D.C.
104 | Chapter 3
life of a small New Mexico town, emphasizing the resilient and industrious
ways of its residents and the prosperity arising from their collective striv-
ing.53 Yet while optimistic photographs became the stock-in-trade at the
section, it was Rothstein who adopted this mode most readily. Along with
Lange’s photographs, many of which emphasized the struggles of migrant
workers, Rothstein’s portrayals of domestic small-town resilience formed
the core of federal government–produced motivational imagery in the late
Depression.
After the United States entered the war in December 1941, the section,
like other New Deal agencies, was placed on war footing as the govern-
ment assigned it to publicize the mobilization of war production. In early
1942, Stryker asked Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein for “pictures of men,
women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. Get
people with a little spirit.”54 From this point forward the section’s photogra-
phers trained their lenses on war production workers in the nation’s facto-
ries and shipyards. Supplied to magazines and newspapers for inclusion in
articles, their photographs served wartime motivational goals by encour-
aging Americans to back the war effort and take war jobs. By this time,
Stryker had been urging the section’s photographers to accentuate the pos-
itive effects of the New Deal for several years, and the shift from depict-
ing late-Depression optimism to wartime determination through images of
work was a relatively smooth one. As propaganda designers soon discov-
ered, FSA photographs of resolve and hope from the late 1930s could often
be reworked into powerful wartime motivational messaging.
Populist Motivation in the Factory: Fun, Games,

and Emotional Conditioning
In the second half of the decade, managers’ efforts to hone motivation in
the factory absorbed many of the dominant themes of the era. The idea that
emotional needs were pivotal to motivation, as suggested in the Hawthorne
studies and emphasized in the New Deal and Hollywood films, became
ingrained in the workplace. Motivation took an abundance of forms and
was implemented unevenly. Economic belt-tightening led many firms to
scale back motivation and to double down on the use of brutalizing speed-
ups of production and a return of the authoritarian foreman. However,
many managers continued to experiment with psychological-based tech-

niques and emotional conditioning.
Whereas many large employers could dedicate resources to structured
and protracted employee motivation initiatives with the aid of personnel
departments, smaller firms, lacking resources, had to rely on more impro-
vised methods. Their methods veered toward a use of the emotionalized
sentiment common to Depression-era popular culture. This shift is illus-
trated in management journals of the day. Traditionally a source of techni-
cal subject matter, including lengthy articles on engineering, productivity
flows, and other “rational” management matters, these magazines shifted
tack, incorporating more accessible content about workplace activities, not
least motivation gimmicks used in factories around the country. Factory
Management and Maintenance (FMM), the most widely read of these jour-
nals, provides a useful case study. Founded in 1933 after absorbing several
competitor journals, FMM abandoned the rationalist orientation of its pre-
decessors in favor of a “newsy” style involving short articles and an abun-
dant use of photographs and other images. It reported on such motivational
ideas as slogan and poster contests, attention-grabbing safety campaigns,
morale boosting games and entertainments, and lunchtime performances
used to energize the workforce. These techniques were not new in the fac-
tory, but the stated purpose had changed. Whereas previously management
magazines linked motivation to the worker’s edification in “good” values (a
tendency seen in the Mather’s posters), FMM touted it as a tool for stim-
ulating cooperation and, importantly, boosting productivity. Emotional
conditioning, an idea questioned by many industrial social scientists who
pushed back against instinct theory in the 1920s, was presented in FMM as
a vital management goal.
As discussions about the human factor in industry grew more prolific
during the second half of the decade, FMM encouraged managers to think
about the factory as a human environment where attitudes and behaviors
could be improved through the use of motivation.55 Authors frequently
emphasized the benefits of regulating the emotional dimensions of the fac-
tory. As one article stated, “Plants Are Like People . . . Individuals have per-
sonalities. Communities have personalities. Decidedly do industrial plants
have personalities.”56 Articles of this sort suggested that both workers’ emo-
tions and the workplace’s human dimensions were a new discovery, a theme
106 | Chapter 3
that lent urgency to their claims. Different now was that managers were
more open than in the past to adopting rhetoric from the culture at large
to aid motivation. In replicating in modified form the pleasures associated
with Depression-era games and entertainments, managers discovered ways
to deemphasize the harsh disciplinary nature of factory work—at least until
workers’ returned to their workbenches.
Factory Management and Maintenance reported that some managers
played records and broadcast radio shows, including music and sporting
events, over the plant speakers. Others hired piano players to entertain
workers. At the New York Brassiere Company, workers were entertained
with “songs, music, and one-act plays, presented weekly during part of
the lunch hour by various members of the company glee club and dra-
matic groups.”57 Slogan contests, one author noted, were useful devices for
exploiting workers’ “creative instincts” and “enlist[ing] their cooperation.”58
Another article enthused that the slogans themselves made workers feel
like “a partner in the business” when viewed repeatedly and gave them “an
increased appreciation of a satisfied customer.” He added, “No political
campaign results were ever argued any more than were the results of this
contest. Many thought their choice of slogans was better and proceeded
to tell why they thought so. All of this was extra thought that employees
gave to the thing of which we wanted to make them conscious.”59 While
such articles gave the wholly misleading impression that management was
perpetually involved in boosting employee engagement, they nonetheless
conveyed to readers that motivation was an indispensable tool for the mod-
ern manager.
Managers’ efforts to channel “populist” ideas in their motivational tech-
niques sometimes produced bizarre results. In 1936, FMM reported a pop-
ular technique among employers known as the “safety police” system, a
device that used levity to promote safety regulations. In this practice, work-
ers were elected to serve as safety police by popular vote and were required
to report safety violations to a “safety committee” after which the offenders
were tried by a “kangaroo court.” Those found guilty were required to per-
form a humiliating stunt, which might include standing in a “rogues gallery”
or being “arrested” with “their pictures . . . hung up at a prominent location,
along with those of other violators.” The magazine reported that at a cement
company in Missouri, the firm’s safety director “was himself caught in the
meshes of this plan when he drove into the plant one morning a little faster
than the speed rule permitted. His punishment was to spend half an hour
of serious meditation before the big safety trophy which adorns the plant
yards, while the gang taunted him in the usual fashion.”60 With their jocu-
larity and simulated punishments, practices such as this allowed managers
to tap some of the engaging techniques associated with popular entertain-
ment and thereby smooth relations between themselves and workers.
In an era when attempts to sell workers on longer-term economic or
personal rewards were unlikely to pass muster, dramatic safety campaigns
provided managers with ways to exploit the powers of motivational rhet-
oric. With their mascots and booby prizes for work gangs with the low-
est and highest accident rates, these campaigns, in manipulating feelings
of camaraderie and morale, could help smooth management’s objectives.
The Reynolds Wire Company in Dixon, Illinois, was one of many compa-
nies that presented a booby mascot (in this case, a bedraggled effigy named
“Dirty Andy”) to the “dirtiest” department.61 Managers at the Owens-
Illinois Glass Company used a massive “safety calendar” to record acci-
dents, a “safety derby” over which workers and managers posed during an
award presentation, and a safety “honor roll” listing accidents and “doc-
tor’s cases.” Safety campaigns operated largely through visual means and
metaphors. An article about eye care described workers as “human seeing-
machines” who were “emotional. Lighting and seeing conditions influence
their feelings, attitude, and enthusiasm, upon which the quantity and qual-
ity of the useful work which they can do eventually depend.”62 Managers’
interest in the capacity of visual images to motivate workers prompted
greater use of films, posters, murals, and other forms of visual communica-
tions in the factory (figure 3.5).63 As one author observed in 1936 when dis-
cussing safety education, “The trend towards visual dramatization is very
pronounced. The dramatization of facts and figures through charts, the use
of film strips, motion pictures, etc., is very common today . . . More for
the eye—less for the ear: that seems to be the new trend. The visual lesson
is more easily remembered—and of course the medicine is always more
pleasant to take.”64
Such emphasis on the power of dramatic, visual appeal was drawn
from the era’s advertising methods and portended a more general shift
in management communications from information to entertainment and
108 | Chapter 3
Figure 3.5. These images from an article on safety campaigns illustrate how some
managers channeled Depression-era games and entertainments into motivational tech-
niques in the factory. Factory Management and Maintenance, August 1939, 38.
therapeutic language. This rubric saw workers’ submission to management

goals not so much as a form of coercion but as a means of curing, a notion
that deemphasized the disciplinary function of motivation. One article
advised managers that “the cheer and cleanliness and life of color create an
improved mental and psychological condition that means much in worker
morale.” Another noted that the “big firms spend hundreds of thousands of
dollars a year in outdoor advertising” and that “it pays because the adver-
tisers make it attractive through dramatization—by using special lighting
effects, changing color, motion.” Managers, it concluded, should use “the
same psychology.”65
In framing the workplace as an arena of emotional conditioning, FMM
presented its manager readers with a different vision of the factory than the
one that workers endured daily. In reality, factory work remained as brutal-
izing as ever and often more so, given that many firms imposed cost cutting
to remain competitive. Yet as factory life became more punishing for work-
ers due to speedups on the line, episodic hiring, and reduced wages, FMM
encouraged managers to adopt the role of motivators. Until the Depres-
sion, discussions of motivation had mainly been limited to management
specialists. But now many managers themselves—traditionally adherents of

a rationalist worldview—were beginning to regard emotionally stimulating
motivation as a valuable tool for pacifying class tensions and smoothing
relations between themselves and workers.
Adapting Populist Rhetoric: NAM’s Motivational

Propaganda Crusade
As the Depression wore on, powerful business organizations waged their
own motivational campaigns inside and beyond the factory walls, often by
adapting the populist rhetoric about work and economic security invoked
by the New Deal.66 At the center of businessmen’s motivational discourse
was a strategic reworking of New Deal–era tributes to ordinary Americans.
As disciples of business leadership saw it, the rhetoric of virtuous striving
associated with the New Deal during the 1930s could be adapted to suit
more conservative purposes by casting workers in common cause with
business rather than the state and labor unions. Business’s efforts to appro-
priate labor rhetoric was evinced in industrialist Nelson Rockefeller’s 1932
commissioning of Mexican artist (and former Communist Party member)
Diego Rivera to create a mural in Rockefeller Center depicting “Man at the
Crossroads” between capitalism and socialism. Rockefeller had hoped for
a mural that would invite viewers to contemplate the choice between these
possible futures, but Rivera produced a vista that contrasted the self-interest
and barbarism of the rich with a socialist workers’ utopia led by Lenin. In
response to April 1933 newspaper reports condemning the mural’s anticapi-
talist message and Rivera’s refusal to remove the depiction of Lenin, Rocke-
feller ordered an end to the project and, in February 1934, had the mural
destroyed. However, although the destruction of the mural illustrated the
tenuous nature of business’s flirtation with labor populism, the episode also
revealed the potential of such appropriations to help business portray itself
as an agent of industrial democracy.67
At the forefront of business’s appropriation of populist labor rhetoric
was the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). During the sec-
ond half of the decade, NAM initiated a massive propaganda campaign
promoting free enterprise as the American way of life. Since its founding
in 1895, NAM’s pro-business and antiunion crusade had consisted mainly
110 | Chapter 3
of speeches to business organizations and church groups and the use of

the written word, not least articles disseminated to newspapers. Only
during World War I, with its use of posters, did NAM begin to venture
into emotion-based messaging. In the mid-1930s, recognizing the deep-
ening influence of visual and emotion-based communications, it doubled
down on such techniques. Through billboards and other propaganda, NAM
extolled the rewards of an individualistic, consumer-based “American way
of life,” an ideal through which it hoped to advance business’s authority over
the economy and undermine the New Deal.68
The association’s shift in tactics gathered steam from the mid-1930s when
it founded the National Industrial Information Council (NIIC) to orches-
trate a public relations campaign encouraging employers to “build good-
will for your local industry”—a euphemism for weakening labor unions.
The council’s output included 2 million cartoons, 4.5 million newspaper
columns written by pro-business economists, 2.4 million foreign language
news pieces, and 11 million employee leaflets. It installed 45,000 billboard
posters, which were viewed by an estimated 65 million Americans daily,
and its films were seen by approximately 15 million viewers. It also supplied
employers with “Service for Plant Publications,” which included ready-
made inserts consisting of NAM puff pieces that employers could integrate
into their own publications.69
In 1936 NIIC began circulating to around two million monthly readers
its “Uncle Abner Says” cartoons, which offered folksy tributes to free enter-
prise. In a typical cartoon, Uncle Abner sat reading a newspaper, lamenting
“politicians [who] are bent on finin’ th’ taxpayer for reckless thrivin’.”70 Such
cartoons were thinly veiled warnings against what NAM regarded as the
excesses of New Deal regulations on business. The organization’s outdoor
advertising campaign, meanwhile, brought its free enterprise rhetoric to
public spaces. Designed by Campbell-Ewald Company, one of the nation’s
leading advertising firms, the billboards asserted pro-business sentiments
like “What is good for industry is good for you” and “You prosper when
factories prosper” and depicted highly idealized visions of family-based
consumption that, they implied, was dependent on the worker’s integration
into a harmonious industrial system led by business (figure 3.6).71
The adoption by NAM of a more populist tone is seen further in NIIC’s
films of the late 1930s, which asserted that business was a more effective
Figure 3.6. This page from a 1938 NIIC promotion booklet showcased NAM’s sophis-
ticated visual communications to managers. The association displayed thousands of
billboard posters in industrial communities in the 1930s. National Association of Man-
ufacturers Collection (Acc. 1411), Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.
steward of the economy than government and thus better positioned to

advance the interests of employees. While efforts to indoctrinate Ameri-
cans through such pro-business messages were not new, NAM’s extensive
economic resources and distribution capabilities meant that its propaganda
112 | Chapter 3
could reach a far wider audience than ever before. By April 1938, NIIC had
produced four films, which were collectively viewed by over eighteen mil-
lion Americans in the late 1930s. The per capita cost of each film was less
than half a cent, making them the most widely viewed and cost-effective,
pro-business films yet seen by American audiences.72 Films like Men and
Machines and America Marching On established formal and narrative con-
ventions that NAM would deploy for years to come. Narrated by journalist
Lowell Thomas, who had helped to bring British army officer T. E. Law-
rence fame as “Lawrence of Arabia,” NIIC’s films offered rousing motiva-
tional messages about the vital role of free enterprise in advancing national
progress. Each film offered a moral tale in which an older and wiser mentor
figure imparted, in folksy idioms, the virtues of business leadership to an
initiate, a convention used already in employee literature.73 The association
also used Hollywood-style promotional techniques, including tie-ins with
manufacturers and film screenings for students followed by guided discus-
sions convened by engineers.74
In its film Your Town—A Story of America of 1940, NAM trained its
sights on critics of business. The film tells the story of Jerry, a young boy
who gets embroiled in a fight that erupts in town when an agitator begins
shouting, “Down with . . . capitalism [and] old man Manson” (the local
factory owner). Jerry, it transpires, was an unwitting bystander, swept up
in the melee only because it seemed like “fun,” but the incident provided
his “Gran-Dad” with an opportunity to educate him on the virtues of busi-
ness. The screen dissolves to a sparse village street as Gran-Dad explains
that the factory was built when the town was only “one straggling street
and a few struggling farms.” It was founded, he reveals, by old man Man-
son, “a man who had a dream [and] some money to invest.” These facts
are accompanied by images of a youthful-looking Manson dressed in 1890s
attire, examining blueprints. When Manson beckons someone to help him
build the factory, it turns out to be Gran-Dad himself in his younger days.
The audience next sees the positive effects of the factory—a montage of
homes, telephone poles, new stores, and schools. Toward the end, the film
cuts back to the church steps in the present day, where Gran-Dad tells
Jerry that he is “part of all this too” because he was born in the hospital,
which exists only because the factory workers needed doctors. Enlightened
about the positive effects of big business, Jerry undergoes a conversion. Yet
Gran-Dad reminds him not to take the fruits of business for granted, noting
that the growth of the town happened only because the factory generated
investment. Against a montage of prosperous small farms and hardworking
locals, Gran-Dad laments, “a lot of folks think it would be fun to destroy all
that the factory stands for,” when in reality, “that factory made your town,
and when you’re working against the factory—you’re working against your
own best interests.” The film concludes as Gran-Dad places his arm around
Jerry’s shoulder and walks him toward the church door as a double expo-
sure of the church and the Stars and Stripes envelopes the screen.75
Your Town, like NAM’s other well-honed publicity, signaled a growing
adeptness among businessmen and their allies in channeling motivational
sentiment in their communications techniques. The shifting propaganda
tactics used by NAM reflected businessmen’s recognition that their struggle
for authority would henceforth require an embrace of the emotion-based
populism that flourished through the New Deal and Depression-era cul-
ture, and that the task of promoting business’s claims to leadership would
be best accomplished via motivational images.
Visualizing Industrial Democracy in Corporate

Motivation Films
Unsurprisingly, the growing interest in the motivational capacities of visual
images led some larger employers to try to deploy images strategically to
promote loyalty and cooperation among workers. For many such com-
panies, film became an especially important motivational tool. Industrial
film producers made new inroads as employers enlisted their expertise in
hopes of countering the power of the labor movement. Among the most
influential producers of industrial films during the era was Jamison “Jam”
Handy. As the film historian Rick Prelinger argues, Handy’s films and other
training publicity introduced a new level of sophistication in business-
sponsored film and had a lasting influence on corporate communications.
From its Detroit base, the Jam Handy Organization employed around six
hundred people to produce and market its films, which were screened in
the workplace, theaters, and classrooms around the country. The organiza-
tion’s earlier films were of a straightforward instructional nature, but after
1935, it developed a more dramatic, emotionally stimulating approach that
114 | Chapter 3
blended aspects of documentary and Hollywood-style filmmaking with the

goal of motivating employee and public goodwill toward the company.76
These qualities are embodied in the films commissioned by Handy’s big-
gest client, the Chevrolet Corporation. Deploying story-driven plots, brac-
ing music, and rousing voice-overs, the films embodied a powerful form of
motivational storytelling. Handy’s short film From Dawn to Sunset of 1937
established conventions that would become central in motivational films
over the next two decades. Among these conventions were a slick story
about the virtues of the firm and the rewards that workers received by iden-
tifying with it and with industrial capitalism more generally, along with a
synthesis of the economic-and emotion-based aspects of motivation.
The film portrays a day in the life of Chevrolet and its workers, situat-
ing the company as a capable agent of the national interest and defining its
aspirations and those of workers as one and the same (figures 3.7–3.10). It
begins with a dawn shot of a town skyline onto which rolling text appears.
A narrator, reading the text, espouses the “mighty army of builders who
go forth accompanied by the whistles of America’s greatest factories,” a sit-
uation which “promises a new prosperity.” To the sound of choral music
reminiscent of another of the era’s paeans to work motivation, Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs, we see a montage of homes, alarm clocks, and work-
ers getting up and eating breakfast, accompanied by invigorating music.
Workers are waved off by their families before heading to the factory as
the narrator announces, “The clans gather in a score of cities. In thousands
of homes, vigorous workmen rise to meet a new day and a new opportu-
nity.” These images and the narration establish a seemingly incontrovertible
claim: that workers are satisfied and motivated. Scenes of lines of workers
entering factories then follow, before segueing to scenes of production at
twelve plants across the country, imagery that emphasizes the interdepen-
dence of Chevrolet’s workforce. After footage of employees receiving their
wage packets, accompanied by a zesty rendition of “We’re in the Money,”
the narrator reminds viewers, “Tens of thousands of men on one single pay-
roll have money for themselves and for their families to spend . . . money
to spend on wholesome foods . . . for good clothes . . . money for comforts
and conveniences.” Over a montage of shopping scenes, he explains that
this spending has led to “prosperity greater than history has ever known.” In
the final sequences, workers and their families enjoy dinner and recreation
Figures 3.7 (top) and 3.8 (Bottom): Jam Handy’s From Dawn to Sunset took moti-
vational storytelling to a new level, connecting Chevrolet, its employees, and the nation
through a dramatic tribute to corporate-led industrial progress. Prelinger Archives, San
Francisco, CA.
Figures 3.9 (top) and 3.10 (Bottom): Jam Handy’s From Dawn to Sunset took moti-
vational storytelling to a new level, connecting Chevrolet, its employees, and the nation
through a dramatic tribute to corporate-led industrial progress. Prelinger Archives, San
Francisco, CA.
before readying for bed, while the narrator intones, “And so across Amer-
ica the thousands have worked today and done their tasks well. And as the
lights blink out, a day of work, a day of fulfillment, of happiness, and of
peace merges into the assurance of a fuller life . . . in the great American
way.” Complete with shots of lights dimming in the living rooms and bed-
rooms of Chevrolet workers, the fairytale-like ending exposed viewers to an
emotionally stirring narrative steeped in motivational sentiment.77
The emotional power of From Dawn to Sunset lies in its portrayal of
workers as a living force (“Along the roads to the factories, tens of thousands
begin to mass. They swell the rising tide. Into the silent buildings goes the
life stream”) and its portrayal of Chevrolet as a benevolent corporate fam-
ily. No less powerful are the connections that Handy emphasizes between
workers and communities in different locations across the country. Viewers
could potentially identify their own communities and workplaces and, pre-
sumably, feel connected to those at other Chevrolet factories. The repeated
scenes of men lining up to collect their pay offer a symbolic retort to then-
prevalent images of “forgotten men” shuffling along on the breadlines in
newsreels and FSA photographs. In keeping with the film’s larger schema,
Handy’s adaptations of Depression-era aesthetics helped deemphasize and
disavow the hierarchical nature of the labor-management relationship.
From Dawn to Sunset, like celebrated New Deal documentaries such as The
Plow That Broke the Plains, offered up a narrative in which all aspects of the
system were integrated and where regional specificities were connected to
the aspirations of workers and the nation alike.
Filmmakers such as Handy offered businesses a major boost in their
efforts to contain challenges to their authority. By appropriating labor and
New Deal sentiment and adapting them for the purposes of corporate com-
munications, large auto companies like Chevrolet could cast themselves
as engines of industrial democracy. This process amounted to a wholesale
plundering of images and language from labor whereby corporations bor-
rowed from the democratic visions of work generated under the auspices
of the New Deal and labor unions. Such appropriations and modifications
would continue to inform employers’ motivational tactics for years to come.
Motivation underwent significant changes during the Depression, both as a

form of rhetoric and as a management practice. The high-minded tributes
118 | Chapter 3
to an individualistic worth ethic and to character building that had infused

motivation previously were eclipsed as a more emotion-based model of
motivation moved to the center of discussions about work and its rewards.
The rising esteem for the ideas of Elton Mayo and other human relations
specialists helped propel this shift. Managers’ embrace of emotional mes-
saging indicated that, while scientific management remained central to
production, Taylorist theories of motivation were rapidly losing authority.
The democratic-intoned tributes to the strivings of “the people” during the
Depression advanced a similar shift in motivation on a broader societal
plane. Idealized images and rhetoric about the virtuous strivings of ordi-
nary Americans quickly migrated from mass culture to the propaganda that
business pumped out in efforts to sell the public on capitalist free enterprise.
Despite being driven by different and often opposing ideals, New Dealers,
filmmakers, and businessmen encouraged Americans to keep believing that
work under capitalism provided a route to a better life regardless of eco-
nomic hard times. The policies and sentiments of the New Deal, when all is
said and done, sought to sustain Americans’ faith that their country could
still deliver on its promises of material and psychological reward—to moti-
vate them to keep aspiring to work’s promises.
Despite the New Deal’s visions of a nation united in common striving,
management and its allies made significant advancements in their efforts to
frame the prevailing conversation about work. By the time the United States
entered World War II, the high-minded motivational appeals to individual
success used by businessmen, managers, and poster vendors a decade ear-
lier seemed hopelessly outdated. As the nation once again threw itself into
war, producers of motivational propaganda in business and government
became even more cognizant of the advantages of appealing to Americans
through messaging that adapted the language of industrial democracy. This
rhetoric, they understood, was not only a means for mobilizing production
but also for waging powerful visions of work’s meanings and rewards.
CHAPTER 4
The War over Motivation
PROSPERITY RHETORIC AND THE REMAKING
OF WORK’S REWARDS DURING WORLD WAR II
Many Reich factories that are turning out guns meant for the enslave-
ment of other people are themselves run by slaves. And workers of coun-
tries overrun by the Axis have been wrenched from their homes and
shipped into the Reich as forced labor. In this country, we have placed
our reliance on what President Wilson called “the highest and best form
of efficiency . . . the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.” We are
fighting a battle of production confident that free labor will outproduce
slave labor.
—Archibald MacLeish, director of the Office of Facts and Figures,
January 1942
Repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. The greatest rogue in his-

tory, Mr. Hitler, was shrewd enough to use that idea. He said: “You can
take a story—even a lie—and if you repeat it often enough you can make
people believe it.” He was no paper hanger!
—Lew Shalett, owner of the Sheldon-Claire Company, reflecting
on his firm’s high sales of motivational posters to factory managers
during World War II
During World War II the United States orchestrated the largest work moti-
vation campaign in its history. In the weeks following the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the federal government, employers, and
business organizations urged Americans to support the war production
effort through an avalanche of propaganda. While motivational rhetoric
119
120 | Chapter 4
saturated American life, it was disseminated with particular vigor in the

workplace. Employers used posters, banners, morale-boosting speeches,
radio spots, films, and literature to encourage workers to produce more and
faster. Labor-management committees called on employees to work over-
time and unite with managers in beating production targets. For their part,
workers supported the war effort by investing in war bonds that they would
use to pay for consumer goods after the war. Many labor unions agreed to a
“no strike” pledge, effectively putting aside grievances against management
for the duration of the war.1
The mobilization of the American home front during World War II has
long served as the basis of a powerful myth. As told in countless movies
and as reinforced through the ongoing valorization of what Studs Terkel
critically termed the “good war,” this was a moment when the nation rallied
itself spontaneously, motivated by a reflexive desire to defeat fascism.2 His-
torians have shown that this interpretation of events is highly romanticized,
and that Americans participated in the war effort for a wide array of rea-
sons that were often more personal than idealistic.3 This was also the case
for industrial leaders and motivational specialists. In the decades before
the war, despite significant advancements, they had struggled to create
effective motivational messaging because they lacked a unifying idea. The
war resolved this limitation. Not only did it end mass unemployment, but
promises of future prosperity for workers in the impending postwar period
also helped pave the way for motivational propaganda that depicted the
United States as a classless nation. No less advantageous from business’s
perspective was that, amid the emergency conditions of wartime, the work-
er’s spontaneous cooperation with management’s objectives in the factory
could be defined as obligatory.4
This chapter tracks the development of motivational discourse during
World War II, arguing that it became a powerful part of the apparatus
through which businessmen and managers advanced their quests for power
and authority. In contrast to perceptions today that wartime propaganda
revolved around rallying workers to defeat the Axis powers, it focused to
a significant degree on preparing the citizenry for a postwar order rooted
in consumer abundance and free market ideals. At a time when business-
men were supposed to be dedicating their resources unreservedly to the
fight against Hitler, they were pouring their energies into defeating what
The War over Motivation | 121
they perceived as more dangerous threats—the New Deal and labor unions.
Despite echoing assertions that the Axis powers must be defeated, business-
men and the advertising specialists who honed motivational propaganda
were fixated on their private postwar goals: to neuter the New Deal and the
labor movement and establish their authority in the coming postwar era.5
The wartime motivational crusade emphasized the concrete rewards that
workers would receive following the war, including job security, a modern
home, consumer goods, and a rising standard of living.6 “Prosperity moti-
vation,” as I call this new strand of the discourse, paved the way for manage-
ment to infuse the factory with rhetoric about consumer rewards for two
decades after the war. Businessmen were not alone in invoking this rhetoric.
The federal government’s main propaganda agency, the Office of War Infor-
mation, initially focused on providing information about the war but soon
embraced the idea that promises of future prosperity were the best way to
motivate workers. For the orchestrators of wartime propaganda, prosperity
motivation was a powerful ideal through which to instill cooperation in
the factory and advance longer-term quests for management control and
authority.
Motivation and Industrial Mobilization

The contests over war mobilization were to have a direct influence on the
motivational propaganda disseminated in the factory. For this reason, a
discussion of the debates around mobilization is essential. At the core of
the rhetoric circulated by the state, business organizations, and other pro-
ducers of wartime propaganda were differing ideas about industrial mobili-
zation and economic planning: How should mobilization be orchestrated?
Should it be led by the federal government, labor, business, or an alliance of
two or all three? Beyond these debates was another question: What incen-
tives and rewards should be used to motivate American workers to support
the war effort?
Many New Dealers hoped that the war would help consolidate the New
Deal and secure its continuation. Industrial expansion, they believed, would
boost the alliance between the state and the working class and solidify gov-
ernment influence over economic planning. However, efforts to instill sup-
port for wartime production ultimately revolved around prosperity-based
122 | Chapter 4
motivation, not an expansion of New Deal liberalism or industrial democ-

racy. The growing status of prosperity motivation was evident in New Deal-
ers’ shift away from the platform based on class embraced in the 1930s. As
historian Alan Brinkley argues, in the face of totalitarianism in Europe, lib-
erals grew increasingly cautious about state power and accepted that lim-
its should be placed on the federal government’s influence over economic
affairs. Amid a war that pitted freedom against tyranny, liberals gradually
discarded their commitment to class-based politics and embraced the cre-
dos of individual liberty and consumer-based freedom. Their acquiescence
to these ideals, coupled with their growing wariness toward expanded state
power in the face of totalitarianism in Europe, caused them to adopt a con-
ciliatory stance toward the arguments of free market economists like Fried-
rich Hayek, which they had dismissed a few years earlier.
The motivational sentiment upheld through the auspices of the New
Deal ultimately revolved around promises of a higher standard of living.
By the end of 1943, many of the New Deal’s flagship initiatives, including
the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps,
had been eliminated. Instead, New Dealers rallied around calls for full
employment and a rising standard of living. This change was reflected in the
actions of the New Deal’s Office of Price Administration, which mobilized
citizens in a campaign to regulate prices of consumer goods and published
numerous “consumer manifestos” that positioned the federal government
as an advocate of consumer rights.7 The connection between motivation
and prosperity was reinforced by the New Deal’s National Resources Plan-
ning Board, whose campaign for full employment and a rising standard of
living sought to incentivize workers through consumption rather than an
expansion of labor rights.8
Union leaders anticipated that industrial mobilization, in bringing mil-
lions of new workers into the labor fold, would strengthen labor’s influence
and advance the cause of industrial democracy. As industry mobilized for
war in 1940 and 1941, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) president
Phillip Murray and United Automobile Workers president Walter Reuther
continued to champion industrial democracy, insisting that labor must play
a leading role in planning and orchestrating production. This gambit was
a partial success. Union membership climbed from 10.5 million in 1941 to
14.75 million in 1945, and many workers experienced significant gains as
unemployment dried up and overtime became abundant. However, if many

workers did well during the war, hopes for industrial democracy receded as
labor leaders embraced the wartime mood of obligatory cooperation.9
At the forefront of this stance of cooperation was Sidney Hillman, head
of the CIO’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and associate
director of the government’s Office of Production Management. A devotee
of industrial democracy since World War I, Hillman shifted right during
the war. Rejecting the radical approaches of Murray and Reuther, he argued
that increased purchasing power and a rising standard of living for workers
were the best platform for labor. He also founded the CIO’s Political Action
Committee (PAC), whose goal was to help Roosevelt and other Democrats
sympathetic to labor in the 1944 elections. For Hillman, the PAC was not
just a means to advance labor’s interests in general but also specifically to
align the CIO with consumer-based liberalism. Hillman and other labor
leaders’ accommodation of prosperity rhetoric ultimately weakened the
long-term aspirations of the industrial working class. Workers’ hopes about
the formation of a Labor Party and of a full-throated challenge to corporate
monopoly dissolved as union leaders promoted all-out production with
promises of postwar prosperity.10
For employers, the war marked an unprecedented opportunity to real-
ize their decades-long efforts to improve motivational techniques. Despite
puffed-up claims that businessmen “won the war” for America, the gov-
ernment’s early attempts to get industry on board with war production
proved difficult, as many large firms resisted converting plants to war pro-
duction. Although industrialists eventually embraced the war effort, as
Michael Adams notes, the notion that they were motivated by a commit-
ment to democratic values or the national interest is a product of “myth-
making.” Many businesses initially “dragged their heels.” Automakers, for
example, resisted transitioning to war production because of fears of los-
ing position in the domestic market.11 Moreover, industrial leaders’ later
self-congratulation for their role in winning the war contrasted sharply
with their chilly response to Walter Reuther’s December 1940 proposal
to convert the nation’s auto factories to aircraft production. Despite their
claims, industrial leaders were motivated principally by the private aspi-
rations of profit and power over labor unions more than a reflexive sense
of patriotic duty.12
124 | Chapter 4
For management theorists, the motivation-laden atmosphere of war-

time offered fresh openings in the quest to control workers. At the center of
human relations research during the war was an effort to boost morale by
approaching the factory as a “social system.” Management textbooks today
mostly offer only brief commentary on World War II, perhaps because for-
mal research on motivation slowed owing to management’s wartime exi-
gencies.13 However, efforts to boost production presented managers with
unprecedented opportunities to experiment with motivation. The war also
saw an increase in personnel departments and, with them, renewed efforts
to train foremen to use “sophisticated behavioral techniques” focused on
motivation.14
Among the most influential studies of the era was Management and
the Worker, the much-celebrated 1939 book by Harvard Business School
human relations specialist Fritz Roethlisberger that documented the results
of the Hawthorne studies. Roethlisberger argued that one of the core chal-
lenges for management was that of “maintaining the equilibrium of the
social organization so that individuals through contributing their services
to this common purpose obtain personal satisfactions that make them will-
ing to co-operate.” This process, he argued, was dependent on the work-
er’s “adjustment” to the system, which could be achieved through employee
interviews and counseling, methods used in the Hawthorne experiments.15
Although human relations specialists ostensibly sought solutions to the
alienating effects of work in large organizations, their long-held manage-
ment belief that workers needed to “adjust” to the system reinforced the
dehumanizing notion that they were pathologically prone to maladjusted
behaviors and thus in need of management’s guiding hand. These views
proliferated widely among managers during the war, even as large-scale
studies into motivation tapered off and Harvard’s core group of human rela-
tions researchers dissolved.
The idea that organizations could benefit from a strategic use of motiva-
tion became further entrenched through the writings of management theo-
rists such as Peter Drucker. A Jewish Austrian émigré who fled to England
in 1933 amid the rise of Nazism, then to the United States in 1937, Drucker
emerged as the most influential management theorist of the twentieth cen-
tury after the publication of his 1946 book, Concept of the Corporation.
Often overlooked, however, is Drucker’s Future of Industrial Man of 1942,

in which he posits that the only entity capable of reviving the worker’s lost
feelings of autonomy was the corporation, which, along with the “mass-
production plant,” was “the representative social phenomena of the indus-
trial system of our time.”16 Drucker’s arguments echoed those made for
years by industrial psychologists. Yet in contrast to many other theorists,
Drucker insisted that workers should be afforded an active role in creating
a workplace culture that was conducive to the cooperation that managers
desired. Workers, he maintained, should participate in labor-management
committees that planned production and be given responsibility for orga-
nizing safety, educational, and social activities. In advancing these argu-
ments, Drucker established an idea that has preoccupied management into
our own day: that the corporation had “social” functions, not least, that of
producing organizational cultures that assuaged class conflict.17
During the war, the theories of human relations specialists, social psy-
chologists, and management theorists gained traction in the factory as
managers honed motivational techniques. Although workers participated
in the wartime production push for a diverse array of reasons, the patri-
otic discourse that proliferated during the war helped managers reinforce
a culture of obligatory motivation in the daily life of the factory. Whether
motivated by patriotism, short-or long- term economic gains, or the
morale-boosting efforts of their employers, American workers encountered
environments steeped in motivational sentiment. Factories were festooned
with motivation-infused installations, banners, and posters that supplied
daily reminders that labor-management cooperation was essential to vic-
tory (figure 4.1).
While ostensibly concerned with mobilizing the industrial workforce
and winning the production battle, employers’ motivational rhetoric was
inseparable from their efforts to weaken labor unions, counter the New
Deal’s pro-labor policies, and secure management’s authority in industry.
The wartime honing of motivation also achieved something absent in the
past: a compelling rationale that linked workers’ futures to those of their
employers and the nation. For the duration of the war, motivational mes-
sages urging labor-management cooperation and teamwork in the name of
future prosperity became a lingua franca in the nation’s factories.
126 | Chapter 4
Figure 4.1. Workplace photographs and posters were powerful tools for promoting
war jobs and motivating workers to back the war effort. The U.S. government’s main
propaganda agency, the Office of War Information, sometimes deployed creative meth-
ods when pursuing these goals. The photograph was taken in February 1942 during an
OWI-organized event in which a steel worker (front, center) gives a tour of the Allegh-
eny Ludlum Steel factory to an army corporal and a navy radioman, who walk behind
him. In October 1941, the OWI had included images of each of the men in a widely cir-
culated poster entitled “Men Working Together!” (a copy of which is displayed above the
door on the right). In arranging for the men to meet for a factory tour and photo shoot,
the OWI found a novel way to promote unity of purpose between industrial workers
and those in the armed services. Such images also channeled human relations theories
that emphasized the managerial benefits available when exploiting the factory’s social
and human dimensions. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/
OWI Collection, Reproduction no. LC-USE6-D-005645, Washington, D.C.
Prosperity Motivation in Government Propaganda:

The Office of War Information
The task of refining motivational discourse was waged no more vigorously
than by the federal government’s main propaganda agency, the Office of
War Information (OWI). Formed in June 1942 from the ashes of the Office
of Facts and Figures (OFF), the OWI distributed a flood of motivational
propaganda that included radio spots, billboards, literature, films, and post-
ers. While the OWI was prolific, it was fraught with bitter struggle over
how it should motivate Americans to support the war effort. Many of its
staffers were New Dealers who believed passionately that the OWI should
focus on providing information to the American people about the nature
of the enemy and the role that citizens must play in defending democracy
and freedom in the face of totalitarian regimes. In January 1942, OFF direc-
tor Archibald MacLeish informed reporters that the “difference” in Amer-
ican and enemy propaganda was one “between the strategy of terror and
the strategy of truth.”18 As MacLeish would write in OFF’s “Report to the
Nation” that month, the factories in the Third Reich were “run by slaves.”
Not only had the Nazis enslaved their own people for war production, they
had subjected those they had overrun to “forced labor.” American workers,
on the other hand, adhered to the ideal that had helped the United States
prevail in World War I: what President Wilson had called the “spontaneous
cooperation of a free people.”19
While “spontaneous cooperation” was more an idealization than a real-
ity, the OWI’s attempts to increase war production in the first half of 1942
focused on communicating to workers the threats posed by Nazism and the
need to defend freedom and democracy. Just as vital, government officials
believed, was the need to instill among workers a clear understanding of
the importance of their work to the nation’s war goals. Government officials
frequently lamented opinion poll findings that Americans had little under-
standing about what they were fighting for.20 Sam Lubell, a staffer at the
Office for Emergency Management (OEM) wrote to a colleague in January,
“A great many workers . . . have little feeling that the particular products
they are working upon are vital to our war effort. They . . . may not visualize
the long chain of production which brings that product into a gun or tank
or plane. Plant by plant, it should be made clear to every worker how their
particular job fits in with the war scheme, how important their work is.”
One useful tactic for achieving this goal, he argued, was to organize tours of
the factory by soldiers, an idea practiced already by the War Department.
Lubell noted that while “labor, traditionally, has regarded the Army with
suspicion, as a strikebreaking organization, as working with Wall Street and
Big Business,” soldier tours of the factory helped “to break down this hostil-
ity” by allowing workers to hear from soldiers how the munitions they were
128 | Chapter 4
producing were used on the front lines. Such discussions, he added, gave
workers a newfound sense of significance in their work, and many plants
saw increased morale, with workers and union officials offering ideas for
boosting production.21
The struggle between “honest information” and “selling the war” came
to a head in spring 1943 in the OWI’s Graphics Division, the body respon-
sible for guiding poster design and distribution.22 Led by former Fortune
art director Francis Brennan and staffed mainly by New Dealers, the divi-
sion initially worked from the belief that propaganda should convey factual
information and avoid the kind of hyperbolic messages espoused during
World War I. Brennan hoped that the division could find a middle way
between advertising specialists’ desire to “sell” the war to the public, which,
if unchecked, would produce “an insincerity repugnant to Americans at
war,” and an uncoordinated solicitation of contributions by artists, which
would result in “confusion and dashed hopes for the artists” if not prop-
erly administered. The Graphics Division, Brennan believed, could develop
relationships with artists and make “intelligent and efficient use of the tal-
ents available.”23 Informed by these ideals, early OWI posters emphasized
the role that Americans must play in defeating the evils of Axis tyranny and
defending the freedoms associated with American democracy.
Brennan’s vision failed to materialize, however. Since the agency’s
early days as the OFF, some staffers had argued that its posters were too
abstract and lacked a design strategy. As one had written in December
1941, its efforts amounted to “a hodge-podge of good, mediocre and bad
design [with] no semblance of balance as to subject matter, and no coor-
dination as to timing.”24 Although government propaganda in the factory
would continue to espouse the rhetoric of democracy in the face of Nazi
and Axis evils, by mid-1942, it had begun to promote the war effort through
advertising-based techniques that touted postwar rewards. Formative in
shaping the new strategy was the War Advertising Council. Founded by the
nation’s leading advertising agencies in early 1942 following federal govern-
ment requests for help in developing industrial mobilization campaigns,
the council “positioned itself as a private adjunct to the government’s war
information efforts.”25 Throughout that year, the council gained the upper
hand in the planning and design of government propaganda. From its
perspective, propaganda should connect victory to Americans’ personal
aspirations, especially those based on consumption. As Inger Stole points

out, the council had the advertising industry’s interests fully in mind. Its
president, Chester LaRoche, was eager that its public relations initiatives
would promote “a positive view of the industry behind the ads [while] giv-
ing advertising credit for ‘an important war job well done.’ ”26
As the council’s strategy gained dominance, OWI propaganda gradually
sidelined its earlier focus on fighting fascism in favor of advertising-based
messaging emphasizing the prosperity that workers would enjoy once vic-
tory was achieved. Telling was the OWI’s responses to posters and propos-
als for posters submitted by independent artists and members of the public,
many of whose messages encouraged Americans to join the fight against
fascism. The OWI rebuffed these proposals with rejection letters that
stressed the agency’s obligations to consistent messaging. As a typical rejec-
tion letter stated, although it received “many such suggestions from simi-
larly patriotically-inspired Americans,” it had to turn them down “because
our program involves long-range planning.”27 From the perspective of the
OWI, propaganda created by ordinary citizens and artists had no place in a
motivational campaign driven by the techniques of advertising specialists.
Amid the intense discord over propaganda strategy, Brennan resigned in
April 1943, asserting that the posters produced by “the Ad boys” assumed
that the “American people average twelve years old.” While “American
soldiers rotted in the desert heat,” he wrote, “the Graphics Division was
designing posters about ordering coal early.” And, with the “African cam-
paign at its height we are instructed to produce posters that would smile
cheerfully from the billboards, saying: ‘I’m happy with my new war job’ and
‘We’ll have lots to eat this winter, won’t we Mother?’ ” This approach had, he
added, “done more toward dimming perception, suspending critical val-
ues, and spreading the sickly syrup of complacency over the people than
almost any other factor in the complex pattern of our supercharged lives.”28
Brennan’s departure was swiftly followed by the mass resignation of over
twenty OWI staffers. A resignation letter signed by fifteen of them asserted
that “the activities of the OWI on the home front are now dominated by
high-pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest infor-
mation” and who believed that the only effective appeal to the public was
“the selfish one of ‘What’s in it for me?’ ”29 The resignations, along with the
rancor over poster policy, were widely reported in the nation’s newspapers,
130 | Chapter 4
many of which expressed trepidation at the new direction of the OWI’s

propaganda.30
This spate of resignations cleared the way for the War Advertising Coun-
cil to impose its ideas more fully on OWI poster policy. From this point for-
ward, the OWI’s posters revolved largely around visions of the prosperity
that Americans would enjoy once the war was won. As George H. Lyon, the
chief of the OWI News Bureau, wrote the day following Brennan’s resigna-
tion, “The self-interest of the individual is identified with the larger interests
of the Nation in a post-war world. For millions of ‘nest eggs’ will cushion
the jars of changing from war to peace. They will furnish fuel for energizing
our peace-time economic machinery.”31 To promote these future rewards,
the advertising specialists who steered poster design at the OWI deployed
the visual tropes of prosperity, economic self-interest, labor-management
cooperation, and a consumer-oriented American way of life anchored in
idealized images of the archetypal white family common in advertising
campaigns. These tropes aligned with the consensus about prosperity moti-
vation then emerging between the state, business, and labor leaders. Posters
produced by the federal government’s Office for Emergency Management,
which was folded into the OWI in 1943, illustrate these developments in
motivational poster design (figures 4.2 and 4.3).32
The OWI’s commissioning of advertising specialists to design posters
brought something to motivational discourse absent in previous decades: a
coherent “story” that defined work’s economic and psychological rewards as
both tangible and imminent. Although motivational discourse had always
touted promises of reward in exchange for hard work, such promises were
rarely linked to a convincing vision of workers’ lives as markedly better
in the future. The war changed this equation. In anticipation of a coming
postwar boom, designers were emboldened to assert that wartime sacri-
fices would be followed by prosperity. This change in tactics symbolized the
state’s deepening role in crafting accord between labor and business.
The OWI’s espousal of prosperity motivation shored up an idea that
became prolific on the American home front: that American workers were
free because, unlike those who toiled under the bootheel of fascism, they did
not need to be forced to work. Comparisons between the brutalizing slave
labor conditions experienced by workers under totalitarian regimes and
the freedom of American workers who threw themselves into defense work
without coercion served as a recurrent theme in propaganda produced not
Figure 4.2. Posters such as these, produced by the federal government’s Office for
Emergency Management, underscore the government’s use of idealized images of white
family–based prosperity and obligatory labor-management cooperation during the war.
National Archives, College Park, MD. Local Identifier 44-PA-2387.
Figure 4.3. Posters such as these, produced by the federal government’s Office for
Emergency Management, underscore the government’s use of idealized images of white
family–based prosperity and obligatory labor-management cooperation during the war.
National Archives, College Park, MD. Local Identifier 44-PA-1384.
only by the OWI but also by organizations dedicated to advancing business’s

authority. This discourse laid groundwork for later motivational rhetoric
contrasting American “free labor” and Soviet “slave labor,” which became a
powerful trope in early Cold War rhetoric asserting that American workers
were the freest in the world and received more abundant rewards than their
counterparts toiling under communism.33
Despite the OWI’s tributes to the freedom of American workers, its pro-
paganda depicted work and its rewards in highly gendered and racialized
terms. Office of War Information posters encouraging women to take war
jobs did not depict women of color and made clear that women would be
expected to resume their roles as homemakers after the war.34 Moreover,
while the OWI condemned the race-based ideologies of Nazism, the agen-
cy’s attempts to speak to the hopes and aspirations of black workers were
meager. Although it distributed a handful of posters depicting noted Afri-
can American servicemen, including Joe Louis, Dorie Miller, and a Tuske-
gee Airman, its output of posters portraying black workers on the home
front was minimal. One of the rare exceptions is a 1943 poster entitled
United We Win, which depicts a black worker and a white worker rivet-
ing an airplane turret. Another government-sponsored poster (produced
by the War Production Board), depicts an African American welder named
Obie Bartlett who had lost an arm at Pearl Harbor and was now working at
a West Coast shipyard.35
The OWI was more robust in using films to motivate African Amer-
icans. It also produced a large number of photographs of black workers
and other workers of color, which it published in pamphlets and distrib-
uted to the press.36 However, the OWI’s attempts to encourage African
American participation in the war effort faced impediments from the start.
Such problems were typified by reactions to Negroes and the War, an OWI
seventy-two-page illustrated booklet authored by Chandler Owen, a for-
mer radical who veered rightward during the interwar period. Like many
black intellectuals, Owen advocated that blacks throw their support behind
the war effort. Negroes and the War warned about the threats that Hitler
posed to blacks’ freedoms, a tactic that was employed by many civil rights
leaders.37 Some prominent black leaders argued that such messaging was
hypocritical, given the continued denial of civil rights in the United States.
Among these critics was William H. Hastie, a civilian aide to the secretary
of war who would later resign in protest over racial segregation in the U.S.
134 | Chapter 4
Army Air Forces. In a strongly worded letter in May 1942, Hastie criticized
Owen for minimizing the realities of lynching and racial discrimination
and rescinded his earlier support for the booklet during its drafting. Hastie
declared, “Men and women with personal experiences of racial discrimina-
tion as bitter as those of most Negroes are in no mood to be told how well
off they are. We need to direct our propaganda at indifferent or prejudiced
whites, not at resentful Negroes.” Signing off, he noted, “Morale will not be
improved by such a project.”38
Even stronger in its denunciations of Negroes and the War were con-
servatives in Congress, especially in the South. Many of them argued that
the booklet was an underhanded tactic to generate favor for the New Deal
among blacks or, alternatively, that its exclusive appeals to blacks threat-
ened to sow racial disunity, a complaint that ignored the fact that the vast
majority of propaganda portrayed white workers. One Louisiana congress-
man maintained that the booklet “undertook to glorify one race in the war.”
In turn, he warned, “such propaganda raises a race issue, which ought to
be kept down.” In the wake of such criticism, Congress cut funding for the
OWI’s Domestic Branch to a bare minimum, shelving its plans for further
literature aimed exclusively at African Americans.39 Although the OWI
distributed 2.5 million copies of Negroes in the War, its attempts to avoid
controversy and its concerns over how to square its appeals to blacks with
the realities of racism undermined further propaganda efforts targeted at
blacks. This stance led the OWI to rely even more so on its practice of por-
traying motivation via images of white workers. In turn, this tactic rein-
forced the decades-long assumption that white workers could stand in as
archetypes for the “typical” worker in motivational communications. The
OWI’s failure to significantly address the hopes and aspirations of work-
ers of color in its posters mirrored the entrenched racial discrimination
in industry during the war. Indeed, despite New Deal legislation barring
employers from discriminatory practices, black workers were routinely
hired in lower-paying positions, denied promotion, and subject to informal
discrimination throughout the war. The buoyant espousals of forthcom-
ing prosperity thus offered little hope to black, Latino, and other workers
of color who experienced scant economic and social gains during the war
compared with white workers.40
Despite the ubiquity of motivational sentiment in the wartime work-
place, workers hardly responded to it in lockstep.41 On the one hand, as
one worker reported, “After Pearl Harbor there was an immediate change
in people’s attitude toward their work—their sense of urgency, their dedi-
cation, their team work. When the chips were down, people dealt with it
like survival. Things that might have taken days longer were done to meet
a target so you didn’t hold somebody else up—even if it meant putting in
extra hours and extra effort.”42 On the other hand, visions of Americans
unified in the fight to defeat fascism and advance democracy were highly
romanticized. As a number of historians have demonstrated, workers and
the broader citizenry participated in the war effort with varying degrees of
enthusiasm and, for an array of reasons, not least the prospect of making
personal gains.43 In this regard, they were much like those in the theater of
war, only 13 percent of whom, according to a study of three thousand sol-
diers by the U.S. Army’s Research Branch, could name more than two of the
Four Freedoms that comprised the nation’s official war aims.44
In deploying prosperity motivation, the state and advertising specialists
established a more unambiguous explanation of what workers were fighting
for than was the case in early OFF and OWI propaganda. Yet, this strategy
also came at the cost of stifling earlier efforts to rally workers to the pro-
duction battle through warnings about fascism’s threats to democracy. The
orchestrators of wartime propaganda reasoned that individual consumer
freedoms, not popular opposition to fascism, should be the overarching
theme of motivational messaging. In the face of fascist coercion, rhetoric
about Americans stepping up to support the nation’s war objectives vol-
untarily added emotional weight to the notion that work was a route to
individual freedom. Contrived as it was, wartime assertions that Ameri-
cans were self-motivated came to embody a powerful ideological claim that
would help the state define American workers as the most free in the world,
an idea that employers would later use to counter labor unions’ efforts to
extract greater concessions for workers from management.
Although the wartime embrace of prosperity motivation and tributes to
cooperation received broad acceptance, it was ultimately more favorable
to business than to labor. The OWI’s motivational discourse, steeped as it
was in the language of labor-management cooperation and business leader-
ship, lent weight to antilabor and anti–New Deal ideologues. Union leaders’
abandonment of industrial democracy in favor of postwar consumer-based
rewards served similar ends. Together, these developments weakened the
militant stance that had served labor so well during the 1930s and helped
136 | Chapter 4
pave the way for unions to become absorbed into the labor-business con-
sensus of the postwar era, which framed work’s rewards around individual-
ism and classless ideals.45
Visualizing the Rewards of Work and Capitalism:

Sheldon-Claire’s This is America
The specialists enlisted by the federal government to produce workplace
propaganda included not only Madison Avenue advertising firms but also
independent poster suppliers. Early during the Depression, independent
suppliers of motivational publicity like the Seth Seiders Syndicate collapsed
as sales dried up in the face of employers’ economic belt-tightening. How-
ever, the intense emphasis on the need for maximum production during the
war prompted employers to take a more positive stance toward the use of
motivational messaging. This development opened the way for one of the
nation’s few surviving independent motivational firms—the Sheldon-Claire
Company of Chicago—to become an ally in the government’s motivational
efforts. As the most prominent independent poster firm to be commis-
sioned by the government during the war, a discussion of Sheldon-Claire
and its contribution to motivational design is useful in illustrating wartime
quests to hone propaganda for the factory.
Sheldon-Claire was owned and led by Lew Shalett, a businessman who
had worked as a poster salesman in the 1920s before launching the firm in
1936. Until the war the company specialized in motivational placards aimed
at salesmen, but in 1940, as American participation in the war grew more
likely, it abandoned these products and began producing slick motivational
posters for use in the factory. Aided by Ben Schenker, a communications
design specialist, and Charles Rosenfeld, the brains behind sales operations
for Seth Seiders Syndicate, Sheldon-Claire’s posters embodied the stream-
lined design sensibility and promises of prosperity that would become hall-
marks of wartime motivational propaganda.
Sheldon-Claire’s work for the federal government began in 1942 when
the government’s War Production Board commissioned it to produce a
poster campaign that, with its help, would be sent out to thousands of fac-
tories across the country. The campaign, This is America, symbolized the
growing sophistication of motivational propaganda.46 It included thirty
posters, each of which came in two sizes (four and one-half feet by two
and one-half feet and three feet by two feet), complete with frames and
spotlights to showcase the “poster of the week.” Individual posters depicted
Americans in an array of settings enjoying the rewards of American life,
which the campaign attributed to free enterprise. Sold by Sheldon-Claire’s
salesmen, who traveled the country calling on employers, and promoted by
government agencies, the campaign received wide usage. Large and small
firms alike purchased it, and some corporations bought several hundred
sets for their plants across the country.47
Thematically, This is America resembled Norman Rockwell’s Four Free-
doms paintings that were issued as posters several months later. However,
through its thirty-week display schedule, the campaign established a more
strategic approach to messaging than was achieved in early OWI posters—a
coherent and emotionally stimulating story that tied the personal aspira-
tions of ordinary Americans to the nation’s future. The four posters shown
below typify Sheldon-Claire’s proficient use of streamlined campaign design
(figures 4.4–4.7). Displayed in the workplace in weeks five, fifteen, nineteen,
and twenty-seven of the campaign, these posters portray the virtues of plu-
ralism (“the melting pot of liberty-loving people”); small-town life (“Main
Street” as a product of “free enterprise”); American freedoms (to “speak,”
“worship,” “work,” and “live in your own way”); and the “free” American
worker (who “Hitler hates” because he is “a man, not a slave”). The slo-
gans “This is America” and “Keep it free!” that announce and conclude each
poster conveyed an indeterminate yet powerful injunction equating belief
in the nation with being a good worker and citizen.
As this sample of posters illustrates, This is America’s messaging was
rooted in a strategic use of rhetoric about American democracy and an
adept use of emotionally stimulating images. The campaign, by including
other posters reminding workers of the freedoms they enjoyed in the work-
place, the home, and civic life, provided managers with a powerful story
about the rewards of work in a nation where class barriers were implied to
be nonexistent. The appeal of this story was based in part in the contrast
that it made between the autonomy experienced by workers (and citizens
more generally) in the United States and the oppressions of Nazism. Such
contrast was implicit in figures 4.4 and 4.6, which extol, respectively, Amer-
ica’s embrace of immigrants and citizens’ freedoms to “speak,” “worship,”
Figure 4.4 (left) and 4 .5 (right). The integration of altered FSA photographs into
This is America underscores the subtle process of image manipulation in the service of a
seamless motivational narrative. Two of the posters (figures 4.5 and 4.6) include altered
versions of FSA photographs created by Walker Evans and John Vachon, respectively.
Sheldon-Claire Company Records, 1942. Archives Center, National Museum of Ameri-
can History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Figure 4.6 (left) and 4.7 (right). The integration of altered FSA photographs into
This is America underscores the subtle process of image manipulation in the service of a
seamless motivational narrative. Two of the posters (figures 4.5 and 4.6) include altered
versions of FSA photographs created by Walker Evans and John Vachon, respectively.
142 | Chapter 4
and “work.” In other posters this contrast was more explicit (as is seen in
figure 4.7, which portrays the “free” American worker as the object of Hit-
ler’s “hate”). The serialized display of these messages and the blending of
older and newer images collectively suggested that America was and always
had been a bastion of freedom for workers and the broader citizenry. This
sentiment is established in figure 4.4, which includes a cropped and color-
ized 1909 photograph by Lewis Hine of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.
The campaign offered tributes to ethnic diversity in the form of copy that
emphasized melting pot idealism, and some posters included portrayals
of workers of differing ethnic appearances. It thus depicted motivation in
more inclusive terms than in the past when designers, assuming that immi-
grants had a low propensity for disciplined work, favored images of proto-
typically white workers. Such changes mirrored the declining authority of
such views in a period when immigrants were gaining acceptance as whites
and as “real” Americans.48 While underscoring ethnic diversity, however,
This is America did not depict workers of color, a practice largely mirrored
at the OWI. This omission echoed visually the fraught racial tensions of
the wartime industrial arena. During the war, white workers engaged in
numerous wildcat strikes in which they walked out of the factory in the
wake of new federal policies aimed at reducing racial discrimination in hir-
ing. In excluding workers of color, This is America offered daily reminders
in the factory that white and ethnic workers were the true embodiments of
American labor.49
This is America was rooted in a highly ideological reworking of the
meanings and rewards of work, one that linked workers’ freedom and pros-
perity to free enterprise and involved a literal adaptation of New Deal moti-
vational images. Seven posters in the series are based on photographs of
rural and small-town life created by the New Deal’s Farm Security Admin-
istration during the Depression. Photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker
Evans, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and John Vachon were cropped, colorized,
and recaptioned, producing a tribute to the individual rewards that workers
enjoyed because of free enterprise and cooperation. Created and used to
promote the FSA’s positive effects on rural farmers and their families, the
FSA’s photographs were already infused with motivational qualities, albeit
of a more subtle nature than in their adapted state in the posters. Modified
and integrated into This is America, these images of hope amid hard times
served just as well, Sheldon-Claire believed, for wartime motivational pro-

paganda. This adaptation of New Deal images, under way since the 1930s,
as we have seen, marked an increasing sophistication in motivational poster
design that would continue in the years ahead.
A brief discussion of this repurposing of New Deal images illustrates
the ideological process at work in the campaign. The adaptation of a pho-
tograph by Dorothea Lange typifies this process. The poster included in
this book’s introduction (figure 0.1) depicts five men from a hometown
baseball team. The group’s demeanor—hands on hips and steely stares—
suggests an aura of preparedness. The men’s close proximity to one another
and the unifying theme of baseball suggests a tightly knit group—a team
mentality. Above, the large caption stating, “This is America,” frames the
men as representatives of the nation. The honorific depiction of the group is
complemented by the caption at the bottom, which reads, “Where a fellow
can start on the home team and wind up in the big league. Where there is
always room at the top for the fellow who has it on the ball * This is your
America . . . Keep it Free!” This caption links the “team” in the image to the
free enterprise system, which is cast as an indubitable national ideal. The
poster’s vivid colors complement its message. The bright red gas pump that
dominates the building frontage at the center of the image, the blue overalls
and baseball caps, and the men’s white baseball uniforms and shirts—the
colors of the nation’s flag—reinforce the poster’s patriotic sentiments and
add urgency to its appeal. The poster’s image and text combine to uphold
the virtues of teamwork and individuality: by working together as a team,
workers would attain individual rewards.
Lange’s 1939 black-and-white photograph on which the poster is based
has a more mundane and austere tone than its reworked version in the
poster (figure 4.8). Lange’s caption reads, “Fourth of July, near Chapel Hill,
North Carolina. Rural filling stations become community centers and gen-
eral loafing grounds. The men in the baseball suits are on a local team which
will play a game nearby. They are called the Cedargrove Team.” The photo-
graph includes four men who are cropped out of the image in the poster. In
contrast to the poster’s unified, team-like aura, the nine men in the photo-
graph lack a unified sense of purpose. The photograph’s laid-back feeling
compared with the more urgent feeling implied by the poster is enhanced by
the inclusion of a large area of sky and foreground. The cutting, colorizing,
144 | Chapter 4
Figure 4.8. Dorothea Lange’s photograph on which Sheldon-Claire’s baseball-themed

poster (figure 0.1) is based. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/
OWI Collection, Washington, D.C. Reproduction no. LC-DIG-fsa-8b34021.
and recaptioning of the photograph, along with its integration into the
poster, dissolve the men’s loafing demeanor and transform the image into
a bold declaration of individual advancement. This feeling is reinforced
by the caption’s assertion that success is attainable for those who are “on
the ball” enough to “wind up in the big league.” This parable of upward
mobility embodies the essence of American conceptions of meritocracy: the
claim that regardless of status at birth, one can achieve economic indepen-
dence through determination and enterprise. Altered and integrated into
the poster, the photograph morphs into a rousing declaration that average
workers can attain success and security by their own determination.50
Figure 4.9. John Vachon’s 1941 photograph of a Minnesota farming couple.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection,
Washington, D.C. Reproduction no. LC-USF3427–063342-D.
The campaign’s reworking of New Deal images continued in a poster

that includes a modified 1941 photograph of a Minnesota farming couple
by John Vachon, in which the woman has been removed and the image
reversed and, again, colorized and recaptioned (figure 4.6). In Vachon’s
photograph, the farmer’s clothes appear well worn, suggesting the realities
of farm labor, and a building is visible to the right (figure 4.9). In the poster,
the now colorized image is cropped, removing the man’s lower torso and
diminishing the photograph’s “rougher” qualities. This cropping gives the
man a more elevated position in relation to the viewer, creating a more hon-
orific pose. His ruddy complexion, made possible by colorizing, suggests a
more healthful appearance than in the black-and-white photograph. The
phrase, “This is America,” positioned above over the man’s head against the
bright blue sky like a salute connects his seemingly motivated attitude to the
campaign’s patriotic sentiment. This theme is elaborated in the text below
the image that reminded workers who viewed the poster of the freedoms
the man enjoys as an American and that, by extension, they too enjoyed.
The alterations also reinforce the campaign’s theme of individual rewards.
Whereas Vachon’s photograph emphasizes the value of collaboration
146 | Chapter 4
(implied by the emphasis on the positive effects of the New Deal’s social
programs and the hard work of the man and woman), the poster presents
the man as an individualistic yet team-minded worker and thus the epit-
ome of management’s ideal employee.
A similar process of modification is used in the poster portraying “Main
Street” (figure 4.5), which is based on an altered version of Walker Evans’s
1937 photograph of Main Street in Moundville, Alabama, to symbolize
small-town America as a wellspring of free enterprise. Whereas the black-
and-white photograph by Evans suggests an uneventful scene, with just a
few people ambling on the sidewalk, the colorized image invokes a bustling
commercial hub replete with stores, cars, and trucks. The vivid blue, red,
and yellow of the stores and cars, along with the cropping and colorizing
of the photograph, the addition of text, and its integration into the vertical
format, suggest a sense of urgency reminiscent of a tabloid newspaper. The
poster’s final caption further amplifies the theme of small-town vigor, stat-
ing that “Main Street” is a place “where, through free enterprise, a free peo-
ple have carved a great nation out of a wilderness.” Ripped from the context
of Depression-era atrophy and integrated into This is America, the reworked
photograph brings Main Street to life as a foundation of American striving.51
When employers purchased This is America, they received another pow-
erful communications device, one that extended the campaign’s messages
to workers in their homes—its “employee mail-o-grams.” An adaptation of
the pivot man letters of the 1920s, each mail-o-gram consisted of a one-page
précis of the forthcoming poster and was mailed by employers to work-
ers’ homes a week before the new poster appeared in the factory to elab-
orate its core message. Steeped in patriotic sentiment, the letters allowed
employers to detail the poster’s main ideas to workers in advance, with the
goal of making them more receptive when viewing the posters on the fac-
tory wall. Many of the mail-o-grams espoused the individualistic rhetoric
about prosperity disseminated in the culture at large throughout the war.
Typical is the mail-o-gram in figure 4.10, which proclaims the rewards of
free enterprise for workers. Tapping the appeals to prosperity motivation
used throughout the series, it states in part, “[Hitler] hates you because
you have things; because as an American, you have more than any man on
earth. No other people have such freedom—such comforts as you. No other
people have so many radios, motor cars, telephones, refrigerators, wash-
ing machines, bathtubs and other goods in life. Because of this, Hitler calls
Figure 4.10. One of the employee mail-o-grams that Sheldon-Claire’s clients sent to
workers’ homes to inform them of the forthcoming “poster of the week.” Using these
mail-o-grams, employers extended the reach of motivational propaganda to workers’
homes. Sheldon-Claire Company Records, 1942. Archives Center, National Museum of
American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
you ‘soft.’ He believed you had grown too fat, too lazy, too self-satisfied. He
thought you weren’t tough enough or man enough to fight, to work, to sac-
rifice in defense of your rights.” The text expands this theme, asserting that
Hitler was driven by a desire to destroy workers’ individual freedoms. Thus,
148 | Chapter 4
he had plundered “warehouses” and “factories,” “enslaved their workers,”

and “depressed their living standards to build up his ‘master race.’ ” Now,
it warned, he wanted to seize the “richest prize of all . . . America—if he
could only get his greedy hands at your throat.” Losing the war, it explained,
“would mean to lose all—your rights as a free worker, your privileges as a
free citizen, your comforts—your individual liberties would vanish.” Work-
ers, it asserted, should “keep that in mind—every minute you are fighting
on the production front. This is your personal war—and your personal free-
dom is at stake.”52
While the claim that Hitler “hated” Americans because they had more
consumer freedoms grossly oversimplified his goals, it served as a powerful
ideological tactic in a wartime motivational campaign that American lead-
ers framed largely around the individual prosperity that workers stood to
gain or lose. Such sentiments worked in tandem with those of other mail-
o-grams delivered to workers’ mailboxes emphasizing the rewards they
enjoyed owing to the freedoms of speech, worship, and education. Woven
through the mail-o-grams was a recurrent reminder to workers that their
belief in the values celebrated throughout the campaign was imperative to
victory. As one mail-o-gram stated, “Your job is your opportunity to fight
the enemy. Your job is your way of keeping faith with America—yourself—
your children. Your job is your fox-hole—your hand grenade to score for
victory.”53
The wartime success of Sheldon-Claire and the slick design principles
of This is America reflect developments in longer-term efforts to advance
motivational discourse in the industrial arena. First, the war had revived
the privately owned motivational business that had been down on its heels
since the onset of the Depression. With motivation once again a national
prerogative, Sheldon-Claire, the most capable firm of its kind, was now
poised to revive the poster market in the postwar era. Second, the repur-
posing of New Deal photographs in This is America shored up an emerging
claim that the United States was a classless nation where workers would
enjoy capitalism’s abundant rewards if they embraced its values of cooper-
ation, teamwork, and individual reward. This ideal was amplified through-
out the war and into the postwar era as declarations about an imminent
consumer utopia free of class conflict gained traction in an increasingly
advertising-driven culture.
This is America also signaled the rise of a more robust approach to

emotional conditioning in the workplace that would only grow more
ingrained. From here on out, streamlined campaigns involving a strategic
coordination of images and words, image manipulation, and the integra-
tion of home mailings and other tie-in materials would become hallmarks
of modern motivational communications. Central to this new approach
was a calculated use of that most revered tool of salesmanship: repetition.
As Lew Shalett later remarked in the statement that heads this chapter, the
key to Sheldon-Claire’s wartime success was “repetition, repetition, repeti-
tion, repetition.” He informed his salesmen, “the greatest rogue in history,
Mr. Hitler, was shrewd enough to use that idea. He said: ‘You can take a
story—even a lie—and if you repeat it often enough you can make people
believe it.’ ”54 Although as a Jew and a passionate devotee of free enterprise
Shalett had no love for the sentiments of Nazi propaganda, he nonethe-
less admired its slick manipulation of images and words in the service of
mass indoctrination and would continue to exploit such practices to the
hilt after the war.
Business Propaganda in the Factory: NAM’s Work

Incentives Rhetoric
The rise of prosperity motivation provided new opportunities for business
organizations to hone their motivational propaganda and deploy it in the
factory. Among the most active and influential of these organizations was
the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Having developed an
ample motivational propaganda apparatus in the 1930s, NAM now sought
to calibrate its pro-business messaging with the wartime campaign for
industrial mobilization. While NAM’s propaganda consequently invoked
patriotic sentiment about boosting productivity and winning the war, its
main priority was to advance business’s long-term power and authority in
economic life. Victory over fascism was characterized as an afterthought
at best. At a time when American troops were dying in the battlefields of
Europe and the South Pacific, NAM’s motivational specialists were excit-
edly anticipating a postwar order in which the power of the New Deal and
labor unions had been eradicated and in which business leaders managed
an economy based on free market principles.
150 | Chapter 4
During the war, the National Industrial Information Council (NIIC), the
public relations agency for NAM, stepped up its use of newspaper adver-
tisements, radio spots, films, and posters aimed at workers. At the core of
its propaganda was the argument that business was better equipped than
government to boost productivity, secure jobs, and achieve a higher stan-
dard of living. In January 1944, Herbert Hosking, an NIIC publicity direc-
tor, decreed that the council’s advertising campaign should try to “convince
the public of industry’s social consciousness by dramatizing the identity of
our postwar objectives with those of the public.” The campaign, he added,
should emphasize that “full production” was the route to postwar prosper-
ity and that management was a proponent of “cooperation,” as opposed to
“the class warfare that has been promoted for the past decade.”55
Over the course of the war, NIIC enlisted managers to champion NAM’s
messages in the factory. By deploying speeches, literature, and films in the
factory, managers could, NIIC officials believed, serve as powerful agents
for NAM’s pro-business and anti–New Deal agenda.56 This approach grad-
ually took precedence over that of the 1930s, in which NAM tried to take its
messages to workers directly via billboards and other propaganda. Its new
strategem rejected the notion that NAM’s messages could be “reduced” to
the level of the “common man.” As Hosking wrote, NAM must “till the soil
of public opinion so that management’s recommendations will fall on fertile
soil when the appropriate time comes to make them.”57 The new approach
also favored the terms “incentives” and the “incentive system” over “free
enterprise,” which NIIC believed lacked “an intensely personal meaning to
the average citizen.”58 The strategy of NIIC signaled a significant shift in
business’s broader quest to turn the workplace into a motivational arena.
Now the largest and most influential business organization in the country
was using managers as agents in its crusade to advance its ideological war
against labor and the New Deal.
In its attempts to delegitimize labor unions and the New Deal, NIIC
focused its attention on honing NAM’s “incentives” rhetoric. One typical
NAM newspaper ad proclaimed that “centralized government planning and
bureaucratic domination of our economy” were inadequate “because FREE
MEN ACCOMPLISH MORE BY INCENTIVES, NOT COMMANDS.”
These “incentives” included “New Products and Better Values for consum-
ers,” the chance to make “A Fair Return on Capital for investors,” “Wages
that Recognize Efficient Production for workers,” and “Keen, Vigorous and
Fair Competition for management”—in short, the ideals then defined by
business leaders as central to a postwar consumption-oriented economy
based on free market principles.59 By couching its motivational discourse in
the language of consumer needs, NIIC helped elide NAM’s antilabor goals,
veiling them behind publicity about the benefits of “business management,”
a term that NAM believed would invite less criticism than “private owner-
ship,” which it felt placed unhelpful emphasis on business’s self-interest.60
In developing its vocabulary of incentivization, NIIC borrowed tactics
from the labor movement. An NIIC study of the CIO’s public information
program noted enviously the impressive messaging of the organization’s “39
international unions [and] 14,000 locals,” which served as “an active distri-
bution center through which CIO material reaches directly to millions of
workers and additional millions of housewives, preachers, non-industrial
workers, etc.” The report also noted the accessibility and adept use of emo-
tional communications in CIO publicity: “CIO material, every bit of it, is
written for the ‘milkman in Omaha’ and his family and friends. There is a
minimum of economics, few statistics, very little history and a maximum
appeal to emotion rather than reason. Every piece is an ‘eye-catcher,’ with
a minimum of text and a profusion of clever ‘art’ to hammer home the
points made. The whole emphasis is on effective content and [the] result is
highly effective but relatively inexpensive material. The most impressive of
the CIO booklets probably cost a fraction of the cost of [NIIC’s] ‘You and
Industry’ booklet.”61
The report went on to lament that “CIO’s program is appealing because it
expresses what the people want. To the people it is constructive.” For exam-
ple, a recent ad, “How’re We Going to Make Both Ends Meet?,” far outshone
NIIC’s endeavors. “With that appeal to the eye and current experiences of
millions of Americans,” it offered “a simply stated, highly plausible, argu-
ment for the guaranteed annual wage as the answer.” Similarly, the CIO’s
recent film, Hell Bent for Election, although “the last word in ‘corn’ judged
from any professional standpoint . . . carried a ‘wallop’ far greater than any
NAM movie.” The NIIC’s problem, according to the report, was that it felt
compelled to “rest its case on what we know the people should want based
on practical experience and sound economics. Thus we are compelled to
the position of opposing the people’s desires. Our insistence that we are
152 | Chapter 4
for jobs and high wages, etc. must be qualified by ‘but . . .’ or ‘if . . .’ At
once we are destructive.” The dry economic messaging of NIIC, the report
concluded, were no match for the CIO, which “writes for the masses.” The
NIIC, the report recommended, needed to learn from the CIO’s tactics if it
was to win workers’ support.62
Among the report’s proposals was “an overhauling of our public rela-
tions activities and material to broaden the market for our story”; a “com-
plete re-writing” of NIIC’s recent campaign materials; and the “production
now of ‘down-to-earth’ popularly written analyses of where jobs and higher
wages come from, the fallacy of the guaranteed annual wage proposal and a
simple statement of our social security philosophy—all for widest possible
distribution.”63 These tactics continued a trend that had been materializing
since the 1930s—the appropriation and reworking of labor’s populist rheto-
ric by management and its allies.
With the postwar era on the horizon, NAM and NIIC staffers’ discus-
sions about how best to delegitimize the New Deal became even more fer-
vent. Internally, each organization asserted that the New Deal was ushering
in “slavery” and that NAM stood virtually alone in the struggle to avert this
catastrophe by defending the “freedom” of workers and the broader Amer-
ican citizenry. An internal report on the development of NAM publicity in
March 1944 noted, “To convince people that freedom versus slavery is the
issue, requires us to convince them that President Roosevelt or the bureau-
crats (or any other group of personalities with whose ideology we take issue)
desire to make people into slaves.” The author lamented, however, that while
such rhetoric was useful in rallying NAM’s existing allies, it “makes few
converts . . . from the tremendous number of ‘middle-of-the-roaders’ who
hold the balance of power and should be our primary audience.” Dismayed
at what it regarded as a myopic public incapable of recognizing the tyranny
of FDR and the New Deal, the author noted that unfortunately for NAM,
this group “believes that we are free men.”64
The author suggested that NIIC employ in its advertising a slogan along
the lines of “Free Men Need Incentives, Not Commands,” a creed that he
believed was illustrated by the “oft-cited contrast between the initiative of
American and German soldiers.” Whereas the former adhered to “Incen-
tives” such as “Rewards” and “Encouragement,” the latter were subjected
to “Directives, Orders, Bureaucratic planning [and] Mandates.” The author
stressed that likening Roosevelt and his “bureaucrats” to the oppressions

associated with such German incentives would be highly beneficial to
NIIC.65 This thinking informed NAM advertisements like “The American
Way Is to the Right” (figure 4.11).66 Such cartoons conflated the New Deal
(symbolized by “government investment”) with Nazism and communism at
the same time. Even before the war was over, then, NAM was grouping one
of the United States’ allies—the Soviet Union—with fascists in its efforts to
delegitimize the New Deal. Such rhetoric also infused the materials circu-
lated by other pro-business bodies like the Citizenship Educational Services
Inc. The organization’s articles and cartoons compared the Nazis’ takeover
of industry with the New Deal’s regulation of business, suggesting that the
totalitarianism imposed on German workers was poised to spread to Amer-
ica due to the New Deal, leading to the “enslavement of labor.”67
Such self-serving sentiments underscore the extent to which business’s
most ardent champions were prepared to go to in using the war to advance
Figure 4.11. An advertisement circulated by NAM toward the end of World War II.
In correlating “government investment” (a euphemism for the New Deal in NAM’s
schema) with totalitarianism and defining “private investment” as the route to “jobs,”
“freedom,” and “opportunity,” the ad offered its viewers a clear rationale for the need to
replace the New Deal with a business-led economy. National Association of Manufac-
turers Collection (Acc. 1411), Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.
154 | Chapter 4
their private ambitions. At a time when Americans were dying on the

front lines, NAM and its allies were training their weapons not on Hitler
and the Axis powers but on what they claimed were more grave threats
to American democracy—the nation’s president, the New Deal, and labor
unions. In casting the American government as an agent of “slavery” and
dismissing the public as deluded “middle-of-the-roaders” who obstructed
business’s self-evident right to control the economy, NAM established blue-
prints for the ideology that management deployed in the workplace in the
years ahead. The dichotomy at the core of this ideology—between the tyr-
anny of government and labor unions and the freedom-granting effects of
business—provided cannon fodder in motivational campaigns that would
be unleashed in the factory by management at large industrial corporations
throughout the postwar period. The sentiments invoked by NAM were also
to become hallmarks of the free market ideology invoked by conservative
think tanks after the war and later became hallmarks of the New Right.68
Rationalizing Motivation: NAM’s “Soldiers of Production” Rallies
In 1943 NIIC launched a new motivational initiative (derived from its cam-
paigns of the 1930s)—its “Soldiers of Production” rallies. The rallies were
led by a roster of pro-business speakers whom NIIC dispatched around the
country giving speeches to large groups of workers in the factory at no cost
to employers, who typically arranged for the rallies to be broadcast on local
radio stations and reported on in local newspapers. For employers, the events
offered an appealing way to communicate motivational messages to workers
and to promote cooperation and loyalty. The rallies allowed NAM to bring
new energy to its motivational crusade. Between mid-1943 and late 1944, over
three hundred companies across the country staged rallies.69 As estimated
by NIIC, over half a million workers attended rallies between July 1943 and
January 1945, and 5.3 million listeners had heard radio broadcasts of them.70
Speakers from NAM included high-profile advocates of business leader-
ship and celebrated servicemen. Its roster featured such businessmen as Dr.
Allen Stockdale, a Christian minister and free-enterprise evangelist from
Oklahoma, and Dr. Neal Bowman, a former marketing professor at Temple
University. It also included Captain Edgar J. Wynn, a Canadian pilot, and
Colin McKenzie, a former merchant marine revered for having survived
three torpedo attacks in one day. Each of these speakers gave around
twenty-five speeches per month in 1943 and 1944, and sometimes more.71
The speakers were aided by NIIC staff, who supplied them with quotes
from pro–free enterprise literature to integrate into their speeches. In
December 1944, it sent its speakers a compilation of “sharp epigrams” from
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (cribbed not from the book itself but
a review of the book in the Atlantic Monthly), as well as some choice quotes
from writings by Alexis de Tocqueville, Peter Drucker, Walter Lippmann,
and the former socialist-turned-free-enterprise-advocate Max Eastman.
The quotes from Hayek consisted of warnings against monopoly that, in the
context of NAM’s schema, served as barbs against the excesses of the New
Deal. These included, “Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests
on the fact that if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to
another. But if we face a monopolist, we are at his mercy. And an authority
directing the whole economic system would be the most powerful monop-
olist conceivable.” A passage from de Tocqueville stated, “Democracy
extends the sphere of individual freedom; socialism restricts it. Democracy
attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere
agent, a mere number.” From Lippmann, NIIC provided a quotation lam-
basting “coercive organization” of the individual’s “affairs” and the “unifor-
mity” that it produced and, from Drucker, the assertion that “the complete
collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through
Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward totalitarianism.”72
Peppered into their speeches, these and similar quotes offered NAM’s
speakers some pithy condemnations of the New Deal and tributes to the
moral sanctity of free enterprise. Like “The American Way is to the Right”
and other advertisements, the speeches contradict the deeply held myth that
everyone put aside their interests and political differences during the war
in the name of national victory. While millions of Americans were being
called on to do their part by working longer hours, enduring rationing,
growing victory gardens, and putting private ambitions on hold, NAM was
busy using the war to advance its private interests by disseminating propa-
ganda that likened the New Deal to a totalitarian regime and impugned the
Soviet Union, an American ally.
As was the case before the war, the rallies were highly rationalized and
orchestrated affairs organized around NAM’s free enterprise messaging and
156 | Chapter 4
Figure 4.12. As illustrated in this page from its “Soldiers of Production” booklet,
NAM’s efforts to advance business’s authority drew on wartime theories of motivation
that encouraged managers to exploit the “social side” of the factory in order to promote
feelings of unity and instill employee discipline. National Association of Manufacturers
Collection (Acc. 1411), Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE.
steeped in spectacle. The main promotional booklet by NIIC outlined each

stage of its thirty-minute rally. As the booklet explained, each event began
with records being played while employees assembled. Second, the “Star
Spangled Banner” was sung by all, led by a company “song leader.” With the
audience warmed up, a company representative would introduce the NAM

speaker. With this, the rally entered its fourth and main stage: the twenty-
minute speech wherein the speaker called on workers to do their patriotic
duty by supporting the company and the war effort. With the main event con-
cluded, the company president took the stage to reiterate the importance of
the speaker’s sentiments and emphasize the need for workers to join the firm
and NAM in the war effort. Next, workers were asked to sing a patriotic song
led once more by the company song leader before the seventh and final stage
of the event, employees returning to work accompanied by recorded music.73
As NIIC reminded employers, the rally itself was but one part of a larger
motivational campaign strategy. The company would, it claimed, continue
to reap the rewards of the rally through subsequent broadcasts of the event
on local radio stations. A series of “follow-up” activities included the display
of photographs of and reports about the rally on plant bulletin boards; the
monthly distribution to workers of five-minute recordings by the speaker
containing an “inspiring message”; the display of cartoon-based posters
around the factory; and the circulation of NIIC messages via house organs
or NAM literature. By offering employers these motivational services, NIIC
claimed that its campaign could be “tailor-made” to suit the needs of each
company.74
National Industrial Information Council staff members accompanied
NAM speakers during the rallies to document the reactions of the workers
in attendance. Staff gathered quotes from workers and management, took
photographs for use in promotional copy, and conducted head counts of
attendees, then submitted reports to NIIC’s head office. The reports pro-
vided a wealth of information for the NIIC propaganda apparatus. In a
typical two-week period, a speaker would give between nine and twelve
speeches to crowds of between 5,000 and 13,000 workers. The audience was
boosted significantly by the radio broadcasts that typically followed each
rally. For example, an estimated audience of over 100,000 listeners in Balti-
more heard broadcasts of rallies that were attended by around 13,000 work-
ers in July 1943.75 This pattern was repeated throughout the country during
the war. In less than a week in late September 1943, nearly 5,500 workers in
Williamsport, Pennsylvania, attended fifteen rallies, but the recordings of
the rallies were heard by an estimated 225,000.76
In letters to their superiors, NIIC staffers reported enthusiastic reactions
to the rallies. In a 1945 letter describing a speech by Dr. Allen Stockdale to
158 | Chapter 4
a shift of African American women at a tobacco plant in Winston-Salem,

North Carolina, one staffer reported excitedly, “Oh, what a scene. 800 pres-
ent—750 of whom were colored women in their various colored costumes
and bandana head gear—right in the middle of big piles of leaf tobacco . . .
Can you picture 750 negro women singing ‘Remember Me’ and ‘Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot.’ (I guess we had better bring the show to Broadway).”77
As staffers’ reports about the rallies indicate, NIIC’s objective had far
less to do with increasing employee motivation and productivity than with
maximizing the audience for NAM’s anti–New Deal and antiunion mes-
saging. Daily, and over the long term, NIIC was focused on a finely tuned
numbers game. Selling the product—pro-business ideology—was the goal.
Increasing workers’ productivity and advancing the war effort barely regis-
tered in the minds of NIIC’s staff. Whether trying to enlist businessmen or
to sell workers on the virtues of free enterprise, NIIC was focused first and
foremost on expanding its audience.
At its core, the crusade by NIIC to indoctrinate workers through NAM’s
ideology amounted to an exercise in spectacle that, beneath staffers’ self-
assured pronouncements about the economic theories informing its vision
for America, was a slick salesmanship enterprise wrapped in a veneer of
intellectualism. In marshaling these methods, NAM and NIIC helped lay
the foundations for motivational specialists after the war. Similar methods,
as corporate motivational specialists would soon find, could supply power-
ful ammunition in their efforts to sell workers and the broader public on the
need for business and management leadership of the economy.78
Despite widespread wartime assertions about work’s rewards, the war

entailed ambivalent outcomes for workers. On the one hand, workers
broadly identified with the need to defeat the Axis powers, and in the wake
of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the nation’s formal entry to the war, mil-
lions took war jobs and experienced economic gains. However, despite
romanticized images of camaraderie in the wartime factory, there was little
unanimity about what workers were fighting for. Most workers were moti-
vated more by personal aspirations than by the lofty values embodied by
the Four Freedoms. Although a discussion of the attitudes of those in the
theater of war toward their work is beyond my scope, we should note that
they, too, were workers, and their motivations as workers were diverse. As
Michael Adams argues, popular assumptions that military members were
universally motivated by patriotism do not stand up to scrutiny. Interviews
and oral histories illustrate that those who served during the war were com-
pelled more by a commitment to their fellow troops than by idealism.79
Additionally, although the factory became more racially diverse, African
American and other workers of color were often funneled into lower-
paying jobs as employers found ways around New Deal labor laws. Women,
meanwhile, were often treated as second-class workers by men who bristled
at them taking jobs traditionally worked by men.80 For their part, union
leaders acquiesced under the pressure of war’s demands to managerial calls
for cooperation and unity. This development led union leaders to abandon
the militant stance that had proven so effective in advancing the cause of
industrial democracy in the 1930s.
World War II marked one of the most intense periods of development
of motivational discourse in the United States to date. Two main changes
stand out in particular. First are innovations on the design front, namely,
the rapid refinement of emotionally stimulating visual communications
and the rise of slick, streamlined campaigns. While these innovations were
not entirely new, they occurred at unprecedented speed as specialists like
the War Advertising Council, Sheldon-Claire, and NAM/NIIC became
instrumental in shaping motivational propaganda for use in the factory.
The second development was the adoption by motivational propagandists
in the latter stages of the war of a far more strategic approach to their mes-
saging than in the past. Most notable, with the postwar era on the horizon,
they began to infuse their messages with emotive visions of work’s long-term
rewards. In doing so, propagandists paved the way for the rise of a wide-
ranging apparatus for promoting the tenets of the emerging postwar order.
Those tenets—the ideologies of classlessness, consumption, and obligatory
labor-management cooperation—would soon form the foundations of the
most powerful motivational apparatus that managers and their allies had
ever deployed in the workplace.
CHAPTER 5
Selling Workers on Their Jobs
CONSUMPTION-B ASED MOTIVATION AND
MANAGEMENT DOMINION IN THE POSTWAR ERA
A really free people can live well materially and spiritually where there is
the incentive to work, create, compete, save, invest, and profit. But there
must be either force to drive men to work. Or there must be incentive to
make men want to work.
—Lemuel Boulware, General Electric’s vice president of employee
and community relations, 1949
As in all propaganda, the point is to make man endure, with the help of
psychological narcotics, what he could not endure naturally, or to give
him, artificially, reasons to continue his work and to do it well.
—Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s
Attitudes, 1965
Although World War II expanded motivation’s role in managerial quests

for control, widespread industrial instability in the war’s aftermath quashed
any hopes among managers and their allies that motivational messaging
would help them advance their ideological goals on a longer-term basis.
With mass layoffs of war workers across the country and fears of a return of
depression circulating in the press, workers had little to feel motivated about
and were hardly disposed to viewing management positively. Between 1945
and 1947, industry became a battleground in the struggle over the nation’s
political and economic future. Mobilized by their unions, millions of work-
ers went on strike, demanding wage increases to offset earnings lost due to
160
Selling Workers on Their Jobs | 161
wartime wage freezes. While the strikes stoked workers hopes for industrial
democracy, for management they served as a stark reminder that enlisting
workers’ spontaneous cooperation would be far from easy.
However, developments from the late 1940s onward gave managers
new reasons for optimism that motivational techniques could yield ben-
efits. Especially influential was the “consensus ideology” that dominated
the political and economic arena after the war. Consensus ideology rested
on two main precepts, each of which had a direct influence on employers’
motivational efforts throughout the postwar period. First, it asserted the
belief that mass consumption, fueled by the superior virtues of the “Amer-
ican way of life,” would lead to a rising standard of living for workers and
their families. In turn, consumption would end the class conflict that had
simmered for decades and give rise to a classless society. Second, it main-
tained that American capitalism was morally superior to communism and
antithetical to socialism. This view underpinned American efforts to con-
tain communism globally and supplied the foundations for domestic poli-
tics. Together, these two precepts became articles of faith among politicians,
businessmen, and civic leaders, reaching deeply into institutions.1
While the influence of consensus ideology is well known, its role in man-
agement’s efforts to advance its goals in the workplace has been less noted.
Following the war, the motivational apparatus—the communication forms,
techniques, rhetoric, and imagery through which managers and their allies
integrated motivation in the workplace—fully absorbed the edicts of con-
sensus. In the process, management integrated the legitimizing ideals of
mainstream political doctrine into its claims and advanced larger goals: to
weaken the visions of work upheld by the labor movement and the New
Deal. By realizing these goals, managers believed, they could extend their
authority beyond the sphere of industry, achieving dominion over the pre-
vailing economic ideas that governed the postwar order.2
Motivation gained further influence due to changes in large organiza-
tions. In the highly bureaucratic corporations that dominated industry,
staffed by a growing army of white-collar workers, effective communica-
tions techniques were considered essential to employees’ integration into
the firm and to organizational efficiency. The concept of communications
was attractive to managers also because it lacked the negative connotations
associated with propaganda, a term that came to be associated after the war
162 | Chapter 5
with misinformation and manipulation.3 These developments obscured the

fact that motivational campaigns now became even more concerned with a
strategic manipulation of the worker’s mind. As sociologist C. Wright Mills
observed in 1951, the period witnessed the rise of a new management tech-
nique for instilling discipline that relied not on control but self-control. The
aim of “the latest psychological equipment,” Mills observed, was “to have
men internalize what the managerial cadres would have them do, without
their knowing their own motives.” This approach was “more insidious than
coercion precisely because it is hidden; one cannot locate the enemy and
declare war upon him.”4 The motivational apparatus deployed by manage-
ment after the war operated partly in this way.
This chapter traces management’s use of motivational propaganda in
the postwar period. After charting some of the broader developments in
motivation, I examine motivational techniques deployed by two of the era’s
largest industrial corporations—General Motors and General Electric. As
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Kim Phillips-Fein have argued, business lead-
ers waged a relentless crusade to weaken the New Deal and labor unions
through pro–free enterprise and antiunion campaigns after the war.5 Moti-
vational propaganda, I argue, played an influential role in this crusade by
helping management to define cooperation and company mindedness as
obligatory in their employee communications. But the increasingly sophis-
ticated character of the campaigns offered management something further:
the ability to refashion the prevailing definitions of work and its rewards
and to tie them to new political and economic ideals. Although industrial
work became even more arduous owing to management’s speedup of pro-
duction and class grievances remained rife, management grew increasingly
effective at honing motivational ideology and “selling” workers on their
jobs. After several decades of experimentation, the motivational project
emerged as a coherent ideology. Its heyday had arrived.
Postwar Management and Motivation

Management’s efforts to exploit motivation were boosted significantly by the
dramatic developments in labor-management relations that followed the
war’s end. Particularly significant was the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Passed by a
Republican Congress in an attempt to weaken unions’ power and influence,
the act outlawed the closed shop (which many managers denounced as a
form of “compulsory unionism”); banned unions from engaging in sympa-
thy strikes and secondary boycotts; required them to expel members of the
Communist Party and other radical organizations; and barred supervisors
from joining the same unions as rank-and-file workers. No less consequen-
tial was the act’s “employer free speech” provision. This measure ended New
Deal regulations that prevented employers from criticizing unions in their
publicity.6 A further boon for management was that, in the atmosphere of
obligatory compromise that followed the act’s passage, labor leaders aban-
doned the commitment to industrial democracy that had galvanized work-
ers hopes in the 1930s and focused instead on winning wage increases. In
the aftermath of the labor-management settlements of the late 1940s, union
leaders became increasingly supportive of prevailing consensus ideals and
thus were less inclined to challenge management messaging than they were
in the past.7 With labor unions compromised amid these changes, man-
agement at large corporations felt increasingly emboldened in deploying
motivational techniques.
Motivation’s stock among managers also grew because it was now
enshrined in the empirical arguments of social science. The field of human
relations rapidly gained acceptance throughout management after the war.
Until the war’s end, its influence was mainly linked to the research of Elton
Mayo and his Harvard Business School colleagues. But now the field’s the-
ories worked their way into workplace policies. Human relations allowed
managers unprecedented stealth in their efforts to indoctrinate and disci-
pline workers. As Howell Harris points out, through human relations, many
managers sought to trade “crude authoritarianism” for “smooth manipula-
tion and persuasion.”8 The antiunion goals of human relations found cover
amid rhetoric about the freedom-granting properties of consensus and
Cold War discourse about the individual’s autonomy (which was habitu-
ally contrasted with the oppressive conditions under which workers toiled
under communism). Human relations specialists cast management as an
agent of liberal democracy and a friend of the worker, tactics used in differ-
ent ways for decades but now anchored in dominant national ideologies.9
Central in shaping management’s motivational apparatus was a branch
of human relations known as “employee relations,” or ER. After the war, ER
departments became familiar fixtures at industrial corporations, dealing
164 | Chapter 5
with all aspects of the employer-employee relationship, including employee

hiring, training, and education, as well as orchestration of motivational
communications devices, including posters, films, literature, employee
contests, and radio spots. Following the lead of Mayo and other human
relations theorists, ER specialists sought to ease conflict arising from dis-
satisfaction with Taylorism. At less than eighty dollars a year per worker,
ER programs were a cheap way to infuse the factory with motivational
sentiment and encourage “cooperative” attitudes.10 Between 1949 and 1950
alone, companies that had ER departments grew from around a dozen to
about fifty.11 Under the umbrella of human and employee relations, manag-
ers used motivational communications in far more rationalized ways than
in the past. For managers and the growing cadre of motivational specialists
in industry, such techniques became indispensable in the mission to instill
discipline in the factory. Moreover, from the late 1940s onward, workers
across industries were subject to increasingly homogenous motivational
sentiment as corporate ER specialists began to network with one another.
Spurred by conversations at the 1950 American Management Association
Conference, ER specialists from large corporations began to meet annu-
ally to share research findings on employee motivation under the name
“Dearborn Group.” The group’s thirteen members included representatives
of General Motors, Ford, AT&T, DuPont, Inland Steel, Esso, Standard Oil,
and U.S. Rubber, collectively employing around 1.6 million workers.12
Distinct in the era’s motivational research was its extensive integration
into university-led research initiatives and private consulting. The former
included the University of Chicago’s Committee on Human Relations in
Industry and its Industrial Relations Center, each of which conducted large
studies into motivation in conjunction with major industrial employers.13
No less influential in the rise of motivation were private consulting firms.
Among the motivational services taken up by employers were employee
attitude surveys, counseling and interviews, films and literature, and
employee education courses.14 Whether in the form of formal research
studies or employee communications, human relations helped manage-
ment to integrate motivational techniques into the firm’s culture. By the
early 1950s, motivation was cited increasingly by management specialists
as an important priority for organizations. In a sign of this shift, the first
section of one of the major management textbooks of the period, Morris
Viteles’s Motivation and Morale in Industry, published in 1953, was enti-

tled “Mobilizing the Will-to-Work” and included chapter-length discus-
sions of morale building, teamwork, and the integration of workers into
the organization.15
Amid the mood of consensus that infused industry and the culture at
large, management invariably couched work’s rewards in individual terms.
This tactic took its cues from the prosperity motivation that proliferated
during the war. In the minds of many businessmen, the state had stimulated
class consciousness through the New Deal. They believed that appeals for
a spirit of collective support for the war effort, though necessary, had also
encouraged communitarian-based ideals of work that invoked the specter
of class consciousness and thus now needed to be reined in. Like earlier
devotees of motivation, management experts believed that industrial sta-
bility would occur only if workers abandoned their “maladjusted” collec-
tive class sympathies. Motivational messaging paid tribute to the “average
family man” who strove to give himself and his family a life of consumer
abundance made possible by a rising standard of living.16 Such sentiment
modified the Depression-era ideal of communitarian striving, swapping its
class idioms for promises that workers could reap material and psycholog-
ical rewards by embracing consumer capitalism. By integrating such rhe-
torical language into the workplace and other spaces where workers were
exposed to mass publicity, management hoped to banish communitarian-
based motivation, along with its class-based intonations, to history.
Behind the sanguine messages about workers’ consumption- based
rewards were some less favorable realities. Although wages increased and a
rising standard of living did occur for many workers, as journalist Godfrey
Hodgson argues, the much-touted gains made by ordinary Americans were
modest when considered alongside those better off. Moreover, the rising
standard of living was far from a cure-all for class inequity. This ideal’s most
notable effect, Hodgson argues, was to institute the illusory impression that
a “universal middle class” had arrived, making class an irrelevancy and
pushing class to the margins of national discourse.17 Moreover, although
wartime ideals of racial pluralism continued to flourish and workers of
color made gains as many corporations implemented racial desegregation
and antidiscrimination policies, when it came to motivation, most special-
ists lagged behind, depicting white and usually male workers as the default
166 | Chapter 5
symbols of motivated labor in posters, films, and other media, as if follow-

ing scripts written in the 1920s.18
Some observers doubted the effectiveness of corporate attempts to influ-
ence workers’ minds in the 1950s. Among the most noted critiques was
William H. Whyte’s 1952 book Is Anybody Listening? His answer to this
question was clear: “The evidence is frighteningly strong that they aren’t.
The employee, surveys indicate, is as misinformed about business as ever.”
Corporations’ campaign to sell workers on the merits of free enterprise, he
argued, was “not worth a damn.” Much of the publicity produced in the
“Great Free Enterprise Campaign,” for workers’ edification, he observed,
reflected the obsessions of businessmen and public relations (PR) special-
ists more than it influenced workers.19 Whyte was correct that such pro-
paganda was largely an expression of business’s own preoccupations. Yet
what he failed to recognize was that the point of such efforts was not to
“convince” workers but to recast the prevailing definitions of work and its
rewards within the organization and in the culture at large in the case of PR
campaigns. By doing so, communications specialists believed, workers and
the public could be habituated to the idea that labor-management cooper-
ation, free enterprise ideals, consumption-based values, and other familiar
postwar precepts were “official.” If individual workers identified with spe-
cific assertions, well and good, but molding the official values of the orga-
nizations in which people worked and lived was the major goal of such
campaigns.20
The motivational project gained momentum because its sentiments
aligned closely with the era’s political and economic orthodoxies. The
Keynesian faith in cooperation and consensus, as well as its claim that class
inequities were receding amid the postwar boom, reached deeply into Amer-
ican life even as class grievances remained as rife as ever. Assertions about
the arrival of a classless social order spread through advertising and PR,
each of which echoed the prosperity-fueled rhetoric espoused by the field
of motivational research (MR), which flourished after the war. Rooted in
Freudian theories originating in prewar Vienna, MR emphasized the happi-
ness that Americans would attain if they embraced consumer-based desires.
The field’s most prolific devotee, Ernest Dichter, achieved fame and fortune
advising leading corporations on the hidden desires that compelled people
to buy products. An Austrian-born Jew who fled Europe amid the rise of
Nazism in 1938, Dichter founded the Institute for Motivational Research in

1946 and conducted numerous studies on consumer motivation. He advised
his corporate clients that products were “symbols of personal growth and
creative self-expression” that could help alleviate and offset class-based dis-
enchantment if presented effectively through advertising.21
While management remained focused on assuaging class grievances by
touting the rewards available to workers if they embraced consensus ideals,
on its lower frequencies, workplace motivation began to adapt MR’s rheto-
ric about personal fulfillment. In an era when work itself became increas-
ingly punishing on the mind and body due to speed-ups of production, and
when automation further eroded workers’ autonomy on the line, employ-
ers instead proclaimed the extrinsic rewards that work supplied through
competitive wages and access to consumption. This tactic echoed some of
Peter Drucker’s postwar writings. Drucker argued that the corporation, as
“the representative social institution of our time,” was the most important
mechanism for integrating the individual into society. Only by harmoniz-
ing the interests of management and workers, he argued, could manage-
ment achieve this goal.22 For many employers, promoting consumer-based
rewards and the familial bonds available to employees at large industrial
corporations presented a means to achieve such ends. Much like the adver-
tisements for consumer goods created by Dichter and other MR specialists
that saturated the culture at large, the goal of the motivational techniques
they deployed was to mitigate the class-based disenchantments arising
from lost autonomy in an industrial society by exposing workers to contin-
ual reminders of the value of work.
The quest for authority in industry was hardly a one-sided affair. Through-
out the postwar era, labor unions waged their own campaigns to maintain
workers’ allegiances and win over younger employees, few of whom had a
strong affinity with the hard-fought union struggles of the past. To these
ends, unions promoted “social unionism” by using newspapers, magazines,
radio, posters, and films, as well as sport and entertainment. As robust as
unions’ efforts were, however, they struggled to match the scale and sophis-
tication of management’s communications apparatus. Often underfunded,
unions’ endeavors to secure workers’ loyalties failed to match those of busi-
ness. No less problematic was that the central message of union publicity—
the need for economic security and a rising standard of living for workers
168 | Chapter 5
and their families—was often the same as that espoused by management.

Faced with powerful organizations like the National Association of Manu-
facturers and well-funded corporate campaigns, labor unions consistently
found themselves at a disadvantage.23
Throughout the era, American motivational specialists and managers
continually contrasted the “voluntary” nature of cooperation in the fac-
tory with the forced coercion imposed on workers in the Soviet Union.
Yet despite its democratizing lingo, the aim of motivational propaganda in
America was the same as that used under the aegis of communism: to instill
morale and discipline among workers and render them more productive
and easier to control.24 American-style motivation resembled the forms of
soft coercion endemic to the postwar era.25 Although Americans liked to
think of their relationship to work in democratic terms, the motivational
propaganda they were exposed to was no less manipulative than that used
elsewhere. Such conclusions are evident in the techniques deployed by the
nation’s industrial giants.
Motivation as Social Science at General Motors

Nowhere did the management quest to exploit motivation flourish more
than at the nation’s largest industrial corporation, General Motors (GM).
The company’s interest in employee motivation was prompted in large
part by a desire to establish managerial authority over the United Automo-
bile Workers (UAW). One of the most militant unions in the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), the UAW had been in a long struggle for
influence over industrial planning. At the end of the war, the UAW staged
widespread strikes in efforts to recoup wages lost due to wartime wage
freezes and to force management to accede to the union’s demands. The
ensuing labor-management conflict led to the most acrimonious strikes in
the country since those of 1919, culminating in a 113-day stoppage in 1945–
46 involving over 200,000 workers.26 The strikes eventually ended in a his-
toric compromise in which the UAW won significant wage increases for
workers while abandoning its more radical aspirations amid the pressures
imposed by the new bargaining environment of the late 1940s.27 But for
management, the strikes prompted renewed efforts to advance the firm’s
motivational apparatus.
In the face of looming postwar conversion of industry back to peacetime

production and the threat of expanded union power, GM embarked on a
wide-ranging campaign to generate employee goodwill toward the com-
pany. This campaign was largely concerned with employee motivation, a
goal that it approached by attempting to focus workers’ minds on the “pos-
itive” aspects of their jobs. Specialists at the firm’s Employee Research Sec-
tion, which it founded in 1945, coordinated this task. Steeped in social sci-
ence techniques and human relations rhetoric, the section mounted one of
the era’s most extensive projects to integrate motivational communications
in the factory. Into the mid-1950s, the section’s employee relations special-
ists produced an array of communication forms, including employee con-
tests, literature racks, films, posters, and suggestion schemes. Espousing the
superior rewards enjoyed by workers at GM relative to other employers, the
firm’s competitive wages, and the sense of community in the “GM family,”
the firm’s motivation-infused campaigns sought to sell management’s ideas
directly to employees.28
The firm’s motivational initiatives also spoke to the broader quest to
produce a more integrated organization in which workers equated their
interests with those of the company and management, ideas reflected in
the influential writings of management theorist Peter Drucker. In his 1946
book, Concept of the Corporation, Drucker encouraged managers to under-
stand that their efforts to establish legitimacy were dependent on recog-
nizing the corporation as a “social institution.” Among the corporation’s
main social functions were to instill a sense “dignity” and “status” and to
encourage workers to believe that they could advance in society. The chal-
lenges, he argued, were rife in the auto industry, especially GM, where he
conducted much of his research for the book during the war. The worker, he
wrote, “often . . . has no idea what he is doing or why. There is no meaning in
his work, only a pay check.” Thus, it was vital to provide him with a feeling
of control over his work and a feeling of being a “partner” with manage-
ment.29 For decades, Drucker’s arguments have been cited in management
textbooks as evidence of the rise of a more humane and democratic form of
management. Yet, Drucker’s theories did not depart from Frederick Taylor’s
view that management should control all aspects of production.30
Although GM’s top brass rebuffed many of Drucker’s proposals (he
encouraged management to cultivate a more worker-centered production
170 | Chapter 5
ethos to aid long-term economic viability), the firm was more recep-
tive to his ideas about creating a “responsible worker” who had a “man-
agerial aptitude.”31 C. E. Wilson, the executive who founded the Employee
Research Section, was especially supportive of these ideas; for him, Druck-
er’s thoughts embodied a useful strategy of motivation, given that the UAW
expanded its own efforts to win workers’ allegiances after the war. These
initiatives included educational programs, numerous newspapers and other
literature, its own stores, radio shows, as well as recreational activities that
spanned sports, musical groups, and hobby exhibitions.32 Over the next few
years, GM found that its ER campaigns were an expedient tool for under-
cutting the UAW’s community-building strategy.
Motivation through Positive Thinking: The “My Job and Why I

Like It Contest”
General Motors’ most prominent motivational campaign, its 1947 “My Job
and Why I Like It Contest” (MJC), invited all hourly paid workers to submit
letters explaining why they “liked” their jobs, and offered as incentives over
five thousand prizes (all of which were GM products), including cars for the
forty letters that its panel of judges deemed the best. For at least two reasons,
labor historians have generally not dwelled on the MJC. First, thousands of
the submissions were from salaried, white-collar, and nonunion employees
(who were more likely than blue-collar workers to adopt the affirming rhet-
oric that GM wished to elicit). Second, workers expressed positive regard
in hopes of winning a prize, and therefore, the letters did not reflect their
real attitudes. However, the fact that the contest was a deceptive effort to
generate employee goodwill toward the firm is precisely what makes it a
useful case study into motivational ideology. Not only did it embody man-
agement’s larger strategic effort to undermine unions in the Taft-Hartley
era, but it was also one of the first major postwar motivational initiatives to
apply social science techniques. An examination of the contest thus allows
us to grasp both GM’s adept honing of motivation and the rationale that
informed the postwar motivational project more generally.33
The MJC was publicized with great fanfare for several months prior
to the entry deadline and generated a participation rate of over 58 per-
cent, with nearly 175,000 workers in forty-nine states submitting letters.34
General Motors’ employee- relations specialists, Chester Evans and La

Verne Laseau, the contest’s principal organizers, described its objectives
in a 1950 research monograph: “To encourage more constructive attitudes
in the minds of employes [sic] by directing their attention to the positive
aspects of their jobs . . . To place certain educational bulletins in the hands
of employes that would indicate some of the benefits derived from employ-
ment with General Motors . . . To collect material for the enlightenment
of supervisory and management groups [and] To obtain a body of data
for the analysis of employe-attitudes.”35 The firm also hoped that the con-
test would aid its mission to redefine foremen as members of management
and linchpins of cooperation. To give workers “a natural reason for talking
with employes,” the organizers assigned supervisors the task of distributing
entry forms and publicity to workers in the months prior to the contest
deadline.36
As indicated by its title and its goals, the contest was a deeply ideolog-
ical exercise in engineering positive regard for GM among workers and
in crafting the image of a harmonious “GM community.” The firm viewed
these objectives as highly desirable given that workers and management
were engaged in another contest during this period—a highly acrimonious
one—over wages and labor’s role in industrial planning. The MJC publicity
made clear to workers that only “positive” comments about their job and
GM were appropriate, effectively precluding critical responses from win-
ning entries. The organizers’ claims that the contest offered a window into
the “true feelings” of the rank and file prompted skepticism among many
workers, as well as from the UAW, not least because thousands of the entries
were submitted by white-collar workers, a fact that was obscured by GM’s
characterization of the letters as the collective expression of “GM employ-
ees.” In response to the artful stratagem behind the contest, Walter Reuther
lambasted it as a “one-sided opinion poll” aimed at eliciting favorable state-
ments about GM from employers that could “later be used in so-called
goodwill advertising.” He suggested that it should have been called “What
I Like or What I Don’t Like about My Job.”37 At least one union publication,
Flint Local 659’s The Searchlight, included letters from workers satirizing
the contest in the form of mock entries that poured scorn on GM’s history
of union-busting tactics and emphasized the CIO’s pivotal role in forcing
the company to improve working standards.38
172 | Chapter 5
In the weeks prior to the contest, supervisors throughout the company

were briefed on its “background, mechanics, and overall objectives” and
received a “Plan Book” explaining how to administer promotional activi-
ties.39 Managers received posters, banners, streamers, and other materials
for installment during a “teaser campaign” to “arouse curiosity and stimu-
late interest” among workers for two weeks prior to the contest.40 The firm
encouraged managers to supplement this campaign with their own public-
ity and to print workers’ guesses about the meaning of the teaser slogans
in plant newspapers. It also instructed managers to ask local radio stations
to cover the MJC and supplied a “sample script” that modeled a typical
exchange between the radio interviewer and a worker. Before the contest,
some plants organized floats and paraded them through the town, while
others held open house events (to “acquaint ‘homefolks’ with the employe’s
job”). Many such events drew audiences ranging between twenty thousand
and forty thousand.41 As illustrated below, promotional materials encour-
aged workers to approach their letter as a “family affair,” portraying a male
worker writing his letter at the dining table aided by his wife and children
(figure 5.1).42 Materials like this helped organizers tap the emotionally pow-
erful ideology of “containment,” which, as Elaine Tyler May argues, desig-
nated the home-centered family as a “psychological fortress” against class
rhetoric and Cold War threats.43 General Motors also tried to boost partici-
pation by emphasizing that workers could win regardless of writing ability.
A postcard mailed to employees’ homes depicted a bust of a frowning Wil-
liam Shakespeare next to that an “average” worker. Its caption stated, “You
don’t have to be a GENIUS . . . So, you’re not so hot as a writer? So what?
You don’t have to be a good writer to enter—or even to win—the big ‘My
Job’ contest.”44
Contest publicity drew on the ideas of positive-thinking author Norman
Vincent Peale, who advised GM during the design stage.45 This publicity
made clear to participants that expressing a “positive” disposition in the
letter would be advantageous. At the outset of the promotional stage, work-
ers received three “Thought Starter” booklets whose sentiments resembled
the “Thought Conditioners” in Peale’s books. The first, “Getting Started,”
invoked the tone of a heart-to-heart talk, using “we” and “our” to define
the worker as a member of a community united in moving beyond nega-
tivity: “Few things in life are perfect. Our daily contacts and associations all
Figure 5.1. “Poster no. 6,” “Plan Book for General Motors Employes.” Kheel Center
for Industrial Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. License supplied by the General
Motors Media Archive, GM Heritage Center, Sterling Heights, MI.
leave certain things to be desired. In fact, it’s easy to concentrate so much

on what’s wrong that we entirely lose sight of the good things we have. For
example, there are things many of us criticize about our government, but
not one of us would want to trade the American way of life for any other.
The same holds true of our jobs. No job is perfect. But whatever your job
174 | Chapter 5
may be, there are many good things about it.”46 The booklet thus proscribed
narrow limits on the commentaries that workers should offer regarding
their employer and job. Similarly, the design of the entry form discour-
aged workers from expressing “gripes.” The form also instructed workers
to include any critical comments in the “P.S.” section on the back of the
form (subtly categorizing such comments as afterthoughts that should be
expressed separately from the letter).47 Workers evidently took the hint that
critical comments would not help their chances of winning: just over 7 per-
cent of entrants used this section.48
General Motors described the judging process with the same lingo used
in contest publicity, informing workers that their letter would be assessed
based on “sincerity, originality, and subject matter, without consideration
of writing ability.”49 In reality, judging was a highly orchestrated exercise
in codifying “positive” employee attitudes. In turn, the project’s coordina-
tors aimed to establish the firm’s transparency in the eyes of employees and
the public and, as Reuther and many other critics claimed, generate a body
of data through which to uphold management’s legitimacy. To categorize
workers’ responses, the adjudicators (GM appointed the Statistical Analysts
Company of Detroit to conduct this work) developed a list of seventy-nine
recurring themes present in a sample of one thousand letters and produced
a coding manual based on them. The analysts later condensed the themes
to a list of eighteen. Next, a team of around forty “coding readers” coded all
174,854 letters, scoring how closely each articulated the themes listed in the
manual on an International Business Machines card.50
Of the letters submitted, reproductions of a mere seventy-one survive
(the forty first-place winners, which were reproduced in a GM book-
let titled “The Worker Speaks,” and thirty-one nonwinning letters, which
Evans and Laseau included in their book). General Motors has declared
neither its reasons for discarding the bulk of the letters nor when it took
place. Whatever the case, this occurrence illustrates the calculating nature
of the firm’s use of a mere fraction of the entries to support its claim that
workers held a positive outlook on their jobs and the company.51 Two main
themes appear in all the winning letters, as well as most of the available
nonwinners. First, they laud GM’s democratic values and humane man-
agement. Second, authors extol the “GM community” and the “American
way of life” (and variants of these terms). The extant letters reveal that
many participating workers adopted the rhetoric espoused in the contest

literature (expressing, for example, a belief in the possibility of personal
advancement at the firm and identification with the GM “family”). Many
also tied their personal or family histories, and often their journey toward
citizenship, to their employment at GM. Accolades to GM products and
pride in being a GM employee appear often, as do expressions of patriotism
and denouncements of America’s enemies (fascism during World War II
and communism amid the current Cold War). While the specific themes of
the surviving letters vary, one trait is quite consistent: many of the authors
invoke the style and tone common in much of the era’s canned advertising
and PR speech and the sponsored radio soaps of the era that included plugs
for manufacturers. This tendency is hardly surprising given that the advice
offered to participants in promotional materials was itself steeped in such
language. Many employees evidently took the hint, resulting in letters that
could have passed for advertisements for General Motors.
A brief discussion of three letters, chosen for their typicality of the extant
entries, illustrates how employees adopted the language modeled in the
promotional materials. Betty Kraft, a secretary to the head of GM’s patent
office, couched her appreciation of her job within an account of a recent
interaction with her son Carl. Declining Carl’s request that she stay home
from work to spend time with him, she segued into an homage to the firm.
“From the time I was a little girl going to school,” she explained, “I have
heard the remark, ‘If it’s made by General Motors it must be good!’ and
General Motors has maintained that reputation for honesty, dependability
and fairness toward employees and customers alike all through the years.”
After this syrupy opening, she told Carl about the “spirit of good fellow-
ship enjoyed by G.M. folks” and the company magazine of the same name,
which helped “bring us closer to our fellow workers and acquaint us with
the many activities engaged in by those employees.” She added that “in a
few years” he could participate the “Annual Soap-box Derby sponsored by
Chevrolet Division of General Motors (you know, Chevrolet, the kind of
car we hope to have some day). It’s a wonderful thing for growing boys,
develops sportsmanship, ingenuity and ability to think for themselves.”
After telling Carl that “Future” at GM “means not only years of steady
and fruitful employment with an established and respected firm” but also
“the GM Retirement Plan,” which will “help me to be independent in the
176 | Chapter 5
later years of my life,” Carl said his prayers and, with a sentiment that must
have thrilled the judges, “asked the Lord to ‘God bless General Motors!’ ”52
Indeed, Kraft’s approach impressed them: she was one of the forty first-
place winners. She got her Chevrolet in the end.
It remains entirely possible that many authors of such letters, even
though adopting an overly sentimentalized parlance, did hold a highly
positive regard for their jobs and the firm. However, more important than
ascertaining how participants “really” felt is to grasp the contest designers’
success in coaching them to adopt sentiments and phrasings that helped
GM to amass “evidence” of workers’ goodwill toward the firm and, in turn,
management’s legitimacy from workers’ perspectives. Whether such letters
reflect authors’ strategic efforts to win a prize or genuine positive regard
for GM, the exercise helped GM to get workers to define themselves as
contented, loyal, and motivated employees. For the contest’s orchestrators,
workers’ true feelings were irrelevant. The payoff for the firm was the letters,
which could be reproduced for years in company publicity—the “so-called
goodwill advertising” that Walter Reuther predicted.53
The next two examples were not winners, but they typify tactics used by
many authors. The first writer structured his letter around his family’s jour-
ney toward American citizenship. He explained that after emigrating from
Italy in 1920, he had encountered hardships as a non–English speaker with
six children and no steady job. The turning point came, he wrote, when he
joined GM’s Chevrolet division in 1934. There he experienced the “team
spirit and loyalty” of his new workmates, as well as “security” and “comfort
in peace of mind.” World War II, he wrote, brought home the full signifi-
cance of his job by teaching him that “my job was more than a job . . . It was
an INSTRUMENT—maybe you’ll call it a Gun . . . A Tank . . . A well trained
army . . . But to me it was an INSTRUMENT with which to fight for the
Freedom of our country . . . an INSTRUMENT with which to insure us of a
free press, Free Religion, and a chance to work side by side with our fellow
men and enjoy life as only a free American can.” These realizations, he con-
cluded, “OPENED A NEW WORLD FOR ME . . . one that has enabled me
to raise a good American family . . . that is more than proud to be associated
with the General Motor Industry.”54
The final example, written by a machinist, underscores how some
entrants adopted rhetoric modeled in contest publicity about the virtues
of capitalism and the problems caused by “griping” (a management euphe-

mism for union agitation). The author included nineteen short paragraphs,
each of which offered a reason for his job satisfaction. Dismissing the need
for unions, he declared, “I have never felt any necessity for having anyone (or
any committee) speak for me when I considered that I had a ‘grievance’—I
have been courteously heard (even when I was not necessarily courteous in
my complaint) and fairly treated.” He was equally dismissive of complaints
about poor working conditions, explaining, “I have yet to meet the ‘Simon
Legree’ type of foreman I had thought to find.” The “average factory worker,”
meanwhile, was not “slaving his life away for a mere pittance.”55
The author’s reference to Simon Legree, the brutal overseer in Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, echoed statements in the contest
guidelines. Adopting this terminology once more, he scoffed that “factory
workers do most of their ‘griping’ about their jobs because it has long been
the popular thing to do—and that they do not realize the bad light in which
it places them in the eyes of people who do not know the actual conditions.”
To conclude, he lauded the virtues of “free Private Enterprise,” adding that
he had “a large and healthy fear of Communism, Socialism, or any other
form of government control of industry.” He concluded, “Private Enterprise
is such an integral part of Democracy that I cannot conceive of the one
without the other. The attempts of the ‘little minds’ to shackle the ‘great
minds’ of the nation is a real threat to our progress, freedom, economy, and
to our very system of government.”56
In deploying the rhetoric of advertising, American exceptionalism, and
free enterprise, these three letters typify some of the most common tactics
used in the extant letters (and, Evans and Laseau’s report of the contest
claimed, the entries more generally). Given GM’s extensive coaching, it is
hardly surprising that workers adopted these tactics. The firm succeeded in
prompting workers to submit letters that confirmed the image that it set out
to create—one of a content workforce that identified with the firm. Thus,
the contest demonstrated a recurrent principle of motivational ideology:
In order to be effective—to shape workers’ dispositions, values, and behav-
iors in ways favored by management—genuine identification was unneces-
sary. Training workers to adopt positive sentiment was enough.57 As Seth
Seiders and his associates had recognized two decades earlier, what workers
actually thought of motivational messages was secondary to controlling the
178 | Chapter 5
prevailing definitions of work and its rewards. Moreover, the contest was
far from a “one-shot” event. The publicity that it generated proved helpful
for years to come as GM reproduced quotes from the letters and photo-
graphs of the lavish awards ceremony in its employee communications and
PR materials and annual reports.
Motivation through “Mental and Spiritual Nourishment” and

“Two-Way Communications”
The Information Rack Service, a second project conducted by GM’s

Employee-Relations Section, allowed a subtler and no less manipulative
use of motivation. Launched in 1948 and used widely through the 1950s, the
service involved the placement of racks carrying company literature in cafe-
terias, clocking-in/out areas, and other high-traffic spaces in all GM plants.
A key objective according to its architect, ER specialist Harry Coen, was to
undercut workers’ view of company publicity as “propaganda” by “let[ting]
the employe help himself ” to the literature, a scenario depicted endlessly
in promotional publicity (figure 5.2). The racks should “feed” workers’
hunger for information, Coen advised, “without overfeeding it, to give the
employee what he wanted without appearing to cram down his throat more
than he wanted.”58 As another staffer put it, the goal of the racks was to pro-
vide “mental and spiritual nourishment to our employes.”59 Such language,
steeped in euphemistic language about providing “nourishment” for work-
ers illustrate the calculated approach to manipulating workers common to
ER and human relations in industry during this time.
The project began with an initial pilot run of twelve racks in five GM
plants before expanding rapidly over the next few years to over thirteen hun-
dred racks in its U.S. and Canadian locations and an additional fifty beyond
GM in educational and civic institutions by the end of 1952.60 During this
four-year period, GM circulated 47 million copies of 280 different booklets,
with a distribution of over 1.3 million per month to its 300,000 employees.
The largest category represented (at 35 percent) was “economic and social”
themes (which consisted primarily of pro–free enterprise sentiment). How-
ever, Coen’s staff believed that, as one of them put it, they should be “careful
not to overdo the economic information,” which “would be a quick way
to kill off interest in the racks.”61 In an effort to avert potential accusations
Figure 5.2. Workers “help themselves” to booklets in GM’s Information Rack Service.
General Motors Annual Report to Employees, 1949. Kheel Center for Industrial Rela-
tions, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. License supplied by the General Motors Media
Archive, GM Heritage Center, Sterling Heights, MI.
that the firm was propagandizing, Coen and his team made sure to include
plenty of “material of natural and spontaneous interest to employes,” such
as gardening, fishing, and sports.62
Among the economics-themed booklets were two main genres, each
of which served not only as economic indoctrination but also as a form
of motivational sentiment. The first genre deployed narratives about GM’s
role in shaping national progress. This tactic is typified by “The Story of
General Motors,” a 1948 eighty-page history of the company replete with
illustrations resembling those used in children’s storybooks, and “Ameri-
can Battle for Abundance,” produced in the early 1950s (figure 5.3).63 The
former began with the 1892 invention of the horseless carriage, continued
with GM’s founding in 1908, and culminated in the “pioneering period” of
the mid-twentieth century, all of which were aided by GM’s ingenuity, the
booklet claimed. Amid the uncertainty of World War I, the firm brought
Chevrolet into the “General Motors family” and expanded into Canada.
Figure 5.3. “American Battle for Abundance,” undated GM booklet, circa early 1950s.
Kheel Center for Industrial Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. License supplied
by the General Motors Media Archive, GM Heritage Center, Sterling Heights, MI.
In the 1920s, as women’s suffrage and prohibition went into effect, GM

advanced its own forms of liberation, initiating employee insurance plans
and health initiatives and expanding educational opportunities at its Insti-
tute of Technology. The firm’s public service continued in World War II,
when it made good on the government’s calls for “500 tanks a day,” devel-
oped military technology, and trained military personnel to use weaponry.
With the war over, GM was now helping to build “the highest standard of
living in the world.”64
While such booklets offered sanguine and often exaggerated accounts of
GM’s role in national progress, a second genre of economics-themed book-
lets took a more forceful approach by lambasting the corrosive effects of
socialism and Marxism on the individual’s sense of motivation. One such
booklet reproduced a 1947 speech by GM’s president C. E. Wilson, the
founder of its Employee Research Section, entitled “The Great Delusion:
Where Marx Went Wrong.” While allowing that Marx “reported accurately”
about class inequality in nineteenth-century Europe, he asserted that his
“diagnosis was wrong.” Taking a cue from Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, a tac-
tic used by many managerial devotees of free enterprise, Wilson pointed
to “statism” as the root of class inequality. Hitler and Mussolini had, he
argued, tried to “make statism work once they had committed themselves
to [Marxist] philosophy.” Importantly, he added, “A communistic or social-
istic government . . . must replace the positive incentives of a free society
with the negative incentives of fear and coercion.” Luckily, in Wilson’s view,
such problems had been averted in America because of the rapid pace of
ingenuity in American industry, which offered a “standard of living . . . nine
times as high as that of the people of the rest of the world.”65
Workers could also pick up booklets that included transcripts of radio
addresses by anticommunist crusader Henry J. Taylor, who was intro-
duced, grandiosely, as a “world traveler, author, [and] seeker of facts.” In
a 1952 address entitled “The Truth about Moscow,” Taylor emphasized the
powerful incentives of cheap, abundant consumer goods that GM workers
enjoyed in contrast with their counterparts in the Soviet Union, for whom
“hot water piping . . . is practically unknown” and whose kitchens “con-
sist of two or three pots.” Roasters and broilers were nonexistent “because
there are so few ovens,” and “the city’s only lawn mower is on the lawn of
the American Embassy.” Women, according to Taylor, suffered especially.
182 | Chapter 5
Invoking habitual assertions by male Cold War authorities about the sup-
posedly liberating effects of domestic abundance, he declared that, whereas
American women experienced a lightened workload due to domestic con-
venience, women did “the burden of the work in Moscow.”66
General Motors’ Information Rack System, like its “My Job Contest,”
embodied instinct theorist Ordway Tead’s call for management to regulate
“the content of [workers’] mental life and the impulses by which they are
moved.”67 While the effects of motivational practices on workers were inde-
terminate, they nonetheless proved invaluable in the firm’s efforts to cast
the worker’s cooperation with management as obligatory and to construe
itself as an agent of workers’ well-being. The larger ideological framework
within which these ideals were promoted—the era’s marriage of social sci-
ence, consumer capitalism, and Cold War consensus—provided a strong
foundation on which the company honed its motivational apparatus.
The firm’s Suggestion Plan Scheme, to note a final piece of its motiva-
tional arsenal, illustrates the deft use of democratizing rhetoric that charac-
terized the firm’s assertions about workers’ satisfaction. A familiar fixture in
the factory since the nineteenth century, suggestion plans had long helped
employers to promote company mindedness among employees. They were
also inherently manipulative because they operated from the assumption
that workers were content to help management in its quest to extract more
productivity from them. In the decade following the firm’s 1942 revamp-
ing of its suggestion plan, workers submitted around 450,000 suggestions,
over 100,000 of which were adopted.68 By 1949 alone, GM had paid over
$4.5 million in awards for suggestions, all of which went to rank-and-file
workers, as technical and supervisory employees were ineligible for prizes.69
Participation in the scheme rose significantly into the early 1950s. In 1947,
nearly 20 percent of GM workers submitted suggestions; by 1951 nearly 40
percent had done so.70
The scheme’s value, according to its chief designer, Donald Morse, lay
in embroiling workers in “two-way communications” with management.
Morse told ER specialists from other companies that “in the very process
of making a suggestion, [the worker] just about has to adopt a positive,
constructive, let’s say, a helpful attitude, and at that point, his thinking and
the company’s become one.” This dialogue typically involved discussions
between the worker and his or her supervisor, aided perhaps by some initial
sketches or calculations; management’s acknowledgment of the suggestion;

discussions between management personnel and the worker about the pro-
posed idea; and updates on management’s investigation into its practicality.
These exchanges, Morse noted, brought the worker into a protracted con-
versation with management and “add materially to his feeling of satisfac-
tion and importance.”71
General Motors’ specialists believed that the scenario of the worker sub-
mitting a suggestion provided a powerful motivational metaphor. Photo-
graphs of workers posing while submitting a suggestion became a familiar
genre piece in publications disseminated through the information racks
and home mailings. Such images asserted the existence of a motivated atti-
tude among workers and shored up perceptions of company mindedness
throughout the “GM family.” Like images of workers “help[ing] themselves”
to literature from the information racks, photographs of them posing while
submitting suggestions implied that they were autonomous and their coop-
eration voluntary. The factory, according to these images, was a space of
what Drucker called “human effort.”72
The refining of motivational techniques by GM presented valuable
research opportunities. In the five years following the war, GM had not
only instituted streamlined motivational communications in its plants but
had also helped create a flourishing field of research on employee motiva-
tion. By 1950, it had established fifteen research collaborations on motiva-
tion with universities. A report circulated among members of the Dearborn
Group listed a doctoral study on the use of facial expressions in the testing
of employee attitudes, a study by Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University
into reactions to the UAW strike at Flint, a University of Michigan study of
“communications channels in first-line supervision,” and several studies of
the “My Job Contest.”73
The company’s quest to perfect its motivational apparatus reflected a
deepening awareness among industrial leaders that motivational techniques
and discourse could be indispensable in managerial efforts to discipline
workers. In an era when workers continued to struggle for autonomy and
control in the factory, GM’s motivational initiatives helped the firm to recast
the prevailing definitions of work and its rewards in ways that characterized
workers’ cooperation with management as obligatory. At the heart of the
banal messages about the rewards of working at GM was a sophisticated
184 | Chapter 5
apparatus of human engineering that drew on the most sophisticated forms

of manipulative inducement of the day. As the firm’s ER specialists saw it,
for motivational discourse to do its work, it was not necessary to achieve a
genuine transformation of workers’ attitudes about the firm or their jobs.
Habituating them to management’s desired ideals was enough.
Boulwarism: Motivation and Antiunion Strategy at

General Electric
Another industrial giant, General Electric (GE), deployed motivation in
an even more systematized, long-term campaign to advance managerial
dominion. Like GM’s, GE’s attempt to hone motivation was prompted by
the postwar strike waves. The third largest employer in the nation during
the 1950s, with nearly two hundred thousand workers, many of whom were
unionized in the United Electrical Workers (UE), GE became an epicenter
of the labor conflict that engulfed the industrial scene at the end of the war.
In 1946, UE struck, demanding a wage increase of two dollars per day as a
catch-up following wartime wage controls. Thousands of workers joined
picket lines and, in some cases, effectively shut the factory down. The inten-
sity of the strike caught GE off guard, but it was even more surprised that
local communities were overwhelmingly supportive of the strikers. In the
end, GE had little choice but to give in, conceding to a wage increase of
around $1.50 per day. While the strike’s outcome was a painful lesson in
labor and community relations for GE, it also prompted it to develop a
more sophisticated strategy for eliciting employee goodwill.74 The central
pillar of this strategy was a job marketing program aimed at selling workers
and local communities on the idea that GE, not unions or government, was
the true defender of their interests. In the decade and a half following the
war, GE implemented this program forcefully, a tactic that placed it on the
front lines of management’s quest to stifle labor opposition and redefine
work’s rewards in individual terms.
At the helm of GE’s job marketing program was one of the most devoted
figures in the crusade for management authority in postwar America,
who would become a tireless evangelist for employee motivation: Lem-
uel Ricketts Boulware (figure 5.4).75 In choosing Boulware to orchestrate
the program, GE brought into the fold not only an adept manager but also
Figure 5.4. Lemuel Ricketts Boulware hamming it up during an undated photo shoot
(circa 1950s) at a lecture podium in front of boards displaying motivational tactics. The
slogan atop the board on the left states, “Build an Employee Awareness Politically—
Economically—Spiritually.” With his finger aloft, Boulware strikes the pose of a wise
and judicious conciliator, embodying physically one of the ideological claims of Boul-
warism. Lemuel R. Boulware Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books
and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
a sales expert with a wealth of experience in marketing ideas. Boulware’s

route to the front lines of the motivational project came via salesmanship.
After graduating as a business major from the University of Wisconsin in
1916, he spent twenty years learning the core strands of business in a vari-
ety of managerial positions, winding up in 1935 as vice president of Carrier
Air Conditioners in New Jersey. It was in his work in sales and market-
ing, however, that Boulware found his niche. As vice president of the Easy
Washing Machine Company from 1925 to 1935, he developed techniques
186 | Chapter 5
that he would later adapt in his “job marketing” work at GE.76 Like many
sales experts, Boulware believed that the essence of successful selling was
emotional appeal. Yet his approach to motivation was influenced less by a
Freudian massaging of desires as proposed by Ernest Dichter than by the
rationalized techniques based on repetition of messages familiar to sales-
manship since the early twentieth century.
Boulware’s beliefs were rooted in an intense distaste for the state’s “inter-
ference” in business. These views had ripened during World War II. In
early 1939, he took a break from his career and embarked on a six-month
world tour with his wife. After visiting the Orient and Africa, the Boulwares
wound up in Europe in the summer, staying in Berlin two weeks before
Hitler invaded Poland. After returning to America the day before the war
began, Boulware enjoyed several months of relaxation at his cabin in the
Laurentian Mountains before reentering business in 1940 as a general man-
ager at the Colotex Corporation. In spring 1942, he accepted an invitation
to serve as Operations Vice Chairman of the U.S. government’s War Pro-
duction Board.77
Like other government officials, Boulware condemned the Nazis in his
wartime speeches. Yet many of his strongest criticisms centered on their use
of state power, a theme that would later become prominent in his work at
GE. Typical was a March 1942 speech to military leaders, in which he con-
demned Germany’s imposition of a forty-hour workweek and its require-
ment that employers relinquish overtime pay to the government “as a con-
tribution by the citizens.” By seizing almost half of industrial production
and imposing extensive taxation, he argued, the German state kept workers
in a “subsistence or bare existence standard of living.” He scoffed that the
state managed to sustain workers’ morale by doling out “weak beer, propa-
ganda movies [and] Sunday picnics on foot.” If the German state’s control
of business offended his free market ideals, however, Boulware “reluctantly
confess[ed]” that Germans were “strong and healthy, and the morale good,”
a situation due largely to the state’s “complete control of all channels of
information.”78 Although aghast at the German state’s control of the nation’s
communications apparatus, he would soon pursue similarly strategic goals
for the more virtuous task of corporate control.
Boulware’s beliefs placed him in good stead for his work at GE, which
became a pioneer in the crusade to weaken state involvement in business and
union power after the war. He joined GE in January 1945 as vice president
of its affiliated companies, but after the June 1946 strike, he was appointed
to oversee the firm’s employee and community relations programs. One
of Boulware’s innovations concerned the firm’s labor negotiation strategy.
Previously, negotiations at GE, as at many firms, had followed a predict-
able pattern. When presented with the union’s demands, management
responded with a “lowball” offer that the union countered with a modified
demand. Further offers and counterdemands followed until a settlement
was reached. In the wake of the 1946 strike, GE concluded that its use of
this negotiation strategy had encouraged workers’ perception that man-
agement, by always holding back in its offers, was disingenuous and self-
serving. In contrast, workers regarded the union as a staunch ally because
it forced management to “come clean” with a genuine offer. GE also feared
that the 1946 wage increases, which UE justified by the rising cost of living,
established a dangerous precedent whereby UE could use further increases
in the cost of living as justification for more wage increases. This situation,
GE argued, undermined the firm’s competitiveness, fueled inflation, and
destroyed jobs.79 Boulware developed a new strategy to combat the union.
In the future, management would listen to its demands, study the issues,
and come back with an offer that it believed fair, which it would not amend
unless new information arose. “Boulwarism,” as this strategy came to be
known pejoratively, was widely regarded by GE’s unionized workforce as a
form of management demagoguery. Yet to union leaders’ dismay, it proved
a highly effective weapon in the firm’s mission to undercut union power.80
Boulware’s tactics gained further traction owing to internal union friction.
In 1949, the UE left the CIO when its leaders refused to testify that they
were not Communists. The CIO subsequently approved membership of a
new anticommunist union, the International Union of Electrical Workers
(IUE), a situation that, as Kim Phillips-Fein argues, led to “a divided labor
force—an ideal testing ground for Boulware’s propaganda campaigns.”81
“Indoctrination and Reindoctrination”: Crafting Motivational

Communications
Boulwarism was distinct not only in its approach to labor negotiations

but also in its highly orchestrated use of motivational communications
188 | Chapter 5
techniques. Boulware deemed employee communications as a means of

“economic education” and “moral enlightenment.”82 The materials that
Boulware developed to advance these goals channeled his distaste for “cen-
trally planned” socialist economies, which he believed suppressed “incen-
tive, competition and risk.” As he argued in one of his most noted speeches,
Salvation Is Not Free, “A really free people can live well materially and spiri-
tually where there is the incentive to work, create, compete, save, invest, and
profit.” Only capitalism could accomplish this goal, he claimed. Socialism,
on the other hand, used “force to drive men to work,” a method that was
incompatible with American work ideals and should thus be eradicated. As
he told his audiences, “We have simply got to learn, and preach, and prac-
tice what’s the good alternative to socialism. And we have to . . . interpret
this to a majority of adults in a way that is understandable and credible and
attractive.”83
The communications apparatus that Boulware built was more exten-
sive than at any other industrial corporation. It included an array of litera-
ture disseminated to workers and throughout the communities where GE
operated. These publications included the Commentator (which included a
didactic four-page treatment of a specific theme weekly) and Monogram (a
more text-based monthly magazine). Another publication, Employee Rela-
tions News Letter, was issued to twenty thousand managerial staff, half of
whom were foremen and other supervisors.84 Print media included pam-
phlets and booklets containing speeches by Boulware and other business-
men and free market advocates. Boulware’s staff disseminated these publi-
cations not just to GE workers and communities but also to GE’s “friends
and competitors who have contracts with the same unions or who face
the same problems.”85 In addition, the company’s motivational apparatus
included films (often screened in the workplace or local theaters), sugges-
tion schemes, and radio ads.86
While GE’s publicity made no secret that the firm’s aim was to “sell”
workers on the merits of its economic arguments, its rhetoric of transpar-
ency elided larger ideological ambitions. For Boulware and his colleagues,
GE’s communications apparatus was a weapon through which to define
the federal government and unions as a hindrance to the interests of busi-
ness and workers alike. The firm’s top brass described their goals in even
more unambiguous terms in internal documentation. In a June 1947 letter
to Boulware summarizing the responsibilities of his job, GE’s president,

Charles E. Wilson (no relation to his namesake at GM), stated that the goal
of the firm’s Employee-Relations Department was the “indoctrination and
reindoctrination” of workers and the public so that they would internalize a
“managerial” view.87 Yet the sense of pragmatism associated with “economic
education” allowed GE latitude in its efforts to depict union wage demands
as a front for furthering the self-interest of conflict-prone union leaders.88
General Electric maintained that its own vision of a “business system” based
on the interdependent needs of employees, customers, shareholders, and
management offered a more realistic and commonsense approach to labor
relations.89 Boulware regarded employee communications not simply as a
convenient tool for spreading messages but also as the engine of a moral
crusade, believing that the “advertising media” and “public relations men”
had an “obligation . . . to promote economic education, moral re-awakening
and political sophistication”—sentiments that he expressed frequently in
his correspondence to businessmen, journalists, and civic leaders through-
out his tenure at GE.90
Boulware’s vision of economic education was principally concerned
with adjusting—or correcting, as he and his colleagues saw it—the motives
that shaped workers’ attitudes about their job and their disposition toward
management. Among his first actions on joining GE was to initiate a study
of workers’ “motives and beliefs.” The study concluded that workers were
motivated by nine main factors: “Good pay”; “Good working conditions”;
“Good bosses”; “Steady work”; “A chance to get ahead”; “To be treated with
respect”; “To get the facts about what’s going on”; “To be doing something
worth while”; and “To have other reasons for really liking their jobs, such
as finding them interesting and deeply satisfying.”91 From 1947 through the
1950s, GE espoused these nine motives, or “Elements of Job Improvement,”
as it called them jointly, as a mantra in its employee communications chan-
nels.92 In espousing its commitment to fulfilling these motives, GE por-
trayed itself as a devotee of workers’ economic progress and job satisfaction,
an image that proved advantageous in its mission to discredit unions. The
firm also invoked motivational rhetoric in its training and educational ini-
tiatives, adapting techniques developed elsewhere, including DuPont’s How
Our Business System Operates course, which seventy thousand GE workers
had taken by January 1952.93
190 | Chapter 5
While Boulware sought to link job security to the firm’s competitiveness

in workers’ minds, he also endeavored to separate workers’ collective toil
from the firm’s profits. Any suggestion of this link, he believed, could arouse
union agitation for wage increases and profit sharing, a situation that the
firm was anxious to avoid. He emphasized this point in a June 1952 letter to
a manager at Trumbell Electric, a GE subsidiary, who had recently erred in
making this connection in a loudspeaker announcement in the factory. He
wrote to the manager, “We have had to learn not to attribute profits to the
efforts of individual employees, or to the sum total of the efforts of individ-
ual employees below the top supervisory level.” The individual worker, he
explained, “does not . . . produce a profit because the fellow next to him, or
at the other end of the shop, may be doing so poor a job as to offset the good
one.” Besides, he added, profits were “determined by those upper execu-
tives who have not single responsibilities, but multiple responsibilities of
the profit planning and making era.”94 If Boulware recoiled at the thought of
workers’ wages being indexed to profits, however, the firm showed no such
qualms in adopting this practice as a tool for incentivizing managers, who,
as part of GE’s “restructuring” measures in the 1950s, received bonuses that
were based on their plant’s profitability.95
Boulware’s efforts to disassociate workers’ productivity from the firm’s
profits helped GE challenge the viability of wage agreements won by unions
in the auto industry that were taken up by other unions throughout indus-
try. In its employee literature, GE informed workers that linking wages to
company profits was not in workers’ interests because profits could just as
easily fall. Typical was a December 1947 issue of the Commentator enti-
tled “Should Pay Be Equal Everywhere?” This question was answered in
the bylines, which asked, “Would it create ghost towns? Would you have to
move?” Having invoked the specter of the insecurity that would result from
pay equalization, it stated, “The worker . . . cannot in fairness be penal-
ized for poor selling, reckless finance, poor judgment as to what product to
make, unwise risks, lack of research, or even plain bad luck on the part of
management. Likewise, he cannot in fairness lay claim to any of the prof-
its that arise from the sounder handling of those matters by one manage-
ment as compared with another.” Besides, it continued, the “experiment in
setting wages nationally [had] failed” because it did not account for local-
level factors that determined the overall competitiveness of a factory or
a company.96 The claim that profit volatility could lead to wage decreases
grossly overstated the likelihood of declining profits. Yet such messaging
served to couch incentive in the language of individual self-interest rather
than the collective terms emphasized by union leaders.
The Commentator’s motivational rhetoric placed heavy emphasis on the
importance of “competitiveness.” Specific issues of the publication chal-
lenged the efficacy of universal wage increases; encouraged workers to help
maximize production and eliminate waste (the latter “won’t make him any
more tired when he goes home at night”); and condemned union negoti-
ation tactics while asserting that management acted in good faith.97 Oth-
ers challenged union criticisms of management “speed-ups” of produc-
tion (a term that GE argued was misleading). A May 1949 issue entitled
“What Is a Speed-up? And What Is Just an Honest Day’s Work?” made the
firm’s position clear. It noted that although “in the pick and shovel days—
and in the early days of crude factory operation—there was all too fre-
quently some justification for increased output per worker to be described”
as a “speed-up,” the term mischaracterized the present situation. Now, it
explained, “the buyer is back in the driver’s seat, and serving notice on us
that he will not buy unless we really take an interest in our work.” It con-
cluded, “If making better products at lower prices to sell more customers
and create more jobs can be called a speed-up, then we have all got to rec-
ognize that there is now—instead of the old bad kind of speed-up—a new
kind of good speed-up.”98
Print-based media, with its didactic visual lessons about virtues of capi-
talism, allowed GE to sermonize workers through slick, repetitive messag-
ing. The company deployed four claims in particular—that “excessive” wage
increases would lead to crippling inflation; that its positions on wages were
fair; that wage negotiations must be based on local-level dynamics; and
that union positions on wages were unrealistic. The visual culture of Boul-
warism stripped away the complexity of economic issues and presented
them as simple dichotomies and choices for the worker. This tactic was typ-
ified in a February 1948 cartoon in the Commentator that asked, “Are we
better off . . . grumbling and griping about everything—sort of wearing
blinders because we don’t want to see any of the good things about our job
and the company we work for . . . or teaming up?” (a scenario that depicted
workers as a baseball team that was pitted against “inflation,” represented
192 | Chapter 5
by a stubborn-looking giant). Photo-textual ads, on the other hand, helped

infuse messaging with an aura of realism. Photographs of employees at
work or at home with their families echoed claims in the accompanying
text that workers were satisfied with their jobs and were company-minded
“shareowners” in GE.99
Illustrated ads used charts, graphs, and other visual imagery to symbol-
ize the economic “facts” according to GE, as typified in the 1960 ad below
(figure 5.5). The visual trope used here—the depiction of a wage gradient
represented by illustrations of a worker who grows in tandem with rising
wages—was deployed in a number of variations in GE propaganda. The
firm circulated similar comparison images showing GE workers as giants
alongside workers in England, Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. Other copy
used the image of the escalator (which, predictably, the GE worker climbed
rapidly) to convey that the company’s wages kept parity with the cost of liv-
ing—a claim that elided its strategic efforts to reduce wage costs by expand-
ing, throughout the 1950s, into the nonunionized south where workers had
little or no bargaining power.100 In its variety of forms, visual motivational
propaganda helped GE construe its positions on wages and other economic
matters as reasonable while subtly condemning the “antagonists” of indus-
trial progress—unions, the state, and the collectivist ideals associated with
New Deal liberalism.
The IUE deployed its own communications apparatus throughout this
time, including newspapers, booklets, and magazines, the content of which
assailed management’s positions and Boulwarism. The IUE’s strategy is
illustrated in a 1962 article authored by its president, James B. Carey, and
distributed to the union’s members in booklet form, entitled “The Intent of
GE Propaganda.” Carey argued that Boulwarism’s “take it or leave it” policy
did not amount to “genuine collective bargaining” and was illegal, and the
purpose of the company’s propaganda was to “undermine the union and
destroy its bargaining power.”101 Yet IUE’s defiance was no match against
GE’s powerful messaging arsenal, which hit workers with a continual bar-
rage of publicity vilifying union leaders as perpetual gripers who failed to
grasp the reality of market forces. Not only did the union lack the abundant
resources available to Boulware, but the company’s transfer of production
to the nonunionized south, coupled with a relentless campaign to sow divi-
siveness among workers and turn them against union leaders, placed IUE
Figure 5.5. General Electric News, September 14, 1960. Lemuel R. Boulware Papers,
Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Penn-
sylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
on the back foot, attacking Boulwarism but unable to impede its growing
dominance.
As was the case for other unions throughout the postwar era, IUE posed a
less formidable challenge to management than had its predecessors because
194 | Chapter 5
it was focused on wage bargaining and obtaining a higher standard of liv-

ing for workers rather than achieving industrial democracy, a goal largely
abandoned by labor leaders amid the postwar strike settlements. Materi-
als disseminated to union members by the AFL-CIO after the 1955 merger
of the two union federations, for example, were framed within assertions
that unions were the true agents of workers’ prosperity, which its litera-
ture portrayed as entailing consumer abundance and domestic happiness
for the “All Union Family.”102 As Jacques Ellul argued in his assessment of
propaganda in 1965, labor unions frequently found themselves at a disad-
vantage when employing such tactics because they did not challenge the
consumption-based “American way of life” that business and management
touted as a salve for class grievances.103 Indeed, despite unions’ efforts to
define themselves as champions of prosperity, GE, like other corporations,
found it much easier to claim this mantle. The ideal of prosperity had, by
the mid-1950s, been thoroughly tied to business through workplace moti-
vational publicity and advertising and PR campaigns in public life.
Selling Motivational Messaging in the Workplace and Beyond
One of the major tactics of Boulware’s motivational strategy was to enlist

supervisors to serve as “salesmen” for management’s arguments. The Taft-
Hartley Act’s ruling that supervisors had to be in different unions than
rank-and-file workers made these efforts easier. Boulware lost no time
in exploiting the supervisor’s salesmanship potential. As he stated in a
1948 address to the American Management Association, “We want that
supervisor—that leader—not only to be the retail salesman of the job pack-
age but also, to the greatest degree possible, to be ‘Mr. General Electric’
to his little group of employees.”104 General Electric’s efforts to assign the
supervisor as a member of management were not an immediate success.
Yet they proved effective over the long term as the firm integrated manage-
rial responsibilities into supervisor training methods and subjected super-
visors to a constant flow of messaging in the form of company newspapers,
booklets, and films.105
General Electric also utilized its employee communications channels
creatively when enlisting supervisors as “ambassadors” for its arguments,
sometimes scoffing at unions in the process. This tactic is illustrated in
the photograph below, which appeared in the Commentator in July 1949

along with the text (figure 5.6). The photograph depicts E. C. Peterson, a GE
warehouse superintendent, with his wife, daughters, and grandson, who sits
on top of him. The scenario, along with the phrase underneath—“I Don’t
Want to Be Agitated”—offers a not-so-subtle denouncement of unions. The
implication of the phrase, taken from a letter that Peterson had recently
submitted to the Commentator, is clear: he has no time for labor strife, an
attitude that other “responsible” workers should adopt. In the letter, which
appeared below the image, Peterson laid tribute to the firm and the “assets”
of his job at GE over nearly three decades. These assets included his “job,”
which was “a better one” than he began with; a “five room house . . . auto-
mobile . . . modest bank account . . . a few war bonds under the mattress . . .
electric refrigerator . . . radio . . . ironer [and] home work shop.” These
rewards, he continued, were due to GE, not unions. One of the benefits of
his job, he wrote was the “company pension . . . which was started about
1912 . . . long before the agitators ‘thunk’ it up. Free insurance—additional
insurance—Hospitalization insurance—annual vacation—steady pay—a
feeling of security. The greatest asset of all.”106
In 1953, GE added another strand to its array of motivational techniques
by hiring Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan as a public and employee rela-
tions ambassador for the firm. Reagan hosted GE Theater, a weekly half-
hour television show that sometimes included didactic talks about the vir-
tues of free enterprise. Reagan also traveled the country touring GE’s plants
as part of the company’s mission to encourage employee goodwill toward
the firm and management. Although Reagan’s role was not to promote
Boulwarism specifically, he eventually took on a more active role in selling
GE’s free market and antiunion idealism to workers.107
To achieve GE’s goal of “indoctrination and reindoctrination” Boulware
devised a stealth strategy for enlisting “opinion leaders”—clergy, school-
teachers, social workers, hairdressers, bartenders, and others—to dissem-
inate the firm’s messaging throughout the community.108 In a frequently
given presentation to managers and civic leaders entitled “How to Transmit
Ideas to Community Groups,” Boulware emphasized the need to control
the “flow” of ideas between three groups—“Idea Starters” (businessmen);
“Idea Spreaders” (influential individuals and groups in the community);
and “Idea Users” (citizens and workers). One of the challenges facing
Figure 5.6. “I Don’t Want to Be Agitated” was the title of a letter written by E. C.
Peterson, a GE warehouse superintendent in Milwaukee in 1949. Commentator, July 8,
1949. Lemuel R. Boulware Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
business, he asserted, was the influence of left-wing “intellectuals” on the

opinions of average Americans. He cited the view of William Schlamm,
conservative author and coeditor of the National Review, that “totalitar-
ianism (and especially Bolshevism) are not expressions of economically
distressed underdogs, but rather diseases prevalent among rather well-fed
intellectuals.” He repeated Schlamm’s claim that the “editorial staffs of met-
ropolitan newspapers” contained “fifty times more collective lunacy (par-
ticularly of the Stalinist type) than among the poverty-stricken Okies, the
needle workers or unemployed miners.” Only by enlisting “opinion leaders”
to direct the “transmission of ideas” could businessmen counter this mes-
saging, he claimed.109
Boulware never tired of enlisting other leaders to the cause. He developed
a large mailing list of businessmen, managers, and civic leaders, encourag-
ing them to join business’s “battle of survival” by implementing the kind
of “incentives” campaigns that he had pioneered at GE.110 In his speeches
and correspondence, he declared that European countries with “planned
economies” were in crisis because their governments snuffed out workers’
incentives by imposing “collectivist” ideals, which businessmen failed to
counter. “Free citizens,” he wrote to a colleague, should be “free to work
and spend or save and risk” and ignore “the false god of security.”111 To these
ends, he urged fellow businessmen to circulate articles from the Freeman
and other conservative journals to their employees. These articles included
“Free Men vs. the Union Closed Shop” by Donald Richberg, former exec-
utive director of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration who now
opposed the closed shop, nearly half a million copies of which had been
reprinted by business leaders since publication. He also encouraged the dis-
semination of “Will Freedom Be Sold Out in the Name of Its Defense?” a
February 1952 article published in the Freeman by former Minnesota sen-
ator Joseph H. Ball. General Electric reprinted the piece as a double-page
spread in 200,000 copies of one of its employee publications, a measure that
Boulware encouraged railroad companies to adopt.112
Boulware was no less evangelistic when offering input on motivational
campaigns produced by other employers and advertising agencies, which
sometimes sought his advice. Among his most frequent criticisms was that
designers were not aggressive enough in countering socialism. Replying to
an executive at a New York agency in February 1952 who had sent some
of his firm’s recent copy, Boulware objected that it “suffer[ed] from . . . the
198 | Chapter 5
typical pleasant, non-controversial public-relations approach.” Specifically,

it espoused rhetoric about “freedom” without emphasizing that the Left was
bent on recasting freedom in “collectivist” terms. He continued, “A commu-
nist or other socialist or collectivist can hide under the banner of your ad
just as well as a free enterpriser can.” It was imperative, he noted, to explain
to workers that they were being led astray by “unintelligent or dishonest”
political leaders. These leaders, he argued, were “leading us step by step into
the bad [collectivist] arithmetic of freedom” that destroyed the individu-
al’s autonomy under totalitarianism abroad. What was needed, Boulware
concluded, was “to get our ablest people in the communications field to . . .
contest our enemies rather than furnishing a pleasant umbrella for them to
get away with more murder.”113
Boulware’s devotion to individualistic motivation placed him at odds
with President Harry Truman’s support for union demands for “catch-up”
wage increases. Boulware regarded Truman’s stance as tantamount to
socialism. He called on businessmen to stand up to Truman by disseminat-
ing to their workers and the public editorials by critics of unions. As he put
it in an October 1949 speech to the Economic Club of Detroit, businessmen
needed to preserve America’s “system of freedoms, incentives, and compe-
tition” from the effects of “collectivism,” which would amount to a “police
state of poverty, slavery, and hopelessness.”114 Although Boulware was heart-
ened by Eisenhower’s 1952 election, he remained highly critical of the new
administration’s labor policies, which he believed far too accommodating
of “collectivist” models of incentive.115 In the face of mainstream conserva-
tism’s failure to promote individual-based incentives, he argued, business
had to act. As he told an audience at the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce
in 1958, “The businessmen’s prompt attainment and immediate sound use
of political effectiveness,” was “the most urgent task facing our free country
today for our own self-preservation.”116
Boulware’s efforts to promote individualistic motivation received a boost
from GE’s decentralization strategy in the mid-1950s. President Ralph
Cordiner replaced GE’s fifteen-component structure with a sleeker one
consisting of over a hundred departments, each led by its own manage-
ment team, allowing more agile local- level control over operations.117
While decentralization was aimed at making management more efficient,
it was also integral to what Cordiner and Boulware called GE’s war on
“bigness”—the company’s mission to neutralize the power of labor unions

and government involvement in business’s affairs. Like many corporations,
GE’s decentralization push involved shifting many operations to the south-
ern states where labor laws were weak or absent and, Boulware scoffed,
workers “had not yet been taught by unions to loaf on the job or stretch out
the work in the false effort to protect the jobs.”118
In 1956, GE merged its public relations and employee relations pro-
grams and placed Boulware in charge, further expanding his control over
its communications apparatus. With Boulware’s help, the firm began to
decentralize its methods for awarding financial incentives to workers. Over
the next few years, it stopped basing employee bonuses on company-wide
performance and allowed managers at plant level to base them on work-
ers’ individual performance, a practice that replicated the firm’s method for
incentivizing managers.119 General Electric’s quest to individualize motiva-
tion was aided by its founding of the Hopf Institute of Management in the
late 1950s. Situated in Ossining in the Hudson Valley in rural New York,
the institute hosted management courses, seminars, and training, each of
which served as channels for the firm’s efforts to hone individualistic moti-
vation. The Hopf ’s location had long been a hub for the development of
motivation. Ernest Dichter’s Institute for Motivational Research was less
than four miles away in Croton-on-Hudson.120 Roycroft, the artisan factory
where Elbert Hubbard had penned “A Message to Garcia,” was also across
the state in rural East Aurora. The founding of the Hopf reflected the state’s
position as an epicenter of motivational ideology, second only to Chicago.
At the end of his tenure, Boulware was no less insistent that a strategic
deployment of motivational ideology was vital to the exercise of manage-
ment power. In a speech shortly before his 1960 retirement, he reminded
the audience that the “essence of good fortune” in America was “the pro-
ductiveness of that combination of the liberty and incentive of the individ-
ual to work, save, risk, compete—and strive to excel—with the incentive to
compete.” However, he believed, even as the 1960s loomed, the specter of
the New Deal still continued to derail the “free market kind of incentive.”
The “government’s thirty-year interference with incentive,” he lamented,
had led to “constantly mounting damage to values, progress, and . . . well-
being for the whole public as well as for the very citizens the program was
intended most to help.”121
200 | Chapter 5
The communications apparatus that Boulware built helped GE’s motiva-

tional and antilabor efforts well beyond his retirement. In fall 1960, GE won
a swift victory over the IUE after it initiated a strike concerning the firm’s
rollback of employe benefits. With union opposition largely neutralized,
GE turned its attention to countering workers’ negative views of company
“profits”—which, it lamented, was deemed a “dirty word” by “critics of ‘big
business.’ ” Workers’ dissatisfaction at GE’s profits was hardly surprising
given that its net earnings more than doubled to over $470 million between
1964 and 1971. To counter union calls for wage increases, GE supplied plant
managers with “Idea Starter” packs that espoused the “economic fact of
life” that profits were integral to job security. The first pack announced that
workers who believe “profits are too high are quite apt to lack the motiva-
tion needed to make [GE’s profitability] program successful.”122
Although the architect of GE’s motivational apparatus had officially
retired, his distinctive brand of motivational ideology lived on at the com-
pany for years to come. By the early 1970s, GE had developed a more per-
sonal model of motivational messaging that used individual workers as
advocates of company profits in employee newsletters (figure 5.7).123 Much
like GM’s “My Job and Why I Like It Contest” over two decades earlier,
these materials included workers’ answers to questions that all but required
them to adopt company rhetoric. In using workers as mouthpieces for com-
pany ideologies, such items also replicated Boulware’s earlier tactic of using
supervisors to sell workers on their jobs.124
Motivational discourse had powerful and congealing effects on manage-

rial quests for control and dominion in the postwar era. From advertising
to positive-thinking literature, and from public relations to the sophisti-
cated techniques honed by ER and communications experts, this discourse
helped motivation’s devotees to wage war on the New Deal and the labor
movement and to stifle the simmering class grievances that threatened to
erupt throughout the era. Channeling the period’s increasingly sophisti-
cated communications techniques and consensus orthodoxies, motivation
became a quasi-official language through which management and its allies
undermined the class-and communitarian-based definitions of work asso-
ciated with the New Deal and labor.
Figure 5.7. As we see in this “Plant Panel” page from a February 1971 GE newsletter for
workers at a factory in Bloomington, Illinois, by the early 1970s the company’s motiva-
tional messaging often centered on using statements solicited from workers by manage-
ment to validate company profits. Such practices continued, in different form, General
Motors’ tactic of using statements from workers to substantiate larger managerial objec-
tives. Lemuel R. Boulware Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
202 | Chapter 5
The architects of motivational communications at GM and GE also

helped pave the way for the promotion of neoliberal economic theories in
the workplace. The core principles of neoliberal economic thought, which
had been gaining traction in political economy since the end of the war—a
devotion to the free market and individual responsibility; a belief that gov-
ernment involvement in the economy was an unnecessary intrusion akin to
socialism; and the thought that unfettered capitalism would make class an
irrelevancy—echoed much of the motivational sentiment designed for use
in the postwar factory.125 Indeed, the ideals espoused in GE’s motivational
apparatus were later enshrined in the neoliberal policies implemented by its
former motivational speaker, Ronald Reagan, who remained friends with
Boulware throughout his presidency.126
Sophisticated motivational propaganda was not limited to such large
corporations as GM and GE, however. Throughout the postwar era, many
smaller employers that were not equipped to produce their own communi-
cations systems relied on the services of independent vendors. These ven-
dors provided managers with posters and literature that took their cue from
the sophisticated motivational materials used by industrial giants like GM
and GE. Managers at such firms, it turned out, found them no less useful
in placating class tensions and shoring up their control and authority than
those at large corporations.
CHAPTER 6
The New Hucksters of Cooperation
COLD WAR CONSENSUS CAMPAIGNS AND
THE AMERICAN WAY OF WORK
I think we’re definitely selling religion—a religion that’s the American

way of life.
—Ralph Rogers, Sheldon-Claire salesman, 1949
Immediate problems are not solved by remote control. ‘Getting along

with people’ cannot be legislated . . . [workers] must learn these facts, not
alone intellectually, but emotionally, and every message and contact we
make with them must echo in their brain and also tingle in their nerves.
—Ben Schenker, Sheldon-Claire campaign designer, 1949
Although motivational ideology proliferated throughout the postwar era,

its spread did not happen mechanically or universally. Although such large
corporations as General Motors and General Electric had ample resources
for streamlined motivational campaigns, this was not usually the case for
smaller companies. For many managers at small and midsize firms, run-
ning a factory left little time for developing motivational campaigns. How-
ever, if they were absorbed in the immediacies of production, when they
read management journals and heard about techniques used by other firms,
they could not but conclude that motivational communications could pro-
vide useful ammunition for eliciting workers’ cooperation.1
Many managers also learned about motivational communications
through visits by salesmen who worked for independent suppliers of posters
and other motivational publicity. The most successful of these organizations
203
204 | Chapter 6
was the Sheldon-Claire Company, the firm that attained wartime success
with its emotion-laden campaign, This is America. After the war, the com-
pany tailored its campaigns to the economic and social ideals associated
with the era’s consensus ideology, a design strategy that held much appeal
for the factory managers that it sold to. With government support no longer
available after the war, Sheldon-Claire’s owner, Lew Shalett, focused on hon-
ing his sales apparatus. The firm’s annual sales hovered at around $800,000
but reached $1 million in 1953, boosted by its renewals—sales to clients
who continued to buy the campaigns over a multiyear period, which, by
the early 1950s, accounted for around 70 percent of its business.2 Although
these sales did not match those of the Seth Seiders Syndicate in the 1920s,
Sheldon-Claire achieved them with a smaller sales team and remained in
business far longer.3
The company’s success was made easier by several factors. First, as wit-
nessed at GM and GE, workers’ cooperation with management was increas-
ingly obligatory in industry after the war, especially after the wage settle-
ments of the late 1940s went into effect. Until that time, some employers
declined to buy the campaigns based on concerns that workers would object
to them as propaganda. By the early 1950s, however, as labor-management
bargaining increasingly eclipsed class conflict, managers’ apprehensions
about purchasing the campaigns receded. Second, as the firm’s salesmen
explain, the campaigns received few objections from union officials. Most
unionized workers at the small manufacturing firms that Sheldon-Claire
supplied were represented by American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions,
which were generally less militant and more accepting of the era’s dom-
inant ideal of labor-management cooperation than were the CIO unions
that represented workers in larger industries.4 The era’s prevailing mood
of labor-management bargaining meant that Sheldon-Claire and its clients
faced a far smoother path when integrating the campaigns in the factory
than did large industrial corporations. The irony was that the campaigns
were premised on the same idea as were those at large corporations—to
advance managerial definitions of work’s meaning and rewards and shore
up management’s authority and control.
The firm’s sales were boosted by its slick self-marketing as an “impar-
tial” outsider, a claim belied by its campaigns, which were designed to help
management to instill its own perspectives among workers.5 Rhetorically,
The New Hucksters of Cooperation | 205
the campaigns mirrored those produced at GE by Lemuel Boulware, whose

commitment to weakening union opposition to management Shalett
shared. Shalett’s ideological likeness to Boulware’s was evident to his asso-
ciates. According to Jerry Johnson, an accountant from Golman, Brook-
stone & Co. who worked closely with Shalett on the firm’s taxes throughout
the late 1950s, Shalett was “just another Lemuel Boulware”—an “Ayn Rand
type” who knew that the “antilabor” thrust of the campaigns was “a key
value to his biggest customers.” To Johnson and his colleagues at Golman,
Brookstone, Sheldon-Claire’s campaigns were “Apple Pie American Excep-
tionalism applied to Soviet and Nazi heroic art . . . Top grade huckstering as
motivation.”6 Although the campaigns were designed to help management
shore up its control and authority, however, these goals were masked by
their sanguine assertions about the consumer-based rewards that workers
stood to receive if they helped their employer to remain competitive by
practicing company mindedness.
Shalett also exploited Cold War contestation to the hilt. In the mid-1950s,
the firm began to expand into Europe, capitalizing on the United States’
efforts to sell European managers on American productivity models and
work ideologies through the Marshall Plan. Shalett believed that Sheldon-
Claire could do a brisk business given that employers across Europe were
seeking to reign in labor union powers and win authority and legitimacy
for management. A skilled self-promoter, Shalett also used the firm’s inter-
national expansion to cast himself as a leader in the quest to advance
the moral supremacy of “management in the free world” over the Soviet
Union’s state-run industrial system. These ambitions ultimately led to a 1958
mission to Moscow, where he toured factories, and then a media crusade
warning Americans that the Soviets’ “fanatical zeal to overtake the U.S.A.”
was succeeding by selling workers on “the promise of a better tomorrow”
once the Soviet Union had surpassed American productivity.7
This chapter explores Sheldon-Claire’s influence on motivational ideol-
ogy in the postwar period. I begin by detailing the firm’s campaign design
rationale and its salesmen’s role in selling the campaigns and smoothing
their integration into the workplace. A full assessment of how the campaigns
influenced management’s broader labor relations efforts at Sheldon-Claire’s
client companies is not possible because the firm’s archived papers do not
include extensive business records.8 However, transcripts of meetings at
206 | Chapter 6
which salesmen discussed their work selling the campaigns offer illumi-
nating insights about managerial interest in motivation. The chapter’s sec-
ond half traces the company’s European expansion and Shalett’s crusade
to make motivation a pillar of the U.S. Cold War struggle. While Sheldon-
Claire’s European sales did not match its domestic business, its forays into
Europe and Shalett’s grandstanding illustrate the deepening influence
of motivational ideology during the Cold War and demonstrate how the
expanding management crusade to sell workers on their jobs that began at
corporations such as GM and GE paved the way for a broader proliferation
of motivational ideology in industry. In turn, Sheldon-Claire’s dissemina-
tion of campaigns touting the rewards of labor-management cooperation
and work’s individual, consumer-based rewards illustrates how neoliberal
values became integrated into the communications apparatuses used by
many firms throughout the postwar period.9
Motivational Campaigns and Consensus Ideology

Sheldon-Claire’s success was encouraged by several developments in the
postwar era: First, consensus ideology was invoked favorably, not only by
industrial leaders but also by labor leaders, politicians, and civic leaders.
Second, “employee communications”—a term that Sheldon-Claire used to
describe its campaigns in marketing materials—was deemed by social sci-
entists and management specialists an essential tool for aiding the integra-
tion of the individual worker into the organization, a development seen
at General Motors and General Electric. Third, the era saw rising esteem
for management consultants. Although Sheldon-Claire was more strictly a
sales operation, Lew Shalett and his associates did an effective job in mar-
keting the firm as a consultant to management.
Ever since the early days of the motivational business, designers had
struggled over how to create messaging that served management’s goals
while also speaking credibly to workers. Shalett had an indispensable ally
in developing Sheldon-Claire’s campaigns: his chief of design, Ben Schen-
ker. An experienced employee communications consultant, Schenker
brought to the firm a sophisticated design sensibility based on stream-
lined, emotionally resonant messaging. Schenker’s expertise allowed for
continuity of messaging over the course of each campaign’s thirty posters
and, for renewal clients, over a multi-year period, mirroring the strategies
of consumer advertising.10 The core of campaign methodology, Schenker
acknowledged, was the translation of the theories of economic and political
consensus espoused by its foremost exponent, Eric Johnston, the president
of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Channeling Johnston’s calls for labor
and management to find “areas of agreement,” Schenker declared that the
route to industrial cooperation lay in “reasonableness and emotional matu-
rity” (which, in management parlance of the day, implied that labor had the
most maturing to do).11 The key to the campaigns, Schenker believed, was
to blend economics-based messages and arresting images. As he told his
colleagues, “Immediate problems are not solved by remote control. ‘Getting
along with people’ cannot be legislated . . . [workers] must learn these facts,
not alone intellectually, but emotionally, and every message and contact we
make with them must echo in their brain and also tingle in their nerves.”12
Schenker also invoked the term economic literacy, a concept that mim-
icked rhetoric used by GE to rebuff union arguments for higher wages, to
encourage workers to perceive their economic interests as dependent on
their employer’s competitiveness. As illustrated in four posters from the
firm’s 1946 campaign We Depend on Each Other, Schenker made creative
use of visual metaphors to advance this goal (figures 6.1–6.4). The first three
posters inform workers that by embracing a company-minded approach
to production (figure 6.1); “co-operation” and teamwork (figure 6.2); and a
commitment to competitiveness and customer satisfaction (figure 6.3), they
will enjoy economic rewards and security. In figure 6.4 (actually the final
poster in the series), the worker joins a manager, a salesman, and a cus-
tomer in showcasing the product that they have “planned,” “produced,” and
will “sell” and “buy.” The cooperation of these four groups, the campaign
asserts, is vital to competitiveness and job security.13 Collectively, these and
other posters in the campaign presented workers with a condensed repre-
sentation of the consensus ideal of cooperation and a vision of a highly uni-
fied organization in which the satisfied worker performs an integral role.
The themes distilled in We Depend on Each Other established a formula
that Sheldon-Claire reprised in its campaigns for the rest of the decade,
including It’s Up to All of Us (1947); Produce Better, Live Better (1948); We
Can’t Have Unless We Give (1949); and It Makes a Difference to You! (1950).
Regardless of specific theme, each campaign, as these titles suggest, was
Figures 6.1 (left) and 6.2 (right). Sheldon-Claire Company Records, 1946.
Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
Figures 6.3 (left) and 6.4 (right). Sheldon-Claire Company Records, 1946.
Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
212 | Chapter 6
anchored in the same core principle: that workers’ economic and job secu-
rity depended on their acceptance of managerial ideals. Whether promot-
ing cooperation, pride of workmanship, or the need for sacrifice (refraining
from costly wage increases, for example), the campaigns linked workers’
livelihoods to the success of the firm and, by extension, the virtues of busi-
ness leadership. In turn, the posters provided managers with tools through
which to promote the individual worker’s integration into the organiza-
tion. This goal became central for management after the war because, for
more and more workers, work itself became less rewarding. In an era when
workers felt increasingly removed from the final product due to the ratio-
nalization and speedup of production, appeals to teamwork in the name
of job security became dominant in motivation.14 By supplying managers
with slick motivational communications materials that resembled those
used by leading industrial corporations, Sheldon-Claire arrived at a win-
ning product. In helping its client managers to integrate messages touting
market-based values and the virtues of management business leadership
(while subtly sidelining unions), the campaigns also channeled the emerg-
ing creeds of neoliberal economic policy into the factory.
Indoctrinating the “Merchandisers” of Motivation: Supervisors
Following the lead of motivational strategies used by GE and other large

corporations, Sheldon-Claire built its campaigns largely around an effort
to enlist supervisors as campaign “merchandisers.” This feature formed
a major selling point, given management’s long-standing efforts to use
supervisors to elicit workers’ goodwill toward their employer. After the
war, the campaigns increasingly abandoned the word foreman in favor of
the more managerial-sounding supervisor, a designation that reflected the
Taft-Hartley Act’s ratification of the foreman’s/supervisor’s managerial sta-
tus. Through booklets, flyers, and other materials and via training sessions
coordinated by its salesmen, Sheldon-Claire supplied managers with a
powerful weapon for enlisting supervisors as allies when promoting coop-
eration, teamwork, and other motivational ideals. Although some manag-
ers opted to buy only one part of a campaign (usually the posters), salesmen
persuaded most prospects to buy the entire package by stressing that the
supervisor’s role in merchandising the campaign was crucial to its overall
effectiveness.15
Sheldon-Claire’s efforts to enlist supervisors as campaign merchandisers

were couched in decidedly masculine terms. Ignoring the fact that some
supervisors in industry were women, Lew Shalett and his associates only
depicted male supervisors and assumed a male reader in supervisors’ liter-
ature. The firm’s deliberations over campaign design contain no discussion
about tailoring materials for female supervisors, and at no point did any-
one ponder how such male-oriented materials might be received by women
supervisors. Such assumptions, along with the posters’ depiction of workers
exclusively as men (and women only as homemakers or consumers) contin-
ued a practice dominant in management’s motivational efforts for decades,
with some exception during World War II, when images with women war
production workers were circulated widely.16
The firm’s 1948 campaign Produce Better, Live Better marked signifi-
cant advancements on the design front. Sheldon-Claire added a variety of
booklets and memos (many of which were titled “Confidential,” strategi-
cally bestowing a sense of magnitude on the supervisor’s role) that detailed
how to administer the campaigns and maximize their impact. One “Confi-
dential Memo to Supervisors” explained the meaning of four forthcoming
posters in the campaign (figure 6.5). Using the metaphor of the social body
to represent the free enterprise system, the four posters collectively portray
an “interdependent . . . industrial system” founded on the cooperation of
capital, management, employees, and customers. In this schema, capital is
the “heart” (poster 5); management the “head” (poster 6); employees the
“hands” (poster 7); and customers “supply the life blood” (poster 8) of busi-
ness. Within this four-part ensemble, workers have two main functions.
They build the capital—the “heart” that pumps the system and creates jobs—
and they provide the “hands” that convert capital into products and services.
The side text informed supervisors that workers’ livelihoods depended on
them recognizing the interdependence of the system and doing their part to
satisfy the customers who are its “lifeblood.”17 Such communiqués provided
management with a tool for depicting industry and the firm in harmonious
terms and for enlisting supervisors to promote such visions to workers.
The campaign’s installation booklet for managers underscores the six-
step process that managers, aided by supervisors, should undertake to
administer and merchandise the campaigns. The illustration below details
the first two steps (figure 6.6). During this stage, the supervisor receives pre-
liminary information about the campaign and proceeds with the strategic
214 | Chapter 6
Figure 6.5. “Confidential Memo to Supervisors,” from Produce Better, Live Better, 1948.
installation of posters in places of high visibility (at eye level and near
doorways). Each poster was displayed in a special frame for the “Poster
of the Week,” and though not depicted here, the frame was equipped with
three spotlights to showcase the poster. Subsequent illustrations in the
Figure 6.6. This booklet explained to managers and supervisors the process for
administering its 1948 campaign Produce Better, Live Better. Comprising “confidential”
memos and supervisor opinion polls, the campaign embodied the streamlined formula
that Sheldon-Claire pioneered throughout the postwar era. Sheldon-Claire Company
Records, 1948. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C.
booklet explain that each Sunday, the supervisor should place an “open-
ing announcement” in a special frame to inform workers of the theme
of the next poster. Next, the supervisor received a series of “confidential
memos” signed by a “major executive” at the company. Finally, he received
“opinion polls,” which he used to survey workers’ responses and record his
own appraisal of the campaign. The systematized nature of this and other
216 | Chapter 6
campaigns offered employers ways to promote the individual worker’s inte-

gration into a smooth-running organization.18
The “supervisor opinion polls” provided managers with additional
ammunition for involving supervisors in the administration of the cam-
paigns. They required supervisors to record their impressions of workers’
perceptions of posters at each stage of the campaign. The completed forms
were then submitted to managers, some of whom subsequently returned
them to the salesman who serviced the firm’s contract. The forms also
asked supervisors to indicate what they believed to be the “most effective
poster,” the “most effective illustration,” and the “most effective copy” and
provided a space for additional comments. In the few extant responses to
this campaign, supervisors adopted a company-minded tone, assuming
their ascribed role of campaign merchandisers. A foreman at the National
Lock Company stated, “I think these posters have generated a lot of thought
among the people working in this plant and makes them wonder if their
friends in a competitive plant are doing better work and putting out a bet-
ter product.” A foreman at Stockman Brothers surmised, “Although these
posters do not induce conversation concerning them, doubtless their value
lies more or less in the subconscious impressions created by seeing them
repetitiously.” Other foremen offered accolades to specific posters, some-
times echoing the language of the campaigns in their comments. Thus the
polls served a dual purpose, helping employers to involve foremen in the
administration of the campaigns while obliging them to adopt a managerial
disposition.19
After several years of increasing sales, in 1950 Schenker and Shalett
nonetheless concluded that the campaigns’ focus on “economic literacy”
had become “repetitious” and prone to “preachiness,” and they thus ini-
tiated an overhaul in design.20 Their efforts to distill economic ideas into
posters had, they agreed, led to overly wordy captions that impeded the
immediacy of messaging that posters were best suited to. Moreover, the ver-
bose and didactic captions risked prompting the accusation that the cam-
paigns were antagonistic toward unions (one that was well founded given
that their purpose was, in part, to help managers temper workers’ interest in
unions). A better way to make the worker “more cooperative,” they agreed,
was to mimic consumer advertising. They therefore enlisted the help of
Magill-Weinsheimer, a leading Chicago advertising agency. After Schenker
Figure 6.7. Throughout the 1950s Sheldon-Claire’s campaigns increasingly resembled

mainstream consumer advertising. The poster above, included in its 1955 campaign,
Make Sales, Make Jobs, conveys the claim that work’s rewards lie in consumption and
that they are possible only if workers perceive work and its rewards through market-
based ideals. The poster’s title embodies the essence of twentieth-century motivational
ideology, asserting that by adhering to the work ethic and identifying with capitalism’s
individual model of striving and reward, one can attain happiness and security. Sheldon-
Claire Company, 1955, emovieposter.com.
died later that year, Shalett worked increasingly with Magill-Weinsheimer,

which developed a new “billboard” format (figure 6.7). From here on, the
campaigns included fifty-two posters per year, an increase over the previous
thirty, providing managers with a poster for every week of the year.21
The posters mostly avoided explicit condemnations of socialism and
communism, a measure aimed at averting worker criticisms that the cam-
paigns were antiunion propaganda. However, the supporting materials sup-
plied to managers made clear that the campaigns were designed to combat
both. Such statements were common in a serialized bulletin entitled They
Say, which Sheldon-Claire sent to managers throughout the 1950s. This
bulletin consisted of seven to eight pages of material that blended warn-
ings about the need for business to defend free enterprise from “Socialists,”
“Communists,” and “Statists” with sales pitches for Sheldon-Claire’s services,
and it situated employee motivation as a vital weapon in capitalism’s strug-
gle against communism. It also included quotes from management authori-
ties, such as Lemuel Boulware, that espoused management’s moral authority
and condemned labor unions and government intrusion in business.
218 | Chapter 6
Originally, Shalett was the sole contributor of They Say, but beginning
around 1951, he hired conservative freelance writer and specialist in employee
communications Helen Bugbee, who authored it until the late 1950s. A pas-
sionate devotee of free enterprise who later went on to author articles in the
conservative journal the Freeman (which today still lists her in its “honor
roll”), she brought a free market, antiunion sensibility to the publication,
as well as an Ayn Rand–like assertion of the virtues of individualism. She
also gave well-received talks at the firm’s conferences and earned tributes
from Shalett and his salesmen (many of whom wrote to thank her for mak-
ing their jobs easier by elucidating the campaigns’ economic arguments).22
Although her expertise was respected by salesmen, some managers, on
seeing a woman’s name listed as the author of They Say during salesmen’s
presentations, responded negatively to the publication. In response, Shalett
asked her to obscure her gender by signing it “H. Bugbee,” an arrangement
that lasted until around 1956, when her full name was reinstated.23Although
Bugbee’s influence beyond authoring They Say is not detailed in the firm’s
extant documents, she likely played a more central role in developing the
campaigns than is acknowledged in its records. One salesman later went
so far as to describe her as the “intellectual brains” behind the campaigns
throughout the 1950s.24 Some of her articles in conservative magazines
during the 1950s, such as “Good Sense Makes Good Business” and “We
Can’t Protect Prosperity,” present arguments that echo the sentiments of
Sheldon-Claire’s campaigns.25 Whatever the reasons behind her obscured
role at the firm, like Shalett’s masking of her authorship of They Say, it
underscores the ways in which the firm maintained an exclusively masculine
vision of motivation.
Building the Sales Apparatus

Shalett understood that slick designs would only take the firm so far. Its
success required an effective sales apparatus. Help was at hand in the form
of Charles Rosenfeld, the mastermind behind the Seth Seiders Syndicate’s
sales organization two decades earlier. In appointing Rosenfeld as his direc-
tor of sales strategy and salesman training, Shalett found a right-hand man
who, more than anyone else, possessed the knowledge and expertise on
which the motivational poster business had been based since its early days.
Between them, Rosenfeld and Shalett knew most of the salesmen who had
worked in the business since that time. Gathering these experienced hands
together, along with many younger salesmen, they assembled a small but
capable sales force of twenty-five full-time salesmen in 1947, a number that
grew to around fifty in the mid-1950s.26 Taking the campaigns from town
to town, factory to factory, these salesmen supplied managers and super-
visors with know-how for implementing motivational communications in
the workplace. Given their pivotal role in disseminating the campaigns and
maintaining face-to-face relationships with the firm’s clients, a discussion of
their work is vital here.27
Salesmen were paid on a commission-only basis (at a rate of 25 percent)
and “volume bonuses,” meaning that the more they sold, the more they
earned. Sheldon-Claire therefore sought men who, as its job ads stated, were
“aggressive, seasoned, and successful,” had “a personality that commands
attention,” and were “in the habit of earning from $15,000 to $20,000 a year
consistently on a commission basis.”28 More seasoned salesmen received
“pyramid overrides” on the sales of those who worked under them and thus
made considerable earnings.29 However, according to salesman David Ber-
nstein (who was also Shalett’s nephew), Shalett found ways to manipulate
sales in efforts to avoid paying bonuses.30
Salesmen’s belief in the products that they sell, or at least an ability to
project that belief, has long been understood to be essential to successful
selling.31 This dynamic applied no less to Sheldon-Claire’s salesmen. Their
contributions to conversations at sales meetings and the recollections of for-
mer salesmen underscore that they believed in the virtues of the product.
In each case, salesmen expressed the view that the campaigns were a useful
“educational” tool that aided mutual understanding between workers and
managers. However, as former salesmen David Bernstein recalls, he and his
colleagues had little interest in Lew Shalett’s speeches about the campaigns’
value in advancing management’s ideological goals, being far more inter-
ested in making sales.32 They paid little heed to the popular motivational lit-
erature of the day, and, after a day of selling, they were more inclined to reach
for a magazine and a drink than a book by one of the era’s sales experts. As
Bernstein explains, “We knew more about it than they did because we knew
the structure of a sale, what made a sale . . . If the guy had the mouth and
the balls and the street smarts, this is what you needed—nothing more.”33
220 | Chapter 6
If salesmen’s attention was focused on the size of their commission

checks, Shalett nonetheless endeavored to instruct them about the firm’s
larger political mission at Sheldon-Claire’s annual sales meeting. Although
by available accounts salesmen experienced the meetings selectively, toler-
ating the antiunion and pro-management speeches but listening up when it
came to advice about selling, a brief discussion of Shalett’s efforts to infuse
them with his own ideals helps illustrate the larger ideological goals that
informed the campaigns and the firm’s mission according to its owner. For
two or three days every year, Shalett gathered the sales force, along with
Rosenfeld, Schenker, and guest speakers from the management world, usu-
ally at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Among the regular speakers were
Alvin Dodd, president of the National Management Association; Larry
Appley, president of the American Management Association; and Russell J.
Greenly, head of the successful Greenly Foremanship Training Service.
With assistance from these management luminaries, Shalett instructed
salesmen at length about the larger stakes of management’s quest to instill
cooperation and win workers’ hearts and minds.34 Rosenfeld and senior
salesmen gave talks about tactics for overcoming sales resistance, and until
his death in 1950, Ben Schenker provided a walk-though of the new cam-
paign that the salesmen would sell over the next year.35 The guest speakers
edified salesmen on the need to help management win the war of ideas
against labor unions through motivational messaging and advised them on
how to win managers over when pitching the campaigns to them.
At the sales meetings, Shalett and his associates made clear that they
regarded the campaigns as a powerful weapon with which managers could
advance antiunion goals.36 In 1947, Dodd claimed that unions had preju-
diced workers against management via “psychological appeals to emotion,
impressions, innuendos.”37 If designed well, he added, Sheldon-Claire’s mes-
sages could be effective in countering this problem because they were pro-
duced by an independent entity and were thus “above suspicion.”38 At the
firm’s 1956 conference, labor lawyer Louis Waldman encouraged salesmen
to exploit anticommunist rhetoric when selling the campaigns. A former
socialist, Waldman became a devotee of anti-communism and a staunch
advocate of management leadership after the war. He used his speech to
warn Sheldon-Claire’s salesmen about “the class struggle doctrinaires”
for whom “every step toward cooperation means the destruction of the
Figure 6.8. Sheldon-Claire salesmen, some accompanied by their wives, at a dinner

during one of the firm’s sales meetings in the mid-1950s. Sheldon Shalett (Rosenfeld’s
assistant and Lew Shalett’s son) stands second from right, next to his cousin and fellow
salesman David Bernstein at far right. Lew Shalett sits at the far end of the table. Cour-
tesy of David Bernstein.
militancy of the working class.” By informing themselves about the “com-

munist philosophy,” he explained, salesmen would boost their sales. Man-
agers, he assured them, “will look up to you [as] the man who [is] talking
the language that will spell out the destiny of that business.”39
Although salesmen were far more interested in selling than in advanc-
ing management power, the conferences nonetheless allowed Shalett and
his associates to expose them to the larger goals that informed the cam-
paigns that they had to sell to factory managers. In the discussions that
followed the guest talks, many salesmen picked up on the speakers’ ideas.
As one salesman put it in 1947, by teaching workers “what their share of the
consumer dollar had to do with the profits,” the campaigns could clear up
“a lot of misunderstanding and fusses between management and labor . . .
over night.”40 Speaking in 1950, veteran salesman Ralph Rogers enthused
that, with its new campaign, We Can’t Have Unless We Give, Sheldon-Claire
222 | Chapter 6
was “selling religion—a religion that’s the American way of life. It’s the fin-
est educational program that has ever been produced in this country by
anybody.” Yet salesmen’s deployment of such rhetoric was more tactical
than sincere. As Bernstein recalls, salesmen learned to echo Shalett’s rhet-
oric back to him “because he was signing their checks. They’ll say God is
dead if it’ll make a buck for them.”41 Yet regardless of how sincere was their
regard for the campaigns, through their adoption of such sentiments they
became influential boosters of the motivational project. Moreover, their
exposure to the ideologically laden arguments of management luminaries
and their boss proved useful when they pitched the campaigns to managers
in the factory.
Selling and Implementing Campaigns in the Factory

In the atmosphere of obligatory cooperation that flourished in indus-
try throughout the postwar era, salesmen found it increasingly easier to
get a foot in the door when calling on factory managers, and they faced
fewer barriers to making sales than in the past.42 It didn’t hurt matters that
Charles Rosenfeld, the architect of the Seth Seiders Syndicate’s sales appa-
ratus, brought to Sheldon-Claire decades of knowledge about selling moti-
vational publicity, not least the scripted sales talks that blended rational-
ized and personality-driven selling. As Bernstein explains, salesmen played
the role of “Pinocchios” who mouthed the words of their “ventriloquists,”
Shalett and Rosenfeld.43 This dynamic reflects sociologist C. Wright Mills’s
observation during this time that “the last autonomous feature of selling,
the art of persuasion and sales personality,” was “expropriated from the
individual salesman.”44 If they worked from organized scripts, however,
salesmen were hardly automatons. While they were expected to adhere to
Rosenfeld’s methods, they did not deliver his sales talks mechanically, and
they deployed improvisation as needed to make a sale.45
If the postwar environment was a welcoming one for motivation, there
was no guarantee that a manager would sign on the dotted line when the
time came to renew a contract or when he listened to a campaign pitch.
Salesmen therefore used their V.P.S.s— the verbal proof stories— when
attempting to convince the manager to buy a campaign. The V.P.S., as will
be recalled, was a story or anecdote that, if used correctly by the salesman,
persuaded the prospect of the value of the campaign. Salesmen were

expected to learn their V.P.S.s by heart and to integrate them into their clos-
ers to nullify the prospect’s hesitancy. Thus, each salesman left his training
with full command of the firm’s “organized sales talk,” which, if delivered
capably, established in the prospect’s mind the certainties of “problem,”
“cure,” and “proof.”46
In his sales talks, Ralph Rogers, who sold the campaigns on the north-
west coast and in Canada, expounded on the value of campaigns in “sell-
ing [the worker] more pride in your products” and gaining workers’ help
in boosting the firm’s competitiveness and customer satisfaction. Among
the benefits of campaigns, he insisted to managers, were “increasing pro-
duction,” “cutting down turnover,” and “building morale.” If the prospect
resisted, Rogers often deployed a more creative tactic whereby he pointed to
respected figures who, he claimed, had endorsed the campaigns. Frequently,
he summoned the legitimizing voice of management authority Paul Hoff-
man, president of the Studebaker Corporation and director of the distribu-
tion of Marshall Plan aid in Europe. Holding aloft a photograph of Hoffman
being sworn in at the Oval Office and reminding the wavering prospect that
the Marshall Plan was a “human relations plan,” Rogers would state that
Hoffman was an ardent admirer of Sheldon-Claire’s campaigns: “When I
called Mr. Hoffman last September . . . [h]e not only has bought [the cam-
paign], but he says today it has made him more money and given his work-
ers more happiness on the job than anything else they have ever had . . .
As he walks through that plant, he puts his hands behind his back, and he
stands and looks at those posters, and he reads the panel message, and he
hears the workers behind him say, ‘Gee, even the boss reads this. It must be
good stuff.’ He has instructed all his works managers, his supervisors, his
foremen, his straw bosses, right on up, to do the same thing.”47 Whether
Rogers met or spoke with Hoffman is unclear. Yet using sales tactics of this
sort—as they did week in, week out in the late 1940s and 1950s—Rogers and
his fellow salesmen smoothed integration of the campaigns into factories
across the country.
When encountering resistance from a manager, a salesman might deploy
a different kind of V.P.S.: testimonial letters from satisfied clients or business
associations that attested to the campaign’s value. Whether extolling the
poster messages or designs or the campaign’s positive effects on employee
224 | Chapter 6
attitudes, authors of testimonials often noted that workers were more

accepting of them because they were not created by their employer. Typical
was a letter from a manager of McIntosh Inc., a Detroit heavy-metal parts
company, who wrote that the campaigns had been “helpful in teaching its
employees the facts of life—business life” and that “their fortunes, their wel-
fare are dependent upon the company’s position and continued success.”
He added, “They will believe you when they won’t believe us—you are an
impartial outsider to them whereas we are prejudiced in their eyes. From
day to day all this helps in getting the work out and keeping the quality up,
but we feel the effects most at bargaining time when all the committeemen
take a more serious view of company position—when our statements of
conditions and position don’t get retorts like “baloney”—and when we even
hear a few admissions like: “Oh, I agree if there’s no profit, there’s no jobs”
and “We can see your side of it, what with competition and all.” Such letters
illustrate the subtle power of Sheldon-Claire’s campaigns. By enlisting the
services of a supposedly “impartial” outsider, employers could gain a layer
of insulation against workers’ criticisms that they were subjecting them to
“company propaganda.”48
A potential hurdle for salesmen was that some managers tried to rebuff
them, citing possible union objections to the campaigns. This challenge was
rare when making renewal sales because any union concerns had gener-
ally been addressed when management purchased its first campaign at an
earlier time. Such objections to the campaigns did sometimes occur when
salesmen presented them to new prospects. Even then, however, it was
limited because the predominantly AFL unions at the firms that Sheldon-
Claire supplied were generally accommodating toward labor-management
cooperation. Sheldon Shalett and David Bernstein explain that union resis-
tance to the campaigns was a nonissue. In a sign of how normalized consen-
sus ideology had become in the industrial arena in the mid-1950s, Shalett
recalled, the unions “believed that cooperation was . . . good, the unions
weren’t antagonistic to that . . . everyone was interested in the same result,
and besides, it didn’t cost the union anything.”49
Until the early 1950s, salesmen sometimes spoke with union representa-
tives to try to sell them on the merits of the campaigns, either at the behest
of managers, who were concerned about potential union criticisms, or at
the suggestion of the salesman. At these confabs, salesman would make the
case that the campaigns were aids for promoting “understanding” between
labor and management. As salesman Ralph Rogers advised managers,
“Present your picture right. Don’t hide it. The workers want you to come
out in the open and explain it to them.” If management failed to be up front,
he argued, the union rep would “wonder, ‘why isn’t he showing this to me?’ ”
Rogers told his colleagues that such meetings usually resulted in his gaining
the representative’s agreement.50
Some union locals even wrote letters to their members encouraging
them to get behind the campaigns. Letters sent to union members in the
Pacific Northwest in 1954 and 1955 are a case in point. All expressed praise
for the campaigns, noting their mutual benefits for workers and manage-
ment alike, and encouraged workers to support them.51 In July 1954 the
Cannery Warehousemen, Food Processors, Drivers and Helpers Local 656
in Eugene, Oregon, received a letter from the union’s secretary-treasurer
extolling the forthcoming campaign, Make Sales, Make Jobs. Echoing the
language of the campaigns’ posters, it reminded workers that “close coop-
eration between employer and employee must prevail” and that workers
must “do our part in a program of selling.”52 The two thousand members
of Local 670 of the Cannery Workers Union in Salem, Oregon, received a
similarly enthusiastic letter stating, “As you pass through the plant you will
observe posters calling your attention to the fact that we are all working
for the Customer. Our plant, and I mean our plant, since we all depend
upon its productivity for a living, must receive, pack, store and ship prod-
ucts as economically and as attractively as is possible in order to Make Sales
Make Jobs.”53 Parroting the campaign’s esteem for the “customer,” its use of
“we,” “us,” and “our/ours,” along with its main slogan, such letters under-
score the growing adoption of management’s motivational language among
union leaders in the mid-1950s. The authors of the above letters supplied
copies to salesmen, who subsequently used them as V.P.S.s when encoun-
tering prospects who were concerned about potential union objections to
the campaigns.54
In an era when business and civic leaders beyond the factory became
influential advocates of cooperation, salesmen were able to capitalize on
local networks when attempting to increase sales. As seen in Lemuel Boul-
ware’s use of “opinion leaders,” networks were indispensable to the spread
of motivational ideology and the ascendance of the motivational project in
226 | Chapter 6
the postwar era. Networks proved no less useful for Sheldon-Claire’s sales-
men, especially in small towns.
The experiences of George Lubin, who sold in the upper Midwest in
the late 1940s, illustrate both how networking could boost sales and how
salesmen aided the integration of the campaigns beyond the factory and
throughout local communities. Lubin concentrated on businesses that
employed between 50 and 250 workers, regarding this strategy as more
fruitful than trying to sell to large urban factories. Lubin’s sales in Ottawa,
Illinois, exemplify this tactic. Of the twenty companies in the town, he sold
the campaign to seven. Lubin found that after buying a campaign, some
managers would call relatives or friends who ran other factories to recom-
mend that they meet with Lubin. These developments often led to multiple
sales and meant that he could pitch to one person instead of “selling six or
eight guys in one company.” In such communities, he added, “the fathers
and wives, the sisters and brothers working in different plants . . . receive
the message simultaneously, and . . . discuss it among themselves.” Stressing
this point to prospects, he noted, helped boost sales.55
Louis Eley, a salesman in the New York region, was one of many who
discovered that small-town networks could yield sales beyond the factory.
In 1948, Eley sold three sets of It’s Up to All of Us to the vice president of the
Delta Ford Company in Rockland County. On a follow-up visit, Eley met
with the company’s president, who purchased copies of the campaign book-
let for each of the plant’s 350 workers, for the 80 students in the local high
school, another 25 for the company’s directors, and copies for the town’s 200
“leading citizens.” The president also purchased three extra frames in which
to display posters in the local bank (which he also owned). He also arranged
for Eley to present the campaign to the manager of a factory in neighboring
Orangeberg County, which resulted in a further sale. By exploiting compe-
tition between the two counties, Eley was invited to present the campaign
to various business and industrial associations and received the Chamber
of Commerce’s blessing in the form of an enthusiastic testimonial letter.
Eventually, It’s Up to All of Us was displayed widely in businesses through-
out both counties.56
In an era when the ideals of consensus reached ever deeper into insti-
tutional life, Sheldon-Claire’s motivational campaigns found an increas-
ingly warm embrace by managers and business leaders after the war. By
presenting themselves as representatives of an impartial service provider

whose products were designed to advance understanding between labor
and management, salesmen extended motivational messaging into the pub-
lic sphere, harmonizing it with business’s quest for authority. Embedding
themselves in local business communities, they were able to elevate the sta-
tus of the campaigns, casting them as visual embodiments of the consensus
ideology that permeated the culture at large.
Getting Foremen in the “Right Frame of Mind”
Because of the emphasis that Sheldon-Claire placed on the role of the super-
visor in merchandising the campaigns, salesmen frequently offered to pro-
vide instruction to groups of foremen. Transcripts of Sheldon-Claire’s sales
meetings contain numerous discussions between salesmen about how they
went about this work. These accounts provide illuminating insights into
how salesmen integrated motivational ideology into the factory through a
use of personality-driven coaching and persuasion.
Salesmen usually gave talks to supervisors at the beginning of a cam-
paign but often returned to give additional talks throughout the year.
Milton Prager, a veteran of the 1920s, believed that the key to selling the
campaigns to a supervisor was to realize that he was essentially a “decent
person” who “feels that somehow he is not doing the right kind of job. He
doesn’t feel himself competent or smooth enough to get the proper enthu-
siasm and . . . understanding of his people to accomplish the particular
objective that is his.” To win their support for the campaigns, Prager would
give talks to groups of supervisors in the factory, detailing motivational
techniques used by management in the past, such as coercion and attempts
to “bribe” employees with “parties” and “picnics.” Both approaches, he told
them, had “failed because in each case supervisors failed to understand that
every worker, even the least informed worker is . . . sophisticated . . . So
how are you going to get your objectives, gentlemen . . . unless you get
the wholehearted support and cooperation of each of your workers[?]” The
answer, he informed supervisors, was that they were “salesmen.”
As “salesmen,” he told them, “each and every one of you have a God
given quality, which you have not developed, for doing a much better job
in supervising, in indoctrinating, in enthusing, in inspiring, in gaining
228 | Chapter 6
the confidence of the people you come into contact with.”57 To succeed, he
added, they must realize that a poster was not just “a picture on the wall.”
Conversely, “if you make it live, and understand its objectives and pur-
poses, and use it as your tool, as your aid, and back it up, you will find it
not only helps you individually and your department, but it will help the
entire company as a whole. It will also help in getting you more respect
from the people you are trying to teach and supervise.” Prager found that
such talks eased managers’ concerns about foremen’s reluctance to back the
campaigns and made them feel more accepting of their role as campaign
merchandisers.58
Many salesmen got supervisors involved during the presentations. Sales-
man William Jackson told his colleagues, “If I was a teacher of gymnas-
tics . . . my class here certainly couldn’t put an inch on their muscle if I stood
up here and took the exercise.” Instead, “the trick” was to get supervisors
to “take the exercise” themselves. With this goal in mind, Jackson gathered
supervisors and as many managers as possible, distributed the campaign’s
introductory booklet, and asked supervisors to read aloud a line or a para-
graph to prompt discussion of the campaign and its objectives. By using
these tactics, Jackson explained, salesmen could resolve supervisors’ “mis-
understandings” and “cynicisms” and help them rehearse answers to poten-
tial questions or objections from workers before the campaign began.59
Salesman Nick Mihailoff frequently gave presentations to groups of
supervisors. An immigrant from the Soviet Union who had earned a mas-
ter’s degree in engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before
working as a supervisor trainer for Pan American Airlines, Mihailoff had
an atypical journey to Sheldon-Claire. As a “convert” to American free
enterprise, he proved effective in getting supervisors behind the campaigns.
Like many salesmen, he also sometimes found himself offering reassurance
to managers who expressed concerns that the campaigns might stoke fore-
men’s opposition to management. After one of his presentations to a group
of unionized foremen in 1949, a manager fretted to Mihailoff that one fore-
man, who had initially expressed skepticism toward the campaign, would
not come on board. Mihailoff replied that the foreman was “a borderline
case,” and despite “leftish inclinations,” he mainly “wants to have the satis-
faction of accomplishment by displaying his initiative.” He told the manager
Figure 6.9. A page from a 1959 Sheldon-Claire booklet showing Sheldon-Claire sales-
men receiving training (above) and a salesman telling a group of supervisors about
“developments in motivational programming” (below). Sheldon- Claire Company
230 | Chapter 6
that “if the management is smart, if they can swing him on their side, he
may become the best salesman they have for the management.” These tac-
tics paid off, Mihailoff reported. Revisiting the factory the next week, he
learned that the foreman in question had been promoted to floor manager.60
Managers sometimes praised salesmen and their talks to foremen in tes-
timonial letters. Typical is a letter from a plant manager of a metal stamp-
ing company in Tucker, Georgia, who wrote that in a recent presentation, a
salesman “gave a real moving one hour talk on what leadership really means
to us . . . He was able to get all of our supervisors in the proper frame of
mind to accept this 12-week program. Each week thereafter, we used your
leadership pamphlets and posters throughout the plant as a short intro-
duction to each session, before moving onto other topics such as economic
environment, organizations, etc. Your program gave us a real basis to build
our entire training program around.”61 At the heart of this letter is a recog-
nition that salesmen offered two things that management was often unable
to provide: an emotionally resonant rationale for supervisors to participate
in the campaigns, and a template from which to develop its training.
By the mid-1950s, as foremen were brought increasingly under the
umbrella of management, salesmen continued to meet with them during
visits to make renewal contracts. Through these confabs, salesmen gave
foremen ongoing direction about how to “sell” the campaigns’ messages to
workers. David Bernstein frequently met with supervisors at Honeywell in
Minneapolis, his largest contract. A photograph taken during one of his
visits there in 1956 depicts him (left) with four supervisors and a manager
gathered around a display board that he used to demonstrate the goals of
that year’s campaign, It Makes a Difference to You!, which asserted that job
security was dependent on labor-management cooperation (figure 6.10).
Bernstein’s demonstration, as illustrated in the headings atop the board,
revolved around “communicate” and “motivate,” two core concerns for
management throughout the era.
For Honeywell and other companies served by Sheldon-Claire, sales-
men’s coaching of foremen served as a subtle form of indoctrination in
managerial ideals. Even as many foremen surely recognized the campaigns’
ideological objectives, they had little incentive to oppose them given that
their tributes to teamwork, cooperation, and company mindedness echoed
foremen’s ascribed responsibilities.62 As representatives of a supposedly
Figure 6.10. Sheldon-Claire salesman David Bernstein (left) posing with four super-
visors and a manager at Honeywell in Minneapolis in 1956. Salesmen such as Bernstein
played a powerful role in the proliferation of motivational campaigns in the postwar
workplace and in enlisting supervisors as “merchandisers” of the campaigns. Courtesy
of David Bernstein.
impartial organization dedicated to helping supervisors accomplish their

goals as “team leaders,” salesmen faced few impediments when presenting
the campaigns to supervisors. Their accounts of their work illustrate that
they played an influential role in management’s efforts to enlist supervisors
as merchandisers of motivational messaging and, in turn, in smoothing the
proliferation of motivation in the workplace.
The Cold War Motivation War

Buoyed by its success, during the 1950s Shalett endeavored to build Sheldon-
Claire’s international presence. Accompanied by his wife and office man-
ager, Wanda, he made several trips to Europe to establish new branches of
Sheldon-Claire. The firm’s international expansion was made possible by
232 | Chapter 6
Figure 6.11. In 1950 Sheldon-Claire moved to lavish 7,500-square-foot offices on the

top floor of 540 Lake Shore Drive, overlooking Lake Superior, close to Michigan Ave-
nue’s advertising district. Designed by leading Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg, the
offices embodied the modernist sensibilities of the firm’s campaigns. Stepping out of the
elevator, visitors encountered an industrial-themed mechanical animation wall com-
plete with moving gears and mobiles. The corridor was lined with industrial images, and
atop the double doors was the slogan, “Man must never be subdued by his own handi-
work.” The reception area, visible beyond the doors, included a front desk designed like
a factory pay window, framed by several of the firm’s motivational posters. HB-13036-D,
Chicago History Museum, Hedrich-Blessing Collection, Chicago, IL.
its decade of success since World War II and by low operating costs. Owing
to its large inventory of campaign materials and poster art, the firm only
needed to put around 20 percent of its income into production costs and
30 percent toward marketing and sales, leaving Shalett with the rest, much
of which he sank into the company. Living in one of the penthouse suites
on North Lake Shore Drive in the prestigious Gold Coast neighborhood of
Chicago, Shalett and his wife were, as one associate put it, “typical Ameri-
can small business Babbit’s [sic] of their time.”63
The firm’s international expansion took time to implement, and most
of its new beachheads were modest at first. In 1950, Canadian salesman
Allan East commanded a small team of around five salesmen in Canada;

Jack Aptaker, the salesman hired by Shalett to develop the British market,
initially covered the United Kingdom alone, eventually hiring three other
salesmen; and French salesman Nick Tatarinov oversaw a small sales team
that sold in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. The firm marketed its cam-
paigns as an “industrial education” program, a tactic that allowed it to
receive payment from clients in the form of United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) coupons.64 Figures on the
firm’s international sales are not available, but its combined international
and domestic sales grew to an estimated $1.5 million per year throughout
the second half of the decade.65 Regardless of how much of this business
consisted of nondomestic sales, Shalett used the firm’s international pres-
ence to boost his own image as an important ally in management’s struggle
to outmotivate and outproduce the Soviet Union.66
The role of workplace motivation in Cold War contestation has largely
been overlooked by historians, so a brief contextual detour is in order
before we detail Sheldon-Claire’s efforts to profit from Cold War tensions.
From the end of World War II, the overarching objectives of U.S. eco-
nomic planners were to contain the spread of communism and establish
a Western economic order under the auspices of American-led consensus
ideology.67 The Marshall Plan, which supplied aid and investment to Euro-
pean nations from 1948 to 1952, was a major vehicle for these goals.68 A
less noted aspect of the Marshall Plan is its efforts to export American-
style models of productivity, labor-management consensus, and work val-
ues. The major developments in American management ideology after
World War II—the growing influence of human relations, the reverence
of labor-management cooperation, and the promotion of neoliberal ideals
of work—began to establish roots in Western Europe where management
efforts to weaken labor unions were accelerating.69
The plan’s approach to industry in Europe revolved around two main
ideas: First, rising productivity, aided by a loosening of regulations, was
defined as the route to social progress. The plan would raise the standard
of living in European nations by increasing wages and access to material
goods. The second idea was more understated in the plan’s publicity but no
less important to its success: its administrators sought to make European
labor unions more receptive to labor-management consensus. Mirroring
234 | Chapter 6
efforts in the United States, they encouraged unions to adopt the role of
“partners in prosperity,” helping management to boost productivity in
return for higher wages for their members (and abandoning their class-
conscious and often antimanagement stances in the process).70
The quest to export American ideas about productivity and work involved
a massive motivational propaganda campaign that was coordinated by
the body responsible for administering the plan in Europe: the European
Cooperation Agency (ECA). Led by Paul Hoffman, former president of the
Studebaker Company, the ECA disseminated posters, pamphlets, films, and
radio broadcasts to businesses across Europe and organized exchange pro-
grams and exhibits—“the largest international propaganda operation ever
seen in peacetime.”71 The ECA sponsored the production of between 200
and 250 films between 1949 and 1953, including documentary-style and
drama-based productions as well as cartoons. Screened in movie theaters,
public venues, and the workplace, these films were seen by an estimated
forty million Europeans.72 These films sought to destabilize “old world”
conceptions of work, but given the attachment that many European work-
ers had toward traditional craft labor, filmmakers implied that “modern”
productivity could be achieved without compromising craft and tried to
limit heavy-handed exaltations of American work values.73
As Victoria de Grazia, among others, argues, the ECA’s efforts to sell
American-style consensus to workers in Europe faced significant obstacles.
American industrial production, with its ceaseless acceleration of the pro-
duction line and alienating effects on workers—“Fordism,” as it came to be
known—was anathema given the profound threats that it posed to craft and
autonomous labor that European workers had long valued. Further under-
mining the ECA’s crusade was the fact that many labor unions in Europe
were communist-led or significantly influenced by communism and thus
far less accommodating to calls for labor-management consensus.74 How-
ever, although the ECA did not prompt a sudden adoption of American-
style productivity, it gave managers leverage to define cooperation as the
guiding principle in labor-management relations, to normalize the purg-
ing of radicals from unions, and to advance management power.75 While it
was not adopted universally, by the mid-1960s, American-style productiv-
ity was making discernible inroads in Europe.76 As Anthony Carew details,
the Marshall Plan had significant effects on the balance of power between
workers and management, which became apparent only after the plan
ended. The “psychological boost” that European managers received due to
U.S. support, he illustrates, emboldened many of them to exploit “divisions
and weakness in the ranks of the labor movement to restructure industry to
their own advantage.”77
For Sheldon-Claire, the crusade to export American production and
work ideals presented rich opportunities to exploit foreign markets. In
communicating visually and rhetorically the precepts of labor-management
cooperation and the claim that jobs and wages were dependent on such
neoliberal ideals as business competitiveness and company mindedness,
these campaigns brought the sensibilities then emphasized through the
ECA’s propaganda into workplace motivation. The core sentiments of cam-
paigns such as Make Sales, Make Jobs (1954), Our Work Guarantees Our
Wages (1956), and Help Your Company, Help Yourself (1958), for example,
were entirely in line with the principles that the ECA promoted. Moreover,
Sheldon-Claire needed only to modify American spelling in its publicity in
order to market it to employers in the United Kingdom and much of Can-
ada. For clients in Western Europe and Francophone regions of Canada,
it translated the text to French, Belgian, or Swiss as the situation required
(figure 6.12).78
Director of sales in France, Nick Tatarinov, noted that early efforts to
market the campaigns in 1954 had proven difficult because some French
employers “dislike the American character of the posters.” Sheldon-Claire
responded by modifying some posters, but the problem remained because
employers were equally negative toward the “American copyright.” As Tata-
rinov saw it, “This continues to be a real handicap to our expansion there
because of the Commies: They are against everything that is American.” By
1956, however, he had built up strong sales. The success of the campaigns,
he believed, was because employers in France, Belgium, and Switzerland
had “to solve exactly the same problems” as their American counterparts,
including “the problem of communication, the problem of production costs
and the problem of being in good terms with their personnel.” Emphasiz-
ing these issues during his sales pitches to European managers had a posi-
tive effect on sales, he reported. Smaller firms employing 100 or so workers
generally purchased six to eight sets of the campaigns, while midsize firms
employing 300 to 400 workers often bought 20 sets, and those with 750 or
236 | Chapter 6
Figure 6.12. An image from a 1959 Sheldon-Claire promotional booklet entitled,

“Employee Motivation Comes of Age,” which touted its international business. The clos-
ing slogan in this French poster reads, “Satisfied customers mean a successful business.”
more workers typically requested up to 45 sets. Like his colleagues in the

United States, Tatarinov found that offering to give instruction to groups of
foremen could secure a sale. European managers and foremen found these
talks appealing, he noted, “because they don’t know how to display” the
campaigns and were self-conscious about presenting them to workers.79
Breaking into the British market proved more difficult than doing so in
mainland Europe. The experiences of Jack Aptaker, the firm’s first director
of sales in the United Kingdom, underscore the combination of economic
and cultural factors that thwarted Sheldon-Claire’s attempts to export
American-style motivation to British workplaces. At Sheldon-Claire’s 1956

sales meeting in Chicago, Aptaker recounted his efforts to build the firm’s
U.K. sales. Those efforts had been stymied by numerous “stalls,” a situation
that was compounded by the “stigma attached to the salesman in England.”
Another challenge was the skepticism of many unionized British work-
ers who were quick to equate the campaign’s references to the importance
of “profit” with management “exploitation.” The British market was also
harder to crack than that of the United States, he added, because industrial
problems in Britain were even “tougher” than those in the United States.
Compounding matters, he observed, was the “ignorance” of British manag-
ers about the benefits of motivation. He read his fellow salesmen an article
from Personnel Management that lamented that British workers were “skep-
tical of management exhortation” because of their radical unions, many
of which were “communist dominated.” Only over the last year, with the
aid of three additional salesmen, he noted, had sales increased. Managers,
he explained, were warming to “effective and unpatronizing communica-
tion media,” while “the British worker” was starting to “realize that his own
prosperity is tied up with how well and how fast he works.”80
Testimonial letters from international clients reveal that they, like their
U.S. counterparts, found the campaigns to be useful in boosting productiv-
ity and mitigating labor-management tensions.81 In April 1957, A. Nurton,
the personnel officer at Bristol Aircraft, informed Sheldon-Claire that prior
to using its posters, the company had been experiencing widespread late-
ness and absenteeism, but after one month using the campaign, each had
declined significantly. The reduction in lost hours, he noted, was caused not
solely by the campaign but also by the additional pretext that it offered for
management to caution workers who it deemed to be remiss. During the
inception of the campaign, Nurton added, “certain people were interviewed
and warned regarding their timekeeping.” While the “individual action”
taken with workers had been effective in reducing lost hours, he concluded,
“the poster campaign assisted to a large measure.”82 The integration of the
campaigns did not always go unchallenged. In 1956, when the management
of a brassware company in Barking, Essex, installed its first Sheldon-Claire
poster, some workers expressed their opposition by fixing a whip to the
frame. Their manager laughed off the gesture in a letter to Sheldon-Claire’s
salesman, stating, “Obviously they have taken interest . . . whoever fixed the
238 | Chapter 6
whip is at least one of the persons who we hope to convince that we are all
in the same boat.”83
Like salesmen in the United States, those in Europe attempted to smooth
the campaigns’ integration in the factory by giving talks to foremen. In
1959, the director of a latex company in Haslingden, Lancashire, wrote to
Sheldon-Claire praising a lecture by one of its salesmen to over forty of its
foremen. He noted that the foremen had “previously only been interested
in the Trade Union propaganda, and it was very interesting indeed to listen
to the questions after the lecture and to note that the material in your post-
ers is at least being absorbed and understood by a good percentage of the
people.”84 Many clients in Europe praised the talks that salesman Nick Tata-
rinov gave to their foremen and managers. Some larger companies, such
as Société Anonyme de l’Union des Papeteries, a paper mill in Belgium,
bought twenty-five sets and enlisted Tatarinov to give talks to workers and
supervisors to help the campaign’s integration. A chocolate company in
Brussels wrote that “a campaign of this kind widens the horizon of the labor
and management of the shop” and that its “success” was “real.” The direc-
tor of a spark plug company in Paris wrote to compliment Sheldon-Claire’s
maxim that “Customer Is King,” noting that its posters had achieved “max-
imum effectiveness” in influencing workers and supervisors. In June 1954,
the assistant manager of an electrical company in Paris wrote that since
implementing Sheldon-Claire’s campaign three months earlier, its workers,
who were “being solicited with all kinds of social economic theories,” were
beginning to understand that they worked for the “community of custom-
ers rather than a boss.”85
Although Sheldon-Claire’s European success was slow to develop, its
international expansion allowed Shalett to boost the firm’s image as an ally
in managers’ motivational efforts. A 1959 booklet for clients announced that
Sheldon-Claire’s international “expansion has been rapid, because manage-
ment throughout the free world realizes that employee motivation pro-
grams play an important role in helping them effectively compete with the
captive Communist bloc in the struggle for free markets.”86 If such trium-
phal rhetoric was overblown, it underscored the increasingly central role
of motivational ideology in management quests for authority during the
Cold War.
A Mission to Moscow: “What Makes Ivan Run?”

Throughout the 1950s, Shalett harbored a desire to visit the Soviet Union
to observe Soviet motivational methods. Soviet officials, he declared, dis-
couraged him by claiming that the visit would be a “waste of time” because
“we don’t have any need for the type of persuasive techniques or the incen-
tives that are used in the capitalistic system.”87 Shalett’s hopes were also frus-
trated by Cold War travel restrictions. Any American who wished to visit
the Soviet Union had to gain permission from American and Soviet author-
ities, making such trips difficult or even impossible. The situation altered
following Stalin’s death in 1953, which prompted a thawing of exchanges
between Soviet and American specialists. Over the next several years, the
U.S. and Soviet governments engaged in an increasingly robust program
of exchanges, involving specialists from industry, science, and the arts.
Far from fueling isolation owing to an East-West schism as scholars once
believed, the Cold War spurred cross-pollination of culture and ideas.88
This new era of openness ultimately opened the door for Shalett to real-
ize his ambition. In fall 1958 toward the end of a European trip, Shalett and
his wife, Wanda, were granted a three-week travel visa to Moscow. Shalett
had no plan in place for accessing Soviet factories, but in a stroke of luck,
on the plane they met Life magazine photographer Howard Sochurek, who
was traveling to Moscow to work on a photo assignment for the Soviet gov-
ernment. Sochurek provided Shalett with contact information for Ivan Ily-
achev, the director of the Soviet Agitational Propaganda Bureau, a connec-
tion that proved fruitful when Ilyachev agreed to arrange several factory
tours for him and his wife.89
During the factory tours, Shalett, accompanied by a member of Ilyachev’s
staff and an interpreter, asked workers and managers about their attitudes
toward their work, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Wanda, a Polish
immigrant who spoke some Russian, subtly informed her husband that the
bureau interpreter was “sugarcoating” some of the responses by the work-
ers and managers whom they talked with.90 With his characteristic bluster,
Shalett later wrote to Sheldon-Claire’s American clients that despite the criti-
cisms that some Russian workers expressed, they were “so enthused over the
prospect of becoming the masters of the world—leaders not only in the field
240 | Chapter 6
of heavy industries but in consumer goods—that they take it upon them-

selves to convert the slackers who have not bought the concept.”91 Work-
ers often pursued this goal, he explained, through the workers’ committees,
which were “organized for the purpose of checking and double checking
their fellow workers to make sure that no one is lying down on the job.”92
Shalett later underscored these claims by reproducing in Sheldon-Claire’s
literature images of posters created by Soviet workers (which he gathered
during his tours of Soviet factories) that espoused the need to outproduce
the United States (figure 6.13).93 This practice of workers creating their own
posters had long been common in the United States, where employers had
encouraged it, sometimes during factory poster contests. Even so, Shalett’s
image of legions of Soviet workers eagerly motivating each other was a pow-
erful one at a time when Americans were bombarded with warnings about
the threat of communism. In comparing Soviet and American motivational
posters, Shalett observed far more similarities than differences, later recall-
ing, “It was a revelation to me because I thought I was back in the United
States except that the communiqués were in Russian.”94
The contradictory feelings expressed among workers as described by
Shalett—on the one hand, expressions of criticism of fellow workers who
were deemed to be “slacking” and, on the other, affirmations of commit-
ment to Soviet mastery of the world—were reflected too among managers,
he claimed. Shalett recalled a tour of the Moscow Ordzhonikidze Machine
Tool Factory, which employed “4,000 people working two shifts of 48
hours each.” Shalett talked for two hours with its managing director, “Mr.
Kozichev,” who explained “the whole organizational set-up” and “all that
was being done to stimulate and motivate his workers to help him make his
quota of 2,000 lathes a year.” Kozichev, like managers throughout the Soviet
Union, Shalett stated, was in a precarious position because trade unions
and workers’ committees had the power to replace him if they were dis-
satisfied with his performance. He and other managers were thus “always
in a squeeze between the trade union on one side and the workers on the
other side, watching his every move.” On asking Kozichev how it felt “to
be the whipping boy of the trade union and the workers’ committees,” he
replied through the interpreter, “How does the general manager of a factory
operating under your system feel when he is caught between the squeeze of
union demands and stockholders’ demands?” The situation that Kozichev
described, Shalett concluded, reflected the fact that Soviet “management is
Figure 6.13. In its marketing publicity, Sheldon-Claire reproduced several of the
worker-produced posters that Shalett brought back from Moscow. In the annotation
at the bottom, the firm emphasized the success of the Soviet Union’s propaganda cam-
paign, informing its clients that Soviet workers made posters “at their own expense!”
242 | Chapter 6
more or less in the same spot, compelled to do the same thing that manage-
ment must do in a competitive society to command the will of the worker—
to secure their willing cooperation for increased productivity.”95
Shalett’s Moscow trip revealed that, despite his assertions about a Cold
War clash of ideals about work, the purpose of Sheldon-Claire’s campaigns
was the same as those deployed by Soviet propagandists. Although couch-
ing their motivational messages through differing ideologies—capitalism
and communism—the purpose of motivational propaganda was in both
cases the same. Each sought to help managers discipline workers by invok-
ing emotion-laden promises about work’s rewards and to stoke workers’
fears that their jobs were dependent on teamwork and labor-management
cooperation.
Selling the Motivational War

After returning to Chicago in November, Shalett embarked on a media
campaign in which he warned Americans about the success of the Soviet
Union’s workplace propaganda initiative. In speeches and in interviews,
Shalett painted himself as a dutiful hero who had ventured into the belly
of the beast and returned with knowledge that would help managers in the
United States and the West best their Soviet counterparts in the motiva-
tional war. At business luncheons and in radio and television interviews, he
paraded Soviet posters gathered during his Moscow trip, using them to warn
audiences that because of its superior propaganda machinery, the Soviet
Union was doing a far better job of motivating workers than were Ameri-
can managers. The result, he warned, was that the United States was in dan-
ger of losing the Cold War production battle and—most devastating—the
struggle for global dominance, a possibility that he illustrated with graphs
comparing the two nations’ productivity.
A November television interview on World Spotlight, a half-hour news
program on public television station WTTW, Chicago, is a case in point
(figure 6.14). In his introduction to the program, host Carter David-
son, director of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, an organiza-
tion dedicated to boosting the influence of Chicago’s business community
in the Cold War crusade, echoed Shalett’s rhetoric in his opening mono-
logue, apparently drawing on information supplied by Shalett. Davidson
announced, for example that “the Russians have approximately 325,000
Figure 6.14. Shalett (right) pointing to Soviet posters during his TV interview with
Carter Davidson, director of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations on Chicago’s
public television station, WTTW, November 1958. Sheldon-Claire Company Records,
1958. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
zealous propagandists assigned to the job of getting the most out of Rus-
sian workers and proving that a communist economy can beat American
free enterprise,” phrasing used by Shalett in his speeches. In the face of
this state-sponsored motivational campaign stood the comparatively tiny
Sheldon-Claire, whose owner, Lew Shalett, commanded “about 135 sales
executives who sell his ideas for higher production and increased efficiency
to business management in the United States and other free countries of
the west.”96 During this and other interviews, Shalett showed some of the
seventy-plus posters that he had brought back from the Soviet Union and
noted that Sheldon-Claire, in a spirit of reciprocity, had since sent some of
its own campaign materials to Soviet industrial leaders.97
Shalett proclaimed to an audience of over 150 management and labor
representatives at the first Partners in Prosperity luncheon in Chicago
(an event cosponsored by Sheldon-Claire) that “employee motivation has
become a world-wide economic problem,” and it was therefore necessary
to “build a fire inside, not under the worker in order to secure their vital
244 | Chapter 6
cooperation.” The need for motivation, he added, was pressing given Soviet
premier Nikita Khrushchev’s frequent claims that the Soviet Union’s supe-
rior production power would “crush” the United States. Moreover, Shalett
argued, the “barbaric” Soviet “propaganda machine,” which was coordi-
nated by over a third of a million agents under the leadership of Agitational
Propaganda director Ivan Ilyachev, assaulted Soviet workers with a constant
stream of lies. The main objective of their propaganda, he claimed, was to
“dramatise the future, because they know it is difficult to reconcile the drab,
dismal present economic conditions to future promises.” He warned the
audience, “Yes, my friends, we can say what we please about the Soviet
system—the viciousness of their propaganda, the ruthlessness of their
propagandists. We can criticize them, ridicule them, we can point to the
crudeness of their work, the poor quality of their products, we can decry
their Godlessness, their political philosophy and lack of integrity, and their
almost inhuman treatment of the masses. But in one department they are
doing a brilliant, masterful job—in one department they are supreme. In
one department they have done more with words then many countries have
done with bullets. They have the most efficiently organized, the most intelli-
gently operated, and the most effective propaganda machinery ever devised
to communicate and motivate their people to do what must be done and
what they believe can only be done—their way.”98
Shalett’s puffed-up rhetoric typified the Cold War bellicosity of the Chi-
cago business community at this time. During the 1950s, the city became
a hub of pro–free enterprise sentiment as its business and civic leaders
strived to define themselves as vital players in the larger national anticom-
munist struggle. These efforts were also boosted significantly by Chicago’s
prominent role in the nation’s Cold War military defense system. Begin-
ning in 1953, the U.S. military installed Ajax missile sites along Lake Shore
Drive and in the city’s surrounding areas as part of its antiballistic missile
program. In June 1958, just a few months before Shalett’s Moscow trip and
ensuing media crusade, the military replaced the Ajax missiles with the
more powerful Nike missile system, whose warheads were twice as power-
ful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In all, twenty-two
firing sites were installed in upstate Illinois and Indiana, making the Chi-
cago area one of the most heavily fortified in the nation. In the wake of the
concern that followed the Soviet’s successful launch of Sputnik the previous
year, the Nike program was hailed as a vital bulwark in the nation’s defenses
against Soviet attack. Looking out from the balcony of his lavish pension
on Lake Shore Drive, not far from several Nike batteries, Shalett must have
felt elated at his newfound status as a prominent champion of motivation.99
To advance his agenda, Shalett developed a relationship with prom-
inent anticommunist and antilabor politician Senator Carl T. Curtis of
Nebraska, an influential member of the McCellan Select Committee on
labor-management rackets. In Curtis, Shalett found an ally who could lend
authority to his warnings about the need for employers to embrace moti-
vational campaigns. At the Partners in Prosperity luncheon, Curtis gave a
keynote speech that union “racketeering” was threatening to destroy the
very foundations of American democracy and that industry and workers
needed to pull together to get rid of the “thieves, hoodlums, crooks, the
Marxists, those leaders who use violence to gain their end, the corrupt and
those union leaders who engage in unlawful political activities.”100 To top
off the event, Mayor Daley of Chicago presented an award to the Magnaflux
Corporation, a firm that Shalett and his cronies deemed to be an exemplar
of labor-management cooperation (figure 6.15).
Shalett’s performances during his post-Moscow media crusade bring to
mind the infamous “kitchen” debate between then Vice President Nixon
and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev the following year at the Ameri-
can Exhibition in Moscow. During their tour of the exhibits, the two men
stopped at a display showcasing a modern, American-style kitchen and
engaged in a debate over the relative merits of American and Soviet life-
styles. Nixon seized the moment to expound upon the virtues of the United
States’ consumer-based economy over a Soviet system that failed to provide
modern consumer goods for its people.101 Like Nixon, Shalett extolled the
moral supremacy of American economic and social values over commu-
nism but also warned that American management was in danger of losing
out to their Soviet counterparts in the Cold War production battle.
Shalett repeated these assertions to anyone in earshot in the wake of
his Moscow trip. In an article in the Chicago Daily Tribune early in 1959,
he warned that when Ilyachev, the head of Soviet Agitational Propaganda
“wants to distribute a message to stir up the workers, he has only to press
a button and the walls of plants and factories are covered with posters.”102
Sheldon-Claire repeated Shalett’s pronouncements in an array of literature
246 | Chapter 6
Figure 6.15. Lew Shalett (left) and Senator Carl T. Curtis of Nebraska (right), at the
1958 Partners in Prosperity Award Luncheon following Mayor Richard J. Daley’s presen-
tation of the award to the Magnaflux Corporation. Steve Bailey, business agent for Local
130 of the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Union, is at center. Sheldon-Claire Company
for its clients. One major forum for this rhetoric was They Say, the monthly
booklet produced by the firm’s in-house specialist in free market economics,
Helen Bugbee, and supplied to its clients. They Say was billed as “a review
of current labor-management problems,” which, unsurprisingly, entailed a
constant stream of stories about the virtues of labor-management cooper-
ation and the importance of effective communications in the workplace.
Mostly, though, They Say was a means for promoting Sheldon-Claire’s prod-
uct. Shalett’s Moscow trip and his reinvigorated mission to advance motiva-
tion provided an abundance of material for the booklet. Its December 1958
issue consisted of a report on Soviet motivational propaganda techniques,
replete with reproductions of some of the posters that Shalett gathered in
Soviet factories. The report warned, “As a result of [its] all-out drive, backed
by unlimited resources, the Soviets appear to be ahead of the U.S. in the
vital field of employee motivation.” Meanwhile, “fewer than 1% of all Amer-
ican businesses and industries have an organized, integrated program for
motivating employees,” which was “ironic because the Soviets are using
visual communications techniques which were pioneered and developed in
America to achieve their objectives.”103
The Shaletts’ Moscow trip served Sheldon-Claire’s interests in another
way: it provided Lew Shalett with an abundance of material with which
to motivate his salesmen. In the months and years following the trip, he
transmitted newsletters to his salesmen in the United States, Canada, and
Europe at a rate of two to three times per week, directing them to tell their
prospects that Soviet workers were more fired up to win the production
battle than were American workers. To bring the point home, Shalett often
included reproductions of posters made by Soviet workers on the newslet-
ters’ covers. In the first newsletter after his return from Moscow, he warned
that the Soviet Union was succeeding in motivating “Ivan and Boris and
Anya and the millions of their comrades upon whom [it] is counting,” not
because they were better than their American counterparts but “because of
their shrewd appraisal of the human mind.” Moreover, Ilyachev’s army of
“salesmen” were working constantly “in all the fifteen Republics—inspiring
the worker to get on with it—to get crackin’—to do what must be done
to beat the West—with the same communicating and motivating meth-
ods created, designed and produced by the Sheldon-Claire Company!” The
company’s salesmen were, he added, “not only in the right business, but at
the right time! . . . there is no better method for mobilizing people’s minds
and controlling their actions than the products and services rendered by
Sheldon-Claire.”104
In a subsequent newsletter, Shalett scoffed at a recent visit to the United
States by Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev’s chief emissary. He announced to
salesmen, “Mikoyan Came! Mikoyan Saw! But Mikoyan Didn’t Fool Any-
body!” before agreeing with one business leader that the trip was little more
than a “burlesque show” and lambasting Mikoyan as an “arch propagandist.”
Shalett added, “Mikoyan . . . represents in everybody’s mind—including
your prospect—the symbol of the vicious and ruthless type of propaganda
that the Soviets are using to motivate their workers to cooperate, to produce
248 | Chapter 6
more—to beat the West.” Mikoyan’s visit, he told his salesmen, provided a
valuable sales opportunity: “By injecting the Russian story into the inter-
view you not only add color and excitement to the pitch—but you arouse
certain fears, certain emotional values in your prospect’s mind that moti-
vate HIM to buy a Sheldon-Claire campaign to help HIM achieve HIS
objectives!” This, he concluded, was “the most powerful ammunition you
can use to destroy the smugness, the complacency, the indifference of those
wise guys who know all the answers—but have not yet been aroused to the
problems—the threats that endanger not only our way of life—but their
jobs!”105
Despite Shalett’s claims about the freedom-granting nature of motivation

in the United States and the West, the firm’s campaigns revolved around
the very same mechanism that Shalett condemned when used by the Soviet
Union: fear. The script of the firm’s training program in the late 1950s
informed inductee salesmen that “by and large, the underlying impetus, in
virtually every program has been a threat . . . to engender fear—not fear of
physical or economic reprisal, to be sure, but the threat of loss of security.” It
continued: “No, we haven’t said to the man or woman whom we address our
motivational messages—‘Work hard or you will be beaten’ or ‘Work hard or
you will be fired’—but we have repeatedly said, ‘Work hard or the company
will go out of business—and you will be out of a job.’ A sugar-coated cap-
sule, but still the same bitter medicine inside. So no matter how you slice
it—we’re threatening—we’re selling fear.”106
This statement underscores a central contradiction in the firm’s mission,
and one that characterized the ECA’s campaign to promote American mod-
els of productivity in Europe. Each claimed that, through work, one gained
autonomy and freedom, a transaction that was contrasted against the sit-
uation of workers subject to coercive propaganda under communism. In
reality, workers in the United States and the West were exposed to a similar
motivational regimen as their counterparts in the Soviet Union, albeit one
anchored in a different political ideology. Although motivation in the West
emphasized “humanistic” ideals—voluntary labor-management coopera-
tion, a rising standard of living, and individual prosperity—it comprised
its own brand of manipulation and obscured the fact that cooperation was
more obligatory than voluntary.
For employers in the United States, Sheldon-Claire’s campaigns served
an array of goals. Not only did they help indoctrinate rank-and-file work-
ers and supervisors in the firm’s official ideals regarding subjects such as
labor-management cooperation, wages, business competitiveness, and
political ideology, but they also integrated employees into the organization,
both through exposure to campaign sentiments and by enlisting foremen
as “merchandisers.” The campaigns also lent credence to the claim that the
“American way of work,” so to speak, was freer than work was elsewhere.
However, if many American workers experienced expanded rewards in
the form of competitive wages and access to consumption, work itself was
another story. As the factory worker and novelist Harvey Swados observed
in a 1957 article in the Nation, “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” workers
of the era felt little of the freedom extolled by devotees of motivation. Rub-
bing against the grain of the era’s orthodoxy that class distinctions were
disappearing amid the postwar boom, Swados observed, “The plain truth is
that factory work is degrading. It is degrading to any man who ever dreams
of doing something worthwhile with his life.” Whereas “for the immigrant
worker, even the one who did not dream of socialism, his long hours were
going to buy him freedom. For the factory worker of the Fifties, his long
hours are going to buy him commodities . . . and maybe reduce a few of his
debts . . . Almost without exception, the men with whom I worked on the
assembly line last year felt like trapped animals.”107
Swados’s observations reflected an increasingly common reality for
workers, both men and women, from the late 1950s onward. Wages and
access to consumption offered little consolation to workers in an era when
automation and speedups on the line were eroding their craft traditions and
autonomy. Concerned that workers’ resentments to these new demands
were compromising productivity and fearing revived class hostility, man-
agement began to develop a different approach to motivation. The mes-
saging emphasizing consumption and Cold War consensus used since the
end of World War II by corporations and specialists such as Sheldon-Claire
would soon fade. However, once again, the strategy deployed in the new
techniques would rely no less on attempts to manipulate the worker’s mind.
EPILOGUE
Motivation in an Age of Diminishing Rewards
Now imagine if you could take all the fun and addicting, motivating
elements in a game and combine that with actually productive activities
in the real world!
—Yu-kai Chou, “The Beginner’s Guide to Gamification,” 2012
If Cold War motivational rhetoric served industrial corporations and inde-

pendent campaign suppliers like Sheldon-Claire well, it rapidly lost rele-
vance as the postwar boom began to slow in the mid-1960s and the post-
war consensus, with its emphasis on labor-management bargaining, started
to erode in the face of a new cycle of class conflict toward the end of the
decade. In collective memory, the era’s class tensions have been largely
overshadowed by its more visible events, including the civil rights move-
ment, the war in Vietnam, the antiwar movement, second wave feminism,
and the counterculture. Yet events in industry—not least surging strikes
toward the end of the decade—were no less dramatic and consequential.
Workers’ responses to automation and speedups on the production line,
moreover, were to prompt a wide-ranging shift in managers’ approaches to
motivation.
Industrial tensions exploded into full view in the early 1970s in a wave
of widely reported strikes involving millions of workers in the auto, min-
ing, trucking, and steel industries. To the frustration of many labor leaders,
younger workers, fueled by the rebellious stance of young people in other
arenas, rejected the fealty of older workers toward consensus-era union-
250
Motivation in an Age of Diminishing Rewards | 251
management bargaining. Operating independent of unions, they engaged

in unofficial strikes and informal action on the line, leading to the most
widespread industrial strike waves since the end of World War II.1 The strike
by workers at General Motors’ Lordstown, Ohio, plant in 1971–72 came to
symbolize the widening discontent among workers as well as management’s
inability to maintain control. In efforts to compete with foreign automakers
then supplying the American market with cheap cars, the General Motors
Assembly Division implemented new production technologies that it hoped
would create the world’s fastest assembly line. Instead of turning out sixty
cars per hour as had been the case with previous models, workers would
be expected to complete one hundred of its new Vega. Many operations
previously performed by workers were automated, a change that managers
cast as a job improvement measure that would also boost morale. The firm
asserted that, “by giving [the worker] less to do he will do it better.” As it
turned out, however, the workforce, whose average age was under twenty-
five, felt very differently. The new production regimen was physically bru-
talizing, compounded the erosion of craft, and made clear that manage-
ment regarded employees as little more than machine parts. In protest,
workers let cars leave the line unfinished, waged informal slowdowns and
sabotage, and engaged in mass absence. After management responded with
a zero-tolerance policy toward dissent, workers finally staged a strike that
lasted three weeks. Management ultimately lost little in the strike, conced-
ing only to reinstate the 1970s contract and to abandon disciplinary layoffs.
Workers’ biggest goal—to gain a say in the organization of production—
was unsuccessful.2 Yet the strike also portended trouble for management.
With its competitive wages and other compensations, as well as promises of
improved working conditions, Lordstown had been heralded as the acme
of industrial progress. Such measures, it seemed, could not be relied on to
assuage the frustrations of a younger industrial workforce who had little
firsthand memory of the golden age of labor-management bargaining.
Assessing the era’s industrial conflicts, journalists and academics con-
cluded that the worker was “alienated” and that the American work ethic
was corroding. This view was captured in a widely reported 1973 study com-
missioned by the Nixon administration, entitled Work in America. On its
first page, the authors warned, “Significant numbers of American workers
252 | Epilogue
are dissatisfied with the quality of their working lives. Dull, repetitive, seem-
ingly meaningless tasks, offering little challenge or autonomy, are causing
discontent among workers at all occupational levels.” The consequences,
they noted, included not just declining productivity, strikes, and absentee-
ism but also poor-quality work, damaged physical and mental health, and
family instability.3
In efforts to increase productivity and curb industrial unrest, managers
turned to a different approach to motivation: “work enrichment.” Although
talk about “enriching” work had formed a core strand of motivational ide-
ology since the nineteenth century, it gained new prominence after 1970.
Some of the era’s most influential management theorists had already rejected
the view that workers were motivated solely by extrinsic rewards (such as
pay and access to consumer goods). Because motivation resided inside the
worker, they reasoned, enriching work was a more effective means of boost-
ing productivity than the carrot and stick of monetary or material incen-
tives. Peter Drucker argued that managers should promote workers’ partic-
ipation in the planning of tasks and individualize motivation by rewarding
them based on their personal performance.4 Douglas McGregor, drawing
on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, proposed in 1960 that manag-
ers focus more on helping employees reach their full “potential,” a tactic
that he argued, was integral to integrating the worker into the organization
and achieving greater efficiency. “Man,” as his famous “Theory Y” stated,
“will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to
which he is committed.”5 Motivation theorist Frederick Herzberg argued
that the route to effective motivation lay in identifying the causes of work
satisfaction and dissatisfaction and then modifying jobs so that they offered
workers a feeling of achievement, recognition, and growth. When manage-
ment enriched jobs in these ways, he posited, workers experienced “self-
actualization” and thus became more amenable to management’s objectives.6
Work enrichment rhetoric helped management obscure the extent of the
crisis affecting work in two ways. First, the era’s industrial tensions were due
not just to workplace monotony but also to the erosion of workers’ long-
term economic security amid the decline of the postwar economy. As David
Harvey has detailed, beginning in the late 1960s, the Keynesian economic
model that had led to stable national growth and economic security for mil-
lions of workers and their families since the end of World War II began to
unravel. This unraveling was fueled not only by the deskilling and decline of
higher-paying jobs caused by automation but also by growing international
competition and spiraling inflation fueled by the war in Vietnam. Work-
ers’ economic well-being deteriorated as business leaders embraced neolib-
eral economic policies based on aggressive antiunion tactics that frequently
entailed downsizing and outsourcing.7 The ideas proffered by devotees of
work enrichment focused on neutralizing workers’ opposition to these neo-
liberal nostrums. Herzberg, for example, touted job enrichment as a means
to wean workers off their “addiction” to wage increases. These increases, he
argued, operated much like “heroin,” whereby as workers became condi-
tioned to them, they needed “more and more to produce less effect.”8
Second, although work enrichment seemed to promise greater auton-
omy for workers, it was principally a means to shore up managerial control.
As labor economist Harry Braverman argued in his highly influential 1974
book Labor and Monopoly Capital, work enrichment rhetoric masked the
root cause of alienation—workers’ loss of ownership of and control over
their work—by equating it to a mere “feeling of distress, a malaise, a bel-
lyache about his or her work.” Work enrichment, he noted, was “a style of
management rather than a genuine change in the position of the worker,”
and its objective was to contain the effects of worker discontent arising
from the destruction of craftsmanship.9 Labor scholars had emphasized the
effects of alienation for years. Two decades earlier, Daniel Bell had warned
that automation was creating the army of “interchangeable factory ‘hands’ ”
that Marx had predicted, as well as a widening gulf of opportunity between
the skilled and the semiskilled.10 Only in the late 1960s, when productiv-
ity slowed and industrial conflict proliferated, did alienation and its prob-
lems become a cause célèbre for managers—and for politicians like Nixon,
whose appeals to white working-class discontent proved indispensable
when courting the “silent majority.”11
Ultimately, work enrichment did little to stir employees’ feelings of good-
will toward management or optimism about work’s rewards. Even at firms
where managers implemented it comprehensively, it did little to quell the
class antagonisms arising from automation, the constricting economy, and
management’s increasing adherence to neoliberal economic theories.12 And
yet, if work enrichment schemes failed to allay the discontent sweeping
industry, they planted seeds that would bear fruit in the years ahead. The
254 | Epilogue
core developments soon to unfold—the hyperindividualism of the Reagan

era, the rise of the New Economy based on service and informational labor,
and the advent of the internet—would provide management with ample
opportunities to exploit work enrichment rhetoric. Moreover, motivational
sentiment would soon spread into the culture at large as self-improvement
gurus began to espouse the personal rewards of a motivated life to a main-
stream audience.
Today, a century after its advent, the motivational project remains a
powerful arm of management ideology. It has, however, undergone two
major changes in recent decades. First, management has couched its rhet-
oric increasingly in the language of employee empowerment and has
become extraordinarily adept at infusing it into the workplace. As a walk
around many workplaces today confirms, managerial jargon espousing the
personal fulfillment and self-discovery offered through work has become
ubiquitous. This rhetoric circulates via such traditional mediums as post-
ers, films, and literature but also through play-and game-based techniques,
“employee wellness” programs, and wearable self-tracking devices. These
techniques invoke language about employee empowerment while masking
their true objectives—to discipline workers, extract more labor from them
at less cost, and instill managerial values in the workplace.13
Second, motivational discourse now infuses the culture at large far more
broadly than it used to. Its wide circulation is fueled by the self-improvement
industry, which is projected to grow to over $14 billion per year by 2023. The
industry’s products include not just employee motivation tools marketed to
employers but also self-help books, videos, apps, seminars, and life coach-
ing services. Through these and other channels, motivational sentiment has
suffused the workplace and a large portion of public and private life.14
While on its surface today’s rhetoric appears very different from that of
the past, its goal remain unchanged—to advance management’s hegemony.
In the workplace and in the culture at large, such discourse helps shore up
neoliberal assaults on wages and economic security by reinforcing the idea
that we should regard work principally as a route to personal well-being,
not economic security. As countless studies have illustrated, economic
gains for workers have receded dramatically since the 1970s as work has
become less secure.15 Given this state of affairs, understanding the power of
our era’s motivational ideology is vital.
Neoliberal Motivation: Illusions of Empowerment,

Fantasies of Success
The type of motivational rhetoric that infuses the workplace and the cul-
ture at large today hardly came from nowhere. Its roots lie in the 1980s
and 1990s, when self-help books took the best-seller lists by storm and
management specialists began proclaiming that the “flexible” jobs of the
New Economy were liberating everyone from the harsh demands of the
industrial age.16 This rhetoric fused traditional management oratories about
the rewards of hard work with a New Agey reverence for the marketplace.
During the second half of the 1990s—“management’s summer of love,” as
Nigel Thrift aptly calls this period—management gurus argued that flexible
work arrangements and the new emotionally attuned dotcom managers of
the day were rapidly remaking the workplace into a space of emotional sup-
port and gratification.17 Such claims gained esteem through books like Jack
Canfield’s Chicken Soup for the Soul and Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My
Cheese?, which imparted managerial values to millions of readers, includ-
ing many white-collar workers who received copies from their managers.18
In reality, workers experienced deepening losses throughout the eighties
and nineties. As Arlie Hochschild shows in The Time Bind, flexible work
was the latest in a long line of management tactics aimed at honing Tay-
lorist quests to extract more labor from workers at less cost. The flexibil-
ity emphasized by the era’s “work enrichment” schemes promised workers
greater control over their work flow but extended the demands of work
into the home, compounding alienation.19 The era also witnessed the rise
of an even more intense regimen of managerial control than existed in the
past, as management doubled down on neoliberal cost-cutting measures.
At a time when the stock market was supposedly yielding untold wealth to
ordinary Americans and work was becoming more rewarding, workers lost
security even as many of them began incorporating motivational ideals in
their cubicles and embracing them through CDs and books.20
Despite its illusory claims, the neoliberal motivational ideals that man-
agement promulgated in the eighties and nineties established a formula that
managers have deployed into our own day. Whether we look at manufac-
turing, the service industry, or higher education, neoliberal motivation is
central to management’s efforts to infuse a belief in work’s promises among
256 | Epilogue
workers. This strategy is even more evident in “creative” work settings,

where managers emphasize the personal esteem derived from “meaningful”
work while minimizing pay and benefits, a practice seen in the proliferation
of unpaid internships in such “prestigious” work spaces as museums and
academe. This tendency has given rise to what Miya Tokumitsu calls “do
what you love” ideology. The “ideal worker,” according to this belief, “is not
the anonymous shift worker but the enlightened genius who never stops
working . . . The passion-driven worker has work on the brain all the time
(much to the delight of his or her boss) and hence eagerly incorporates this
work into his or her identity.”21 Today’s managerial assertions about fulfill-
ing and meaningful work are, like the claims about the liberating effects of
flexible work since the 1980s, just a means to keep workers buying into the
same old promises while extracting more labor from them at less cost.
Over the last decade, neoliberal motivation has proliferated in the cul-
ture at large, both in the United States and around the world. A case in point
is the massively successful franchise The Secret, which includes a book (with
sales of over twenty million copies) and a film. Produced by Rhonda Byrne,
an Australian TV producer-turned-self-help-guru, The Secret offers an
innovative spin on the age-old notion that anyone can realize their dreams
by deploying the “law of attraction” and “visualizing” their goals. Weaving
mystical, Da Vinci Code–like imagery, adrenalizing music, and commentar-
ies from self-improvement luminaries, the film tells viewers that through a
combination of positive mental energy and visualization, anyone can actu-
alize their desires. As author Lisa Nichols tells viewers, “What you think
about, you bring about. Your life is a physical manifestation of the thoughts
that go in your head.” For sympathetic viewers, The Secret’s claims about
the power of self-motivation and visualization are boosted by the asser-
tions of its parade of commentators, most of whom are prominent figures in
the New Thought movement. Those featured include “inspirational” min-
ister Michael Beckwith (author of Life Visioning: A Transformative Process
for Activating Your Unique Gifts and Highest Potential); visualization pro-
ponent Marci Shimoff (Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from
the Inside Out); and Jack Canfield (the Chicken Soup for the Soul series).
Beyond its main claims, The Secret asserts that the Law of Attraction has
long been known to successful individuals, including everyone from Plato
to Einstein and Beethoven to Lincoln, but has been hidden from the masses
by the powerful. This conspiratorial theme is accompanied by scenes of a

scribe during ancient times hurriedly trying to smuggle the scroll that con-
tains the secret, accompanied by heart-pounding music.22
Among the most influential of the motivational gurus to appear in The
Secret is the inspirational speaker Esther Hicks (whose ideas about visual-
ization partly inspired Byrne to make the film but who was cut from a later
version owing to a legal dispute).23 Along with her late husband, Jerry, a for-
mer Amway salesman and circus acrobat, Hicks has made a fortune offer-
ing seminars ($225 a ticket) that advance the belief that people can make
up their own reality and achieve whatever they wish through the power of
“thought vibrations.” At her seminars, Hicks summons—she has her fol-
lowers believe—otherworldly spirits that she collectively calls “Abraham,”
who “responds” to the audience’s questions through Hicks. Regardless of
the manifestly bogus and exploitative nature of the whole enterprise, Hicks
has millions of followers. According to her, what happens to people is solely
a result of their own choices. This principle holds true, she informs follow-
ers, not only for everyday events like the outcome of a job application but
also serious ones like child abuse and murder and world-historical events
like the Holocaust. The victims of these last examples, while deserving of
sympathy, nonetheless played a role in their own fate through their prior
thoughts and actions, Hicks claims. When asked how six million Jews
“attracted” their deaths in the Holocaust, she replied in part, “When you
hang around with one another and you talk about things in the way that
you do, and you talk about victimhood and you talk about injustice and you
beat the drum of unfairness, how could anything other than someone to
fulfill that vibrational escrow happen?”24 It’s no coincidence that a film like
The Secret would spur such interest in the 2000s and 2010s. Not only was
this the era when the motivational industry went into overdrive via rock-
eting sales of books, CDs, and seminars but it was also a period when neo-
liberal ideology eroded faith in the idea that one could achieve economic
security through work. In a time when work offers less security and when
many people find economics opaque, the neoliberal mysticism espoused in
The Secret and its ilk have no small appeal.25
The Secret’s brand of motivational rhetoric has been promoted widely
on the national and world stage by talk show hosts such as Oprah Winfrey.
Winfrey’s gushing tributes to self-improvement have exposed millions of
258 | Epilogue
viewers around the globe to a steady diet of motivational ideas. A long-

time devotee of self-empowerment who explains her own success in terms
of bootstrap individualism, Winfrey has hosted motivational specialists on
her show on multiple occasions. In a special episode devoted to The Secret
in 2007, featuring Michael Beckwith and fellow “expert” James Arthur Ray,
Winfrey stated that the film embodied her show’s main message: “Taking
responsibility for your life. Knowing that every choice that you’ve made
has led you to where you are right now.” This and other episodes feature
testimonies from viewers who offer fawning praise for The Secret, attest-
ing to how it saved their troubled marriages and careers and resolved their
financial problems, stories that predictably elicit ecstatic responses from the
audience. Winfrey’s enthusiasm knows no bounds when giving motivation’s
disciples a platform. When hosting Byrne, Winfrey went into full-on evan-
gelizing mode, telling her viewers, “Watch it with your children.”26
While motivational rhetoric has always conjured far-fetched visions of
the rewards of individual striving, it has increasingly taken on the form of
money-making schemes. Nothing demonstrates this reality more than the
stadium-packing “business seminar” known as Get Motivated! Founded in
the 1990s by noted Republican Party donors Peter and Tamara Lowe, Get
Motivated! has drawn hundreds of thousands of Americans to hear its rotat-
ing roster of high-profile conservatives from the worlds of politics, busi-
ness, sport, and entertainment espouse the creed that a motivated attitude
can lead to personal success. Billed as a means to help attendees hone their
business skills and attain personal and career advancement, Get Motivated!
is, in reality, a profit venture that works by selling its captive audience addi-
tional products. The eleven-hour seminar includes several breaks during
which attendees are encouraged to visit adjacent rooms to sign up for work-
shops that promise to help participants improve their job prospects and, for
managers, boost teamwork in their organizations. This formula is rooted in
the sales training workshops developed by the Christian-conservative sales
specialist Zig Ziglar in the 1980s. A long-time presenter at Get Motivated!
before his 2012 death, Ziglar’s brand of evangelistic success rhetoric set the
stage for the capitalism-on-steroids sentiment touted by the event’s speak-
ers to this day, some of whom are Ziglar’s protégés.
On March 14, 2011, I joined over twenty thousand attendees when
Get Motivated! visited the Moda Center in downtown Portland, Oregon.
Among the speakers were regulars Colin Powell, Laura Bush, Rudi Giuliani,
Terry Bradshaw, and Bill Cosby. Each extolled the power of a motivated
attitude, attesting to how it had helped them and others achieve success.
Powell regaled the crowd with stories about how a motivated attitude to
leadership had brought success in his military career; Giuliani used his
time to praise his own “motivated” performance in the aftermath of the 9/11
attacks on the World Trade Center; Laura Bush delivered a sentimentalized
account of “my George,” who, “during recount after recount” in Florida on
election night in 2000, kept his resolve (which she deemed a lesson in the
importance of motivational thinking); and Bradshaw waxed about how a
motivated attitude on the field made all the difference between losing and
winning. To cap it off, Bill Cosby affirmed the virtues of motivation by sat-
irizing those who, he explained, could use it the most—unmotivated teen-
agers and welfare dependents—much to the crowd’s delight.
As if to preempt such doubts, many speakers warned of the dangers
of losing faith in motivation. This theme was hammered home by self-
improvement devotee Krish Dhanam, an entrepreneur who emigrated
to the United States from India in the 1980s before becoming one of Zig
Ziglar’s most beloved students. Dhanam recalled how, after arriving in New
York City “with nine dollars my pocket and a vision of promise in my heart,”
he came to “epitomize the American Dream” by embracing American indi-
vidualism. The rags-to-riches story that Dhanam served up is the sort that
conservative audiences have long liked to point to as evidence that any-
one can succeed in America if they work hard enough, and predictably, the
crowd lapped it up. Among the most elated responses of the day occurred
when Dhanam turned his ire on those who cast doubt on the possibility
of upward mobility. For Dhanam, such doubts are the work of “elites” who
undermined the individual’s success by “telling you that you don’t belong.”
The rapturous applause that Dhanam received for this and other zingers
illustrates a central tenet of neoliberal motivation: it’s not a rigged system
that stands in the way of anyone’s success but a lack of determination, along
with the corrupting influence of nonbelievers.
Despite the enthusiastic responses from the audience that day, not every-
one was sold. Many attendees, it turned out, had been required to attend by
their employers (to whom Get Motivated! provides tickets for free). Judg-
ing by the bored-looking groups of coworkers clustered in the concession
260 | Epilogue
area, it was clear that few would return to work feeling motivated. A group
of young women employed at a nursing home killed time by texting and
chatting, appearing underwhelmed at the talks. One dismissed the event
aptly as “an advertisement for the Republican Party,” a conclusion shared
by her coworkers, who nodded in agreement. Still, neither the skepticism of
many attendees nor the midafternoon thinning of the crowd undermined
the event’s success. Whenever the sign-up tables appeared throughout the
day, hundreds flocked to enroll for workshops. And when TV news stations
dropped by to get some reactions, attendees—at least those included in the
evening reports—enthused that the speakers’ wisdom would help them
fine-tune their career prospects, hone their business skills, and enhance
teamwork in their organizations.27 Regardless of how truly motivated they
may have felt, attendees, by cheering the speakers, signing up for another
workshop, or expressing their enthusiasm to the TV cameras, helped grease
the wheels of the motivational machine for another day.
One hardly needs to buy into money-making schemes like The Secret
or Get Motivated! to be exposed to neoliberal motivation today. The dis-
course circulates widely in daily life. Its proliferation is seen in the output of
organizations like the Foundation for a Better Life (FFBL). For over fifteen
years, FFBL has installed billboards and aired TV ads carrying inspirational
messages along the nation’s highways and on TV about individuals whose
actions it believes should be emulated, an ideal captured in the slogan that
concludes each message: “Pass It On.” Owned by billionaire businessman
Philip Anschutz, its messages are steeped in tributes to individual success
and character, including many historical figures.28 The actions of Abraham
Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, to name a few, are framed
as poignant anecdotes about inspiring individuals disconnected from larger
political events. This practice employs the visual and rhetorical simplification
that has always been a hallmark of motivational messaging. As the design-
ers of twentieth-century workplace communications understood, images of
virtuous-looking individual strivers, coupled with pithy captions, are inte-
gral to emotionally appealing messaging. Whereas in the past, these design
tactics encouraged faster production in the name of such tangible goals as
victory over fascism and economic security, today FFBL and other devotees
of inspirational messaging use them to promote a belief in the virtuousness
of individual striving, whose reward is an ethereal sense of fulfillment.
This strategy is evident in FFBL’s billboards featuring “everyday heroes”

who have prevailed over difficult challenges to achieve distinction. Typify-
ing the genre is a billboard featuring Liz Murray, who grew up in a drug-
filled home and became homeless before going on to Harvard, authoring a
popular memoir, and becoming a motivational speaker. Pictured in a lecture
hall embracing a psychology textbook, Murray embodies the familiar claim
that anyone can achieve success regardless of the circumstances into which
they are born if they work hard enough. Other billboards, like one depicting
a good-hearted mechanic, lay tribute to those who have acted with generos-
ity or good character without thought of personal gain (figure 7.1).
According to FFBL’s website, when its creative director dropped into a
garage to get his car fixed, the mechanic, Mike—“the ‘Mother Teresa’ of the
automotive world”—worked on it for three hours before concluding that
the problem could not be fixed, graciously refusing payment. The foun-
dation used the incident as a touching parable about the importance of
cultivating character in one’s work.29 Like Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message to
Garcia” and many other motivational texts, FFBL’s billboard uses a real-life
incident as the basis of a moving story to remind its audience that a good
work ethic is a principled goal. The irony is that for many who view such
billboards along highways during their commutes or who view similar mes-
sages in the workplace, cultivating good work ideals provides little comfort
amid an increasingly precarious labor market that is less and less likely to
offer the economic security that work did in the past.30
Figure 7.1. This billboard by the Foundation for a Better Life embodies a common
strand of motivational sentiment over the last two decades, in which work’s meanings
are defined as personal rather than economic. Such publicity echoes techniques used by
managers in the workplace during the same period. Image courtesy of The Foundation
for a Better Life.
262 | Epilogue
New Frontiers in Workplace Motivation: Play,

Gamification, and Self-Tracking
In the early twenty-first century, managers have turned increasingly to
motivational techniques based on play. Managerial uses of play vary, but
typically they involve infusing work with elements of fun, games, and
worker self-expression to facilitate team building (and, less ostensibly, to
encourage workers to adopt a managerial attitude). As workers in office
and nonoffice settings alike know, types of play-based motivation common
at work today include training days structured around “fun” themes, role-
playing and game-based exercises, and employee presentations in which
workers and managers are expected to engage in elements of performance.
From the now-cliché Hawaiian shirt Friday to more recent innovations like
manager-employee role reversal exercises, outings to escape rooms, and
even workplace murder parties, play-based motivation holds appeal for
managers because its emphasis on enjoyment infuses their techniques with
a nonideological facade. This tactic is invaluable to management in con-
cealing its true objectives: to define a positive attitude as a de facto require-
ment in the workplace and render workers more accepting of managerial
goals. Ultimately, play-based motivation is a means for managers to col-
lapse the distinction between work and leisure and to conceal the inherent
power hierarchies between themselves and workers.31
Among the most noted examples of play- based motivation is the
employee “morale-building” book Fish! Philosophy (which, since its 1998
publication, has sold over five million copies and been adapted into a larger
package of employee engagement techniques by its producer, ChartHouse
Learning).32 Fish! Philosophy takes its name from the infamous work philos-
ophy of fishmongers at Seattle’s World Famous Pike Place Fish Market. As
visitors have observed since the 1980s, fishmongers at the market perform a
high-energy routine in which they engage customers in playful banter. This
routine involves throwing fish across the shopping area and yelling humor-
ous announcements when a customer orders a fish, much to the enjoyment
of other customers who gather to enjoy the spectacle. Often, the fishmon-
gers involve the customers in their playful act more directly by having them
catch a fish or by holding up a fish and manipulating its mouth so that it
appears to be talking to the customer. According to ChartHouse’s website,
its owner, John Christensen, was inspired to write the book after he wit-
nessed the fishmongers’ performance during a chance visit to the market. In
video footage shot by him, the fishmongers explained that the idea behind
their routine boiled down to one idea: “choose your attitude.” By “choosing”
their attitude, the fishmonger explained, they could bring a sense of “fun”
to their work and “make the customer’s day,” a situation that was good for
workers and for business.33
In Fish! Philosophy, Christensen and his coauthors assert that when work-
ers choose to adopt a positive and playful attitude—the ideals exemplified
at Pike Market—the workplace will become a happier and more productive
environment. The book, which takes the form of an inspirational story, is a
fictionalized retelling of Christensen’s visit to the market that modifies his
experience to heighten the story’s effect on the reader. Christensen has been
replaced by a woman, Mary Jane, who, after taking a position at a bank in
Seattle, is tasked with improving its dysfunctional third-floor department
known by other workers as the “toxic energy dump” because of its unhappy
and abrasive staff. A few weeks into her quest, Mary Jane takes a lunchtime
walk to mull over her vexed efforts and happens on a group of fishmon-
gers at Pike Place Fish Market performing the playful act described above.
One of the fishmongers, Lonnie, befriends Mary Jane, and a heart-to-heart
ensues in which she tells him about her struggle to improve work condi-
tions; Lonnie offers to help her bring the “energy” that she had witnessed to
the bank. Upon Mary Jane’s second visit to the market, Lonnie explains the
secret to the fishmongers’ energized approach to their work. The idea devel-
oped, he explains, after they made an “amazing” discovery: “There is always
a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about
the work itself . . . We can choose the attitude we bring to work.”34
For Mary Jane, this insight is a revelation, and she soon begins giving
presentations to the bank’s employees that apply the “choose your attitude”
ideal. After her efforts receive a positive reception from the staff, she con-
sults further with Lonnie, who tells her about three other core principles
that make for a positive workplace and good customer relations at the fish
market: “play,” “make their day,” and “be there.” Inspired by these conver-
sations and by motivational CDs and books, Mary Jane adapts the fish-
mongers’ four-part work ethos into an employee-engagement program at
the bank. Via heartfelt inspirational talks, she encourages her colleagues to
264 | Epilogue
“choose your attitude,” embrace a sense of “play” in their work, “make their
day,” and “be there” for each other, all of which, she explains, will make their
jobs more rewarding and the workplace more positive. Eventually (and pre-
dictably, given the didactic goals of the book’s authors), the employees come
on board. By the end, they are putting up their own motivational posters
and giving enthused presentations about how to change the bank to be
more “fun” and “rewarding.” Aided by the now motivated employees, the
“toxic energy dump” transforms into a positive and energetic working envi-
ronment where employees feel empowered.35
Despite its veneer of innocuous self-help, Fish! Philosophy is very much
in the same manipulative tradition as GM’s “My Job and Why I Like It”
contest and many of the other motivational devices discussed in this book.
Sold to human resources departments, which, in turn, present it to workers
as a fun-based team-building program, the book is a tool for accommo-
dating workers to managerial objectives. The “choose your attitude” ideal
that it extols masks workers’ increasing inability to control their labor. It
appeals to managers because it casts workers not as what they truly are—
performers of labor—but as contented team members in a workplace sup-
posedly devoid of power hierarchies. The fishmongers’ approach to work,
far from embodying a devotion to managerial ideals, can be more realis-
tically understood as a way to cope with the demands of cold, demanding
labor and make the day go faster, a tactic used by workers for centuries. The
book’s interpretation of the fishmongers’ behavior has been challenged by
the workers themselves. As one of the fishmongers stated in a now deleted
YouTube video entitled “Pike Place Hates Fish! Philosophy,” “The guys that
work here don’t actually like the FISH! videos” and just “put on a show”
for Christensen during the three days that he visited to shoot the footage.36
Since the book’s 1998 publication, ChartHouse has developed additional
tie-in products whose goals include “improving teamwork and trust among
employees,” boosting “engagement and morale,” and “build[ing] a culture
Millennials love.” These products span an array of workbooks, e-learning
videos, study kits, and employee and manager training programs. The last
of these products brings to life the principles laid out in the Fish! Philoso-
phy book via workshop facilitator Deena Ebbert. As seen in ChartHouse’s
videos, Ebbert gives high-energy interactive talks that involve throwing
toy fish to participants, a practice that adapts the fishmongers’ routine at
Pike Market (figure 7.2).37 As Kevin Carson argues, employers’ distribu-

tion of Fish! Philosophy and their utilization of Fish! training programs is
often a prelude to restructuring initiatives in which management demands
increased productivity from workers, compounding burnout while giv-
ing no additional compensation. Using Fish! Philosophy programs, “man-
agement attempts to deal with burnout entirely through cheerleading and
slogans . . . without having to increase staffing levels or pay, or otherwise
alter its own contribution to the problem.”38 Although management typi-
cally buries such goals in soothsaying about the happy and rewarding work-
place, they are occasionally made more explicit. A case in point is South
African management organization Goldfish Consulting. On its website, the
firm explains that its name was inspired by Fish! Philosophy and that it
“specializes in interventions that can assist organisations through the diffi-
cult economic climate of the country . . . This often requires restructuring
and sometimes downsizing in order to find and unlock the value the strate-
gic initiative anticipated.”39
The Fish! Philosophy book and its array of tie-in programs and prod-
ucts embody many of the motivational techniques used by management
since the publication of “A Message to Garcia.” Much like Hubbard’s essay
and a number of the techniques discussed in this book, the goal remains
Figure 7.2. Deena Ebbert and an audience during a high-energy Fish! Philosophy
workshop. Promoted as a means to boost teamwork, engagement, and morale, the
workshops also help smooth management efforts to instill company mindedness and
accommodate employees to restructuring and other management initiatives. YouTube/
ChartHouse Learning.
266 | Epilogue
the same: to help employers accommodate workers to managerial prior-

ities. Those priorities have always fluctuated in response to historical cir-
cumstances and organizational needs. The products and services sold by
ChartHouse and other consultants today are just the latest iteration of over
a century of techniques used by management and its allies to encourage
workers to view managerial goals like cost cutting and boosting productiv-
ity as imperative, even if these objectives work against employees’ interests.
Play-based approaches to motivation have become even bigger business
in recent years, especially in the form of gamification—the integration of
game mechanics into organizations and work to increase employee engage-
ment. Gamification takes place principally, though not wholly, online.
Games such as FarmVille and Angry Birds, introduced in 2009 and 2010,
respectively, were soon taken up by numerous businesses as tools to moti-
vate employees. Typically, the player-worker collects points and “badges”
for completion of tasks that are designed around the organization’s core
ideals (teamwork, customer service, and so on). Gamification is now a
big business. Around 70 percent of the employers globally use “gamified
applications for employee performance, marketing, and training.”40 The
global gamification market was over a $7 billion in 2019 and is projected to
increase by nearly a third by 2025 according to more recent projections.41
Gamification’s popularity has prompted bold claims by its devotees, many
of who have authored widely read books and are regular speakers in Sili-
con Valley. As gamification author Gabe Zichermann writes, for example,
“smart companies” can increase employee productivity by 40 percent by
using gamification. “The Revolution,” he asserts, “Will Be Gamified.”42
Gamification’s devotees tout it as a tool of democratization, but its goal
is to subtly instill discipline through the distraction of games. This goal is
evident when considering the ideas of gamification specialist Yu-kai Chou.
One of the wave of gamification innovators who emerged early in the first
decade of the twenty-first century, Chou is today known for Octalysis, an
eight-component model of motivation that uses “human-focused design”
and recent ideas about left brain/right brain processes. As Chou explained
in a 2016 presentation at Google, Octalysis works by manipulating work-
ers’ emotions, a process that he likens to “a theme park.” As he puts it, in
a “factory, you’re paying these people to sit there and do relatively mun-
dane things. But in the case of a theme park, they’re paying [them] to stand
in line for hours and hours ’cause they want to enjoy that experience so
much.”43 As he adds in the first of ninety Beginner’s Guide videos about
gamification on YouTube, “Now imagine if you could take all the fun and
addicting, motivating elements in a game and combine that with actually
productive activities in the real world!”44
Despite the excited claims of the high priests of the “gamified revolu-
tion,” gamification is just another attempt to maximize discipline and pro-
ductivity while masking the power differentials between workers and man-
agers. This dynamic, we have seen, gained traction during the 1930s when
managers tried to bring the motivational properties of Coney Island–type
amusements into the factory. Now as then, by tapping humans’ predilection
for playing games, management seeks to collapse the distinction between
work and play and thus render workers more amenable to its goals. As a
number of ludic or game theorists have argued, by engaging workers in a
perpetual state of amusement, gamification embodies a far more embed-
ded form of employee discipline than was possible in the past.45 As Mathias
Fuchs argues, like neoliberalism, gamification “enhances performance for
the ruling system,” and its “unconscious motivational processes” are more
effective than those that use “persuasion” or “brute force.”46 Although some
recent studies emphasize that gamification fuels alienation by eliciting
inauthentic expressions of happiness among workers, this poses little con-
cern to management, for whom, we have witnessed, greasing the wheels of
employee discipline has overwhelmingly been more important than achiev-
ing authentic feelings of motivation among workers.47
Not all motivation revolves around play and games. Another device used
widely by management today— employee self-tracking— marks a super-
charged version of the Taylorist approach to work incentivization whereby
the worker’s body is calibrated to the machinery of production. As many
people who work at corporations and universities today know, self-tracking
devices are widely used in conjunction with “employee wellness” programs,
often as a means to monitor health, and sometimes in conjunction with pro-
ductivity tools whose function is ostensibly to help workers alleviate stress
by helping organize tasks and workflow. In the white-collar workplaces
where wellness programs mainly proliferate, self-tracking is thus associated
with employee empowerment, a fact that helps management mask its true
objectives: instilling discipline and increasing its control over the worker.48
268 | Epilogue
Self-tracking in the name of employee wellness takes on a variety of

forms. Many employers have begun deploying wearable devices and other
sensory technologies to surveil workers. “Mindful” devices and “digital
health coaches,” for example, log workers’ daily physical exercise or produc-
tivity. Far from a form of liberation for workers, wellness devices signal the
rise of a more prosthetic form of Taylorism. In 2013, 90 percent of employ-
ers offered wellness programs to employees, and by 2016, a third of employ-
ers provided wearable devices to workers whose stated uses ranged from
tracking activity, saving money, and improving employees’ health and hap-
piness.49 In 2015, nearly 600,000 American employers implemented well-
ness programs that involved having employees use wearable fitness tracking
devices, a development that allows an ever-invisible management to mon-
itor workers’ behaviors and emotions and to gather an immense body of
data on them. As Phoebe Moore observes, “Before too long, it will be possi-
ble for employers to literally track our blood, sweat and tears.”50 Moreover,
while wellness programs present self-tracking as a choice, many workers
participate in them because of an implicit expectation that they conform
to organizational norms and because doing so will “auger well with their
supervisors.” By adhering to these expectations, workers “become impli-
cated in a panoptic mode of surveillance.”51
In recent years, Amazon has explored the potential of self-tracking
devices in order to streamline work and thus increase efficiency in its fulfill-
ment warehouses. In 2018, for example, the corporation submitted a patent
for its self-tracking wristband that would follow the worker’s every move
while working (figure 7.3).52 According to the proposed patent, the device
would track the position of the employee’s hand vis-à-vis inventory bins via
ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions and vibrate if they engage
in “undesirable” movements.53 Conceived ostensibly to make production
and workflow more efficient, the proposed device would allow managers to
implement supercharged forms of Taylorism that come closer than ever to
rendering workers into robots. Although Amazon has not implemented the
device in its warehouses as of spring 2020, its interest in such technologies
reveals how far one of the world’s most stringent managements is going
in developing ideas that may be used in the future to incentivize employ-
ees to work more efficiently. Amazon’s incentivization techniques are not
limited to blue-collar workers. As the New York Times reported in a 2015
Figure 7.3. Taylorism on steroids: an illustration from Amazon’s 2018 patent for a wear-
able self-tracking device for its warehouse workers. The proposed device would track the
worker’s hand movements and send haptic feedback in the form of an ultrasonic buzz
to the worker’s wrist if they placed an item in the wrong bay. Amazon Technologies,
Inc./United States Patent and Trademark Office, Patent US0099881276, January 30, 2018.
exposé, the company’s approach to motivation involves “running a contin-

ual performance improvement algorithm on its staff ” and instilling a cul-
ture of intense competition among them. Amazon’s “genius,” some veterans
observe, is “the way it drives them to drive themselves.” As one employee
stated, “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Ambot,” a name that
“means you have become at one with the system.”54
270 | Epilogue
I cannot help but reflect briefly on the workplace that I’m most familiar
with—the university campus. While efforts to infuse the campus with moti-
vational rhetoric are a world away from the physical discipline imposed by
self-tracking devices in Amazon warehouses, they are no less determined.
As students, staff, and faculty can’t fail to notice, today’s campus has become
a thriving arena of motivational sentiment. A visit to most campuses is akin
to a motivational tour replete with banners and posters and magazines
espousing the commitment of students, faculty, and staff alike to the “core
values” of the institution. University websites routinely frame the institu-
tion’s merits in motivational terms, invoking in their mission statements
and in articles about high-achieving students rhetoric that resembles the
inspirational lingo of Get Motivated!, The Secret, and the Foundation for
a Better Life. Inspiration-infused articles about exemplary students, fac-
ulty, or staff have become today’s university’s versions of “Employee of the
Month” announcements. Faculty, meanwhile, are compelled to adopt the
role of motivators if they are to be seen as embracing the institution’s values.
Encouraging students to “discover” themselves—a central pillar of manage-
rial rhetoric—seems to be the order of the day.
The institution where I teach is a pioneer when it comes to the use of
motivational discourse in higher education institutions. Its slogan, “Brand-
ing Success,” is invoked widely on university’s website and in its array of
publicity. A framed poster, installed in the staff kitchen, embodies this
enthused commitment to the institution. Depicting the gun-toting mascot,
Pistol Packin’ Pete, in the university’s familiar orange and declaring “Cow-
boy Pride Works!,” the poster reminds staff and faculty that they are integral
players in the institution’s mission. I cannot help but notice its similari-
ties with the publicity used by management to instill company mindedness
among workers in the twentieth-century factory. Its ebullient slogan echoes
the one in the baseball-themed poster from Sheldon-Claire’s 1941 work-
place campaign, This is America, that opens this book (figure 0.1). “Cowboy
Pride Works!” is a similarly incontrovertible slogan, one that it would seem
inappropriate to question.
However they are packaged—as play, games, wellness, or organizational
efficiency—the techniques and sentiment deployed by management today
reflect the goals that managers have pursued since the dawn of the moti-
vational project: control over the worker and authority in the workplace.
Today’s workplace is increasingly a realm of emotion and bodily manage-

ment that presents engagement, drive, and the like as integral to work.
Although management always wants workers to identify with its messages
and adopt its techniques willingly, as I have argued throughout this book,
the success of motivational ideology does not hinge on whether workers
“believe the message.” For management, controlling the official definitions
of work and its rewards remains the goal. Even a surface-level acceptance of
the inherent value of the ideals espoused by management is enough to keep
motivational ideology working.
Conclusion
We live today in the shadow of the motivational project. In our workplaces
and educational institutions, in public spaces and on the internet, we are
exposed regularly to motivational sentiments that can be traced to those
first forged by allies of management in the factory in the early decades of
the twentieth century. Motivational discourse is no longer confined to the
workplace or, indeed, the subject of work. We encounter messages urging
us to cultivate determination, ambition, and other motivational ideals just
about everywhere. Much of this output bears echoes of the ideas first artic-
ulated by businessmen, industrial social scientists, and motivational poster
suppliers and later developed by champions of free market capitalism and
influential managers. Take a closer look at the posters, banners, and social
media circulated by your employer, university, or local businesses today,
and you are likely to notice the resemblance. Motivation has, it seems,
became the soup in which we swim.
If motivation has grown more multifarious in recent times, its core
assertions have nonetheless remained the same: a commitment to indus-
triousness, whether in our work or our personal lives, will make us hap-
pier and more successful. Such claims are belied by the fact that even the
most sanguine motivational messaging used by employers today says lit-
tle if anything about work’s economic rewards. Aside from the get-rich-
quick rhetoric espoused by many success gurus, today’s motivational
lingo mostly asserts that work will deliver personal fulfillment and self-
discovery. This shift reflects work’s declining ability to offer economic
security.55 Even so, motivational sentiment continues to exert a powerful
272 | Epilogue
hold, urging us to stay or get motivated and to believe in capitalism what-

ever our job may be.
The illusory nature of motivational rhetoric is evident no more clearly
than in our day’s most ubiquitous motivational ideologue: Donald Trump.
At the core of the image that Trump projects to the world (and a central
part of the sales pitch that he made when running for president) is the claim
that he is a “self-made” billionaire whose success came from hard work and
determination. In a 1990 interview with Playboy magazine, he declared,
“Rich men are less likely to like me, but the working man likes me because
he knows I worked hard and didn’t inherit what I’ve built.”56 Trump reiter-
ated his claim of being self-made during his presidential campaign, assert-
ing that his father had given him a “small loan of a million dollars” and that
he “had to pay him back with interest.”57 Yet, for anyone who cares to check,
Trump is far from the self-made man he claims to be. His wealth comes
mostly from inheritance, tax evasion, money laundering with oligarchs,
and marketing his own persona. According to the most in-depth study of
how he acquired his wealth, from the time he was a toddler to the present,
Trump received from his father the 2018 equivalent of at least $413 million
and was a millionaire by the time he was eight. Bailed out by his father
during spiraling failures in the 1980s and 1990s, he cultivated the image of a
self-made billionaire while dodging millions of dollars in taxes.58
While his own wealth was handed to him on a plate, Trump has excelled
at selling others on how to achieve success. Trump is not known for espous-
ing the “bootstrap” rhetoric long upheld by Republicans, being more prone
to touting his own work ethic. Yet even his claims about success were first
crafted by hired hands. One of his highest-selling books, The Art of the Deal
(1987), was written by somebody else, it turns out. In 2016, its coauthor
(more accurately, its ghostwriter), Tony Schwartz, revealed that he wrote
every word of it and that all Trump contributed were a few marks on the
manuscript in a red felt-tipped marker to indicate passages he wanted
to be cut.59 Trump’s penchant for peddling motivational scams is further
embodied in Trump University, a venture that amounted to a “multilevel
marketing scheme.”60 Like Get Motivated!, Trump University offered a free
ninety-minute seminar that served as a hook for getting attendees to sign
on for incrementally larger seminars, including the Trump Gold Elite, a
package that touted “persona mentorship” by instructors “handpicked by
Trump.” As enrollees discovered, Trump University did not offer a degree,

and its curriculum consisted of sales and investment materials provided
by an unnamed third party that supplies motivational speakers and time-
share rental companies.61 Despite the fraudulent nature of such enterprises,
Trump’s election revealed that motivational ideologues who promise us the
world but give us nothing in return remain as powerful as ever.
In many ways, our era feels like an eerie echo of the motivational crusade of
the middle decades of the twentieth century—only worse. Intangible assur-
ances of self-discovery and personal fulfillment seem to be the horizon of
what many workers can hope to achieve through work today. However, the
motivational bandwagon trundles along unabated, prompting little critical
response. The idea that Americans must be perpetually motivated if they are
to be successful workers and citizens remains utterly uncontroversial, ques-
tioned by a mere handful of critical voices who are almost totally drowned
out in the cavalcade of motivational cheerleading that dominates public
discourse. To question the motivational mantra, it seems, is an affront to
American values and, therefore, outside the realm of polite conversation.
Given that the power of the motivational project shows no signs of sub-
siding, it is incumbent on us to expose motivational discourse for what it
is: a sham promise. In tracing the architecture of the motivational project—
its discourse, communications techniques, and ideology—this book takes a
step in that direction. Only by asking where the motivational project comes
from and why it continues to hold such influence over our lives might
we begin to see it for what it is: an apparatus for shoring up managerial
hegemony and embedding capitalist values ever more deeply within our
consciousness.
NOTES
Abbreviations
AOF Archives Organization File, Kheel Center for Labor-Management
Documentation and Archives, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
CHRC Charles H. Rosenfeld Collection, University of Chicago Special
Collections Research Center, Chicago, IL
DGR Dearborn Group Records, Kheel Center for Labor-Management
Documentation and Archives, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
FMM Factory Management and Maintenance
HRNC Herbert R. Northrup Collection of Boulwarism Research Materi-
als, Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
LBP Lemuel Boulware Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections,
Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Phila-
delphia, PA
NAM National Association of Manufacturers Collection, Hagley
Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE
OWI Office of War Information Collection, National Archives, College
Park, MD
PFEB Francis Edwin Brennan Papers, Library of Congress, Washing-
ton, D.C.
PHFP Henry F. Pringle Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
RSCC, NMAH Records of the Sheldon-Claire Company, National Museum of
American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
SCSC Sheldon-Claire Company sales conference
WWE “World-Wide Endorsements and Acknowledgements of
Sheldon-Claire Services”
275
276 | Notes to Pages 1–5
Introduction
1. The motivational or self-improvement industry was valued at nearly $11 billion
a year as of 2018 and is projected to grow to almost $14 billion by 2023. See John
LaRosa, “$11 Billion Self-Improvement Market Is Growing,” October 16, 2019, https://
www.marketdataenterprises.com/11-billion-self-improvement-market-is-growing
-by-john-larosa/. See also Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking
Is Undermining America (New York: Picador, 2009), chap. 4, and Jonathan Black, Yes
You Can! Behind the Hype and Hustle of the Motivation Biz (New York: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2006).
2. Assertions of the superior virtues of American ideals of work and productiv-
ity formed a central pillar of U.S. quests for ideological dominance in Europe after
World War II. See Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through
Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2005), chap. 7. See also Anthony Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan: The
Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science (Manchester, U.K.:
Manchester University Press, 1987).
3. On the long quest to promote the work ethic and work ideology, see Reinhold
Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of
Industrialization (New York: Harper, 1956), 281–340, and Sharon Beder, Selling the
Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR (New York: Zed Books, 2000).
4. Exemplars of this work include Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial
Efficiency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); Walter Dill Scott, Increasing Human Effi-
ciency in Business: A Contribution to the Psychology of Business (New York: Macmillan,
1912); and Ordway Tead, Instincts in Industry: A Study of Working-Class Psychology
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918).
5. On businessmen’s quests for power and assaults on labor, see Elizabeth Fones-
Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), and Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands:
The Businessman’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009). On
neoliberalism and industry, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An
Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers,
1990), chaps. 8 and 9.
6. As several scholars gave shown, managers’ interest in emotions (or, more accu-
rately, their efforts to use workers’ emotional needs and desires to advance managerial
prerogatives), has a long and complex history. As relevant studies are cited in the notes
for the forthcoming chapters, I shall not list them here to avoid repetition. The shift
from the body to the mind in managerial efforts to discipline and control workers is
Notes to Pages 6–10 | 277
examined at length in Gerard Hanlon, The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History
of Management Theory (New York: Routledge, 2016), esp. chap. 6.
7. Businessmen’s gradual embrace of images is detailed in T. J. Jackson Lears, No
Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). The adoption of images by managers
and employers is examined in Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin (New York:
Basic Books, 1996); Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public
Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998); and David Nye, Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General
Electric, 1890–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). On management communication
techniques before this embrace of images, see JoAnne Yates, Control through Com-
munication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989).
8. Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon, What
Happened and Why (New York: Vintage, 1978), 81–82.
9. On the racial roots of industrial social science, see Mark Pittenger, Class
Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Pro-
gressive Era to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2012). The effects
of Anglo-Saxonism and whiteness on discourse about labor are detailed in Matthew
Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at
Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), chap. 2.
10. The most influential critique of this sort from the era is Smedley D. Butler,
War Is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier (Los Angeles:
Feral House, 2003 [1935]).
11. Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul; Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise;
Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands. See also William L. Bird, A Better Living: Advertising,
Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–1955 (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1999). Television also played a powerful role in the
efforts of free enterprise proponents to undermine New Deal liberalism. See Anna
McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (New York:
New Press, 2010), esp. 10–23.
12. Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love: And Other Lies about Success and Hap-
piness (New York: Regan Arts, 2015).
13. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980),
109–33; Sverre Raffnsøe, Andrea Mennicken, and Peter Miller, “The Foucault Effect
in Organization Studies,” Organization Studies 40, no. 2 (December 2019): 155–82;
Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For an account of management governance

of workers at corporations, see Megan Brown, The Cultural Work of Corporations
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), esp. chap. 4.
14. For insights into this important history and, in turn, my arguments about
motivation in this book, see Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2004), chap. 1; Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making
of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2007); Simon Williams,
Emotion and Social Theory: Corporeal Reflections on the (Ir)Rational (London: Sage
Publications, 2001); William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government
and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (New York: Verso, 2017); Frank Biess and Daniel
M. Gross, eds., Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Samantha Warren, “ ‘Show Me How It Feels to
Work Here’: Using Photography to Research Organizational Aesthetics,” Ephemera:
Critical Dialogues on Organization 2, no. 3 (2002): 226.
15. See Walton Rawls, Wake Up America! World War I and the American Poster
(New York: Abbeville, 2001); James Aulich, War Posters: Weapons of Mass Commu-
nication (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011); and Pearl James, ed., Picture This:
World War I Posters and Visual Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
16. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973 [1962]). On “political propaganda,” see 62–70. On behavior, see
20–25. On Ellul’s persuasive debunking of the assumption that propaganda must
convince its audience of its claims in order to be effective, as well as on how socio-
logical propaganda operates through unconscious processes, see the appendix to
“Effectiveness of Propaganda,” 259–302. On social conditioning, see 33–43.
17. Jackson Lears and Roland Marchand show that advertising had a profound
effect on modernity in America, regardless of the fact that specialists had only a
weak understanding of how advertisements influenced individuals. T. J. Jackson
Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York:
Basic Books, 1994), and Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul. On visual education
and visualization in industry, see Elizabeth Wiatr, “Between Word, Image, and the
Motion Picture: Visual Education and Films of Industrial Process,” Historical Journal
of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 333–51, and Lee Grieveson, “Visualizing
Industrial Citizenship,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United
States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2019), 107–23.
18. Helena Flam, “The Transatlantic Element in the Sociology of Emotions,” in
Biess and Gross, Science and Emotions after 1945, 18.
19. During the 1960s and 1970s, labor historians who worked on gender encoun-
tered resistance when arguing that discourse analysis should be given greater attention
in labor history, largely due to the field’s traditional commitments to empiricism. This
tendency continued into the 1990s. See Leonard Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor
History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana: University of Chicago Press,
1993), esp. Berlanstein’s introduction (1–14). Later scholarship suggests that labor
history is becoming more accommodating of discourse analysis. See Donna T. Haverty
and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class
Experience, 1756–2009 (New York: Continuum, 2010), esp. the introduction. For a
discussion of the tensions between social/labor history and discourse that also seeks
to reconcile these tensions, see Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in
History: What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
See also American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth
Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press),
2006. This volume includes several articles that examine management and business
ideologies in relation to work.
20. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003 [1983]).
21. Analysis of the role of visual images and aesthetics in influencing emotions
and behavior in the workplace has now become a major field in the study of work. See,
for example, Emma Bell, Samantha Warren, and Jonathan Schroeder, eds., The Rout-
ledge Companion to Visual Organization (New York: Routledge, 2014). Importantly, as
Tim Strangleman argues in the same volume, the “sociology of work” has long empha-
sized the ways that images influence work and perceptions of work, but this legacy has
often been overlooked. Tim Strangleman, “Visual Sociology and Work Organization:
An Historical Approach,” 243–58. On game-based “employee-motivation” tools, see
Rajat Paharia, Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionize Customer and Employee Engagement
with Big Data and Gamification (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013).
22. Williams, Emotion and Social Theory, 3. Studies of the history of motivation by
management scholars, no less than labor and cultural historians, have largely ignored
the kind of motivational rhetoric and ideology examined in this book. Management
school scholars have focused mainly on the history of formal research studies of
motivation. See, for example, Gary P. Latham, Work Motivation: History, Theory,
Research, and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007).
23. For persuasive accounts of the ways in which the behaviors of individuals in
organizations are influenced unconsciously, see John A. Bargh, introduction to Social
Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Mental Processes, ed. John
A. Bargh (New York: Psychology Press, 2007), 1–9, and James S. Uleman, “Introduction:
Becoming Aware of the New Unconscious,” in The New Unconscious, ed. Ran R. Hassin,
James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3–18.
24. Ellul, Propaganda, xvi.
Chapter 1: Motivation, Management, and Industrial

Modernity
1. Elbert Hubbard, A Message to Garcia (1899; repr., East Aurora, NY: Roycroft,
1916), 164. Hubbard omitted the accent in García in the essay’s title and its text. I have
retained this style when quoting from both.
2. Jules Zanger, “ ‘A Message to Garcia’: The Subsidized Hero,” American Studies
20, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 99–108.
3. The influence of “A Message to Garcia” and other writings by Hubbard on
publicity disseminated to workers by employers is discussed in a biography by his
former general manager and friend, Felix Shay. Felix Shay, Elbert Hubbard of East
Aurora (New York: Wise, 1926), esp. 110–11 and 159–63. On Hubbard’s influence
on businessmen, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the
Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), chap. 2.
4. My insights into the history of managerial efforts to exploit communication
tools are informed by several studies, including Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of
Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul:
The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1998); and David Nye, Image Worlds: Corporate
Identities at General Electric, 1890–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
5. Alfred J. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977).
6. See Elspeth Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of
American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
7. On workers’ use of strikes and employers responses to them in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, see David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of
Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Jeremy Brecher, Strike!, revised, expanded,
and updated ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014 [1972]), chaps. 1–4.
8. Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul.
9. Progressives’ concerns over and critiques of industry’s effects on workers
are detailed in Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), chap. 2.
10. Rodgers, Work Ethic in Industrial America, chap. 4. On the accommodating
stance of progressives toward industrialization, see Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for
Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), chap. 6, and Lears, No Place of
Grace, chap. 6.
11. Rodgers, Work Ethic in Industrial America, 83.

12. Joel M. Winkelman, “A Working Democracy: Progressivism and the Politics
of Work” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2012), 93, 86.
13. Reinhold Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in
the Course of Industrialization (New York: Harper, 1956), 263–65. On success literature
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Judy Hilkey, Character Is Cap-
ital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1997).
14. The roots, development, and consequences of the “human factor” in industry
are detailed extensively in Bruce E. Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor: The Early
Years of Human Resource Management in American Industry (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press
of Cornell University Press, 2008). On personnel management, which couched the
management of the labor force in humanistic discourse, see Sanford Jacoby, Employ-
ing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American
Industry, 1900–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
15. For Taylor’s most influential work on the subject, see Frederick Winslow Tay-
lor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers,
1911).
16. See Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne
Experiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11–12. On the devel-
opment and influence of scientific management, see Daniel Nelson, Managers and
Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory System in the United States, 1880–
1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), chap. 4, and Gerard Hanlon,
The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory (New York:
Routledge, 2016), 102–17.
17. See Carl Cederström and Andre Spicer, The Wellness Syndrome (Malden, MA:
Polity, 2015).
18. See Daniel A. Wren and Arthur G. Bedeian, The Evolution of Management
Thought, 6th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), chap. 9; Sanford Jacoby,
Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997), chap. 1; and Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor, 75–86.
19. Jacoby, Modern Manors, 15.
20. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 47–55. Quote from page 53.
21. See T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising
in America (New York: Basic, 1994), 261–98.
22. See Nikki Mandell, The Corporation as Family: The Gendering of Corporate
Welfare, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), and Nye,
Image Worlds, 85.
23. Andrea Tone, The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progres-

sive America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 105.
24. As David Nye points out in a case study of General Electric during this time,
industrial photographs included many kinds of images and did not amount to a single
or coherent ideology; instead, they allowed the corporation to craft and present its
image to different audiences, including engineers, workers, managers, and consumers.
Nye, Image Worlds, introduction.
25. Larry Peterson, “Producing Visual Traditions among Pullman Workers: The
Uses of Photography at Pullman,” Special Issue: Tradition and the Working Class,
International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 42 (Fall 1992): 40.
26. For insights into the Pittsburgh Survey and the rise of “visual education,” see
Yann Giraud and Loïc Charles, “Economics for the Masses: The Visual Display of
Economic Knowledge in the United States (1910–1945),” History of Political Economy
45, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 567–610.
27. See, for example, Frederick Sanger, “The Making of Right-Hand Men: VII
Developing an Office Manager,” System, the Magazine of Business, July 1915, 46–53.
28. System, the Magazine of Business, September 1915, 226.
29. At this juncture, some industrial psychologists, working from nineteenth-
century phrenology, claimed that there was little point in trying to condition workers
because their aptitudes were biologically fixed. See Brown, Corporate Eye, chap. 1, for
an extensive and illuminating discussion.
30. See Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor, 110–35, and Wren and Bedeian,
Evolution of Management Thought, 192–200.
31. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 119, 131; Wren and Bedeian, Evo-
lution of Management Thought, chap. 9.
32. Walter Dill Scott, Increasing Human Efficiency in Business: A Contribution
to the Psychology of Business (New York: Macmillan, 1911). On “competition,” “con-
centration,” and “wages,” see 48–74, 104–31, and 132–64, respectively. The quotes are
from 186 and 234.
33. On Scott’s influence in industrial psychology, see Edmund C. Lynch, “Walter
Dill Scott: Pioneer Industrial Psychologist,” Business History Review 42, no. 2 (Sum-
mer 1968): 149–70.
34. Brown, Corporate Eye, 47–51.
35. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1913), 190.
36. Münsterberg, Psychology, 234.
37. See, for example, Gary P. Latham, Work Motivation: History, Theory, Research,
and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007), 9–11.
38. On the rise of personnel departments in the 1910s, see Kaufman, Managing the
Human Factor, chap. 4, and Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 102–4, 142, and 164–65.
39. See Nelson, Managers and Workers, chap. 3. From the middle of the decade
onward, management magazines began to pay more attention to the psychological
dimensions of the foreman’s work. See, for example, the two-part series in Ameri-
can Machinist: C. B. Lord, “Personality in the Shop—Psychology of the Foreman I,”
American Machinist, February 25, 1915, 315–16, and C. B. Lord, “Personality in the
Shop—Psychology of the Foreman II,” American Machinist, March 11, 1915, 421–22.
40. On the “new foremanship” and its limits, see Kaufman, Managing the Human
Factor, 129, and Jacoby, Modern Manors, 22.
41. Image from Industrial Management, November 1918, 67. On the foreman’s
responsibilities, including “diplomacy,” “tact,” and similar skills, see Fred H. Colvin,
“The Foreman and His Job,” American Machinist, January 20, 1921, 81–82.
42. The Wilson administration’s broadly supportive stance toward labor and
Wilson’s pursuit of labor-friendly legislation is discussed in Joseph McCartin, Labor’s
Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American
Labor Relations, 1912–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
As McCartin notes (34), the most consequential of the labor laws passed by Wilson
were the La Follette Seamen’s Act, the Keating-Owens Child Labor Act, the Kern-
McGillicuddy Federal Employees’ Compensation Act, and the Adamson Act.
43. See James Robert Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The
Story of the Committee on Public Information (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
44. Creel quoted in Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American
Propaganda (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xi. The figures and CPI usage
of “people’s war” and “capital’s war” are quoted from Mock and Larson, Words That
Won the War, 162, 169.
45. Mock and Larson, Words That Won the War, 187–89.
46. Axelrod, Selling the Great War, 142–43. Reference to “people’s war” from Mock
and Larson, 162, 169. On the CPI’s approach to posters, see also Mock and Larson,
Words That Won the War, chaps. 4 and 8; Walton Rawls, Wake Up, America! World
War I and the American Poster (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), chap. 6; and Stewart
Halsey Ross, Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight in
the Great War of 1914–1918 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996), chap. 5.
47. Quoted in Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor, 59.
48. Joseph A. McCartin, “ ‘An American Feeling’: Workers, Managers, and the
Struggle over Industrial Democracy in the World War I Era,” in Industrial Democracy
in America: The Ambiguous Promise, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 76.
49. Mock and Larson, Words That Won the War, 191, 197–98.
50. McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 67–68.
51. “Selling the War to the Working Man,” Printers’ Ink, February 14, 1918, 69–82.
52. Michael J. Hickey, “What the Industrial Conservation Move Is Doing,” Mich-
igan Manufacturer and Financial Record, February 2, 1918, 4. See also George Weiss,
“Bridging the Chasm between Capital and Labor,” Forum, November 1916, 633–40.
53. Lynch, “Walter Dill Scott,” quoted in Nelson, Managers and Workers, 164.
54. See Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor, 164–74, and Jacoby, Employing
Bureaucracy, chap. 5.
55. The YMCA’s Among Industrial Workers (1916) listed around fifty large com-
panies currently using “industry” films. It also listed numerous organizations that
loaned films and portable motion picture machines, lantern slides, and visual exhibits
focused on health and safety, saving, thrift, and other aspects of industrial education.
Among Industrial Workers (Ways and Means): A Hand Book for Associations in Indus-
trial Fields (New York: Industrial Department, International Committee Young Man’s
Christian Associations, 1916), 70–97. On the educational film industry and industrial
films, see Anthony Slide, Before Video: A History of the Non-Theatrical Film (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1992), esp. chaps. 1 and 2.
56. See Lee Grieveson, “Visualizing Industrial Citizenship,” in Learning with the
Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron,
and Dan Streible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 107–23. On the use of indus-
trial films in schools and factories, see Elizabeth Wiatr, “Between Word, Image, and the
Machine: Visual Education and Films of Industrial Process,” Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 333–51. On visualization in the films of Frank B.
Gilbreth, see Scott Curtis, “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth,” in
Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger
and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 85–99.
57. Reel and Slide, January 1919, 19; DeVry ad on p. 48.
58. “Free Factory Movie Exhibitions,” Furniture Manufacturer and Artisan,
November 19, 1919, 243.
59. “Free Factory Movie Exhibitions.” The word employe (with one e) was used
widely in management circles well into the 1950s, when employee became more prev-
alent. I have retained original spellings in quotations here and throughout the book.
60. Heide Solbrig, “Film and Function: A History of Industrial Motivation Film”
(PhD diss., University of California, 2004), esp. chaps. 1–2. See also Wiatr, “Between
Word, Image, and the Machine.”
61. H. L. Clarke, “Visual Education as a Constructive Force in Industry,” Visual
Education, September–October 1920, 12–13.
62. Slide, Before Video, chap. 2.
63. Chicago was also home to the Society of Visual Education and the National
School of Visual Education. See Orgeron, Orgeron, and Streible, “A History of
Learning with the Lights Off,” in their edited volume, Learning with the Lights Off,
48. Beginning in the 1910s, organizations that sold salesman training literature and
correspondence course materials considered visualization an important sales tech-
nique. See Arthur F. Sheldon, The Art of Selling (Chicago: Sheldon School, 1911), 112,
120, 142–43; Walter H. Cottingham, “Selling—the Lifeblood of Business,” Personal
Salesmanship: Students’ Business Book Series (Chicago: A. W. Shaw, 1909), 10; and
Thomas Herbert Russell, Salesmanship Theory and Practice (Chicago: Washington
Institute, 1910), 239. On Chicago’s dominant role in industrial sociology, see Andrew
Abbott, “Organizations and the Chicago School,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology
and Organizational Studies, ed. Paul Adler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
399–420. On the proliferation of the field of industrial psychology in Chicago, see
Morris Viteles, Industrial Psychology (New York: Norton, 1932), 44.
64. George J. Zehrung, “Taking the Cinema to Mill and Shop,” Reel and Slide,
January 1919, 19 (my emphasis).
65. William J. Banning quoted in Ewen, PR!, 195–96.
66. E. P. Corbett, “Selling Goods by Illustrated Lectures,” Reel and Slide, February
1919, 9, quoted in Sean Savage, “The Eye Beholds: Silent Era Industrial Film and the
Bureau of Commercial Economics” (master’s thesis, New York University, 2006), 8.
Chapter 2: Quests to Shape the Worker’s Mind

1. See, for example, Carleton H. Parker, “Motives in Economic Life,” American
Economic Review 8, no. 1 (March 1918): 212–14; Carleton H. Parker, The Casual
Laborer, and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920); and Daniel
Bloomfield, ed., Employment Management (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1919).
2. Exemplars include Ordway Tead, Instincts in Industry: A Study of Working-Class
Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), and Lionel D. Edie, Principles of the New
Economics (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1922). On the development and influence
of instinct theory, see Malcolm Rutherford, The Institutionalist Movement in American
Economics, 1918–1947: Science and Social Control (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), chap. 1, and Christian Cordes, “The Role of ‘Instincts’ in the Development of
Corporate Cultures,” Journal of Economic Issues 41, no. 3 (September 2007): 747–64.
On Veblen’s theory, see Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State
of the Industrial Arts (New York: Macmillan, 1914).
3. Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright Publishing, 1928), 9. On
Bernays and the influence of his work, see Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin
(New York: Basic Books, 1996).
4. On management’s shift from bodily discipline to mental manipulation, see
Gerard Hanlon, The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management
Theory (New York: Routledge, 2016).
5. See Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2010 [1931]), and T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation
to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,”
in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, ed.
Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 1–38.
Interest in the restorative effects of motivation was influenced partly by the vet-
eran rehabilitation movement. Throughout the interwar period, the state and civic
organizations embarked on a wide-ranging campaign to rehabilitate disabled World
War I veterans that echoed aspects of industrial motivation, not least the use of
emotion-based propaganda. On the rehabilitation movement, see John M. Kinder,
Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), esp. chap. 4. Many specialists whose
work influenced theories about motivation in industry first researched morale and
motives in studies of injured soldiers, not least, Walter Dill Scott. See Edmund C.
Lynch, “Walter Dill Scott: Pioneer Industrial Psychologist,” Business History Review
42, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 149–70.
6. For a detailed discussion of management efforts to resolve the “labor problem”
in the 1920s, see Bruce Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of
Human Resource Management in American Industry (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press of Cornell
University Press, 2008), chap. 5.
7. For further insights into management’s enlistment of psychology and use of
psychological discourse during this time, see Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power:
A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1960), chap. 4, and Reinhold Bendix, Work and Authority
in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York:
Harper, 1956), 281–97.
8. For an excellent account of the development of instinct theory, see Pier Fran-
cesco Asso and Luca Fiorito, “Human Nature and Economic Institutions: Instinct
Psychology, Behaviorism, and the Development of American Institutionalism,”
Journal of the History of Economic Thought 26, no. 4 (December 2004): 445–77.
9. Parker, “Motives in Economic Life,” 212, 14.
10. Parker, “Motives in Economic Life,” 220, 227. An illustration of Parker’s elite-
minded distaste for labor unions (and one that typifies instinct theorists’ stance on
unions and workers more generally) is provided by Don Mitchell, who examines
Parker’s work heading the California State Immigration and Housing Commission’s
investigation of the Wheatland Riot of August 1913. While allowing that the employer,
E. C. Durst, fueled the riot by engaging in wage suppression and failing to provide
sanitary toilets and drinking water for workers, Parker described workers as “mal-
adjusted,” concluding that the strike occurred largely because of the “abnormal”
psychology and “pugnacious instincts” of workers and the Industrial Workers of the
World. See Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California
Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 46–51.
11. Tead, Instincts in Industry, 148.
12. Tead, x, xiv, 30–31, 67–85, 94–95, 113–14.
13. For a detailed analysis of Williams’s book, see Mark Pittenger, Class Unknown:
Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to
the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2012), chap. 2.
14. Whiting Williams, What’s on the Worker’s Mind: By One Who Put on Overalls
to Find Out (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 294.
15. Exemplars of the criticism of instinct theory include Knight Dunlap, “Are
There Any Instincts?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 14, no. 5, (December 1919): 307-
11, and A. J. Snow, “Psychology in Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 32,
no. 4 (August 1924): 487–96. These authors did not dispute the claim that psychology
was important in workers’ emotions, however.
16. Rutherford, Institutionalist Movement, 125. On Chicago’s role in the institu-
tionalist movement, see chap. 5. See also Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “Instinct and Habit
before Reason: Comparing the Views of John Dewey, Friedrich Hayek and Thorstein
Veblen,” in Cognition and Economics, ed. Elisabeth Krecké, Carine Krecké, and Roger
G. Koppl, vol. 9 of Advances in Austrian Economics (Bingley, U.K.: Emerald, 2007),
109–43.
17. On welfare capitalism, see Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The
Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial
Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and
Gerald Zahavi, Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoeworkers and
Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
18. See Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne
Experiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Baritz, The Servants
of Power, chaps. 5 and 6.
19. Many historians have challenged the view that researchers “discovered” the
influence of emotion in the workplace during the Hawthorne Studies. See Gillespie,
Manufacturing Knowledge, and John. S. Hassard, “Rethinking the Hawthorne Stud-
ies: The Western Electric Research in Its Social, Political and Historical Context,”
Human Relations 65, no. 11 (November 2012): 1431–61. As Kyle Bruce argues, human
relations was, in many ways, more exploitative of workers than scientific manage-
ment. The Taylor Society, he points out, included a strong progressive wing, whereas
human relations was largely aligned with conservative managerial goals. Kyle Bruce,
“Democracy or Seduction? The Demonization of Scientific Management and the
Deification of Human Relations,” in The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology,
and Imagination, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2012), 42–76.
20. Robert H. Zieger, “Herbert Hoover, the Wage-Earner, and the ‘New Economic
System,’ 1919–1929,” Business History Review 51, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 165; Robert H.
Zieger, “Solving the Labor Problem: Herbert Hoover and the American Worker in the
1920s,” in Herbert Hoover Reassessed: Essays Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary
of the Inauguration of Our Thirty-First President, comp. Arthur Link (Washington,
D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1981), 177–87; David M. Hart,
“Herbert Hoover’s Last Laugh: The Enduring Significance of the ‘Associative State’ in
the United States,” Journal of Policy History 10, no. 4 (October 1998): 419–44.
21. David Brody, Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2005, chap. 5.
22. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933,
Sentry ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 146. Employers’ ambivalence to workers
and unions was reflected in the decline of the number of personnel departments
in the 1920s. See Sanford Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and
the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–1945 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), chap. 6.
23. Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S.
History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 165–66.
24. My discussion of Seiders’s career and the syndicate’s formation is drawn from
documentation in the Charles H. Rosenfeld Collection at the University of Chicago
Special Collections Research Center (hereafter CHRC), and Neil McCullough Clark,
“Seth Seiders” (unpublished article, 1926), box 5, folder 5, Neil McCullough Clark
Collection, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
The Charles H. Rosenfeld Collection has been reorganized since the research was
conducted. I have endeavored to identify new archival locations for all materials cited,
but some items may have been relocated.
25. Seth Seiders Syndicate photograph album, box 6, folder: “Photographs,”
CHRC.
26. See “Big Order Report,” October 10, 1927, Mather and Co., black binder:
“Letters: Leroy Fox,” box 4, CHRC.
27. Felix Shay, Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora (New York: Wise, 1926), 111.
28. Art S. to Charles Rosenfeld, January 11, 1928, black file, 1-3, box 1, CHRC.
29. See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots
of the Consumer Culture, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
30. Lippmann argued that the masses had become incapable of rational thought
and called for the creation of a corps of experts who could disseminate informa-
tion to the public, thus helping them understand the complex issues of the day. See
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1922), and Walter Lippmann,
The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925). Dewey advanced a more
democratic vision, countering that the solution to the challenges of mass society
was for public institutions to harness the power of modern communications. Used
properly, he posited, radio, newspapers, and other new media could help build
the “Great Community” and deepen Americans’ sense of connectedness. See John
Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry, edited and with an
introduction by Melvin L. Rogers (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 2016 [1927]), 170. On
the influence of Lippmann’s and Dewey’s theories about communication, see Brett
Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), chaps. 1 and 2, and Daniel Czitrom,
Media and the American Mind from Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1982), chap. 4. On the influence of mass communications in
the 1920s, see Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American
Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), chaps. 7 and 13.
31. Hoover quoted in “Herbert Hoover Said—Notes from His Address of Wel-
come to the Delegates to the Houston Convention, A.A.C. of W.,” Advertising and
Selling Fortnightly, May 20, 1925, 21. Seiders quoted in Seth Seiders, “Billions of Dollars
Annually Wasted,” Banker and Manufacturer 18, no. 12 (December 1924): 12, 13.
32. Seth Seiders, “Getting the Best Out of Your Help,” Banker and Manufacturer
19, no. 1 (January 1925): 32, 49. Similar articles that he published during this period
include Seth Seiders, “Selling the Employee His Job,” Pacific Factory, November
1924, and Seth Seiders, “How to Cut Waste—Methods That Have Succeeded,” Pacific
Factory, January 1925.
33. For a more detailed discussion of Mather’s designs, see David A. Gray, “Man-
aging Motivation: The Seth Seiders Syndicate and the Motivational Publicity Business
in the 1920s,” Winterthur Portfolio 44, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 77–122.
34. Mather & Co. Poster Catalog, 1924, box 34, folder 1, CHRC.
35. “What Are Loafers Paid?,” Mather Poster Collection, Hagley Museum and
Library, https://digital.hagley.org/posterexhibit_078.
36. Looking back at the poster business of the 1920s two decades later, the most
successful supplier of motivational posters of the day estimated that 75 percent of the
messages in Mather’s posters were generated by its sales specialists and salesmen. Lew
Shalett, “Our Heritage,” proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Company sales conference,
January 31–February 1, 1947, 5, box 29, folder 7, CHRC.
37. On elites’ belief in the virtues of white labor in the early twentieth century,
see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign
Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), chap. 2.
38. The first poster may be viewed here: https://sova.si.edu/details/NMAH
.AC.0877#ref24. The second one is viewable here: https://www.internationalposter
.com/product/one-man-is-due-for-promotion-mather-work-incentive/.
39. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, with a new introduction by Sally E. Parry (New York:
Signet Classics, 2007), 75.
40. Many of Mather’s posters can be viewed in various online archives. See, for
example, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History’s Guide
to the Emanuel Gerard Collection of Mather and Company Employee Motivation
Posters, https://sova.si.edu/details/NMAH.AC.0877.
41. See Howard M. Weiss and Arthur P. Brief, “Affect at Work: A Historical Per-
spective,” in Emotions at Work: Theory, Research, and Applications for Management,
ed. Roy Payne and Cary Cooper (New York: John Wiley, 2001), 133–7 1. On the use of
floral and decorative borders in the middle-class home after the turn of the century,
see Karen Zukowski, Creating the Artful Home: The Aesthetic Movement (Salt Lake
City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2006), 62–69.
42. See Gray, “Managing Motivation,” for more extensive analyses of this and
several other Mather posters.
43. Seth Seiders, “Introductory,” in binder entitled “Sales Talk,” 3, box 1, CHRC.
44. On the indebtedness of Mather artists to the Plakatstil or sach Plakats style, see
John Heller, “Mather Work Incentive Posters,” in Posters: Identification and Price Guide,
ed. Tony Fusco, 2nd ed. (New York: Avon, 1994), 204. Heller draws parallels between
Mather’s posters and the designs of the German poster artist Ludwig Hohlwein.
45. For examples of Mather’s animal-themed posters (as well as others), see
https://sova.si.edu/details/NMAH.AC.0877.
46. Seiders, “Getting the Best Out of Your Help,” 34.
47. On management efforts to infuse managerial values among foremen, see
Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory
System in the United States, 1880–1920, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1995).
48. “Monthly Digest of Current Books, Newspapers and Magazines in Relation
to the Human Element in Business,” box 4, binder: “Survey Copies,” Seth Seiders
Syndicate, CHRC.
49. Constructive Letters to Pivot Men, W. C. Mitchell and Company, box 6, folder:
“W. C. Mitchell and Co.,” CHRC.
50. “Yourself, Incorporated,” Constructive Talk to Pivot Men, no. 54, Seth Seiders
Inc., Constructive Talks to Pivot Men, 1927, author’s collection.
51. Seth Seiders Inc., Secretary’s Record Book: For Use in Prompt, Easy, Sure Dis-
tribution of the Seth Seiders “Constructive Talks to Pivot Men,” box 7, folder 5, CHRC.
52. Ronald F. Dixon, “The Value of Hitching the Plant to a Slogan,” Industrial
Psychology Monthly 2, no. 9 (September 1927): 465.
53. However, Charles Rosenfeld, western division manager of Mather, had only
sixty-one salesmen in March 1924. Felix Shay to Rosenfeld, March 7, 1924, 1, box 1,
binder: “Mostly letters encouraging salesmen to make more sales,” CHRC.
54. A field manager earned 15 percent commission when his salesman sold $5,000
or less a month, 20 percent if the salesman sold between $5,000 and $6,000 a month,
and 25 percent if his sales were over $6,000 a month. “District Manager Plan on Seth
Seiders Inc.,” November 15, 1929, box 1, binder: “Recharging Weak Salesmen, Seth
Seiders, Mather & Co.,” CHRC.
55. Seth Seiders to Felix Shay, April 10, 1924, box 5, binder: “Sales Talks to–by
Salesmen Various SS Services,” CHRC.
56. “Dear Mrs. ________,” 1924, box 6, binder: “1929: Seiders-Mather-Howard,”
CHRC.
57. “Mather Poster Training Schedule,” box 1, unlabeled file, and Seth Seiders to
S. J. Glazel, October 6, 1924, box 1, binder: “Recharging Weak Salesmen, Seth Seiders,
Mather & Co.,” CHRC.
58. “No apparent benefit,” box 5, binder: “Customer Complaints,” CHRC. How-
ard’s V.P.S.s are collected in box 1, “Howard Sales Bulletin Binder Code L,” CHRC.
The syndicate’s index to over three hundred V.P.S.s is in “Explanation of House Policy
on Sales Territory,” box 1, CHRC.
59. See “Are Verbal Proof Stories Ethical?,” box 2, binder: “National Research
Bureau,” CHRC.
60. Felix Shay to Seth Seiders, May 27, 1924, and Seiders to Shay, May 28, 1924,
box 5, binder: “Sales Talks to–by Salesmen Various SS Services,” CHRC.
61. “A Few Expressions from Concerns Using Mather Pictorial Poster Service,”
box 5, binder: “Customer Complaints,” CHRC.
62. Leroy Fox to salesmen, August 17, 1929, box 4, binder: “Letters: Leroy Fox,”
CHRC.
63. Leroy Fox, “What do you do when Pivot Men can’t read English?,” August 17,
1929, box 4, binder: “Letters: Leroy Fox,” CHRC.
64. Leroy Fox to salesmen, August 19, 1929, box 4, binder: “Letters: Leroy Fox,”
CHRC.
65. Leroy Fox to salesmen, August 19, 1929. As Timothy Spears and Walter Fried-
man illustrate, scientific salesmanship drew from prevailing notions of intelligence
based on the claims of phrenology. See Timothy Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The
Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995),
217–19, and Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in

America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), chap. 3.
66. A small handful of Mather’s posters depicted subjects of color, though never
as workers. These posters centered on common racial stereotypes, including an Afri-
can tribesman, a black “pearl diver,” and a Native-American hunter, some of which
are viewable here: https://sova.si.edu/details/NMAH.AC.0877.
67. “A Study in Contrasts,” box 5, binder: “Sales Talks to–by Salesmen Various
SS Services,” CHRC.
68. Seiders’s legal troubles are detailed in a court case transcript in an untitled
manila folder, box 6, CHRC.
69. Leroy Fox to Headmasters, n.d., Brown binder, box 5, folder 3, CHRC.
70. Mike Smith, “Al Capone’s Jemez Hideout,” New Mexico Magazine, July 2007.
Chapter 3: Visions of Striving

1. On work and communal bonds in the 1930s, see Robert S. McElvaine, The Great
Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1993), 199–202; Warren
Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 154; Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the
Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009);
and Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
2. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997).
3. Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne
Experiments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 103 (for a fuller account
of Mayo’s career, see chap. 4); James Hoopes, False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created
Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today (Cambridge,
MA: Perseus, 2003), chap. 5.
4. Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, 242–43; Hoopes, False Prophets, 143.
5. Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, 120.
6. This account of Mayo’s background and career is informed by Hoopes, False
Prophets, 133–35.
7. Mayo’s meeting with Malinowski is documented by Hoopes, 97–98.
8. Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, 97–100; Hoopes, 132–36.
9. Quoted in O’Connor, “The Politics of Management Thought: A Case Study of
the Harvard Human Relations School and the Human Relations School,” Academy
of Management Review 24, no. 1 (1999): 126.
10. Hoopes, False Prophets, 141–46.
11. Hoopes, 142–43.

12. Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, with an intro-
duction by F. J. Roethlisberger (New York: Viking, 1933), 116, 149. For critical analyses
of Mayo’s theories during this time, see Reinhard Bendix and Lloyd Fisher, “The
Perspectives of Elton Mayo,” Review of Economics and Statistics 31, no. 4 (November
1949): 312–19; Loren Baritz, Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science
in Industry (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), chaps. 5–6; and Gerard Hanlon,
The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory (New York:
Routledge, 2016), chap. 4.
13. My argument here draws on Hanlon’s discussion of Mayo’s theories. See
Hanlon, Dark Side of Management, 169–77. On Mayo’s emphasis on the mind as
opposed to Taylor’s focus on the body, see Hanlon, 14.
14. Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, 100.
15. Reinhold Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management
in the Course of Industrialization (New York: Harper, 1956), 307–40; Nikolas Rose,
Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 137–40.
16. Baritz, Servants of Power, 118, 119–20.
17. See, for example, Sanford Jacoby’s case studies of Eastman Kodak, Sears Roe-
buck, and Thompson Products. Sanford Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism
since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), chaps. 3–5, and
Bruce Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource
Management in America (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press of Cornell University Press, 2008),
263–79.
18. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933,
Sentry ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 460.
19. Quoted in Lawrence F. Hanley, “Popular Culture and Crisis: King Kong Meets
Edmund Wilson,” Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and
Sherry Lee Linkon (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 246. On Hoover’s
response to the Depression, see Bernstein, Lean Years, 460–62, 465–73; Caroline
Bird, The Invisible Scar: The Great Depression, and What It Did to American Life,
from Then until Now (New York: David McKay, 1969), chap. 4; and McElvaine, Great
Depression, chaps. 3–4.
20. McElvaine, Great Depression, 66.
21. Brian Farmer, American Conservatism: History, Theory and Practice (Newcas-
tle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), 227.
22. William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover, American Presidents Series: The
31st President, 1929–1933, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz (New York:
Henry Holt, 2009), 130–31; Bird, Invisible Scar, 71.
23. Bird, Invisible Scar, 59.

24. Bernstein, Lean Years, 252–53.
25. Bird, Invisible Scar, 71.
26. Herbert Hoover, “Radio Address to the Nation on Unemployment Relief.
October 18, 1931,” in Herbert Hoover: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and
Statements of the President, January 1 to December 31, 1931, 487–91. Quotes on 490.
27. Good Housekeeping, January 1, 1932, 124.
28. Literary Digest, November 21, 1931, 45.
29. Literary Digest, November 21, 1931, 45.
30. Bernstein, Lean Years, 460; McElvaine, Great Depression, 59.
31. Bernstein, Lean Years, 460–62.
32. On Hoover’s faith in advertising, see Bernstein, Lean Years, 301–2, 460–62; on
his enlistment of advertising experts during his 1932 reelection campaign, see Dennis
W. Johnson, Democracy for Hire: A History of American Political Consulting (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 17–18.
33. Indeed, Raymond Moley and Rexford Tugwell, two of the New Deal’s archi-
tects, later credited Hoover with establishing the foundations of the New Deal.
According to Moley, “Herbert Hoover originated the New Deal.” Tugwell stated,
“We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated
from programs that Hoover started.” McElvaine, Great Depression, 70.
34. On the continuance of individualism in modified form during the New Deal,
see Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, chap 7.
35. McElvaine, Great Depression, 258–59.
36. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940
(New York: Harper), 41.
37. See Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-
Mediated Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), chap. 1.
On FDR’s “Forgotten Man” radio speech in 1932, see McElvaine, Great Depression,
125. On FDR’s tactics and his appeal, see McElvaine, 118–41.
38. Steinbeck’s interest in “group-man theory” and, specifically, his indebtedness
to philosopher John Elof Boodin is discussed in Jeffrey Wayne Yeager, “The Social
Mind: Elof Boodin’s Influence on John Steinbeck’s Phalanx Writings, 1935–1942,”
Steinbeck Review 10, no. 1 (2013): 31–46.
39. See May, Big Tomorrow, and Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 233.
40. Denning, Cultural Front, 266, 268.
41. Denning, 266–68.
42. My argument here is informed by Fredric Jameson’s discussion of “class and
allegory” in film. Jameson posits that film allows viewers to indulge their grievances
but ultimately resolves them in favor of the status quo. See Fredric Jameson, Signatures
of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), chap. 2.
43. On the Historical Section’s history, see F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade:
Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (n.p.:
Louisiana State University Press, 1972); Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brennan,
eds., Documenting America, 1935–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988); and Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003).
44. Rexford Guy Tugwell, Thomas Munro, and Roy Stryker, American Economic
Life and the Means of Its Improvement (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925).
45. Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America 1935–
1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 14.
46. This esteem for white agrarian virtues was echoed in other “official images”
of the era, including those created under the auspices of the Civilian Conservation
Corps (CCC). As Maren Stange argues, CCC photos celebrated Anglo-Saxon agrar-
ianism while ignoring the racial complexity of agricultural labor. See Maren Stange,
“The Record Itself: Farm Security Photography and the Transformation of Rural
Life,” in Official Images: New Deal Photography, ed. Pete Daniel, Merry A. Foresta,
Maren Stange, and Sally Stein (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1987), 66–70. As Cara Finnegan details, magazine articles about the southern farm
tenancy system and rural poverty used FSA photographs in ways that downplayed the
racial dynamics of each and that served mainly to emphasize the white Depression
experience; see Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, esp. 78–94 and chap. 4. Framing the
experiences of struggling farmers in terms that middle-class viewers could empathize
with was fundamental to the section’s strategy. Images of honest-looking Americans
who appeared predisposed to hard work but were hindered by circumstances beyond
their control were deemed a necessary tactic for motivating middle-class viewers to
support New Deal programs. Similarly, images and captions that seemed to invoke
dependency on government handouts were to be avoided. See Curtis, Mind’s Eye,
Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1989), viii–ix, 6.
47. See Roy Stryker, “The FSA Collection of Photographs,” in Stryker and Wood,
In This Proud Land.
48. Migrant Mother has received extensive discussion and analysis in histories of
FSA photography, and rather than rehashing this well-trodden ground, I will refer
the reader to some important works. See Wendy Kozol, “Madonnas of the Fields:
Photography, Gender, and 1930s Farm Relief,” Genders, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 1–23;
Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, chap. 2; and James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth,
chap. 3. The photograph may be viewed at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource

/fsa.8b29516/?co=fsa.
49. See, for instance, Lisa Helene Kaplan, “Introducing America to Americans”:
FSA Photography and the Construction of Racialized and Gendered Citizens (PhD
diss., Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, 2015), esp. 126–29; Stange,
“The Record Itself ”; Sharon Musher, Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on
American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 130–44; and Finnegan,
Picturing Poverty, chap. 5.
50. Several studies have addressed the section’s shift to a more optimistic portrayal
of American life from the late 1930s onward and the ways in which this new direction
advanced more conservative ideals than the section emphasized previously. See, for
example, Paula Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented: The Politics of Documentary
(New York: Verso, 1994), chap. 4. Myles Orvell discusses the nostalgic portrayals
of small-town life in FSA photographs in The Death and Life of Main Street: Small
Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina, 2012), esp. 104–15. John Raeburn explores how the section’s emphasis on
Depression-era exigencies such as poverty and distress were largely erased when art
museums used FSA photographs in exhibits during the war, in A Staggering Revolu-
tion: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2006), 183–93.
51. Stryker, shooting script entitled “Suggestions recently made by Robert Lynd
(co-author of Middletown) for things which should be photographed as American
Background,” 1936, in Stryker and Wood, In This Proud Land, 187.
52. Quoted in Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in Amer-
ican Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 287.
53. Russell Lee, “Life on the American Frontier—1941 Version,” U.S. Camera,
October 1941, 52.
54. Quoted in Levine, Unpredictable Past, 287.
55. Factory had already consolidated eight other titles by this time, and Industrial
Maintenance had absorbed nine. A full list of the publications folded into these two
magazines appears in Factory Management and Maintenance (henceforth FMM) 95,
no. 1 (January 1937): 108.
56. John Richelsen, “Plants Are Like People,” FMM 95, no. 9 (September 1937): 66.
57. Ellis Rosenthal, “Employees ‘Go on the Air’ on Public Address System,” FMM
95, no. 7 (July 1937): 134. In 1933 FMM reported that a company in New Jersey had
a pianist play every afternoon to inspire faster production. “Management Shorts,”
FMM 91, no. 5 (May 1933): 179.
58. Allan H. Mogensen, “Every Worker Has Ideas,” FMM 93, no. 4 (April 1935):
148 and advertising section, 83–84.
59. Frank Voelkl, “Slogan Contest Teaches: ‘Do It for the Customer,’ ” FMM 98,
no. 9 (September 1940): 160, 162.
60. Tom A. Burke, “Safety: Seventeenth in the Series of Factory Management and
Maintenance Plant Operation Library,” FMM 94, no. 7 (July 1936): S-284.
61. Burke, “Safety,” S-283.
62. Dr. Mathew Luckiesh, “Workers Are Human Seeing-Machines,” FMM 92,
no. 3 (March 1934): 93–96.
63. J. F. Andrews, “Swapping Ideas Betters Safety Programs,” FMM 97, no. 8
(August 1939): 38–39, 110–16. Image from p. 38.
64. Burke, “Safety,” S-281–82.
65. The first quote is from T. J. Maloney, “Color Increases Shop Efficiency,” Factory
and Industrial Management 83, no. 4 (April 1932): 139; the second is from Burke, S-279.
66. As Jennifer Klein argues, economic security became a powerful symbol of
progress during the middle decades of the twentieth century. See Jennifer Klein, For
All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare
State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
67. For analysis of the episode, see “Diego Rivera at Rockefeller Center: Fresco
Painting and Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 41, no. 2 (Spring
1977): 70–82.
68. James Guimond develops this line of discussion, exploring FSA photographs
that depict NAM billboards. James Guimond, American Photography and the Ameri-
can Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chap. 4.
69. The first four figures are stated in Sharon Beder, Free Market Missionaries: The
Corporate Manipulation of Community Values (New York: Earthscan, 2006), 17. The
figure for billboard poster installations is from “Experts All: Who’s Behind Industry’s
Public Relations Program,” folder: “Miscellaneous NIIC Material, 1938–1940,” box
848, series 1, National Association of Manufacturers Collection, Hagley Museum
and Library, Delaware (hereafter NAM). The figure of billboard viewings is from
William L. Bird, A Better Living: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Busi-
ness Leadership, 1935–1955 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 222.
The figure for film viewings is quoted in “Report of Motion Pictures Theatrical and
Non-Theatrical Showings,” April 27, 1938, box 113, folder: “Public Relations-Motion
Slide Films Rep. of Motion Picture Showings,” series 1, NAM.
70. “Service for Plant Publications,” June 1936, no. 10, box 111, folder: “Public
Relations: Service for Plant Publications,” series 1, NAM.
71. “Experts All.”
72. “Report of Motion Pictures Theatrical and Non-Theatrical Showings.” See
also Bird, A Better Living, 131–33.
73. “Men and Machines,” box 111, folder: Public Relations Posters, series 1, NAM;
“Continuity Outline for ‘America Marching On’ No. 2 Production in 1938 N.A.M.
Series,” box 113, loose materials, series 1, NAM.
74. “Men and Machines.”
75. “Shooting Continuity, Your Town—A Story of America,” box 113, loose mate-
rials, series 1, NAM.
76. See Rick Prelinger, “Eccentricity, Education and the Evolution of Corporate
Speech,” in Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz
Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). For
an illuminating account of the development and influence of motivational films and
their relationship to social science, see Heide Solbrig, “Film and Function: A History
of Industrial Motivation Film” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2004).
77. The film can be viewed online at the Internet Archive, https://archive.org
/details/0560_From_Dawn_to_Sunset_14_01_40_00.
Chapter 4: The War over Motivation

1. On American domestic propaganda during the war, see John Morton Blum,
V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace, 1976); Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of
War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), chaps.
1–2; and William L. Bird Jr. and Harry Rubenstein, Design for Victory: World War II
Posters on the American Home Front (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998).
2. Studs Terkel, The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (New York: New
Press, 1984).
3. On narratives about the “good war,” see Michael C. C. Adams, The Best War
Ever: America and World War II (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1994). For an illuminating critique of assumptions about wartime motivation and of
discourse about the Greatest Generation, see Kenneth D. Rose, Myth and the Greatest
Generation: A Social History of Americans in World War II (New York: Routledge,
2008).
4. On efforts by advertisers to exploit the war to bolster their standing in the
postwar era, see Frank W. Fox, Madison Avenue Goes to War: The Strange Military
Career of American Advertising, 1941–1945 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University
Press, 1975); Inger L. Stole, Advertising at War: Business, Consumers, and Government
in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Mark Leff, “The Politics
of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II,” Journal of American
History 77, no. 4 (March 1991): 1296–1318; Cynthia Lee Henthorn, From Submarines
to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939–1956 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006);
and Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, “Sacrifice, Consumption, and the American Way
of Life: Advertising and Domestic Propaganda during World War II,” Communication
Review 8, no. 1 (2005): 27–52.
5. Fox, Madison Avenue Goes to War, esp. chap. 2, and Stole, Advertising at War.
On the quest by business to advance free enterprise ideology and secure its power and
influence after the war, see Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business
Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
6. On the war’s effects on economics and on relationships between the state and
labor, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and
War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), chaps. 7–9; Steve Fraser, “The Labor Question,”
in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary
Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 55–84; and Alan Brinkley,
“World War II and American Liberalism,” in The War in American Culture: Society
and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 319–20.
7. Meg Jacobs, “ ‘How About Some Meat?’: The Office of Price Administration,
Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941–1946,” Journal
of American History 84, no. 3 (December 1997): 910–41.
8. Liberals’ shift from the New Deal’s earlier class-based agendas to a wartime
consumer-based platform rooted in free market principles is detailed in Brinkley,
End of Reform, chap. 7, appropriately titled “Liberals Embattled.” On full employment,
see 250–53.
9. On gains and losses of labor unions, see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at
Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and
George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Class in the 1940s (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1981).
10. See Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home, 34–36; Brinkley, End of Reform, chaps.
8–9; and Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight.
11. Adams, Best War Ever, 71.
12. On the Reuther Plan and resistance to it by industrial leaders, see Nelson
Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1995), chap. 8.
13. See, for example, Gary P. Latham, Work Motivation: History, Theory, Research,
and Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007), 21.
14. See, for example, Loren Baritz, Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social
Science in Industry (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), chap. 8; Howell John
Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the
1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); and Sanford Jacoby, Employing
Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Indus-
try, 1900–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 194–204, quote on 201.
15. See F. J. Roethlisberger and William Dickson, Management and the Worker:
An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company,
Hawthorne Works, Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), chap.
25. Quote from 408.
16. Peter F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man (New Brunswick, NJ: Trans-
action Publishers, 1995 [1942]), 60.
17. See Nils Gilman, “The Prophet of Post-Fordism: Peter Drucker and the Legit-
imation of the Corporation,” in American Capitalism: Social Theory and Political
Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press), 109–31.
18. “Press conference of Archibald MacLeish, Director of the Office of Facts and
Figures,” January 21, 1942, 3, box 3, subject file: MacLeish, Archibald, 1941–43, Papers
of Henry F. Pringle, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter PHFP).
19. “Report to the Nation: The American Preparation for War,” 36, box 5, subject
file: OEM, Office of Facts and Figures Board Meeting Minutes, PHFP.
20. Leo Rosten, June 10, 1942, “Movies and War Information,” box 3, entry 6-A,
folder: Bureau—Motion Pictures, Records of the Office of War Information, Records
of the Historian Relating to the Domestic Branch, RG-208, Records of the Office of
War Information, National Archives, College Park, MD (hereafter OWI). For further
insights into Americans’ ambivalence about the war, see John W. Jeffries, Wartime
America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 171–72, and
Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation, 70–7 1.
21. “The Labor Front,” Sam Lubell to Marty Sommers, January 21, 1942, box 6,
subject file: OEM Office of Facts and Figures Ideas, memo attachment and pp. 1–2,
PHFP.
22. The struggle over propaganda policy at the OWI has been discussed by many
historians. For informative analyses, see Blum, V Was for Victory, chap. 1; Winkler,
Politics of Propaganda, chap. 2; and Bird and Rubenstein, Design for Victory, chaps.
1–3.
23. “Note to American Artists,” August 1942, 3, box 14, folder: World War II—
Office of War Information Domestic Operations Correspondence 1942–44, n.d.,
Papers of Francis E. Brennan, Library of Congress (hereafter PFEB).
24. George A. Barnes to Archibald MacLeish, December 20, 1941, box 42 E-7,
folder: Posters, OWI-OFF 1941–42, alpha subject file, OWI.
25. Stole, Advertising at War, 12.
26. Stole, 68.
27. Julia A. English to Myrtle A. Weese, March 29, 1945, box 1126, NC-148, entry
236, folder: Poster Ideas—unsolicited, OWI. This file contains numerous rejection
letters, and many more are scattered throughout the OWI’s papers.
28. Francis Brennan to Elmer Davis, April 6 1943, box 14, folder: World War II—
Office of War Information Domestic Operations Correspondence, 1942–44, PFEB.
29. Letter, box 3, entry 6-A: Records of the Historian relating to the Domestic
Branch, folder: Bureau of Publications & Graphics Printing Division, OWI.
30. See, for example, “Fifteen Quitting O.W.I. Accuse It of Ballyhoo,” Herald
Tribune, April 16, 1943, box 14, folder: World War II—Office of War Information
News Clippings, 1942–44, PFEB.
31. Memo from George H. Lyon, Chief of the OWI News Bureau, August 10, 1943,
box 1066, folder: Graphics News Letters, OWI.
32. For further discussion of these developments, see Bird and Rubenstein,
Design for Victory; Winkler, Politics of Propaganda; Blum, V Was for Victory; and
Stole, Advertising at War.
33. See Laura Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold
War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chap. 4, and Fones-Wolf,
Selling Free Enterprise.
34. See Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propa-
ganda during World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
The most well known World War II poster depicting a woman worker today—
J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!”—has for decades been upheld as a symbol of
women’s empowerment. Although the poster had no connection to the OWI (it
was commissioned by Westinghouse Electric), its unique standing in collective
memory calls for commentary here. The poster is known popularly as the major
image portraying “Rosie the Riveter” and is often assumed to have been used for
recruitment purposes or as an affirmation of women’s important role in the war
effort. Yet the poster has long been misunderstood. It was produced, rather, to
motivate women (and perhaps men) already employed in Westinghouse’s factories
and was, more accurately, part of the firm’s efforts to urge increased productivity and
instill discipline. Its audience was also far more limited than is often assumed, as it
was displayed for only two weeks in February 1943, and only inside Westinghouse’s
plants. On these points and for a more extensive discussion, see James J. Kimble
and Lester C. Olson, “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and
Misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster,” Rhetoric & Public
Affairs 9, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 533–69.
35. United We Win has been widely reproduced in World War II poster books and
may be viewed, along with the posters depicting Joe Louis and Dorie Miller, on the
National Archives’ “Powers of Persuasion” online exhibit, https://www.archives.gov
/exhibits/powers_of_persuasion/united_we_win/united_we_win.html. The poster
depicting Obie Bartlett may be viewed at http://findit.library.yale.edu/bookreader
/BookReaderDemo/index.html?oid=16047887#page/1/mode/1up.
36. On the OWI’s liaison with Hollywood film studios and use of films in efforts
to represent African Americans and boost support for the war effort among blacks,
see Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “Blacks, Loyalty, and Motion-Picture
Propaganda in World War II,” Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (September 1986):
383–406.
37. The entire booklet is available for viewing on the National Museum of African
American History website at https://edan.si.edu/transcription/pdf_files/10156.pdf.
38. William H. Hastie to Chandler Owen, May 1, 1942, box 3, folder: General
Correspondence 1942–1943, PHFP.
39. On southern congressional members’ criticism of Negroes and the War, the
subsequent loss of funding of the OWI Domestic Branch, and its vexed efforts to
develop propaganda aimed exclusively at blacks, see Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices:
American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),
246–50, quote from 132. As Hilmes argues, the OWI developed a number of radio
programs and films that addressed racial issues, but its efforts were often held back
by critics who deemed them divisive. See Hilmes, chap. 8.
40. On wartime racial discrimination in industry, see Eileen Boris, “The Racial-
ized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States,” Social Politics
2, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 160–80, and Boris, “ ‘You Wouldn’t Want One of ’Em Dancing
with Your Wife’: Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II,” American Quarterly 50,
no. 1 (March 1998): 77–108. For an illuminating study of the racialized and gendered
nature of work on the American home front in Montana that also addresses national
contexts, see Matthew L. Basso, Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s
World War II Home Front (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On race and
wartime contests for authority in industry, see Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, chap. 3.
41. Jeffries, Wartime America; Allan M. Winkler, Home Front U.S.A.: America
during World War II (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000 [1986]); and Blum, V
Was for Victory.
42. Winkler, Home Front U.S.A., 22.
43. Gary Gerstle, “Interpreting the ‘American Way’: The Working Class Goes to
War,” in Erenberg and Hirsch, War in American Culture, 105–27.
44. Rose, Myth and the Greatest Generation, 280.
45. On unions’ accommodation of labor-business consensus during and after the
war, see Harris, The Right to Manage, esp. chaps. 3–5.
46. For a more in-depth discussion of Sheldon-Claire’s This is America, see David
A. Gray, “New Uses for Old Photos: Renovating FSA Photographs in World War II
Posters,” American Studies 47, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2006): 5–34.
47. Sheldon-Claire’s archived records do not contain complete order lists or
records of annual sales. However, a collage of clients’ insignia used for promotional
purposes includes those of around five hundred companies. Untitled collage, sub-
ject file: “Our Work Guarantees Our Wages,” and “The Competitive Edge: Your Key
to Greater Profits” (“Management Manual,” 1955), box 2, series 1, Records of the
Sheldon-Claire Company, Archives Center, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter RSCC, NMAH).
48. More immigrants acquired citizenship during the war than in any previous
five-year period, making naturalization a “major social movement” in America. Reed
Ueda, “The Changing Path to Citizenship: Ethnicity and Naturalization during World
War II,” in Erenberg and Hirsch, War in American Culture, 202–16.
49. On wartime “wildcat” strikes rooted in white workers’ grievances over the
gains of black workers, see Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, chap. 3.
50. The modification of FSA photographs and their captions has been discussed
by several historians. While one might imagine that Lange and her fellow photog-
raphers were troubled about such alterations, as John Raeburn points out, “If these
journalistic disfigurations discouraged the photographers they have left no record
of it.” John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photog-
raphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 164. On captioning, see Maren
Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary in America, 1890–1950 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 113–20, and Linda Gordon, “Dorothea Lange:
The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist,” Journal of American History 93, no. 3
(December 2006): 698–727, esp. 716–19.
51. “Main Street” became a powerful ideal associated with prosperity in the
1930s and 1940s. Indeed, images of American small-town life were encoded with the
rewards of the work ethic and consumption. See Myles Orvell, The Death and Life
of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); see esp. 104–15. The nostalgic mythos
of Main Street formed a core strand of motivational rhetoric about the virtues of
individualism throughout the postwar era.
52. Employee Mail-O-Gram no. 4, This is America, 1943, box 1, subject file: This
is America, series 1, RSCC, NMAH.
53. Employee Mail-O-Gram no. 16, This is America, 1943, box 1, subject file: This
is America, series 1, RSCC, NMAH.
54. Lew Shalett, “Our Heritage,” proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Company
sales conference, January 31–February 1, 1947, 7, box 29, folder 7, Charles H. Rosenfeld
Collection, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center.
55. Herbert Hosking, “The Development of an Advertising Approach,” April
27, 1944, 3, box 843, folder: January–May 1944, series III, National Association of
Manufacturers Collection, accession number 1411, Hagley Museum and Library,
Wilmington, Delaware (hereafter NAM).
56. G. E. Harrison Jr. to “Mr. Sloan” and “Mr. Adams,” May 19, 1944, box 843,
folder: January–May 1944, series III, NAM.
57. Hosking, “Advertising Approach,” 3.
58. Hosking, 3. See also Harrison to “Mr. Sloan” and “Mr. Adams.”
59. “Passwords to a Better America,” “Reorganization Plans, 1943–1944,” 1, box
846, series III, NAM.
60. Efforts by NIIC to hone NAM’s language in ways that veiled its antilabor and
anti–New Deal agendas are outlined in “Terminology concerning Electric Power and
Light,” box 847, folder: Semantics, 1943–1944, series III, NAM.
61. “Re: CIO Public Information Program,” 1–2, box 845, folder: Misc. Oct. 1944–
62. “CIO Public Information Program,” 2–4.
63. “CIO Public Information Program,” 4–5.
64. Letter, March 14, 1944, 2, box 843, folder: January–May 1944, series III, NAM.
65. Letter, March 14, 1944.
66. “The American Way Is to the Right,” box 843, folder: “Capital Formation,”
series I, NAM.
67. “Footprints of the Trojan Horse: Some Methods used by Foreign Agents
within the United States” (booklet), 1942, Citizenship Educational Service Inc., New
York, box 5, subject file: OEM, Office of Facts and Figures General Memoranda, PHFP.
68. On the expansion of this quest after the war, see Fones-Wolf, Selling Free
Enterprise; Kim Philips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessman’s Crusade against
the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); and William L. Bird: A Better Living:
Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–1955 (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). For insights into how conservative
economists and think tanks advanced free market ideology after the war, see Nancy
MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan
for America (New York: Viking, 2017).
69. “Companies which have held ‘Soldiers of Production’ rallies. July 2,
1943–December 1, 1944,” box 846, folder: Promotional Material for 1944 NIIC, series
III, NAM.
70. “Soldiers of Production Weekly Statistical Report,” February 12, 1945, box
842, folder: NIIC Administration Weekly Reports, Jan–Feb 1945, series III, NAM.
71. “Soldiers of Production Advanced Schedule,” April 16 1945, box 842, folder:
NIIC Administrative Weekly Reports April–May 1945, series III, NAM.
72. “Information Bulletins for NIIC Speakers, December 6 1944,” 1–2, box 845,
folder: Misc. NIIC Material, series III, NAM.
73. “Your Plant and ‘Soldiers of Production,’ ” 3, box 846, folder: Promotional
Material NIIC, 1944, series III, NAM.
74. “Your Plant,” 4.

75. “Baltimore Soldiers of Production,” 1943, box 847, folder: Soldiers of Produc-
tion 1943, series III, NAM.
76. “Williamsport, PA. ‘Soldiers of Production’ Rallies,” box 847, folder: Soldiers
of Production 1942–1943, series III, NAM.
77. “Employee Programs Division, ‘Soldiers of Production’ Weekly Report,” Jan-
uary 12, 1945, 1–2, box 842, folder: NIIC Administration Weekly Reports, Jan–Feb
78. See for example, Sharon Beder, Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate
Manipulation of Community Values (London: Earthscan, 2006), and Stephen But-
terfield, Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise (Boston: South End Press, 1985).
79. Adams, Best War Ever, chap. 4.
80. Portrayals of women’s expanded opportunities and gains during the war have
long been overstated. See Adams, 70.
Chapter 5: Selling Workers on Their Jobs

1. On consensus ideology, see Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From
World War II to Nixon, What Happened and Why (New York: Vintage, 1976), 67–98.
2. On the larger ambitions that fueled businessmen, including many management
figures, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the
New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
3. On the growing influence of “communications” after World War II, see Timothy
Glander, Origins of Mass Communications Research during the American Cold War:
Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications (New York: Routledge, 2009),
and J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of
Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap.
7. As both authors illustrate, propaganda had long been debated by this time, having
been criticized by journalists and progressives since the early twentieth century. By
the end of World War II, the field of communications research became a powerful
force in institutional life as influential organizations enlisted the expertise of social
scientists to conduct empirical studies on communications and persuasion. See also
Kenneth Cmiel, “On Cynicism, Evil, and the Discovery of Communication in the
1940s,” Journal of Communication 46, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 88–107.
4. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1951), 110.
5. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands; Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The
Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1994).
6. On the Taft-Hartley Act’s “employer free speech” provision and its effects on
business’s approach to communications, see Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, 78–83,
and Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American
Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 123–25.
7. The literature on labor-management contestation and labor’s compromises after
the war is vast, but for some illuminating studies, see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s
War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1982), chaps. 11–12; George Lipsitz, A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the
1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), chap. 7; Alan Brinkley, The End of
Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995),
chaps. 7–9; and Steve Fraser, “The Labor Question,” in The Rise and Fall of the New
Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1989), 55–84.
8. Harris, Right to Manage, 103, 163.
9. On management and Cold War ideology, see Ori Landau, “Cold War Political
Culture and the Return of Systems Rationality,” Human Resources 59, no. 5 (May
2006): 637–63, and Elizabeth S. Kelley, Albert J. Mills, and Bill Cooke, “Management
as a Cold War Phenomenon?,” Human Relations 59, no. 5 (May 2006): 603–10.
10. One 1956 survey of 269 companies calculated that such programs cost employ-
ers on average seventy-six dollars a year per employee. Dale Yoder and Roberta J.
Nelson, “How Much Should an Employee Relations Program Cost?,” Personnel: The
National Journal of Personnel Management 33, no. 3 (November 1956): 214.
11. “Memorandum, Dearborn Group (Employee Relations Research Section),”
May 21, 1951, n.p., box 1, folder 2, Dearborn Group Records, coll. no. 5569, Kheel
Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University,
Ithaca, NY (hereafter DGR).
12. “Memorandum, Dearborn Group.”
13. On the postwar rise of employee morale and motivation studies and their
effects, see C. Wright Mills, “The Contribution of Sociology to Studies of Industrial
Relations,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 15 (1970): 11–32; Richard Gillespie, Manufac-
turing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 250–63; Reinhold Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry:
Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York: Harper, 1956),
chap. 5; Loren Baritz, Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in Industry
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), chap. 9; and Sanford Jacoby, Modern Manors:
Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1997), chap. 6. As Jacoby notes, behavioral science research had particular influence
at large nonunion firms and helped extend welfare capitalism into the postwar era.
14. Sanford Jacoby, “Employee Attitude Surveys in Historical Perspective,” Indus-

trial Relations 27, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 74–93.
15. Morris Viteles, Motivation and Morale in Industry (New York: Norton, 1953),
1–61.
16. Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a
Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
17. Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time, 86.
18. Jennifer Delton observes that with the help of human relations specialists, cor-
porations made significant strides in integrating the workforce after the war, guided
by the view that this policy was “good business.” Organizations like the National
Association of Manufacturers, she adds, adopted a similar stance. While this may be
true, motivational rhetoric and imagery continued to be cast almost exclusively in
white terms. See Jennifer Delton, Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
19. William H. Whyte Jr., Is Anybody Listening? How and Why Business Fumbles
When It Talks with Human Beings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 2, 7.
20. On this distinction, see Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s
Attitudes (1965; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 259–302. As Ellul argues per-
suasively, the assumption that propaganda must convince its audience of its claims
in order to be effective is inadequate. Propaganda, as he explains, operates through
unconscious processes that habituate audiences to the ideas communicated regardless
of the individual’s conscious reaction.
21. Dichter quoted in Daniel Horowitz, “The Birth of a Salesman: Ernest Dichter
and the Objects of Desire,” http://www.hagley.org/library/collections/historicalref
/articles/HOROWITZ_DICHTER.pdf, 2. On MR’s influence in postwar advertising
businesses, see Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American
Consumer Culture, 1939–1978 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004),
48–64, and Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, Ernest Dichter and Motivational
Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
22. See Nils Gilman, “The Prophet of Post-Fordism: Peter Drucker and the Legit-
imation of the Corporation,” in American Capitalism: Social Theory and Political
Economy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press), 109–31.
23. On labor’s postwar communications campaigns, see Fones-Wolf, Selling Free
Enterprise, esp. chaps. 4–5, and John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto
Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
24. On the illusory claims by human relations specialists about morale, see Mills,
“Contribution of Sociology.” On U.S. government efforts to contrast “free” American
labor with oppressive working conditions imposed on Soviet workers in its propa-
ganda, see Laura Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold
War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chap. 4.
25. Brian Holmes argues that the soft coercion proved effective in masking the
authoritarian nature of power in postwar capitalism. See Brian Holmes, “The Flex-
ible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique,” translate.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/
holmes/en.html. On management and Cold War ideology, see Landau, “Cold War
Political Culture,” and Kelley, Mills, and Cooke, “Management as a Cold War Phe-
nomenon?”
26. See Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, chap. 4, and Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most
Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York:
Basic Books, 1995), chaps. 11–12.
27. On the shift in UAW tactics from industrial democracy to economic growth,
see Nelson Lichtenstein, “UAW Bargaining Strategy and Shop-Floor Conflict: 1946–
1970,” Industrial Relations 24, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 360–81.
28. Harry B. Coen, “Are Employe-Programs Worth While?”: Talk given to the
Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association, Detroit, January 30, 1952, 1–2, box
17, loose materials, Archives Organization File, 5583/1, Section 1, Kheel Center for
Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
(hereafter AOF).
29. Peter Drucker, Concept of the Corporation (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Books, 1985 [1946]), chap. 3. On “dignity” and “status,” see 149–53. Quote from 158.
30. See Stephen P. Waring, “Peter Drucker, MBO, and the Corporatist Critique of
Scientific Management,” in A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor,
ed. Daniel Nelson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), 205–36, and Gerard
Hanlon, The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory (New
York: Routledge, 2016), 6.
31. Drucker, Concept of the Corporation, 298–99.
32. Barnard, American Vanguard, 266–68.
33. For an exception to labor history’s tendency to ignore the contest, see Alan
Raucher, “Employee Relations at General Motors: The ‘My Job Contest,’ 1947,” Labor
History 28, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 221–32. A recent discussion of the MJC, albeit one that
relies exclusively on secondary sources, is Rick Wartzman, The End of Loyalty: The
Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America (New York: Perseus Books, 2017), 43–52. John
Barnard notes that skepticism toward the MJC was due to “the loaded term of the
contest and the participation of thousands of white-collar employees.” See Barnard,
American Vanguard, 269.
34. The organizers listed the total number of entries as 174,854. See Chester E.
Evans and La Verne N. Laseau, My Job Contest, Personnel Monograph No. 1 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Personnel Psychology, Inc., 1950), 10.
35. Evans and Laseau, My Job Contest, 4.
36. Coen, “Employe-Programs,” 4.
37. Barnard, American Vanguard, 269. Emphasis in the original.
38. William L. Bird, A Better Living: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary
of Business Leadership, 1935–1955 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999),
166. For additional discussion of hostility toward the contest among labor leaders
and workers, see Jacoby, Modern Manors, 245–46. For a brief discussion of some
of the critical letters in The Searchlight, see Wartzman, End of Loyalty, 50–52. For
examples of several of the letters, see Ronda Hauben, “The ‘New’ Labor Relations
and the My Job Contest of 1947–48,” http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/articles
/qualitycircles1.txt.
39. Evans and Laseau, My Job Contest, 4–5; “Plan Book for General Motors
Employes: ‘My Job and Why I Like It’ Contest,” box 61, folder: “General Motors,”
AOF 5583/1, Section 3.
40. Evans and Laseau, My Job Contest, 4–9.
41. Evans and Laseau, 8, 99–101.
42. “Plan Book for General Motors Employes,” 4.
43. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1988), 11.
44. Postcard Reminder No. 4, “Plan Book for General Motors Employes.”
46. “Getting Started . . . ‘My Job and Why I Like It’ Contest,” 2, box 62, folder:
“General Motors Corp,” AOF 5583/1, Section 3.
48. According to Evans and Laseau, 12,589 workers included such comments.
Evans and Laseau, My Job Contest, 36.
49. The other judges were Edgar A. Guest, prominent poet, reporter, and radio host;
James E. McCarthy, business mogul and college dean; and George W. Taylor, former
vice chairman of the National War Labor Board and professor of industrial relations at
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Evans and Laseau, My Job Contest, 11–12.
50. Evans and Laseau, 17–18, 33.
51. The forty top prize-winning letters appear in “The Worker Speaks,” General
Motors Booklet, 1948, General Motors Business Research Archives, Detroit, Mich-
igan. Twenty-five nonwinning letters appear in Appendix B of Evans and Laseau,
My Job Contest, and another six letters appear in a discussion of the contest coding
structure (20–26).
52. Betty Kraft, “The Worker Speaks,” 122–23; General Motors Booklet, 1948, Gen-
eral Motors Business Research Archives, Detroit, MI. The booklet containing the top
forty prizewinning letters is available in its entirety at https://www.gmheritagecenter
.com/gm-heritage-archive/Events/The_Worker_Speaks.html.
53. Bird, A Better Living, 166.
54. Entry no. 74–1702, Evans and Laseau, My Job Contest, Appendix B, 25–26.
55. Entry no. 02–0017, Evans and Laseau, Appendix B, 6.
56. Entry no. 02–0017.
57. See Raucher, “Employee Relations at General Motors,” 221–32.
58. Coen, “Employe-Programs,” 7–8.
59. William H. Lane, “Information Racks: A New Effective Method of Communi-
cating with Employes,” 5th Annual Conference Public Relations Society of America,
Inc., November 25, 1952, box 63, folder 10, 8–9, AOF 5583/1, Section 3.
60. The racks were located in colleges, universities, YMCAs, and other public
and private institutions. Coen, “Employe-Programs,” 8–9.
61. Lane, “Information Racks,” 2, 6–7.
62. Coen, “Employe-Programs,” 7; Lane, “Information Racks,” 7–8.
63. “The Story of General Motors,” 1960 [1948], box 61, folder 2, AOF 5583/1, Sec-
tion 3; Charles Franklin Kettering and Allen Orth, “American Battle for Abundance,”
1947, box 62, folder 3, AOF 5583/1, Section 3, 20–23, 38–39, 50–73.
64. “The Story of General Motors”; Kettering and Orth, “American Battle for
Abundance,” 20–23, 38–39, 50–73.
65. C. E. Wilson, “The Great Delusion . . . Where Marx Went Wrong,” 1947, 5–8,
box 61, folder 2, AOF 5583/1, Section 3.
66. Henry J. Taylor, “The Truth about Moscow . . . ,” box 18, folder: “General:
General Motors Corp, 1952,” AOF 5583/1, Section 1.
67. Ordway Tead, Instincts in Industry: A Study of Working-Class Psychology
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), xiv.
68. Evans and Laseau, My Job Contest, 8.
69. Figures quoted in “Conference for College and University Educators, Per-
sonnel and Industrial Relations, June 16–28, 1948,” 9, box 14, file: “Spaulding Tire
Company, Inc.: General Motors Corporation Fourth Conference for College and
University Educators, box 63, folder 4, AOF 55831, Section 1. Employees whose
duties fell under the category of “creative work,” such as engineering, tool design,
and production planning, were not eligible for the plan’s monetary rewards because
submitting ideas was defined as part of their duties. The same rule applied to supervi-
sory employees. See C. E. Wilson, President, Foreword, “General Motors Suggestion
Plan,” 1947, box 13, untitled file, AOF 5583/1, Section 1.
71. “Conference for College and University Educators.”

72. Drucker, Concept of the Corporation, chaps. 1–5.
73. Author’s name withheld due to archival restrictions. See “Report on Coop-
erative Research with Universities by Employee Research Section, General Motors
Corporation,” n.p., box 2, folder: “Dearborn Conference, General Motors, LIMA,
Inland Steel,” DGR.
74. On the strike, GE’s response to it, and its role in shaping the firm’s overhaul of
its labor relations strategy, see Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, chap. 5. Efforts by GE to
come to terms with its defeat against the union are detailed throughout its internal
memoranda in the years that followed but distilled in Professional Management in
General Electric, Book One: General Electric’s Growth, 75–97, box 81, bound volume,
manuscript collection 52, Lemuel Boulware Papers, Kislak Center for Special Col-
lections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
(hereafter LBP).
75. Box 55, folder 1701, n.d., LBP.
76. This synopsis is drawn from “Lemuel R. Boulware—Management Executive,”
Monogram, June–July 1946, box 6, folder 144, LBP.
77. “Lemuel R. Boulware.” See also Herbert R. Northrup, Boulwarism, the Labor
Relations Policies of the General Electric Company: Their Implications for Public Policy
and Management Action (Ann Arbor: Bureau of Industrial Relations, Graduate School
of Business Administration, University of Michigan, 1965), chap. 4, and Phillips-Fein,
Invisible Hands, 97–98.
78. Speech, March 1, 1942, box 15, folder 339, LBP.
79. Professional Management in General Electric, 75–97.
80. GE’s approach to union negotiations during Boulware’s tenure is summarized
in a 1955 speech by GE chairman of the board Ralph Cordiner. See “Ralph Cordiner’s
Notes as Source Material for Remarks at the Duquesne Club Dinner—Pittsburgh, PA.
Oct. 6, 1955,” box 6, folder 119, LBP. On Boulware’s career up until his appointment
at GE, see “Lemuel R. Boulware.” My discussion of GE’s labor negotiations during
Boulware’s tenure is informed by Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, chap. 5.
81. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 108.
82. Lemuel Boulware, “How to Transmit Ideas to Community Groups,” December
1957, box 14, folder 308, LBP.
83. Lemuel Boulware, “Salvation Is Not Free,” in Lemuel R. Boulware, The Truth
about Boulwarism: Trying to Do Right Voluntarily (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of
National Affairs, 1969), 164. Boulware first gave this speech at Harvard University in
June 1949 and delivered it many times throughout the 1950s. See Thomas W. Evans,
The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of
His Conversion to Conservatism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 44, 50.
84. Lemuel Boulware to Roy H. Horton, Humble Oil and Refining Company,
March 17, 1952, box 57, General Electric Letterbook, Jan 1952–June 1952 (hereafter
Letterbook), LBP.
85. Boulware to Horton. Boulware sent numerous letters of this type to business
associates throughout the early 1950s, all of which are collected in this and other
letterbooks in his archived papers. For a detailed discussion of GE’s array of employee
magazines, see Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan, 50–53.
86. While I have chosen not to examine motivational films here, it should be
noted that GE, like many other corporations, made extensive use of them after World
War II. On GE’s use of such films, see Heide Solbrig, “Henry Strauss and the Human
Relations Film: Social Science Media and Interactivity in the Workplace,” Moving
Image 7, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 27–50. On the use of films at GE and AT&T, see Heide
Solbrig, “Film and Function: A History of Industrial Motivation Film” (PhD diss.,
University of California, San Diego, 2004), chap. 4. On DuPont’s use of films in the
1950s, see Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s
America (New York: New Press, 2010), 51–59. On the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s
use of animated economic education films as “Cold War industrial propaganda,”
see Caroline Jack, “Fun Facts about American Business: Economic Education and
Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series,” Enterprise and Society
16, no. 3 (September 2015): 491–520.
87. “Employment Relations Policy and Job Description of Vice President in
Charge,” attachment to letter from C. E. Wilson to Boulware, June 13, 1947, box 8,
folder 155, LBP. For a detailed summation of GE’s employee relations strategy, see
Boulware’s eighteen-page letter to Ralph Cordiner, February 10, 1951, box 8, folder
160, LBP.
88. See “Ralph Cordiner’s Notes.”
89. V. M. Welsh to Lemuel Boulware, January 21, 1952, box 8, folder 166, LBP.
For Boulware’s arguments about communications, see Professional Management in
General Electric.
90. “Rough-out” of speech based on Boulware’s suggestions from V. M. Welsh to
Lemuel Boulware, January 21, 1952: “The Obligation of Advertising Media and Public
Relations Man to Promote Economic Education, Moral Re-awakening and Political
Sophistication,” box 8, folder 166, LBP. Boulware used variations on this language
consistently in his correspondence. See Letterbooks, 1952–1959, series XI, LBP.
91. Lemuel Boulware, “How Big Is Our Job?,” Personnel Conference, American
Management Association, February 17, 1948, Chicago, 5, box 15, folder 354, LBP.
92. “Employee Communications in Connection with 1960 General Electric-
Union Negotiations,” 8, manuscript collection 532, box 13, folder 163, Herbert R.
Northrup Collection of Boulwarism Research Materials, Kislak Center, University

of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter HRNC).
93. Lemuel Boulware to Professor W. Roy Buckwalter, Temple University, January
15, 1952, box 57, Letterbook, LBP.
94. Lemuel Boulware to Elmer T. Carlson, Trumbell Electric Department, Pla-
inville, Connecticut, June 5, 1952, box 57, Letterbook, LBP.
95. See Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 103.
96. “Should Pay Be Equal Everywhere?,” Commentator, December 12, 1947, box
70, file: Oct. 15, 1947–Dec. 23, 1955, LBP.
97. Commentator, December 19, 1947, and January 23, 1948, box 70, file: Oct. 15,
1947–Dec. 23, 1955, LBP.
98. Commentator, May 27, 1949, box 70, file: Oct. 15, 1947–Dec. 23, 1955, LBP.
99. One piece of copy depicts toolmaker Don Ramsey at work and at home with
his family. The piece introduced Ramsey as an “Employee . . . Customer [and] Shar-
eowner.” General Electric News, April 26, 1957, 8. In The GE News: The Techniques of
Employee Communication, 39, box: “GE Management Guides,” Archives, Museum of
Science & Innovation, Schenectady, NY.
100. On GE’s relocation of many operations to the south beginning in the 1950s,
see Evans, Education of Ronald Reagan, 70–72, 102–3, and Phillips-Fein, Invisible
Hands, 89–90, 104.
101. “Rockefeller Speech Echoes Boulwarism,” IUE News, November 23, 1959, 6,
box 72, folder: “Oversize posters, etc.,” LBP. On IUE’s efforts to counter Boulware’s
propaganda, see “Boulware in Tears, Crocodile, That Is,” IUE News, November 28,
1963, box 7, folder 138, LBP. James B. Carey, “The Intent of GE Propaganda,” 2, man-
uscript collection 532, box 13, folder 178, HRNC.
102. AFL-CIO, “Mr. and Mrs. America, All Union Family,” n.d., box 32, folder
715, LBP.
103. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973 [1962]).
104. Lemuel Boulware, “How Big Is Our Job?,” 6.
105. As Heide Solbrig illustrates, GE employed film to powerful effect in the early
1950s, not least by enlisting the help of industrial filmmaker Henry Strauss. Employ-
ing theories from sociology about small group dynamics and his democratic visions
of work, Strauss’s 1951 industrial motivation film The Inner Man Steps Out, Solbrig
argues, presented a more dynamic approach to motivation than often used at GE until
this time. For this illuminating discussion, see Heidi Solbrig, “Henry Strauss and the
Human Relations Film.” Also see Solbrig’s equally enlightening 2013 film Man and the
Middle Class: The Work and Vision of Henry Strauss, https://vimeo.com/71693033. On
Boulware’s quest to enlist supervisors as “job salesmen,” see Phillips-Fein, Invisible

Hands, esp. 100–103. On managerial efforts to enlist supervisors’ support for man-
agement, including at GE, see Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, chap. 3, and Evans,
Education of Ronald Reagan, chaps. 3 and 10.
106. Commentator, July 8, 1949, box 70, bound volume: “The Commentator, Oct.
15, 1947–Dec. 23, 1955,” LBP.
107. Although Reagan’s work for GE was highly significant in the firm’s efforts to
instill favorable views of the firm among workers, I do not discuss it here because it
is detailed at length elsewhere. See Evans, Education of Ronald Reagan, esp. chaps.
5–6, and Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 110–14.
108. Boulware’s job description listed among his responsibilities the “indoctrina-
tion and periodic re-indoctrination, and other selling approaches in both personal
interviews and the use of appropriate mass selling materials and methods, all aimed
at the individual employee accurately knowing and favorably regarding—and being
constantly reminded of—the contents of the job package we sincerely feel he ought
to want eagerly to ‘buy’ every day.” Quoted in “Employment Relations Policy and
Job Description of Vice President in Charge,” 2, box 8, folder 155, LBP. Boulware
emphasized the importance of “economic education” frequently. Typical is a memo
to Cordiner that states, “We will—in order to get the proper effect upon the morale
and productivity of our employees—teach economics to, and make economic teachers
of, our management at all levels.” Lemuel Boulware to Ralph Cordiner, February 10,
1951, box 8, folder 160, LBP.
109. Lemuel Boulware, “How to Transmit Ideas,” 5–10.
110. See, for example, Lemuel Boulware to F. R. Brophy, Vice President in Charge
of Sales, R. W. Cramer Company, Inc., June 4, 1952, and Carl M. Jacobs, Frost and
Jacobs, June 3, 1952, box 57, Letterbook, LBP. This and other letterbooks in box 57 and
neighboring boxes contain numerous similar letters.
111. Lemuel Boulware to R. W. Turnbull, commercial vice president of GE’s Appa-
ratus Department, January 19, 1952, 1, box 57, Letterbook, LBP.
112. On incentivizing workers through individual self-interest, see Lemuel Boul-
ware, “Why and How General Electric Is Integrating Public and Employee Relations,”
address to the American Management Association, July 23, 1956, box 16, folder 410,
and Lemuel Boulware, “Wages and Economic Growth,” address to the National
Association of Manufacturers, December 6, 1956, box 16, folder 414, LBP.
113. Lemuel Boulware to C. J. Renner, Harcon Inc., February 22, 1952, box 57,
Letterbook, LBP.
114. Lemuel Boulware, “The Responsibility of Management to Make Known to
All, the Economic Facts of Life,” address to the Economic Club of Detroit, Michigan,
October 10, 1949, 6, box 15, folder 368, LBP.
115. See Lemuel Boulware, “Some Observations on the President’s Taft-Hartley

Message,” box 8, folder 170, LBP. The document is undated, but its folder indicates that
Boulware wrote it between July and December 1954, and it responds to Eisenhower’s
“Special Message to the Congress on Labor-Management Relations” on January 11
that year.
116. Lemuel Boulware, “Politics—The Businessmen’s Biggest Job in 1958,” address
before the Annual Meeting of Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, Phoenix, Arizona,
May 21, 1958, in Vital Speeches of the Day, July 15, 1958, 591, box 17, folder 429, LBP.
117. See “The Crotonville Story,” February 1965, 4, box 6, folder 126, LBP.
118. Lemuel Boulware to Dale W. Gordon, Vice President & Treasurer, the O. A.
Sutton Corporation, June 27, 1952, 2, box 57, Letterbook, LBP.
119. The merger was announced in a memo of January 3, 1956, by Keith H. Kran-
dell, box 8, folder 177, LBP. On setting wage incentives at the local level, see “To
Members of the Advisory Council” (draft), March 12, 1956, box 8, folder 177, LBP, and
“Compensation Meeting Notes,” May 7, 1956, box 8, folder 178, LBP.
120. “The Crotonville Story,” 6–12.
121. Lemuel Boulware, “A Job of Two Magnitudes,” December 8, 1959, 12, box 14,
folder 312, LBP.
122. GE Corporate Employee Relations Operation, “Idea Starter Package no. 1:
Communicating on Profits,” 11, box 6, folder 125, LBP.
123. “Plant Panel,” box 6, folder 125, LBP.
124. See “Speeches and publications,” boxes 20–22, LBP.
125. As Kim Phillips-Fein argues, businessmen’s crusade against the New Deal
and labor unions was intimately connected to the rise of neoliberal economic theories
after the war. See Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, chap. 2. On the rising influence of
neoliberal thought in human resource management in the 1960s, see Sami Itan, The
Ideological Evolution of Human Resource Management: A Critical Look into HRM
Research and Practices (Bingley, U.K.: Emerald Publishing, 2017), 113–36.
126. For discussions of Boulware’s influence on Reagan’s political ideals, see Evans,
Education of Ronald Reagan, chaps. 12–13.
Chapter 6: The New Hucksters of Cooperation

1. Management literature encouraged managers to deploy motivation and
morale-boosting and to sell workers on management ideas during the postwar era.
See Patricia Genoe McLaren and Albert J. Mills, “A Product of His Time? Exploring
the Construct of the Ideal Manager in the Cold War Era,” Journal of Management
History 14, no. 4 (2008): 386–403; Sanford Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism
since the New Deal (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Howell
John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business
in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), chap. 6.
2. Lew Shalett, proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Company sales conference,
January 4–5, 1954 (hereafter SCSC, 1954), 9, box 30, folder 3, Charles H. Rosenfeld
Collection, University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center, Chicago, IL
(hereafter CHRC).
3. For figures on sales, see Lew Shalett, proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Com-
pany sales conference, New York, January 31–February 1, 1947 (hereafter SCSC, 1947),
3, box 29, folder 7, CHRC; Shalett, SCSC, 1954, 9–16. Insights into the firm’s sales in
the late 1950s are partly informed by Jerry Johnson (former tax assessor for Sheldon-
Claire), email to author, March 24, 2011, and Lew Shalett to Alex Bruzas, March 26,
1958, box 9, folder: “Sheldon-Claire,” 1, CHRC.
4. Sheldon Shalett, interview with the author, June 10, 2008, Mesa, CO.
5. On the increasing role of outside consultants and service providers in man-
agement, see Christopher D. McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management
Consulting in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
For a discussion of why Chicago became central to management consulting, see chap.
2 in McKenna’s book.
6. Jerry Johnson, email to author, March 20, 2011.
7. “Shalett Says Productivity is Key to Prosperity,” “Employee Motivation—
Management’s Worldwide Headache,” November 12, 1958, 5–6, box 7, folder 1, series
9, Records of the Sheldon-Claire Company, Archives Center, National Museum of
American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter RSCC); They
Say, December 30, 1958, 2, box 6, folder 4, series 11, RSCC; and Lew Shalett, untitled
communiqué to salesmen, October 31, 1958, 4, box 25, folder 9, CHRC.
8. Some of Sheldon-Claire’s clients may have left such records, but an examination
of the situations at those client companies is beyond my scope.
9. As Gerard Hanlon points out, management has always embodied neoliberal
ideas. However, it was only in the post–World War II period that these ideals began
to be taken up more explicitly and extensively. See Gerard Hanlon, The Dark Side of
Management: A Secret History of Management Theory (New York: Routledge, 2016).
10. Shalett frequently acknowledged Schenker’s role in the firm’s success. See, for
example, SCSC, 1954, 7–9.
11. Ben Schenker, SCSC, 1947, 49–51. On Johnston’s theorization of liberal con-
sensus, see Eric Johnston, America Unlimited (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1944).
12. Schenker, SCSC, 1947, 49–51.
13. We Depend on Each Other, box 1, folder 7, series 1, RSCC.
14. On the accelerating rationalization of work and its alienating effects after the
war, see C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951; repr., New
York: Oxford University Press, 1967), esp. chap. 10.
15. Shalett, SCSC, 1947, 9. On management’s campaign to redefine the foreman as
a member of management in the 1940s, see Harris, Right to Manage, 74–89.
16. Sheldon-Claire’s assumptions concerning the gender of supervisors are evi-
dent in its campaign materials throughout the 1950s, which frequently use “supervi-
sor” interchangeably with “foreman” and emphasize the need to enlist the supervisor
as a “salesman.”
17. “Confidential Memo to Supervisors concerning Chapter 1 of the Series, ‘Pro-
duce Better, Live Better,’ ” 2, box 1, folder: “Produce Better, Live Better (continued)
1948,” series 1, RSCC.
18. Produce Better, Live Better, box 1, folder: Produce Better, Live Better, 1948,
series 1, RSCC.
19. “Foreman Opinion Poll,” box 5, folder: chapter II of It’s Up to All of Us: “Over-
coming Competition by the Elimination of Waste,” 1947, series 1, loose materials, RSCC.
In praising one poster, a foreman at Stefco Steel borrowed the phrasing of a campaign
poster, capitalizing and underlining his words to emphasize his point, declaring, “We
are inclined to notice prices go up, as in [poster] #2 but seldom think the reason for
this as in [poster] #4 which may . . . have a great deal to do with Skyrocketing Prices
& Waste.” It remains unknown whether any foremen filled out a negative response. If
so, these polls were evidently either not returned to Sheldon-Claire or were discarded.
20. Schenker, proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Company sales conference,
Chicago, February 17–18, 1950 (hereafter SCSC, 1950), 208, box 30, folder 1, CHRC;
Shalett, SCSC, 1950, 211.
21. Schenker, SCSC, 1950, 210, CHRC.
22. For Bugbee’s speeches, see proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Company sales
conference, Chicago, April 4–5, 1952 (hereafter SCSC, 1952), 110–12, box 30, folder 2,
CHRC; proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Company sales conference, Chicago, June
14, 1956 (hereafter SCSC, 1956), 225–30, box 30, folder 5, CHRC.
23. The negative responses to They Say among some managers owing to its female
author were described by salesman Milton Prager at Sheldon-Claire’s 1956 sales con-
ference. Milton Prager, SCSC, 1956, 229.
24. David Bernstein, email to the author, July 22, 2012.
25. Helen Bugbee, “Abundance versus Scarcity,” Freeman, June 1961, 10–13; “Good
Sense Makes Good Business,” Freeman, November 1969, 692–97; “We Can’t Protect
Prosperity,” Humanist (January 1, 1979), 50; and “Industry’s Annual Disemployment
Factor,” Modern Age, Fall 1962, 413–16.
26. Shalett, SCSC, 1947, 3; Shalett, SCSC, 1954, 16.
27. As Timothy Spears notes, as foremost agents in a “face-to-face economy,”

salesmen and the work that they performed shaped business culture and market
relations in innumerable ways in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Timothy Spears, 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), xii.
28. Pittsburgh Press, July 17, 1955, section 3, 10.
29. Insights on salesmen’s backgrounds and the firm’s sales bonus practices sup-
plied by David Bernstein, telephone interview with author, April 23, 2011. Further
information on sales bonus practices provided by Jerry Johnson, email to author,
March 24, 2011.
30. Bernstein, interview.
31. See, for example, Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation
of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
32. My thanks to David Bernstein and Sheldon Shalett for their helpful insights
into how they regarded the campaigns, the company, and Lew Shalett’s ideas, as well
as their perspectives on how fellow salesmen perceived the same. Shalett, interview;
Bernstein, interview.
34. At the 1947 conference Shalett told the sales force that the poster business
was “about 30,000 years old. It was then that one of our ancestors—an ape man—
designed the first poster. It was a message in hieroglyphics—it was carved in stone.”
Sheldon-Claire’s salesmen, he declared, were the descendants of this ancient com-
munications form. By bringing it to the nation’s workplaces, he added, they would
advance “civilization.” Shalett, SCSC, 1947, 2.
35. Rosenfeld, SCSC, 1950, 84.
36. See SCSC, 1947, 91–120.
37. Alvin Dodd, SCSC, 1947, 95.
38. Dodd, SCSC, 1947, 93.
39. Louis Waldman, “America’s Destiny: Labor-Management Cooperation or
Class Struggle,” SCSC, 1956, 173, 175.
40. Tom Hunt, SCSC, 1947, 59.
41. Ralph Rogers, proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Company sales conference,
January 27–29, 1949 (hereafter SCSC, 1949), 129, box 29, folder 10, CHRC; Bernstein,
interview.
42. For an excellent account of changes in the salesman’s work in the postwar
era, see Jeremy A. Greene, “Attention to ‘Details’: Etiquette and the Pharmaceutical
Salesman in Postwar America,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 2 (April 2004): 271–92.
44. Mills, White Collar, 181.

45. Bernstein, interview; Shalett, interview.
46. This summary is drawn from Rosenfeld’s talks at Sheldon-Claire’s annual sales
conferences and my interviews with Sheldon Shalett and David Bernstein. Shalett,
interview; Bernstein, interview.
47. Rogers, proceedings of the Sheldon-Claire Company sales conference,” 1948
(hereafter SCSC, 1948), 133, 161–62, box 29, folder 9, CHRC.
48. Donald J. McIntosh, Vice President, Manufacturing, McIntosh Inc., Detroit,
to Shalett, n.d., series 7, box 4, folder 17: “World-Wide Endorsements and Acknowl-
edgements of Sheldon-Claire Services” (hereafter WWE), RSCC.
49. Shalett, interview with author, June 11, 2008, Mesa, CO; Bernstein, interview.
50. Rogers, SCSC, 1948, 177–79.
51. The three letters are J. M. Bennett and J. Frank Jensen, President and Rec.
Secretary of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America to mem-
bers of Local Union no. 2195, May 27, 1955; E. S. Benjamin, Cannery Warehousemen,
Food Processors, Drivers and Helpers, Local Union no. 670, n.d.; and C. F. Burt,
Secretary-Treasury, Cannery Warehousemen, Food Processors, Drivers and Helpers,
Local Union no. 656, n.d., all WWE, RSCC.
52. C. F. Burt, Secretary-Treasurer, Local Union 656, to Shalett, July 14, 1954, with
enclosed letter, both in WWE, RSCC.
53. E. S. Benjamin, Secretary of Cannery Local 670 of the Cannery Workers
Union in Salem, Oregon, to the local’s two thousand members in an undated letter
in 1954, WWE, RSCC.
54. The secretary of Local 656, quoted above, also sent a copy of his letter to Lew
Shalett and invited him to use it in Sheldon-Claire’s literature. Burt to Shalett, letter.
55. Lubin, SCSC, 1949, 77
56. Eley, SCSC, 1949, 227–28; Fred Germain Jr., Executive Secretary, Middle-
town Chamber of Commerce, Middletown, New York, to Mr. Myron C. Alting, Miss
Swank, Inc., Middletown, New York, February 21, 1949, WWE, RSCC.
57. Prager, “Merchandising through the Supervisor,” SCSC, 1949, 190–93.
58. Prager, SCSC, 1952, 53–54.
59. Jackson, SCSC, 1949, 223–26.
60. Mihailoff, SCSC, 1949, 80–91.
61. Joe G. Fleniken, Plant Manager, B & C Metal Stamping Company, to Shalett,
n.d., WWE, RSCC.
62. On the proliferation of this discourse, see Harris, Right to Manage, chaps. 5–6.
63. Quote and information on operating costs provided in email from Jerry
Johnson to author, March 24, 2011. Johnson states that Shalett “milked the profits
down any way he could to avoid double taxation,” a practice that was standard for ad
agencies of Sheldon-Claire’s size at the time. Johnson, email to author, June 12, 2012.
64. Efforts to use UNESCO’s humanitarian ambitions as an opportunity to
promote Western values during the 1950s is well documented, though mostly with
regard to artistic exchanges. See, for example, Michael L. Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for
the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2005), chaps. 1 and 2.
65. Jerry Johnson, email to author, March 24, 2011.
66. “Employee Motivation Comes of Age,” n.p., 1959, box 6, folder: Employee
Understanding, series 11, RSCC.
67. Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American
International Economic Policy after World War II,” International Organization 31,
no. 4 (1977): 607–32.
68. For an overview of literature on the global proliferation of American products
and influence in the postwar era, see the introduction to Neil Campbell and Alasdair
Kean, American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture (London:
Routledge, 2011).
69. For an account of the influence of Cold War ideology and, especially, the
Marshall Plan on management’s campaign to restrain labor union power in Europe,
see Anthony Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and
the Marketing of Management Science (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University
Press, 1987).
70. David Ellwood, “ ‘You Too Can Be Like Us’: Selling the Marshall Plan—
American Propaganda during the European Recovery Program,” History Today 48
(October 1998): 33–39, quoted in Images of the Marshall Plan in Europe: Films, Pho-
tographs, Exhibits, Posters, ed. Gunter Bischof and Dieter Stifel (Innsbruck, Austria:
StudienVerlag, 2009), 9; Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan, chap. 1.
71. David W. Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America and Postwar
Reconstruction (New York: Routledge, 2013), 162.
72. De Grazia places the number of films at approximately two hundred. See
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century
Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 348.
Another study puts the number at 250. See Evan S. Noble, “Marshall Plan Films and
Americanization” (master’s thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
2006), ii.
73. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 348; Noble, “Marshall Plan Films,” 33–38.
74. De Grazia, Irresistible Empire; Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The
Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See
also Marie-Laure Djelic, Exporting the American Model: The Postwar Transformation
of European Business (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
75. On the role of the ECA in advancing management-coordinated anticom-

munist and antiradical agendas, see Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America,
Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), chaps. 4 and 5, and Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan,
chap. 5. On the selective adoption of American management practices, see Jonathan
Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel, eds., Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Tech-
nology and Management in Post-War Europe and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
76. For an in-depth account of these developments, see Djelic, Exporting the
American Model.
77. Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan, 223. On the consequences of the
“managerial revolution,” see chap. 13.
78. “Employee Motivation Comes of Age.”
79. Nick Tatarinov, SCSC, 1956, 156–58.
80. Jack Aptaker, SCSC, 1956, 159–61.
81. There are approximately thirty such letters in Sheldon-Claire’s documentation
from the 1950s. These clients include companies in England, Scotland, Wales, France,
Switzerland, Belgium, and Canada. See WWE, RSCC.
82. A. Nurton to Sheldon-Claire, April 2, 1957, WWE, RSCC.
83. N. Alzan, Barking Brassware Co. Limited to J. D. Aptaker, Sheldon-Claire Co.,
September 11, 1956, WWE, RSCC.
84. F. Hill, Works Director, Durie & Miller Ltd., Haslingden, Rosendale, Lan-
cashire, to Sheldon-Claire (Great Britain) Ltd., January 15, 1959, WWE, RSCC.
85. Société Anonyme de L’union des Papeteries to Canadian Sheldon-Claire
Limited, April 18, 1956; R Vecchi, Directeur, ABG (Sociétés Ariès, La Bougie B.G. &
S.F.E.D.R. Réunies), to Canadian Sheldon-Claire Ltd., November 28, 1955; Monsieur
Boutin, Directeur Adjoint de la Maison Brequet, Compagnie Industrielle des Piles
Électroniques, Cipel to Sheldon-Claire, June 4, 1954. All in WWE, RSCC.
86. “Employee Motivation Comes of Age.”
87. “Interview—Phil Bowman-Lew Shalett,” November 1958, box 7, folder 1, SC
Scrapbook, series 9, RSCC.
88. On the increasing openness between the United States and the Soviet Union
after Stalin’s death, see Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture,
and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), chaps. 4–6; Yale
Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); and Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo
Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004).
89. For Shalett’s account of how the trip materialized, see “Interview—Phil
Bowman-Lew Shalett,” 2. Wanda Shalett also offered recollections of the trip in my
interview with her. Wanda Shalett, interview with the author, September 9, 2003,
Boca Raton, FL.
90. For Shalett’s account of his factory tours and his comments about the efforts
of Agitational Propaganda guides to misrepresent workers’ responses to his questions,
see “World Spotlight 1958,” box 5, series 14, RSCC. The reference to “sugarcoating” is
quoted from my interview with Wanda Shalett.
91. Shalett, “Weekly Bulletin to Sheldon-Claire clients in the U.S., Canada, the
UK, and Europe,” November 28, 1958, 3–4, 6, box 7, folder 1, series 9, RSCC.
92. Shalett, “Employee Motivation,” 5–6, RSCC.
93. They Say, December 30, 1958.
94. Interview with Alex Dreier, WNBQ, Chicago, November 7, 1958, box 7, folder
1, series 9, RSCC.
95. Shalett, “Employee Motivation,” 5–6.
96. For the transcript of the introduction to the interview, see Attitudes Incorpo-
rated, “Introduction to Sheldon-Claire Kinescope,” 2, November 1958, box 6, folder:
Kinescope Info, series 11, RSCC. For a video of the interview, see World Spotlight,
1958, box 5, series 14, RSCC.
97. “Interview—Phil Bowman-Lew Shalett.”
98. Shalett, unpaginated speech given at the Partners in Prosperity Award Lun-
cheon, November 12, 1958, Scrapbook, series 9, box 7, folder 3, RSCC.
99. On the U.S. missile programs of the 1950s and 1960s, see Mark L. Morgan and
Mark A. Berhow, Rings of Super Steel: Air Defenses of the United States Army, 1950–1979
(Bodega Bay, CA: Hole in the Head Press, 2002). My thanks to Jacqueline McGlade
for her helpful insights into Chicago’s role in the U.S. missile system in the 1950s at
the Business History Conference in March 2013.
100. Carl T. Curtis, speech given at the Partners in Prosperity Award Luncheon,
November 12, 1958, n.p., series 9, box 7, folder 1, RSCC.
101. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1988).
102. Chicago Daily Tribune, Monday, February 9, 1959, part 4, 6, Scrapbook, box
6, series 1, RSCC.
103. Sheldon-Claire Co., They Say, December 30, 1958. The quotes are from pages
1 and 4.
104. Shalett communiqué vol. 1649, November 5, 1958, 1, 2, and 6, box 25, folder
9, CHRC.
105. Shalett communiqué vol. 1697, January 22, 1959, 1, 6, 7–8, box 25, folder 9,
CHRC.
106. “Sales Presentation: How and Why the Business Evolved into Employee
Motivation Campaign,” 3, box 5, folder: This is America, series 10, RSCC.
107. Harvey Swados, “The Myth of the Happy Worker,” in Swados, On the Line,
with an Introduction by Nelson Lichtenstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1990 [1957]), 243.
Epilogue: Motivation in an Age of Diminishing Rewards

1. On the era’s strikes, see Jeremy Brecher, Strike!, revised, expanded, and updated
ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014 [1972]), chap. 7, and Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive:
The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), esp.
chap. 1.
2. This account of events at Lordstown is drawn from Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 44–49.
Quote from 45.
3. Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Work in
America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973), xv, xvi.
4. Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Collins, 1993 [1954]),
see esp. chap. 23, “Motivating to Peak Performance.” Drucker’s theories were largely
in keeping with Taylor’s. See Stephen P. Waring, “Peter Drucker, MBO, and the
Corporatist Critique of Scientific Management,” in A Mental Revolution: Scientific
Management since Taylor, ed. Daniel Nelson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
1992), 205–36.
5. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, annotated ed. updated
and with new commentary by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld (New York: McGraw-Hill,
2006 [1960]), 65.
6. Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner, and Barbara Bloch Snyderman, The
Motivation to Work (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010 [1959]), and
Frederick Herzberg, Work and the Nature of Man (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell,
1966), chap. 6.
7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins
of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), chaps. 8 and 9.
8. Frederick Herzberg quoted in Stephen P. Waring, Taylorism Transformed:
Scientific Management since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1991), 136. For a discussion of developments in motivational theory during this time,
see Waring, chap. 6, and Catherine Casey, Work, Self and Society: After Industrialism
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 59–61.
9. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in
the Twentieth Century, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998
[1974]), app. 2, “The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century,” 317, 26. On
Braverman’s anticipation of quality work circles, see the new introduction by John
Bellamy Foster, xx.
10. Daniel Bell, “The Study of Man: Adjusting Men to Machines,” Commentary,
January 1947, 2, 86.
11. The literature on Nixon’s appeals to working-class alienation is too vast to cite,
but for illuminating insight, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American
History (New York: Basic, 1995), and Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive.
12. See Waring, Taylorism Transformed, 142–55. For another noted example of the
failure of work enrichment schemes, see Joanne B. Ciulla’s discussion of the ill-fated
experiment at the Bolivar, Tennessee, plant of Harman Automotive, beginning in
the mid-1970s, in The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work (New
York: Three Rivers Press, 2000), 119–22.
13. On recent managerial uses of employee wellness ideology, see Carl Ceder-
ström and Andre Spicer, The Wellness Syndrome (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015),
and Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us
Well-Being (London: Verso 2015). On self-tracking, see Deborah Lupton, The Quan-
tified Self (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016), and Phoebe V. Moore, The Quantified
Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts (New York: Routledge, 2019).
14. See John LaRosa, “$11 Billion Self-Improvement Market is Growing,” Octo-
ber 16, 2019, https://www.marketdataenterprises.com/11-billion-self-improvement
-market-is-growing-by-john-larosa/.
15. The data illustrating the decline of economic mobility in the United States are
too vast to cite, but representative studies include Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maxi-
milian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, and Jimmy Narang, “The Fading
American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940,” Science 356, no.
6336 (April 28, 2017): 198–406, and Michael Hout, “Americans’ Occupational Status
Reflects the Status of Both of Their Parents,” Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 38 (September 18, 2018): 9527–32.
16. See Thomas Frank, One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market
Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Anchor Books, 2001).
17. Nigel Thrift, “Making Sense: An Afterword,” in Magic, Culture and the New
Economy, ed. Orvar Löfgren and Robert Willim (New York: Berg, 2005), 133–34.
18. For an account of the ideological work performed by this literature, see Staffan
Furusten, Popular Management Books: How They Are Made and What They Mean for
Organizations (New York: Routledge, 1999).
19. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and
Home Becomes Work (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
20. See Frank, One Market under God, 171.
21. Miya Tokumitsu, Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Hap-
piness (New York: Regan Arts, 2015), 42.
22. See https://www.thesecret.tv.
23. Hicks appeared extensively in the original version of the film, along with her
coauthor and husband, Jerry Hicks. The pair’s contributions were subsequently cut
following a legal dispute, but Hicks continues to praise the film. On the success of The
Secret and insight into how the film draws on success literature of the early twentieth
century, see Kelefa Sanneh, “Power Lines: What’s Behind Rhonda Byrne’s Spiritual
Empire?,” New Yorker, September 13, 2010, and Allen Salkin, “Shaking Riches out of
the Cosmos,” New York Times, February 25, 2007.
24. See “Abraham Hicks the 6 million jews question and Jesus attract that?,”
August 21, 2011 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Uckk2dbbdEo.
25. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining
America (New York: Picador, 2009), chapter 4 for further discussion of the rise of
the motivational industry.
26. Salkin, “Shaking Riches.”
27. For example, see “Big Names Drop in to Portland for ‘Get Motivated’ Seminar,”
March 14, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFN9RbZlE7I.
28. For a critique of Anshutz’s support for right-wing cultural causes and of FFBL’s
billboards, see Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University
29. See https://www.passiton.com/inspirational-sayings-billboards/26-integrity.
30. See Chetty et al., “Fading American Dream,” and Hout, “Americans’ Occu-
pational Status.”
31. For insights into how play has been appropriated and put to use to aid pro-
ductivity, see Emmanuelle Savignac, The Gamification of Work: Uses of Games in
Workplaces (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017). For analyses of specific types
of games, including murder parties, simulation, and role-playing games, and the use
of board games and Lego blocks, see chap. 2.
32. Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen, with an introduction
by Ken Blanchard, Fish! Philosophy: A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve
Results (London: Hodder, 2014).
33. A preview of the Fish! Philosophy training video can be viewed on YouTube
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AAQT6ifGys&t=23s.
34. Lundin, Paul, and Christensen, Fish! Philosophy, 21.
35. Lundin, Paul, and Christensen, 14–84.
36. Fishmonger quoted in N. B. Dubey, Office Management: Developing Skills for
Smooth Functioning (New Delhi: Global India Publications, 2009), 272.
37. Fish! Philosophy, “Brand Ambassador for The FISH! Philosophy/Keynote
Speaker & Facilitator: Deena Ebbert,” September 15, 2017, https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=481rRuBXij4.
38. Kevin A. Carson, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective (n.p.:
BookSurge, 2008), esp. chap. 8. Carson offers an illuminating discussion of the ways
in which Fish! Philosophy aids managerial efforts to conceal power relations and
define positive attitudes as mandatory. See 269–83.
39. See http://goldfish-consulting.co.za/our-story.
40. Kavitha Desai and Jyothi Magodu Nagaraju, “Gamification—An Innovative
HRM Practice @ Workplace,” International Journal of Scientific Research and Review
7, no. 7 (May 2018): 94.
41. See https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/gamification
-market.
42. Gabe Zichermann, The Gamification Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game
Mechanics to Crush the Competition (New York: McGraw Hill, 2013), 3.
43. Yu-kai Chou, “A Framework on Actionable Gamification,” undated talk at
Google, uploaded April 20, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4acIpWrn
zo&t=3s.
44. Yu-kai Chou, “The Beginner’s Guide to Gamification: Introduction by Yu-kai
Chou (1 of 90),” 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cknd7564PVU.
45. See Savignac, Gamification of Work; Jennifer Dewinter, Carly A. Kocurek,
and Randall Nichols, “Taylorism 2.0: Gamification, Scientific Management and the
Capitalist Appropriation of Play,” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 6, no. 2 (June
2014): 109–27; and Mathias Fuchs, “Gamification as Twenty-First-Century Ideology,”
Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 6, no. 2 (June 2014): 143–57.
46. Fuchs, “Gamification,” 153.
47. On the ways in which managerial exploitation of “fun” in the workplace
can be counteractive, see Chris Baldry and Jerry Hallier, “Welcome to the House of
Fun: Work Space and Social Identity,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 31, no. 1
(December 2010): 150–72.
48. See Lupton, Quantified Self, and Moore, Quantified Self in Precarity.
49. Moore, Quantified Self in Precarity, 8–9.
50. Moore, 3. See also Phoebe Moore and Lukasz Piwek, “Regulating Wellbeing in
the Brave New Quantified Workplace,” Employee Relations 39, no. 3 (April 2017): 309.
51. Lupton, Quantified Self, 86.
52. Amazon Technologies, Inc. Patent US0099881276, January 30, 2018, https://
pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=09881276&IDKey=&HomeUrl=%2F.
53. See Ceylan Yeginsu, “If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know (and
Amazon Has a Patent for It),” New York Times, February 1, 2018, and Olivia Solo,
“Amazon Patents Wristband That Tracks Warehouse Workers’ Movements,” Guardian,
February 1, 2018.
54. Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a
Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015.
55. In reality, Americans have less cause to believe in the promises of the motiva-
tional ideal than at any time since World War II. See Hugh Gusterson and Catherine
Besteman, eds., The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do
about It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), introduction.
56. Glenn Plaskin, “The 1990 Playboy Interview with Donald Trump,” Play-
boy, March 1, 1990, https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-donald
-trump-1990.
57. Colin Campbell, “Donald Trump: ‘My Father Gave Me a Small Loan of a
Million Dollars,’ ” Business Insider, October 26, 2015, https://www.businessinsider
.com/donald-trump-small-million-dollar-loan. Trump reiterated his claim in 2016.
See Glenn Kessler, “Trump’s False Claim He Built His Empire with a ‘Small Loan’ from
His Father,” Washington Post, March 3, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news
/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/03/trumps-false-claim-he-built-his-empire-with-a-small
-loan-from-his-father/?utm_term=.161144c51f67.
58. David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner, “Trump Engaged in Suspect
Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches from His Father,” New York Times, October 2,
2018.
59. “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” Jane Mayer, New Yorker, July 25, 2016.
60. Libby Nelson, “Trump University, Explained, Vox, February 26, 2016.
61. Nelson, “Trump University.” See also John Cassidy, “Trump University: It’s
Worse Than You Think,” New Yorker, June 2, 2016. Trump’s very name is rooted in the
history of duplicitous motivational salesmanship. Earliest uses of the word “trump”
were to “fabricate,” “deceive,” and “dominate”—the tools of the trade for motivational
salesmen ever since Seth Seiders established the first nationwide motivational pub-
licity business.
INDEX
Adams, Michael, 123, 158 American way of life, discourse of, 2,

Adamson Act, 283n42 109–10, 130, 161, 173–74, 194, 222
Addams, Jane, 22–23 Anglo-Saxonism, 7, 295n46
advertising techniques in motivation, Anschutz, Philip, 260
5–6, 10–11, 13; during the Great anticommunism, 6, 242–45; consensus
Depression, 89–94, 107–8, 110–13; ideology and, 161, 233; in motivational
during the postwar era, 166–67, publicity, 181–82, 161, 220, 244–48
175–77, 189, 194, 207, 216–17; during AT&T, 34, 49
World War II, 127–32, 149–52. See also
visualization Babbitt (Lewis), 66–67
affect, 10, 58. See also emotions Ball, Joseph H., 197
African American workers: gains relative Banning, William J., 49
to white workers during World War Baritz, Loren, 88–89
II, 158; representation/absence of, in Bartlett, Obie, 133
motivational publicity, 78, 133–34, Beckwith, Michael, 256, 258
165–66, 307n18. See also race behavioral psychology, 31, 51, 55
Agitational Propaganda Bureau (Soviet), Bell, Daniel, 253
239, 244–45 Bendix, Reinhold, 276n3
alienation, 22, 29, 53, 251–53, 267 Bernays, Edward, 52
Allegheny Ludlum Steel, 126 Bernstein, David, 219, 221–22, 224,
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of 230–31
America, 123 Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, 41
Amazon, 268–69 billboards, 110–11, 129, 150, 260
American Alliance for Labor and biological determinism, 22, 55, 282n29
Democracy (AALD), 40–42 Bird, Caroline, 91
American exceptionalism, 1, 177, 205 Bolshevism, 47, 197
American Federation of Labor (AFL), bootstraps rhetoric, 18, 82, 89–94, 258,
40, 204, 224 272
American Federation of Labor and Boris, Eileen, 302n40
Congress of Industrial Organizations Boulware, Lemuel Ricketts: antiunion
(AFL–CIO), 194 efforts, 184, 186–200; career before GE,
American Management Association, 164 184–86; economic education, goals
329
330 | Index
Boulware, Lemuel Ricketts (continued) Chandler, Alfred, 21

of, 188–89; German state, views on, Chaplin, Charles, 96–98
186; his job responsibilities defined, character building: decline of, in moti-
314n108; job marketing strategy, 184– vational rhetoric, 118; gospel of work
86; motivational communications, and, 2; posters as aids for, 60, 64, 79
uses of, 186–99; “motives and beliefs” ChartHourse Learning, 262–66
of workers, study of, 189; pro-business Chevrolet Corporation, 114–17, 175–76,
campaign beyond industry, 195–200; 179
Salvation Is Not Free (speech), 188; Chicago Council on Foreign Relations,
state involvement in business, criti- 242–43
cisms of, 186–87. See also Boulwarism; Chicago Daily Tribune (newspaper), 245
General Electric Chicago school of sociology, 48
Boulwarism, 184–201; as antiunion Chou, Yu-kai, 250, 266–67
strategy, 184, 186–200; employee– Christensen, John, 263–64
indoctrination through communica- Citizenship Educational Services Inc., 152
tions, 187–99; pro-business campaign Civilian Conservation Corps, 95, 122,
beyond industry and, 195–200; 295n46
supervisors, efforts to enlist to civil rights movement, 250
advance management goals, 194–96. Civil Works Administration, 95
See also Boulware, Lemuel Ricketts; C. J. Howard, Inc., 60–61; sales, 60–62.
General Electric See also pivot man letters; Seth Seiders
Braverman, Harry, 253 Syndicate
Brennan, Francis, 128–30 Clarke, H. L., 47–48
Brinkley, Alan, 122 classless ideology, 15; consensus
Brown, Elspeth, 31 ideology/consumption and, 161, 165–
Bugbee, Helen, 218, 246 66; MR and, 167; in This is America,
Bureau of Commercial Economics, 45 136–49; World War II and, 120–21, 159
Byrne, Rhonda, 256–58 Coen, Harry, 178–79
coercion: claims of under socialism/
Campbell-Ewald Company, 110 communism, 155, 168, 181; decline of
Canfield, Jack, 255–56 as management strategy of control, 22;
Cannery Warehousemen Food Proces- denials of, 130, 133, 135, 168, 227; under
sors Drivers and Helpers (union), 225 fascism, 135; during the Gilded Age,
Cannery Workers Union, 225 20, 22
capitalism: classless ideology and, 6, 202; Collins, Tom, 96
communism and, 161, 217; consensus Commentator. See General Electric
ideology and, 161; consumption and, 4, Commission on Industrial Relations,
165, 182, 217; in Depression-era films, 36, 38
98; Get Motivated! seminar, 258; indi- Committee of Classification and
vidualized striving and, 4; meritocracy Personnel (CCP), 44
and, 3; motivation and, 2–6, 17, 202, Committee on Public Information (CPI),
271–72; propaganda/communications 37–44
and, 136–49, 171, 176–77, 182, 191 communications: emotional manipula-
Carew, Anthony, 234–35 tion and, 10–13, 49; field, emergence
Carey, James B., 192 of, 4; field, male–dominated nature
Carnegie, Andrew, 2, 24 of, 7; management, value for, 5–6,
Carson, Kevin, 265 49, 161–62; managers’ embrace of, 5;
Index | 331
the motivational project and, 4–7; Dhanam, Krish, 259

specialists, value for, 13; visual images dichotomy of motivated/unmotivated
used in, 5–8, 27–30, 45–49, 69, 107, worker, 18–20, 61–62, 72
111, 247. See also under entries for Dichter, Ernest, 166–67, 186, 199
employers and motivational publicity Dodd, Alvin, 220
suppliers Donham, Wallace, 87
Communist Party, 109, 163 Drucker, Peter, 124–25; corporation as
Conference Committee on National a “social” institution, 167, 169–70; the
Preparedness, 42 factory and “human effort,” 183; Fred-
Congress of Industrial Organizations erick Taylor’s similarity in theories
(CIO), 122–23, 168, 171, 187, 204; of motivation, 169; individualized
motivational techniques as viewed motivation and, 252; theories applied
by business, 150–51; Political Action at GM, 170; theories invoked by NAM,
Committee (PAC) and consumption, 154–55
123 DuPont, 164; “How Our Business System
consensus ideology, 6, 161, 163; adapted Operates” (course), 189
in motivational campaigns, 203–51;
individual rewards and, 165; motiva- Eastman, Max, 154
tion after World War II and, 161–67 Ebbert, Deena, 264–65
consumption, 6–7, 15; Depression-era economic security, 56, 167, 297n66;
films and, 97; free enterprise propa- decline of among workers, 252
ganda and, 110; labor unions and, 123; Ehrenreich, Barbara, 276n1
motivational campaigns/propaganda Eisenhower, Dwight D., 198
and, 120–23, 129–35, 148, 150, 159–62, Ellul, Jacques, 160; on labor union
165–67, 205–18, 245. See also prosperity propaganda, 194; on propaganda’s
motivation influence, 13–14; sociological and
Cordiner, Ralph, 198 political propaganda, distinction
Cowie, Jefferson, 323n2 between, 11
Creel, George, 17, 40–41 emotional conditioning, 10; Depression-
Creel Committee, 10 era factory and, 104–9; gamification
Curtis, Carl T. (Senator), 245–46 and, 266–67; industrial psychology
and, 31–37; managers’ interest in, 12;
Daley, Richard J., 245–46 motivation and, 10; Scott, emphasis
Dark Side of Management, The (Hanlon), on, 32; self-tracking and, 271; World
276–77n6 War I workplace and, 40–41
Darwinism, 22; work and, 24; workers’ emotions, 4, 10, 31–35, 44; labor histori-
instincts and, 31, 52, 55 ans’ inattention to, 12; as malleable, 80,
Davidson, Carter, 242–43 82; managers’ dismissal of as irratio-
Dearborn Group, 164, 183 nal, 5; managers’ interest in/attention
degradation of work, 249, 251 to, 6, 10–13, 54, 88
de Grazia, Victoria, 234 employee relations (ER), 163–64
Delano, Jack, 102 empowerment, discourse of, 9–10, 19,
Denning, Michael, 83, 97 254–67, 301n34
Department of Labor, 36 European Cooperation Agency (ECA),
Depression-era films, 94–98 234–35, 248; films, 234. See also
DeVry Corporation, 44–46 Marshall Plan
Dewey, John, 23, 63, 289n30 Evans, Chester, 171, 174, 177
332 | Index
Evans, Walker, 138, 140, 142, 145 From Dawn to Sunset (film), 113–17
Ewen, Stuart, 49, 63 Furniture Manufacturer and Artisan
(magazine), 47
Factory Management and Maintenance
(FMM, magazine), 105–9 gamification, 12, 250, 262, 266–67
Farm Security Administration (FSA) García, Calixto, 18–19
photography, 98–104; as emotion- General Electric (GE): 1946 strike and
based communication, 99–100; management response, 184; antiunion
middle-class viewership and, 100–101; tactics deployed, 184, 186–200;
motivational qualities of according to Commentator, 188, 190–91, 195–96;
Stryker, 99–100; optimistic tone, shift communications techniques used,
toward, 101–4; striving, emphasis on 187–201; print media used, 188–201;
as form of motivation, 98–104; white Ronald Reagan, GE Theater, 195.
poor, focus on, 100–101, 295n46. See See also Boulware, Lemuel Rickets;
also entries for individual photogra- Boulwarism
phers General Motors (GM), 162, 168–84;
Finnegan, Cara, 295n46 Employee-Relations Section, 169–84;
Fish! Philosophy (book), 262–65 General Motors Assembly Division,
Fish! Philosophy (program), 264–66 251; Information Rack Service, 178–82;
Flagg, James Montgomery, 39 “My Job and Why I Like It Contest”
Flamm, Helena, 12 and sample letters, 170–78; “The Story
flexible work, 255–56 of General Motors,” 179–81; Suggestion
Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth, 8, 162 Plan Scheme, 182–83; union critiques
Ford, John, 96–98 of “My Job and Why I Like It Contest,”
Fordism, 234 171; “The Worker Speaks,” 174
Ford Motor Company Sociological Gerstle, Gary, 299n6
Department, 26–27 Get Motivated! (motivational seminar),
foremen, 104, 124, 163; image, efforts to 258–60
recast, 34–36; motivation and, 171–72, Gillespie, Richard, 287n19
177, 182–83, 188, 190, 194, 200, 212–16, Gold Diggers of 1933 (film), 95–97
219, 223, 227–31, 236, 238, 249; pivot Goldfish Consulting, 265
man letters and, 60, 71–74 Gompers, Samuel, 40
Foucault, Michel, 9–10 Good Housekeeping (magazine), 91–92
Foundation for a Better Life (FFBL), gospel of work, 2, 4, 24
260–61 Grapes of Wrath (film), 96–98
Four Freedoms (Rockwell), 137 Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 96–98
Four Freedoms (Roosevelt), 135, 158 group man theory (Steinbeck), 96–97
Frank, Thomas, 324n16
Franklin, Benjamin, 24 Handy, Jamison (“Jam”), 113–17
Fraser, Steve, 299n6 Hanlon, Gerard, 88
free enterprise ideology, 109–12, 137–58, Harris, Howell John, 163
178–81, 213, 217, 243–44 Harvard Business School (HBS), 58,
Freeman (magazine), 197, 218 84–88, 124, 163
free market ideology, 6, 120, 122, 149–50, Harvey, David, 252
202, 246, 271; Boulwarism and, 186–88, Hastie, William H., 133–34
199; incentives and, 150; New Right Hawthorne effect, 58
and, 154; Ronald Reagan and, 195 Hawthorne studies, 21, 58, 84–88, 104,
Freud, Sigmund, 4, 52, 85 124
Index | 333
Hayek, Friedrich, 122, 154–55, 181 industrial betterment, 23–24, 33

Herzberg, Frederick, 252–53 industrial democracy, 36, 38, 109, 118, 159
Hicks, Esther, 257 industrial films: Depression-era uses
hierarchy of needs (Maslow), 252 of, 107, 110, 112–17; the Marshall Plan
Hillman, Sidney, 123 and, 234, 312n86; as tool for assuaging
Hine, Lewis, 28, 100, 142 class tensions, 47; as visual education/
Hitler, Adolph, 102, 120, 133, 137, 142, 146, instruction in the factory, 44–49, 107;
147–49, 153, 181 work’s rewards and, 11. See also From
Hochschild, Arlie, 12, 255 Dawn to Sunset; Your Town—A Story
Hodgson, Godfrey, 6, 165 of America
Hoffman, Paul, 223, 234 Industrial Management (journal), 35
Holley, Francis, 47 industrial psychology, 23, 31–35, 50
Honey, Maureen, 301n34 industrial social science, 8, 14, 52, 54–60,
Honeywell, 230–31 93, 168–84
Hoover, Herbert: advertising, view Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
of, 64; background and career of, 287n10
58–59, 90–94; morale boosting/ instincts, 4, 22; as fixed, 22, 51; as
motivational rhetoric, 58–59, 89–94; irrational, 10; as malleable, 33, 52–59;
motivational rhetoric, influence workplace communication and, 60–7 1
on, 91, 94; motivational rhetoric of, Instincts in Industry (Tead), 56
limitations of, 94; POUR and, 91–94; instinct theory, 4, 54–60, 70, 80; elitist
as president, 82–94; prosperity-based conceptions of workers and, 55, 286–
motivation and, 59; as secretary of 87n10
commerce, 58–59 Institute for Motivational Research, 167
Hopf Institute, 199 institutionalism, 57, 60
Hosking, Herbert, 149–50 International Harvester, 26, 34, 58
Hubbard, Elbert: death, 20; influence on International Union of Electrical
motivational rhetoric and, 62, 67–68, Workers (IUE), 187, 192–94, 200. See
79, 261; “A Message to Garcia” and, 2, also United Electrical Workers
18–20 Is Anybody Listening? (Whyte), 166
human factor, 24–30, 34, 40, 50, 105, 118
human relations: influence on moti- Jacoby, Sanford, 26
vation, 4, 7, 11, 13. See also Harvard James, William, 32
Business School; Hawthorne studies; Jam Handy Organization, 113–17
Mayo, Elton Janet, Pierre, 86
Johnson, Jerry, 205
Ilyachev, Ivan, 239, 244, 247 Johnson, Spencer, 255
incentives (economic-based), 4–5; Johnston, Eric, 207
challenges to, 5; countered by
psychological-based view of, 21–22, Kaufman, Bruce, 24
25; debates over, during World War Keating-Owens Child Labor Act, 283n42
II, 121–22; freedom of, vs. socialist/ Kern-McGillicuddy Federal Employees’
Soviet coercion, 181, 188, 191; industrial Compensation Act, 283n42
psychology and, 31; industrial social Keynesian economics, 166, 252
science and, 53–54; NAM, rhetoric of, Khrushchev, Nikita, 244–45
149–52; need to individualize, 252; in “kitchen” debate (Nixon/Khrushchev),
United States vs. “planned economies,” 245
197–99, 239 Klein, Jennifer, 297n66
334 | Index
Labor and Monopoly Capital (Braver- 4–6; motivation, use of, as apparatus
man), 253 of control, 2–9; motivational rhetoric,
labor problem, 22, 34, 82 use/value of, for, 9–13; psychological
labor rhetoric, appropriation of by motivation and, 5; worker productivity
business/management, 83, 109, 117, 152 and, 5; work ideals and, 2–5. See also
labor unions, 53; consensus ideology entries for individual employers
and, 163; consumption ideal and, management ideology, 2–9
167; cooperation with management management magazines, 27, 29–30,
and, 163; motivational campaigns of, 34–35, 104–9
167–68; no-strike pledge during World “Man at the Crossroads” (mural), 109
War II and, 120. See also strikes Marchand, Roland, 8, 22
La Follette Seamen’s Act, 283n42 Marshall Plan, 205, 223, 233–35
Lange, Dorothea, 100, 104, 142–44 Maslow, Abraham, 252
LaRoche, Chester, 129 Mather & Co., 60–71; advertising
Laseau, La Verne, 171, 174, 177 techniques, applied to posters, 60–64,
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 183 67–69; antilabor sentiment and, 66;
Lee, Russell, 102, 104, 142 character building rhetoric extolled
Lewis, Sinclair, 66–67 by, 60, 64; clients, 61–62; elitist views
Lichtenstein, Nelson, 299n9, 306n7 of workers, 64–65, 67, 77; Hubbard’s
Lippmann, Walter, 63, 154–55, 289n30 influence on products of, 62, 67–68,
Lipsitz, George, 299n9 79; marketing/sales techniques of,
Literary Digest (magazine), 93 74–79; “popular” style, shift to, 69–71;
Lordstown strike, 251 poster design, limitations of, 64;
Louis, Joe, 133 poster design and communication,
Lubell, Sam, 127 approaches to, 59–71; race-based
Ludlow Massacre, 84 views of workers, 66, 78; sales; 61–62.
Lynd, Helen Merrell, 53, 102 See also Seth Seiders Syndicate
Lynd, Robert S., 53, 102 May, Elaine Tyler, 172
Lyon, George H., 130 Mayo, Elton, 7, 14, 81–82, 118, 163–64;
career and theories on motivation,
MacLeish, Archibald, 119, 127 84–89; Hawthorne studies and, 84–88;
Magill-Weinsheimer, 216–17 HBS and, 7, 84, 87–88; maladjustment
Main Street, as motivational ideal, 137, of workers, claims about, 85–88
139, 145–46 McCarthy, Anna, 277n11
maladjustment, 7, 124; instinct theory McCartin, Joseph, 36
and, 55–57, 286–87n10; Mayo, views McCellan Select Committee, 245
on, 85–89; workers’ class sympathies McGregor, Douglas, 252
and, 165 McKinley, William, 18–19
Malinowski, Bronisław, 85 “Men Working Together!” (poster),
Managed Heart, The (Hochschild), 12 125–26
management: antilabor efforts of, 4–9; “Message to Garcia, A” (Hubbard),
classless ideology, efforts to exploit/ 2, 19–20, 24, 50; influence on early
promote, 8, 15, 120, 148, 159, 161; motivational publicity, 62, 67–68;
communications, development and resonance of in contemporary
uses of, 4–13; emotions, desire to motivation, 261, 265
regulate, 11–13; images, interest in, Middletown (Lynd & Lynd), 53, 102
5–6; motivation, emerging interest in, Mikoyan, Anastas, 247–48
Index | 335
Miller, Dorie, 133 claims about, 54–56; productivity and,

Mills, C. Wright, 12, 162, 222 33, 51–80
Modern Times (film), 96–97 Münsterberg, Hugo, 18, 33–34, 38, 52, 80
Moore, Phoebe, 268 Murray, Phillip, 122
morale: decline, concerns about, 35, 51, “My Job and Why I Like It Contest”
59, 72, 74; decline attributed to work- (MJT). See under General Motors
er’s pathologies, 87; Depression-era “Myth of the Happy Worker, The”
films, and 95–98; employee-discipline, (Swados), 249
inexpensive tool for, 105–8; Hoover’s
rhetoric of, 58–59, 89–94; managers National Association of Manufacturers
encouraged to address, 29–31; moti- (NAM): emotion-based messaging
vation, links to, and, 38–40; national used, 110, 149–57; films produced
obsession about, during World War I, by, 110–13; incentives rhetoric used,
38; productivity, seen as integral to, 31. 149–59; labor union rhetoric, appro-
See also motivation priation of, 150–51; populist rhetoric,
Morse, Donald, 182–83 adaption of, 109–13; propaganda
motivation: development of, 2–5; during World War I, 42–44; Roos-
emotion-based messaging, 6, 12–15; evelt/the New Deal, condemnations
game/entertainment-based, 26, 32–33, of, 150–53; “Soldiers of Production”
104–9, 250, 254, 266–67; ideological rallies held, 154–59; Your Town—A
nature of, 2–5; images, importance of, Story of America and, 112–13. See also
5–6; persuasion unnecessary in, 11–14, free enterprise ideology
271; play-based, 262–67; promises National Cash Register Company, 26,
(illusory) of, 17, 271–73; shift from 34, 49
worker’s body to mind as realm of, 5; National Industrial Conservation
ubiquity of, 1, 271 Movement (NICM), 42
motivational ideology, 8, 14–17. See also National Industrial Information Council
management ideology (NIIC), 110–13, 149–59
motivational project: rationale for term, National Industrial Recovery Act, 95
4; synopsis of development, 4–9 National Research Council (NRC), 86
motivational propaganda: Cold War National Resources Planning Board, 122
contestation and, 231–49; consump- National Review (magazine), 197
tion and, 206–7, 230, 242; continuous National War Labor Board (NWLB), 40
existence of, beyond world wars, 5; Nazism: coercion contrasted against
integration of, into organizational American work motivation, 127–28,
communication, 162–231; multifaceted 137–38, 141, 152–53, 186
nature of, 5; poster design innovations Negroes and the War (booklet), 133–34
and, 37–44, 49; pro-business crusades Nelson, Daniel, 34
and, 109–13, 149–57 neoliberalism: relationship of, to
motivational publicity business, 11, 52–53, motivational ideology, 4, 16, 202, 206,
59–80, 136–49, 203–49 212, 233, 253–73
motivational research (MR), 166–67 New Deal: motivation and collec-
motivational rhetoric: characteristics tive striving, 82–83, 94. See also
of, 4–9; gender and, 7; race and, 7; Depression-era films; Farm Security
rationale for term, 9 Administration (FSA) photography
Motivation to Work (Herzberg), 323n6 New Economy, 254–55
motives, 4, 18, 20, 31, 40, 189; pathology, New York Times (newspaper), 269–70
336 | Index
Nichols, Lisa, 256 of, 74–79; themes of, 70–74. See also
Nixon, Richard, 251, 253 under C. J. Howard, Inc.; Seth Seiders
Syndicate
Octalysis (gamification platform), Plakatstil (“poster style”), 69
266–67 Plow That Broke the Plains, The (film), 117
Office for Emergency Management positive thinking, 170–78
(OEM), 7, 127 posters: advertising principles in,
Office of Price Administration (OPA), integration of, 63–7 1; campaign
122 integration of, 206–7; consensus
Office of Production Management, 123 ideology as focus in, 206–21; design
Office of War Information (OWI), 126; developments of, 37–44, 136–49; har-
advertising specialists enlisted, 128–30; monized with pivot man letters, 72–74;
African Americans and propaganda, motivational ideology in, 3; prosperity,
133–34; Domestic Branch funds emphasis on, 126–33, 136–49. See also
reduced, 134; Graphics Division, under Mather & Co.; Sheldon-Claire
128–29; individual rewards, 128–30; Company
motivational propaganda, debates Prelinger, Rick, 113
over, 126–36; Negroes and the War, President’s Organization on Unemploy-
133–34; Office of Facts and Figures ment Relief (POUR), 91–94
(OFF), forerunner of, 126; photog- Principles of Scientific Management, The
raphy, 126; prosperity motivation (F. Taylor), 281n15
and, 128–30, 135; resignation of New Printers’ Ink (magazine), 42
Dealers, 129–30; women, representa- progressivism: industrial betterment
tions of in propaganda, 133, 301n34 and, 23–24; management’s image and
Ordzhonikidze Machine Tool Factory, efforts to recast, 22; motivation and,
Moscow, 240 21–30; workers’ instincts, deemed
Owen, Chandler, 133–34 malleable, 22, 26; work’s rewards,
promotion of, 23–24. See also human
Parker, Carleton, 55, 286n10 factor
Peale, Norman Vincent, 172 propaganda: limitations of term, 11;
Pearl Harbor, 135, 158 management’s distancing from term,
personal fulfillment, 17, 26, 167, 254, 271, 7–8; political/sociological distinction
273 (Ellul), 11; unifying effects on moti-
personnel departments, 34, 88–89, 105, vation, 40, 44. See also motivational
124 propaganda
Personnel Management (journal), 237 Propaganda (Bernays), 285n3
Peterson, Larry, 27 Propaganda (Ellul), 278n16, 307n20
Phantom Public, The (Lippmann), prosperity motivation: defined, 121;
289n30 management, value for, 121; New Deal,
Philistine (magazine), 18–19 roots in, 122; World War II propa-
Phillips-Fein, Kimberley, 8, 162, 187 ganda, antecedents in, 130–35
piece-rate system, 25 Psychology and Industrial Efficiency
Pittsburgh Survey (magazine), 28–29 (Münsterberg), 33–34
pivot man letters (C. J. Howard, Inc.), Public and Its Problems, The (Dewey),
60–61; appeal/value of for managers, 289n30
72, 74; design features of, 71–74; dis- Public Opinion (Lippmann), 289n30
semination of in factory, 72; marketing public relations: business’s image and,
Index | 337
129, 149, 151; employee education/rela- Rosenfeld, Charles: Seth Seiders Syn-
tions and, 178, 189, 199; field, founding dicate career, 75–76; Sheldon-Claire
of, 52; motivation, relationship to, 6, 8; Company career, 136, 218–22
as motivational tool, 110 Rosie the Riveter, 2, 301n34. See also
Public Works Administration, 95 under women
Rothstein, Arthur, 100, 102–4
race: African Americans and propa- Roycroft (arts and crafts society), 18, 62,
ganda, 133–34; Nixon and “silent 199
majority,” 253; posters, marketing of,
78; racialized basis of motivation, salesmen, 16–7; at the Seth Seiders
6–7; self-discipline, arguments about, Syndicate, 60–62, 74–79; at the
and, 6; white labor focus in propa- Sheldon-Claire Company, 203–7, 212,
ganda, 130–33, 142; white workers 218–32, 237–38, 247–48
as “deserving poor,” 100–101; white Schenker, Ben, 136, 206–7, 216, 220
workers as symbols of motivation, 7, Schlamm, William, 197
66, 165–66, 98 scientific management, 25–26, 29, 31–32,
Ray, James Arthur, 258 87, 118; emotions and, 32. See also
Reagan, Ronald, 202, 254; GE Theater Taylor, Frederick; Taylorism
(television show), 195 Scott, Walter Dill, 32–33, 38, 44, 63
Reel and Slide (magazine), 45–46, 48–49 Searchlight, The (Flint union local 659
Resettlement Agency (Historical publication), 171
Section), 98–99 Seattle’s World Famous Pike Place Fish
Reuther, Walter, 122–23, 174, 176 Market, 262
rewards of work: absence of, 249; Secret, The (video), 256–58
consensus ideology and, 203–48; Seiders, Seth, 53; background of, 60. See
consumption/prosperity rhetoric and, also Seth Seiders Syndicate
59, 110–13, 121–49, 160–202; efforts to self-actualization, 252
sustain faith in, 23–28, 250–67, 270–7 1; self-help industry, 1–2. See also self-
industrial films, depictions of, in, improvement industry
113–17; psychological-based concep- self-improvement industry, 1, 254–59
tion of, 21–22, 25; standard of living self-tracking, 267–69
and, 149–54; striving and, 94; theories Servants of Power (Baritz), 286n7
of, 1–11; welfare capitalism and, 57; Seth Seiders Syndicate, 52, 136; founding
welfare work and, 26–28; worker’s of, 60; immigrant and non-white
self-interest and, 67, 79 workers, views on, 77–78; sales of,
Richberg, Donald, 197 60–62; sales resistance encountered
Riesman, David, 12 by salesmen, 76–78; sales strategy of,
Riis, Jacob, 22 60, 74–80; sales talks used by, 75–76;
Rivera, Diego, 109 salesman training and incentivization
Road to Serfdom (Hayek), 122, 154–55, 181 techniques, 78; V.P.S., design and uses,
Rockefeller, Nelson, 109 76–78. See also C. J. Howard, Inc.;
Rockefeller Foundation, 84–88. See also Mather & Co.
Harvard Business School; Mayo, Elton Shahn, Ben, 142
Rockwell, Norman, 137 Shalett, Lew, 136; Boulware, affinity with,
Roethlisberger, F. J., 124 205; exploitation of Cold War contes-
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 82, 89, 152; tation and, 205–6; media campaign
motivational sentiment and, 94–95 after Moscow trip, 242–48; Moscow
338 | Index
Shalett, Lew (continued) to, 11–12; emotion, renewed interest in,

trip, 239–42; Partners in Prosperity 12. See also industrial social science
luncheon, 243–46; on repetition, Solbrig, Heidi, 47, 313n105
importance of in motivation, 148–49; spontaneous cooperation, 120, 161;
salesman motivation efforts, 219–22; Woodrow Wilson’s calls for, 127
on Soviet motivation, 168, 205, 239–41, standard of living (as motivational ideal),
242–48; World Spotlight appearance, 6–7, 181; business as agent of, 149; class
242. See also Sheldon-Claire Company sympathies, tool for weakening, 165;
Shalett, Sheldon, 221, 224 consensus ideology and, 161; exag-
Shay, Felix, 62, 74 gerated claims about, 167; promises
Sheldon-Claire Company, 3; advertising of during World War II, 121–23;
techniques used by, 216–17; the promotion of in Europe, 233, 248;
Cold War and, 231–49; Confidential union support for, 167, 193–94; worker
Memos to Supervisors, design and discipline and, 10
uses, 213–14; consensus ideology and, Steinbeck, John, 81
204–12; economic literacy and, 207–12, Stella, Joseph, 28
216; emotion, uses of, in campaigns, Stockdale, Allen, 154, 157
136–49, 206–7, 230, 242; impartiality, Stole, Inger, 129
claim of, 204–5, 224–31; international strikes: 53, 142, 160–61, 250–51; claims of
expansion of, 231–49; employee pathological nature of, 55, 85; employ-
mail-o-grams, design/uses of, 146–48; ers’ efforts to suppress, 22, 37 41, 162–63;
Produce Better Live Better, design/use at General Motors Assembly Division,
of, 213–15; rewards for American and Lordstown, Ohio, 250–52; International
German workers contrasted, 146–47; Union of Electrical Workers, 200;
sales apparatus of, 218–22; salesman management violence in response to,
incentivization and indoctrination 22, 84; unions agreements to suspend,
efforts, 219–22; salesmen’s relationship 120, 142, 161–63; United Auto Workers,
to products and, 219; sales of, 204; sales 168; United Electrical Workers, 184–85,
resistance encountered by salesmen, 187. See also Taft-Hartley Act
224, 235–38; sales techniques deployed, striving: as form of motivation, 94–104;
235–38; Soviet propaganda, similarities ideology of, 4; image of worker and,
to its own, 240; supervisor opinion 92. See also Depression-era films;
polls, design of, 216; supervisors, Farm Security Administration (FSA)
enlistment of, as motivators by, 212–16, photography
227–31; supervisors, gendered view of, Stryker, Roy Emerson, 99–104; on moti-
213; testimonial letters received/used vational qualities of photographs, 99.
by, 223–30, 237–38; They Say (bulletin), See also Farm Security Administration
rhetoric in, 217–18, 246; union coopera- (FSA) photography
tion with campaigns, 224–25; V.P.S., use sublimation (Tead), 56, 67
of, 222–25; We Depend on Each Other, success, 1; Depression-era films and, 94–
design of, 207–11. See also Shalett, Lew; 95; Hooverite rhetoric, 90; workplace
This is America motivational rhetoric and, 64–7 1,
Shimoff, Marci, 256 78–79, 144, 155–61, 270–73. See also
Slide, Anthony, 48 self-improvement industry
Smiles, Samuel, 2, 24 suggestion: in pivot man letters, 71–74;
social scientists: emotion, inattentiveness in posters, 63–7 1, 78; Scott, theories
Index | 339
about, 32; Tead’s emphasis on, 56; Vachon, John, 142, 145
visualization, 11 Veblen, Thorstein, 52, 80
suggestion schemes, 182–83 verbal proof story (V.P.S.), 76–78, 222–26
Swados, Harvey, 249 visual education movement, 45–48, 52, 60
System the Magazine of Business, 29–30 visualization, 11, 45–49, 256
Viteles, Morris, 165
Taft-Hartley Act, 162, 170, 194, 212
Taylor, Frederick, 25, 88, 169; emotion Wagner Act, 82
and, 32–33 Waldman, Louis, 220
Taylor, Henry J., 181 Wall Street crash, 80, 90
Taylorism, 53–54, 83, 88, 118, 164, 267– War Advertising Council, 128–30
69 War Production Board, 133, 136
Tead, Ordway, 56, 67, 182 welfare capitalism, 57, 88
Terkel, Studs, 120 welfare work, 26–29, 34
“Theory Y” (McGregor), 252 wellness, 26, 254, 267–70
This is America: adaptation of New Deal Western Electric, 58, 84–85. See also
imagery and rhetoric, 142–46; classless Hawthorne studies
rhetoric, use of, 136–49; design Westinghouse, 34, 301n34
innovations in, 136–46; emotional What’s on the Worker’s Mind (Williams),
conditioning and, 148; individual 56–57
rewards emphasized, 136–49; Main white-collar work, 161–62, 170–7 1, 255,
Street ideal in, 145–46; serialization, 267
use of, 137–41; teamwork rhetoric in, Whyte, William H., 12, 166
143–44; tributes to “ethnic” Amer- Williams, Whiting, 56–57
icans, 142. See also Sheldon-Claire Wilson, C. E. (president, General
Company Motors), 170, 181
Thrift, Nigel, 255 Wilson, Charles E. (president, General
Time Bind, The, (Hochschild), 255 Electric), 189
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 154–55 Wilson, Woodrow, 36, 38
Tokumitsu, Miya, 9, 256 Winfrey, Oprah, 257
Tone, Andrea, 27 women: consumers, depicted as, 7, 67;
Truman, Harry, 198 domesticity, invoked as beneficiaries
Trump, Donald J., 272–73 of, 182–83; opportunities/gains of,
Tugwell, Rexford, 99 during World War II, 305n80; resented
Tuskegee Airman, 133 by male workers, 158; “Rosie the
Riveter” and rhetoric of empower-
Uncle Abner (cartoon), 110 ment, 301n34; supervisor literature,
UNESCO (United Nations Educational non-representation in, 213; white
Scientific and Cultural Organization), women, focus on in posters, 133
233 Wood, Henry A. Wise, 42
United Automobile Workers (UAW), 122, Work and Authority in Industry (Bendix),
168–7 1 276n3
United Electrical Workers (UE), 184, work enrichment, 23, 252–55
187. See also International Union of workers: deemed as maladjusted, 7; emo-
Electrical Workers tional regulation of, 10–11; immigrants
United States Army Research Branch, 135 viewed as receptive to images, 6;
340 | Index
workers (continued) YMCA, 45, 48–49, 66

management desire to control, 8–13; “Yourself, Incorporated,” (pivot man
motivation and, 12–14. See also letter), 72–73
motivation Your Town—A Story of America (film),
work ethic, 1–3, 59, 79; concerns about 112–13
corrosion of, 251; as principled goal,
261; prosperity motivation and, 217 Zehrung, George, 48–49
Work in America (report), 251 Zichermann, Gabe, 266
Works Progress Administration, 122 Ziglar, Zig, 258
i
n the United States, a strong work ethic has long been upheld as a
GRay
WorK BETTEr
necessity, and tributes to motivation abound—from the motivational
posters that line the walls of the workplace to the self-help gurus who
draw in millions of viewers online. Americans are repeatedly told
they can achieve financial success and personal well-being by adopting
a motivated attitude toward work. But where did this obsession come
Live BETTEr
from? And whose interests does it serve?
Work Better, Live Better traces the rise of motivational rhetoric in the
workplace across the expanse of two world wars, the Great Depression,
WorK BETTEr Live BETTEr

and the Cold War. Beginning in the early twentieth century, managers
recognized that force and coercion—the traditional tools of workplace
discipline—inflamed industrial tensions, so they sought more subtle means
of enlisting workers’ cooperation. David Gray demonstrates how this
“motivational project” became a highly orchestrated affair as managers
and their allies deployed films, posters, and other media, and drew on
the ideas of industrial psychologists and advertising specialists to advance
their quests for power at the expense of worker and union interests.
“Work Better, Live Better provides invaluable insight into how

corporate management attempted to refashion the American
work ethic in the twentieth century. An ambitious, intelligent, and
thoughtful account of work and its ideological management that is
essential reading for anyone interested in the history of capitalism.”
—Tim Strangleman,
author of Voices of Guinness: An Oral History of the Park Royal Brewery
“By focusing on the idea of ‘motivation’ and the level of effort, energy, and
engagement that managers have historically put into attempting to shape
the inner psychic lives and experiences of workers, Gray renders strange
and unusual some of the most familiar tropes of economic culture.”
—Kim Phillips-Fein,
author of Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal
DaVID GRay is teaching assistant professor of American studies

and history at Oklahoma State University.
MOTIVATION, LABOR,
Cover art by Packer (poster artist), “We’re
Ready for the Challenge Tomorrow, Let’s do AND MANAGEMENT IDEOLOGY
the Job Together!”. c 1941–1945. Courtesy
National Archives and Records Administration
DaVID GRay
(NAID) 516115.
www.umasspress.com Cover design by Frank Gutbrod
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i

WorK BETTEr Live BETTEr

“Work Better, Live Better provides invaluable insight into how

DaVID GRay is teaching assistant professor of American studies

www.umasspress.com Cover design by Frank Gutbrod

Gray_softcover.indd 1 10/15/20 3:46 PM

University of Massachusetts Press

British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data

when older rewards such as economic security and collective well-­being

My sincere thanks go to Liam Kennedy and Catherine Carey at the

American Studies for granting permission to include the respective article

My biggest debt of gratitude is reserved for Sarah McKemie, whose love

In the United States, a motivated attitude is often characterized as a require-

Motivation and Management Power

images. Posters, films, image-­laden booklets, and other visual communica-

assumptions about race and gender. Many of the management specialists

as agents of workers’ well-­being even as in reality they became more dogged

workers more acquiescent. The motivational project became a powerful

Accounting for Motivational Rhetoric

focused on the workplace, but analysts of organizations have since extended

attentive to emotion in the workplace. As Helena Flamm notes, at the center

no less consequential. Tracing the motivational project—­bringing to bare

cornerstone of democracy—­can be so fragile” as to be influenced by pro-

Organization and Goals

motivational sentiment to the center of public life in the form of political

the most ubiquitous yet underanalyzed ideologies of industrial modernity.

work was pivotal to the proliferation of motivational campaigns at indus-

Emotions may be conditions of stimulation or interference, and no one

of self-­discipline, and it was eventually translated into all major languages

This chapter tracks the emergence of motivation as a management idea

Motivation’s Progressive Era Roots

from this standpoint, managers thought little about influencing workers’

Addams, and they became tenets of industrial psychology, which flourished

Motivation and the “Human Face” of Industry

much touted promises of higher earnings also proved illusory as managers

department amounted to an apparatus for monitoring workers and pro-

Motivation and Visual Communication

Innovations in workplace communications and management theory fur-

emphasizing the rewards that workers would supposedly receive if they

Industrial Psychology, Motivation, and Emotional

dismiss the influence of emotions on workers’ job performance and pro-

conceive the factory as an emotional arena.33 In the decades that followed,

Industrial psychology’s emphasis on workers’ adaptability and emo-

rationalize production. Managers’ esteem for “humane” foremanship

“Selling the War to the Working Man”: World War I

supporter of the war, the AALD became a powerful force in suppressing

the Committee of Classification and Personnel (CCP), a body that con-

Motivation and Visual Education: Industrial Films

educational) films in factories and communities at large. The organization

methods—­especially where there is only limited knowledge of English, as

motivational messaging to workers. The main factors driving this change—­

[Our posters must] create favorable action in [the worker’s] mind,

and PR to encourage workers and foremen to adhere to what managers

Managing Instincts: Motivation and Industrial

influential than organizational theorist Ordway Tead. At the center of Tead’s

involved the use of practices that were broadly motivational, including

weapon in the crusade to resolve labor-­business disputes and impose indus-

Modernizing Motivation: The Rise of the

opportunity, a cluster of enterprising salesmen began to develop a new

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

when older rewards such as economic security and collective well-being

images. Posters, films, image-laden booklets, and other visual communica-

as agents of workers’ well-being even as in reality they became more dogged

no less consequential. Tracing the motivational project—bringing to bare

cornerstone of democracy—can be so fragile” as to be influenced by pro-

of self-discipline, and it was eventually translated into all major languages

methods—especially where there is only limited knowledge of English, as

motivational messaging to workers. The main factors driving this change—

weapon in the crusade to resolve labor-business disputes and impose indus-

nineteenth-century milieu, Mather glossed over the realities of modern

While the syndicate’s products were well-suited to prevailing managerial

hesitant prospects that foreign-born foremen’s “desire to learn” led them to

Mayo’s early writings—one emphasized in his 1919 book, Democracy and

recovery—albeit a limited one—cracked the door open a little wider for

many managers continued to experiment with psychological-based tech-

specialists. But now many managers themselves—traditionally adherents of

blended aspects of documentary and Hollywood-style filmmaking with the

For management theorists, the motivation-laden atmosphere of war-

served just as well, Sheldon-Claire believed, for wartime motivational pro-

Figure 4.8. Dorothea Lange’s photograph on which Sheldon-Claire’s baseball-themed