The most intense period of concern about standardization, during which the term became common currency in discussions about the workings of the economy, was the first three decades of the twentieth century. During those years, the passion for standardization was directed toward all parts of the economy, from raw materials to manufactured goods, styles of construction, regulations, and measures and weights. Urgent calls were made for the standardization of a vast range of materials, products, and services, including public utilities, freight cars, trucks, automobiles, trafic control systems, munitions, currency, education, color charts, textiles, all manner of produce, credit arrangements, real estate agent qualifications, worker’s accident compensation rates, tennis balls, golf balls, bowling balls, the list goes on and on. There were even appeals for the standardization of methods of evangelizing. Reverend A. N. Archibald of Lowell, Massachusetts, surveying in 1918 what he took to be the dismal state of the national evangelical mission, concluded that the essence of the problem was a deficit of standardized method.10 “There can be no success in this [spiritual] war without standardization,” he pronounced, continuing: “If the fight is to be won swiftly, definitely, and completely, evangelism and its methods must be standardized.”11 In the early decades of the century standardization was frequently identified as an element of the zeitgeist: “This is an age of the standardization of everything” announced a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, an opinion frequently echoed in newspapers and periodicals.12 In the first Yearbook issued by the American Engineering Standards Committee in 1927, standardization was breathlessly described as “the outstanding note of this century,” reaching “the remotest details of our industrial regime” and making use of “all sources of scientific knowledge and [afecting] every phase of design, production, and utilization” (quoted in Cochrane 1966, p. 256).13 Indeed such was the enthusiasm for standardization in this period that it became a target for humorous comment. The
Standardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages
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