ORGANIZATION AND APPLICATION
Sidebar 4.1 Focus on Lillian Moller Gilbreth
Lillian Moller was raised in an independent-minded family in Oakland, California. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in literature at the University of California, Berkeley. At age 26, she married Frank Gilbreth, nine years her senior and already a successful consulting engineer and contractor in Boston. Lillian became the vice president of Gilbreth Consulting and was fully involved in the business. She and Frank became experts in the new field of industrial efficiency, inventing the Gilbreth clock to measure
FIGURE 4.7 Lillian Moller Gilbreth
worker efficiency and pioneering the use of film to conduct motion studies in the workplace.
Although a proponent of scientific management, Lillian grew dissatisfied with the rigid focus on conforming the worker to the job, coming to believe that psychological factors were important in understanding worker efficiency.
She enrolled in Brown University and earned her doctorate in applied psychology in 1915. Under her guidance, the firm had great success with both labor and management. When Frank died suddenly in 1924, Lillian became the president of Gilbreth, Inc., and continued their successful work consulting to industry and teaching motion study methods. She became a leading figure in industrial relations in the United States and the world, serving on national and international commissions devoted to topics such as reducing unemployment during the Great Depression. A postage stamp was issued in her honor by the U.S. Post Office in 1984; she is the only psychologist to ever be honored with an American stamp.
SUMMARY 89
What characterized her work was a consistent concern for workers and their environments. To make the work of the homemaker easier, for example, she invented the foot-pedal trash can, which continues to be one of the most widely used models of garbage cans in the world. She also designed kitchens for people who were disabled.
Remarkably, with all the work-related achievements of her life, Gilbreth and her husband had 12 children. The Hollywood version of their family life can be seen in the movies Cheaper by the Dozen (1950) and Belles on their Toes (1952).
The applications of psychology in education and worker efficiency were notable in this period, but there were many others. For example, Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955), after earning his PhD with Wundt in 1900, supplemented his meager salary at Northwestern University with public speaking. A series of invited talks Scott gave to a group of advertising executives in Chicago helped move him to a successful career in business psychology. His booksTheory of Ad- vertising (1903),Psychology of Advertising (1908), andIncreasing Human Efficiency in Business(1910) made him a leader in the new field. In his work on advertising, Scott argued that increasing desire among consumers rather than appealing to their reason was the key to sales. He parlayed his early success into a visiting position at a new program in applied psychology at theCarnegie Institute of Technology (nowCarnegie Mellon University) in 1916 as the first ‘‘professor of applied psychol- ogy.’’ After World War I, he founded the Scott Company inChicago (1919), counted by many as the first psychological consulting company.
His friend and colleague at Carnegie Tech was the applied psychologist Walter Van Dyke Bingham (1880–1952). Bingham was trained as an experimental psychologist at the University of Chicago and earned his degree there in 1908. In 1915, he accepted the offer to start a new kind of psychology program in applied psychology at Carnegie Tech. Over the next 9 years, he created a division of applied psy- chology comprising a talented group of young psychologists, both men and women. AtCarnegie Tech, these young psychologists, joined by Scott for a year in 1916, created programs tailored for the Bureau of Salesmanship Research and the School of Life Insurance Salesmanship.
They received large grants from Pittsburgh corporations to improve worker productivity, increase sales, and generate new products. It was a remarkable period of the application of psychology and bridged the surge of interest in and growth of applied psychology in the 1920s and 1930s, which we detail in another chapter.
SUMMARY
In this chapter, we have traced the complex development of the new discipline of Psychol- ogy in one national and cultural context: the United States. We have shown how American life in the 19th century helped prepare the coun- try for the rapid indigenization of disciplinary Psychology. The Americanization of psychology had both elite and nonelite origins. Revivalist
religious practices—Methodism, camp meetings, the shout tradition—were important in raising questions about the psychological nature of the religious phenomena exhibited in these prac- tices. The indigenous self-help orientation of the American people, especially in the era after the great democratization of public life following Andrew Jackson’s presidency, also contributed
90 CHAPTER 4 FROM PERIPHERY TO CENTER: CREATING AN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY
to Psychology’s origins. In the first half of the 19th century, this was especially so in the emer- gence and widespread popularity of phrenology and mesmerism, which were often promulgated among the same portion of the population that was receptive to revivalist religion. Through the agency of such skillful practitioners as Sunder- land and Quimby, millions of Americans were sensitized to an interior psychological dimension of everyday life. Organically related to the move- ments stirred by phrenology and mesmerism were the development of spiritualism and New Thought in the second half of the century. Thus, by the time the new Psychology was introduced to the United States in the late 19th century, an everyday psychology was already in place.
In the second half of the chapter, we saw how American society turned to science for pragmatic solutions. This was part of what was called the Progressive Era in American politics and social life. The psychologizing of education and the study of work were part of the desire to view all life on an orderly and scientific basis.
This focus was not without problems and was intensely resisted both by workers, who saw it as an extension of oppression by owners, and by old-money elites, who viewed it as a deepening of the crassness of American life. Psychologists seized the opportunities offered by education and by industry to define their science and discipline as useful and, in so doing, fostered an American psychology geared to American ideals. This, we argued, was critical for the full indigenization and naturalization of psychology in the United States. In other national and cultural contexts, both process and outcome were different, as sci- entists and practitioners attempted to construct a psychology that fit their own context. We explore some of those contexts in later chapters.
Finally, we again make the point that the events and outcomes we described in this chapter illustrate how the center and periphery of a science is a negotiated and competitive pro- cess. When disciplinary Psychology came to the United States, it was very much at the periph- ery of science when compared with the centers
of Germany or France. It was also peripheral to American society and in direct competition with the everyday psychologies that had grown out of a mixture of religion and mind science practices over the course of the 19th century. It was these everyday psychologies, we have shown, that actually created a psychological sensitivity among millions of Americans. Thus, the success of disciplinary Psychology depended, somewhat paradoxically, on building on the everyday psy- chology of its competitors. That is, disciplinary psychologists had to employ careful rhetori- cal and practical strategies to attract and hold the attention and eventual support of Ameri- cans who owed their psychological awareness to other sources, while at the same time drawing clear distinctions between their new Psychology and the psychology of mental science, spiritu- alism, and religion. The success of disciplinary Psychologists in this process enabled American psychology, over the course of the 20th century to move not only to the center of disciplinary Psy- chology around the world but to the center of American social life. However, even with success, this outcome was not inevitable; one can argue, as we do in a later chapter, that psychologists have never been able to gain complete cultural and intellectual authority over the subject matter of psychology. That is, as historian Roger Smith has stated, in America ‘‘everyone became her or his own psychologist’’ (1997, p. 577).
In this chapter, we have sought to portray these events in such a way that it will help you, as a student, see how psychological science and its applications, like all sciences, are human processes. As such, they are subject to the com- promises, conflicts, and constructions that make up human society. It is this human dimension, we believe, that both gives us cause to celebrate the knowledge produced by psychologists and cau- tions us to take all such knowledge as provisional and contingent on time and place. The histor- ical perspective on these events that we have offered here may help us see more clearly that historical knowledge is crucial to understanding ourselves.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 91
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
For our section on mental and moral philosophy, we relied on the scholarship of Al Fuchs, whose article ‘‘Contributions of American Mental Philosophers to Psychology in the United States’’ (2000) gave us the context for the reception of the new Psychology in the United States. Rand Evans’s seminal chapter (1984) on the influences of the Scottish philosophers in American mental philosophy was foundational for our understanding. The work of James Hoopes, especially his Consciousness in New England(1989), was valuable. We also drew on the scholarship of Graham Richards, ‘‘To Know Our Fellow Men To Do Them Good’’ (1995) for his account of the moral dimension of mental philosophy in American colleges.
An extensive literature exists on the role of religion in American life in the 19th century, and much of it touches on the connections between religion and psychological thinking. We found the following to be especially useful:The Democratization of American Christianity (Hatch, 1989) and Fits, Trances, and Visions (Taves, 1999). The recent books byCatherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit (2007), and Christopher White,Unsettled Minds(2009), were also helpful.
The recent work of David Schmit (2005, 2009) has been of great critical help in our understand- ing of the complex relationships among religion, mesmerism, and spiritualism in the near-chaotic mid-19th-century America; his comments on our work were also extremely valuable. Eugene Taylor’s Shadow Culture(1999) was helpful for understanding the links among religion, spiritual movements, and the emergence of psychology in the 19th century. The fascinating and complex intersection of mesmerism, religion, phrenol- ogy, New Thought, spiritualism, and psychology has been well documented. We also drew upon Robert Darnton’sMesmerism and the End of the
Enlightenment in France(1968) for background on the power of mesmeric explanations and relied on Alison Winter’s fine book,Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain(1998). For the Amer- ican context, Robert Fuller’sMesmerism and the American Cure of Souls(1982) was most helpful.
We returned to it repeatedly for inspiration and correction. Sheila Quinn’s recent article (2007) on the man who began the popularization of mesmerism in the United States,Charles Poyen, was quite helpful. Although it is an insider’s his- tory, with all the faults that such a status entails, Horatio Dresser’sA History of the New Thought Movement(1919) was still useful.
The problematic relationship between these everyday psychologies and the new disciplinary Psychology is most expertly described in Deb- orahCoon’s ‘‘Testing the Limits of Sense and Science’’ (1992); in addition, Wade Pickren’s
‘‘A Whisper of Salvation’’ (2000) articulates the complex and conflicted relationship of the new psychologists with religion. We also found the aforementioned Shadow Culture (Taylor, 1999) andFits, Trances, and Visions(Taves, 1999) help- ful for this section.
We relied on standard accounts of events in the sections on organizing and applying psychology. Thus, Dorothy Ross’s biography of Hall (1972) was relied on extensively. But we also drew upon the work of African American historian of psychology Robert Guthrie for his account of the use of psychology by an early cohort of African American students and professors, Even the Rat Was White (1998).
Jackson Lears offered a stimulating account of how elites rejected the changes in American society in the decades just before and after the turn of the 19th century,No Place of Grace(1981).
Matthew Hale’s biography of M ¨unsterberg was very helpful, as was the account of M ¨unsterberg’s work inThe Human Motor(1990).
William Tuke (1732–1822) Philippe Pinel(1745–1826)
Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825)
American Declaration of Independence is signed(1776) Chiarugi directs the Santa Dorotea hospital
in Florence(1785–1788) James Braid(1795–1860)
Tuke founds the York Retreat (1796)
Thomas Kirkbride (1809–1883)
Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) Franz Brentano (1838–1917) Josef Breuer(1842–1925)
Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O. (1859–1936) Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault founds the Nancy School(1866)
Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions, precursor of the American Psychiatric Association, is founded(1844)
Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904) Benjamin Rush(1745–1813)
Vincenzo Chiarugi(1759–1820)
Mesmer settles in Paris after the failure of Fraulein Paradies’s case(1777) Pinel becomes chief physician of Salpêtrière(1795)
Ernst Brücke(1819–1892)
Theodore Meynert (1833–1898) Hippolyte Bernheim(1840–1919)
Charcot becomes director of Salpêtrière(1862) Braid’sThe Rationale of Nervous Sleep(1843) First Kirkbride Plan building opens at New Jersey Hospital(1847)