On Oct 4, 1915, ranks of women singing the eight hour anthem led thousands of striking General Electric workers out of the Schenectady Works. Many of those strikers then gathered for a rally in Schenectady's Crescent Park. Among the speakers was machinist and strike leader Harvey Simmons. This was, he explained, a good time to go on strike. For General Electric had good reason to settle fast. It had just signed a $1.5 million contract, via purchasing agent Drexel Morgan & Co., to manufacture munitions for the British, French and Russian forces fighting in World War I.
Years later, novelist John Dos Passos would express the thought more poetically:
Wars and panics on the stock exchange,
Machine gun fire and arson,
bankruptcies, warloans,
starvation, lice, cholera and typhus:
good growing weather for the House of Morgan. (219)
Good growing weather also for that creation of the House of Morgan, General Electric. Over the five years 1915-1920 General Electric would record the greatest sales increase for any five year period in its entire history, a more than tripling from $86 million to $276 million. The only comparable five years sales growth, also just over a tripling, occurred during the war years 1940-1945. (220)
What did this good growing weather bring forth for the Old GE and Schenectady? That is the question this chapter answers. That tripling of sales (with profits restricted to a mere doubling, due to income and excess profits taxes) was only part of the impact of World War I on General Electric. Some 7000 GE employees, 2500 of them from Schenectady, would serve in the U.S. armed forces. Sixty-four Schenectady Works employees would give their lives.
As the Simmons speech indicated, Drexel Morgan and GE had become heavily committed on the Allied side well before the U.S. entered the war. By 1915 the GE Schenectady Works was making things it had never made before, such as artillery shells for the Russian Army. (221)
The Morgan contracts also provided good growing weather for workers' wages. With the labor supply tight, the company increasingly relied on piecework to combine higher wages with even higher productivity. This kicked off a rise in wages and productivity that lasted well beyond the war. For example, over the ten years 1914-1924 the average wage for a worker in the Schenectady Motor Department doubled to 67 cents per hour while the labor cost per motor fell by 15%. (222)
The Works had been a significant military contractor ever since that 1886 Edison Sims torpedo, but never before like this. As the U.S. began a rearmament effort in 1915-1916, the U.S. Navy did not just ramp up orders for such established products as searchlights, shipboard generators, motors, light bulbs, turret drives and controls. It also became more receptive to new ideas. (223)
One such new idea had been brought to the Navy and GE in 1910 by independent inventor Reginald Fessenden. He was born in Canada, had worked for Edison, moved to Pittsburgh as a professor of electrical engineering and, briefly, as an employee of Westinghouse. He then worked for the Weather Bureau, and finally became a full time inventor entrepreneur. In this last role he combined a remarkable ability to come up with major new ideas with an inability to profit from them.
Fessenden addressed ship propulsion. By 1910 steam turbines were being used to drive ship propellers directly through mechanical gears. In his agreement with GE in 1900 that put GE into the turbine-generator business, Charles Curtis had reserved for himself this use of turbines to drive ships directly. So GE was receptive in 1910 when independent inventor Fessenden proposed his alternative. Use a shipboard turbine generator to produce electricity that would be sent through wires to an electric motor driving the propeller. Beside evading Curtis' reserved rights, this indirect turbine drive method also had benefits. Turbo electric drive could transmit power more reliably and efficiently than the gears available in 1910. That higher efficiency translated into a larger radius of action for a navy now seeking to operate on a full two ocean scale. In addition, electric drive allowed the turbine generator to be nestled in the bowels of the ship, protected from enemy shells. These advantages had to be balanced against a slightly lower top speed and a higher initial cost compared to direct turbine drive.
GE assigned Fessenden's idea to an engineering team led by turbine expert William Le Roy Emmet. The technology looked promising, but marketing proved difficult. Navy leaders preferred to use a direct drive turbine system proposed by a retired chief of naval engineering and developed by Westinghouse. It was scheduled for tests driving a new collier. GE and its Washington lobbyists managed in 1912 to secure an extension of that trial to three colliers. One would have the Westinghouse direct turbine drive, one the GE turbine electric drive, and one a conventional steam engine drive. In the test, the GE system decisively outperformed its rivals. The timing was opportune. The still neutral U.S. was about to commit to rearmament. After a bruising political and lobbying battle, the navy decided in 1915 to equip the first of its new battleships, the New Mexico, with GE turbo-electric drive. This seemed to be the opening of a long term multimillion dollar opportunity to equip the next generation Navy . The next four battleships and the next four cruisers were then scheduled for electric drive. Longer range plans called as many as 19 electric drive warships. For GE it was the inside track to a big new business — if the good growing weather held. (224)
Earlier, an even more visionary idea, had also been brought to GE by Fessenden. It dated back to 1903, and addressed a weakness of the new technology of wireless telegraphy.
In 1903, wireless dots and dashes were sent by striking electrical sparks. This achieved transatlantic range but made inefficient use of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum. Each different spark system produced a wide range of frequencies, overlapping and interfering with others. Fessenden proposed instead sending the signals by changing the amplitude of a continuous electrical wave produced by a very rapidly rotating electrical alternator (AC generator). This would restrict the signal to a narrow frequency range. This idea had occurred in the 1890s to other scientists and engineers. Some dismissed it as impractical. Those who tried it could not achieve the very high rotating speeds needed for radio signals. Such an alternator would have to spin thousands of times as fast as one used to generate electricity. This put very severe strains on the alternator 's materials and structure.
Fessenden planned on 1902 to make such an alternator not in his own workshop, but by placing an order with an experienced alternator manufacturer. He first tried his former employer, Westinghouse, but was turned down. Next trying GE, he succeeded in interesting Steinmetz. A 1903 alternator built to Steinmetz's design at Schenectady fell short, but showed enough promise for Steinmetz to turn the effort over to a protégé, Ernst Alexanderson.
Alexanderson had been well educated in electrical engineering in his native Sweden and in Germany. He had come to the U.S. just after 1900 for economic opportunity, then moved to Schenectady specifically to work with Steinmetz. Perhaps as impressive as his technical virtuosity over the next few years was Alexanderson's ability to work both productively and harmoniously with the tempestuous Fessenden, who normally left behind him the debris of wrecked technical, business, and personal relationships. (225)
On Christmas Eve, 1906, Fessenden sent out from his laboratory on Brant Rock, MA, using an Alexanderson alternator as a transmitter, the world's first radio broadcast. Ships' wireless operators heard, instead of the usual dots and dashes, the voice of Fessenden and the strains of his violin. GE now possessed the world's best wireless transmitter. It did not, however, leap enthusiastically into the wireless business. Instead, it required the enthusiasm of Alexanderson, Steinmetz, and a few other GE leaders, such as lighting department manager, Edmund Edwards and sales executive Caryl Haskins, to keep the project barely alive. From 1906-1914 GE sold perhaps a dozen alternators, all for experimental purposes, and mainly to Fessenden's ultimately unsuccessful communications company, NESCO. (226)
By 1914, however, good growing weather for alternators had arrived. Germany, fearing correctly that in a war Britain would control undersea telegraph cables, had developed its own alternators. One, placed at the German company Telefunken's station at Sayville, Long Island, quickly gained a sinister, probably much exaggerated, reputation for transmitting warnings to German ships and espionage results to the homeland. This got the U.S. Navy interested in alternators, of which Alexanderson's was the U.S. best. All this at last helped GE land major customers. By 1917, a 50 kw Alexanderson alternator was in operation at the New Brunswick, NJ wireless station of the British Marconi Company, proving itself superior to that company's old spark transmitters. A 200 kW model was under construction. GE was by 1917 clearly in the wireless business. Marconi expressed a desire to become the sole buyer of Alexanderson alternators. The request would soon have big repercussions.
Even as alternators were becoming a business, back in Schenectady, a team of researchers was unwittingly targeting radio alternators for early obsolescence. This second and longer lived GE entry into wireless would branch off the Edison Elm from light bulbs. (227)
In 1912 Coolidge and Langmuir each got a burst of research freedom as a reward for their commercially valuable light bulb successes. They picked new targets for their tungsten and theorizing. One of the suspects in the case of light bulb blackening had been a process called the Edison effect, named after an 1880s discovery by the Wizard himself. Choosing to explore it was Irving Langmuir. As part of that exploration, in the fall of 1913, Langmuir attended in New York City a meeting of the American Physical Society. There a British physicist, Owen Richardson told how new physics explained the Edison effect. Richardson's mentor, British physicist J. J. Thomson, had earlier identified the elementary particle of electricity, the electron. Richardson had subsequently explained the Wizard's discovery. Hot light bulb filaments "boiled off" electrons into the surrounding vacuum. For this discovery Richardson would win the Nobel Prize. Langmuir, however, greeted the discovery with skepticism. Langmuir and Coolidge had done experiments on heated tungsten components in very high vacuum, and had not observed the sort of electricity flow that Richardson's theory predicted.
Langmuir invited Richardson to Schenectady. Preparing for that visit, two important events occurred. First, Langmuir repeated his experiments and found that Richardson had been right. The currents were present, just much smaller than the Richardson theory predicted due to a sort of electron traffic jam effect. Just at the same time, in October of 1913, Ernst Alexanderson learned about, and told Langmuir about, a device called the Audion invented back in 1906 by a Ph.D. physicist turned independent inventor named Lee De Forest. It had recently been licensed by AT&T for telephone use. In this light bulb looking device the filament was accompanied by two other electrodes, one to receive the Edison effect current, the other to control it.
Langmuir quickly produced mathematical models based on his experiments and the earlier work of Thomson and Richardson. Those models not only explained how that Audion worked, but also showed how to make it work better. This included operating it in a higher vacuum and using new electrode arrangements and higher voltages to overcome that electron traffic jam effect. This brilliant work educated the world about the physics of the vacuum tubes that created the first electronics revolution. Langmuir's theorizing was not however, an invention. As AT&T later correctly claimed, it was scientific knowledge providing a guide to better use of De Forest's patent. One of AT&T's physicists, working independently of Langmuir, came up with the same model and used it in the same way that Langmuir did . That work turned De Forest's invention, the Audion, from an erratic curiosity into the building block of that first electronic revolution.
Blocked by the De Forest patent, GE had perhaps the world 's best vacuum tube technology, but no legal way to make money from it. The company's patent attorneys did their best to break the De Forest-AT&T monopoly. They depicted Langmuir's work as the invention of a new class of devices called "pure electron discharge devices". They even invented a new language for naming these devices, a language dubbed by a GE physicist "Greco-Schenectady." It combined the suffix "tron" with a prefix indicating the tube's controlling force. Examples included, "magnetron", "kenotron", and "pliotron", the last being Greco-Schenectady for GE's rival to the De Forest's Audion. This legal and semantic hand waving kept the courts busy for a decade, before finally accepting AT&T's more sensible version.
By then the good growing weather of war had accomplished for GE what attempted Greco-Schenectady misuse of the patent system could not. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917 it learned that the British and French had accomplished their own first electronic revolution. Electronic devices similar to those of GE and AT&T were in use at the battle front. The U.S. government immediately paid GE to mass produce vacuum tubes based on the French military version. Using skills built up over four years at its Research Lab, GE was soon producing thousands of vacuum tubes a day at the Schenectady Works and at its Harrison, NJ and Cleveland, OH lamp plants. When the end of the war threatened to put an end to this production, the government, as will be seen in the next chapter, stepped in to keep it going. (228)
Meanwhile, back in 1913, Coolidge had applied Langmuir's model to build an X-Ray tube. It combined tungsten electrodes, high vacuum, and a pure electron current. It quickly showed sharply superior performance to previous X-Ray tubes. GE was not, however, in the X-Ray equipment business. It had earlier been in that business, but dropped out. This was not because X-Ray equipment was too hard to build, but because it was too easy. A giant corporation's scale gave it no economies over smaller manufacturers.
Again the war provided good growing weather. The U.S. Army, seeking a portable X-Ray system for use near the sites of battles, paid GE to develop one, based on the Coolidge tube.So when the war ended, GE had not only the world's best X-Ray tube, but also, thanks to its Army contract, a well engineered system to use it in. That "X-ray outfit", a GE publicist wrote in 1920, "rendered service of a high order in the European War." He added that GE's "new and more compact outfit is the peace outgrowth of that Army set." (229)
The Coolidge tube's high-tech production requirements now rewarded economies of scale. It was protected by Coolidge's patent. (A German inventor had claimed the same invention in an German patent issued earlier than Coolidge's American one. His U.S. claims were, however, taken over after the war by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian and not pursued.) In 1920 GE bought a major X Ray Company, Victor X-Ray of Chicago. Thus was born GE Medical Systems, one of the three companies that would in the 21st century succeed the New GE. Electric drive for ships, alternators for wireless communication, vacuum tubes for electronic communication and control, and X-Ray tubes of unprecedented performance were just a few examples of the way engineering and research excellence were amplified by wartime good growing weather into business opportunities. Another example was work at Lynn, MA by GE engineer Stanford Moss. He convinced the U.S. Army to support development of airplane superchargers enabling high altitude flight. It would take another war, however, to convert this success into a GE business. At Schenectady, military request for high speed recording of wireless messages and instrument readings led GE engineer C. A. Hoxie to develop a way of converting those signals into a light wave that could be imprinted onto a paper tape or photographic film. In the 1920s this would be one of the ways sound was brought to the movies.
Finally, another Reginald Fessenden invention led to a pioneering effort at industry-university-military cooperative R&D. Here GE and AT&T researchers, rivals in the patent law courtroom, teamed up with the Navy and university physicists at Nahant, MA to develop better methods for detecting submarines. The team included GE's Coolidge and Langmuir, and drew on suggestions for British physicists, including the great Ernest Rutherford. With remarkable rapidity and efficiency, some promising methods were developed and went into experimental use. Those methods, some purely acoustic, some electronic, were too late to affect the course of the war. They did result in at least one unconfirmed, most likely erroneous, claim of a submarine sinking. More important they offered a head start on combatting future outbreaks of the submarine menace. Sadly, the participants, including GE, failed to follow up adequately in the 1920s and 1930s. This left the US nearly as unprepared for the submarine menace in 1941 as it had been in 1917.
The antisubmarine story typifies the U.S.'s arsenal of democracy efforts in World War I. The efforts of American companies, workers, engineers and scientists were impressive. The duration of U.S. participation in the war was, however, short. Too short for the mounting flood of U.S. production to reach the front. Americans soldiers went into battle behind barrages by British artillery. American pilots flew French planes. Combatting the submarine was a British effort, relying on the convoy system, not new gadgets. (230)
That anti-submarine project was one of the few effective initiatives of the Naval Consulting Board, a much ballyhooed 1915 effort to put the giants of American ingenuity to work combating that submarine menace. It was formed just after the German sinking of the liner Lusitania had taken the lives of 128 Americans. Members of the Naval Consulting Board included Thomas Edison and GE's Willis Whitney and William Le Roy Emmet. Conspicuous by his absence from that board was GE's, and perhaps even the nation's, most publicized engineer, Charles Proteus Steinmetz. This was not due to doubts about his technical eminence, but to doubts about his loyalty. Steinmetz's outspoken prewar opposition to the U.S. tilt away from neutrality and toward the Allies — a tilt evident in that munitions production at the Schenectady Works — drew national comment. "Steinmetz, exile from Germany, sides with her in war" read a headline in the New York Times on September 13, 1914.
Steinmetz's major local effort was a May, 1915, chairmanship of a Pro-Neutrality mass meeting at Schenectady. With its German immigrant chairman, and with its principal speaker being a champion of Irish independence, the meeting was strongly anti-British rather than pro-German. Its timing, however, was bad. The meeting was held just four days after the sinking of the liner Lusitania with the loss of many American lives. Schenectady supporters of the Allies proceeded to brand Steinmetz as a pro-German danger . One GE engineer took this to the extent of informing the predecessor of the FBI, without any accompanying evidence, that Steinmetz was a German spy. Such completely erroneous suspicions may well have kept Steinmetz off that Naval Consulting Board. They appear, however, not to have hurt his popularity in Schenectady. In the Fall of 1915, Steinmetz decisively won election as the city's Common Council President, a sort of vice-Mayor.
Almost immediately however, the winning Socialist team of Mayor George Lunn and Steinmetz split apart over that neutrality issue. While Steinmetz stuck to Socialism and anti-British neutrality, Lunn declared for the Democratic Party's advocacy of strong rearmament and a tilt toward the Allies. Lunn would be elected to the House of Representatives in 1916 as a Democrat. Never again would a Socialist win an election in Schenectady.
So World War I delivered the final blow to the Schenectady Socialist Party. That party was, however, already on the way to extinction before that blow struck. That 1915 Lunn-Steinmetz victory was a salute to two popular citizens, not an endorsement of Socialism. The Socialist Party, which had held a majority on the 16 member Common Council as recently as 1913, held on in 1915 to only two of those 16 seats.
Schenectady Socialism's sudden fall was in part due to a conflict between the doctrinaire Socialists of the party's inner circle, called Local Schenectady, and Lunn's "sewer socialist" faction. In April, 1915, this led to physical violence at a meeting of the Socialist County Committee at Steinmetz's home laboratory. This escalated into a movement by Local Schenectady to expel Lunn from the Socialist Party. This narrowly failed, but in the process fatally damaged both factions.
Working class Socialist political leaders, such as GE Turbine employees John Bellingham and William Turnbull turned away from politics and returned to union organization at the Schenectady Works. For this effort, World War I provided, briefly, yet another kind of good growing weather. This came in the form of a new U.S. Government agency, the War Labor Board. The Board's main purpose was to prevent strikes from hampering the war effort. The Board's chairmen, ex-president William Howard Taft, and progressive lawyer Frank Walsh, chose to do this by consensus and conciliation.
This government policy complemented the policy George Emmons had already been following. In the Spring, of 1918, Emmons called union leaders to his.office. "Now, boys," he reportedly said, "if you will come to me with a reasonable proposition, I will put it to our people and I think I can put it over." By a reasonable proposition he meant a pay raise of 10%. The Union leaders came back with a proposal for a 25% wage increase coupled with a reduction in weekly hours from 48 to 45. The resulting impasse was not fought out by a strike. Instead the War Labor Board came to Schenectady in 1918 to take testimony and reach a ruling. This testimony is a boon to historians. Drawing mainly in that testimony, supplemented with a few other sources, ranging from General Electric's publicity to that Idwal Jones novel, a picture of the early 20th century GE Schenectady Works emerges. (231)
A day at the Works began in darkness, long before even the first trolley ran. Some 100 scrubwomen, such as Mrs. Abbie Richmond, walked in, sometimes a mile or more, to arrive at 5 AM. "If we are late, they scold us," she said. "If we are kept from reporting they dock us a day's work." For a thirty hour week of sweeping, mopping, dusting, and cleaning lavatories she earned $6 a week. It went toward the support of nine children, "one of them a soldier in France."
As she was completing her morning work, light was filtering down through the skylights, girders and overhead crane tracks. The world's greatest electrical works still depended heavily on natural light for illumination. By 7:20 AM clanging trolleys had already discharged streams of shop workers, many of them makers of the very motors that powered those trolleys. Half an hour later, the white collar run arrived, carrying clerks, bookkeepers, draftsmen, and.engineers. On the grease stained wooden block floors of dozens of shops, the workers took their places. Around them, sound rose like an orchestra tuning up. The hollow roar of steam filled the pipes. Chains clanged and compressed air pipes hissed. The thundering roll of the overhead cranes joined in, accompanied by the rat-tat of pneumatic hammers, and finally the rasp of metal from the meeting of cutting tools and gigantic castings rotating in great electrically driven machine tools. All this was punctuated by explosive bangs from "squirming blue hot chips that, every five or six yards, broke off with loud reports, and bounced crazily on the floor like cobras."
Those spectacular sound effects were typical in Building 60, where the steam turbines were being made. On that factory floor machinist William Turnbull, now returned from a stint as a Socialist city Alderman, worked alongside his chief foreman, company loyalist Billy Madigan. All four of Madigan's sons had enlisted in the armed forces. One was already in France.
In the second biggest manufacturing effort at the Works, electric motor manufacture, the sound symphony, though ever present, was more muted. The workers were regarded as steps below the elite turbine machinists. "We were told we were unskilled", said coil winder R. P. Wilkie. He went on, however, to relate how he noticed, in instructions passed on to him by his foreman, that the design engineer had made a mistake. "All of us knows what works around there," he said. "we always carry a little record book of windings and spools and forms, " he explained. "I found out that this coil was wrong, and took it to the assistant foreman and showed him that this work was wrong."
Down through the job categories ranged the ranks of men and women, clearly marked by a pay level, typically in the range of $15-$35 a week. Increasingly, that pay was not a wage, but a piece work target. Working conditions ranged widely, in heat, strain, repetitiveness and even sometimes altitude.For example, in the intense heat of the Foundry, exhausted foundrymen poured molten metal into containers and hurriedly carried that hot heavy load to the sand molds. In Building 17, machine tenders stood all day long at giant presses that punched laminated motor disks out of sheet steel hundreds of times a minute.
Overhead might be seen painter Harvey Sanders, working 30 feet up on a swaying scaffold. Also at high altitudes, in the upper reaches of cathedral shops such as Buildings 10 and 12, lordly crane men piloted their cabs along steel rails with the dignity of locomotive engineers. Down below, lowly crane followers hitched steel ropes, descending from the cabs to the part to be moved. One hopes they did so with care. Fully half the Works' 1400 annual accidents (only two of them in 1916 fatal) resulted from improper lifting or securing a load. (232)
Other dangerous conditions, such as airborne metal particles and noxious vapors, were still present where the Metal Polishers worked. Now, in 1918, serving as their assistant foreman, and returned politically to the ranks of the Republican Party, was former Socialist, strike leader, and IWW organizer Martin Clune. He now also served as Chairman of the of GE's Committee of 1000 promoting the sale of War Bonds. Martin Clune's son Donald, a shop worker in the GE Controls Department, had enlisted in Schenectady's Company E of the 105th Infantry. In 1918 he was in action in France. (233)
Those shop men who remained at the Works typically earned enough to support a family in good times, though little or nothing to save for the bad. The shop women received far less, perhaps half as much for similar skill demands. Their pay was assumed to support a single woman, still living with parents, or to be family supplement, not support — assumptions not always correct. Ruth Rice, for example, supported herself by running a drill press for only $9 a week, of which a dollar was taken out to buy a War Bond in a plant-wide campaign that was only nominally voluntary. Catherine Kennedy told how she had to support her husband and family on her coil-winder's pay of $15 a week.
George Emmons objected. These wages were low because these "young girls" were still learning. The "old girls" did much better. Charlotte Ross, a Works veteran, disagreed, speaking at first too softly for Mr. Taft to hear. Speaking up, she told how she had been seven years in the Wire and Cable Plant and.still took home only $11 a week. A few women did move into the empty places left by those men who enlisted. An estimate by a GE executive in 1917 that women would move into thousands of former male jobs, however proved a great overestimate. A 1918 study at the works found only 65 women doing what what was traditionally designated men's work. The number of women did increase by hundreds. This was, however, mainly due to increased demand for work traditionally done by women, such as coil winding, or new jobs on their way to becoming women's work such as assembling electronic vacuum tubes. (234)
Moving beyond the shops, more than 4000 men and women worked in the offices. There the surface appearance of white collar privilege masked a life of demanding work at a lower pay scale than in the shops. For example, John Murray had started eight years before in the shops at a daily wage. He worked his way up to a piece work slot paying "fairly good wages," then the lure of a white collar caused him to transfer to the job of cost clerk in the production department. This proved disappointing. He missed out on the rapid rise in shop wages, and his request for a return to the shop was denied.
The office workers began belatedly, in about 1915, the same response that the shop workers had carried out more than a decade earlier. They were in the process of forming a Stenographers', Typists', and Bookkeeper's Union. So far, however, it had achieved neither results nor recognition. "It is really getting the clerical work force, I might say, warm under the collar," said bookkeeper Scott Uecker, "to see the shop workers get so many raises, raise after raise, while we remain stationary."
On the other hand, the offices and laboratories were places where women's work expanded, slowly, but irreversibly, beyond traditional boundaries. In the offices, as early as 1910, women had become not just stenographers, but also bookkeepers. Examples were 46 year old Ellen Pipper, 21 year old Anna Seeley and 38 year old Nellie Bekenie. At the GE Research Lab, founded in 1900, by 1905 Edna May Best, a recent MIT grad, was researching light bulb filaments. In the process she became perhaps GE's first woman professional in science and technology. (235)
One last group at the Works, though numbering in the thousands, remains invisible. These were the laborers, a group made up increasingly of immigrants from Eastern or Southern Europe. They were rarely called on for testimony, perhaps because their English was halting or even nonexistent. Former machinist Idwal Jones, condescendingly described the laborers as remote and foreign; men with "heavy feet swathed necks, and faces grey with morning pallor" or "simple ox-like beings with China-blue eyes lined with awareness of ignominy." (236)
For all these workers, from the newest, least skilled laborer to longest serving most irreplaceably skilled tool and die maker or patternmaker, the long exhausting work day would finally conclude, nine and a half hours after punching in, often in outside darkness. Even inside one of the great cathedral shops, if one leaned over the gallery rail and looked below
it was a crater of blackness at this end, distant from the lighted machines; a gloomy well, with phosphorescent gleans over motors. Two Government jobs, marine turbines were humming like giant bumblebees. The sleepy test-engineers, stumbling around them with late-night in hand to read the thermometers that were stuck on the bearings with putty, would keep their watch until dawn.
Like that envisioned ordinary work day, the War Labor Board investigation would also eventually come to a close. Not, however, before the Board heard the company's side, as presented by George Emmons. As usual, his tone was reasonable and conciliatory. He presented figures indicating that workers' wages had gone up more rapidly than the local cost of living (while not mentioning that General Electric sales and profits had gone up even faster). He alluded briefly to the sacrifices being made by American boys fighting for their country in France (leaving it to his listeners to make the comparison to workers safe at home while receiving rising wages).
After all that testimony, the War Labor Board returned a mixed decision. It ruled in favor of a wage increase for all shop workers. The women were to get a higher proportionate increase than the men due to past inequities, though the Board did not require equal pay for equal work. At the personal urging of Taft himself, Abby Richmond and her fellow scrubwomen got a substantial raise. On the other hand, on the size of the men's pay increase, the Board ruled for Emmons' 10% raise rather than the worker's proposed 25%. The office worker's petition was ruled to have been submitted too late for consideration.
In all, the rulings left labor relations at the.Schenectady Works about where the War Labor Board had found them. The unions could conclude that their informal bargaining relationship with Emmons had been ratified. It now had the endorsement of the Government through the War Labor Board. Emmons could conclude, conversely, that the decision left his company in full control of how it ran its Works. Both sides could perceive, if not a happy, at least a satisfactory ending to recent labor strife. Any such conclusion, however, was rapidly overruled by another ending: the end of the Great War.
As that ending approached, Martin Clune became one of the most popular speakers at the works, extolling the war effort and selling those war bonds. At the same time, Donald Clune was advancing across France in the drive of the 105th Infantry to pierce the Germans' Hindenburg Line. On Sept. 25, 1918, less than two months before an Armistice ended the fighting, Donald was killed in action. (237)
That Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, while not officially ending the war, was the beginning of the end for the War Labor Board. The Board did deal with some post-Armistice appeals, including one from the Schenectady Works unions, which it ruled against. By 1920, however, the War Labor Board had faded away. At Schenectady union leaders such as John Bellingham had a plan to lock in the union acceptance that the War Labor Board had supported. This was a single industrial union representing all the workers at the five biggest GE plants, Schenectady, Lynn, Pittsfield, Erie and Fort Wayne. The union would encompass the great majority, perhaps three-quarters, of GE's shop employees. (238)
Had the war, and the War Labor Board, lasted longer, say as long as World War II, this plan might have worked. The U.S. was, however, in World War I for only 1-1/2 years, compared to the 4-2/3 years of World War II. The plan for the Electrical Workers Union was put underway just before the November, 1918 armstice. Before it really got going, growing weather for unionism suddenly turned bad. By the beginning of 1919, the U.S. was already cancelling military orders and winding down the War Labor Board. GE no longer felt the need to conciliate workers.
Bellingham led a meeting at GE's Erie, PA Works in December, 1918, to begin the organization of the new union. This was immediately followed by a strike at Erie. The workers there asked workers at other GE plants, especially Schenectady, to support them with sympathy strikes. This created a dilemma for Bellingham and the industrial union leadership. GE was in a good position to withstand a strike, given the sudden armistice driven drop in business. On the other hand, failure to support Erie would surrender the momentum for creation of one big GE union.
Bellingham and the Schenectady unions chose to support the strike. In this, they failed to gain the support of either the AFL or the IAM national leadership. Nor would they be met with the accustomed pragmatic, conciliatory reaction of George Emmons. Instead, Emmons treated the strike not as about issues at the Works, but as a sympathy strike. This type of strike was one on which GE had consistently refused to compromise. Rather than bargaining, Emmons announced coming layoffs. "The General Electric Company", he explained "preferred conservative unionism to the Bolshevism tendencies of some groups of workers." He also encouraged a workers' anti-strike campaign. (239)
Over the opposition of the national officers of the AFL craft unions, Schenectady workers overwhelmingly approved Bellingham's motion to go on strike. The strikers stayed out for a winter month. The company, taking advantage of slack demand, held firm, and won a total victory. A subsequent appeal to the War Labor Board was unsuccessful. The Board accepted the Company's position that this was a sympathy strike, refused to step in, and then went out of existence.
This was the last major Works-wide strike in Schenectady for more than two decades. A small but determined single-craft strike did follow. The iron molders went out at Erie, Lynn and Schenectady in the summer of 1920. At Schenectady some 400 workers stayed out for 10 months. This proved long enough for the company to decide to close its Schenectady iron foundry. For two years, Schenectady GE bought castings from outside vendors, until it was able to reopen the foundry on a non union basis, hiring back only half the strikers. (240)
Those episodes appears to have resulted in a selective, rather than a general, purge of union leaders. That the purge was selective was not just a GE claim. It was verified by the Socialist newspaper The Citizen. In addition, a later look at a sample of a dozen top leaders of unions at the Schenectady Works found six of them still listed as GE workers in 1925. This was not too different from the turnover rate for all workers. Still on the GE payroll in 1922 were, for example, the two leading unionists, John Bellingham and Bill Turnbull.
So, what did this good growing weather of 1914-1919 bring forth? Summing up those years, good growing weather for GE had been bad growing weather for unions and for socialism. The 1920s would see both reduced to the minor status they had occupied before 1900. This did not, however, represent, either for the city or the company, a complete reversion to past policies. In the city, the gains of decades of progressivism would be retained and extended. These gains, achieved not only by the Socialists but by their progressive predecessors and successors, ranged from professional police and fire departments to a clean and abundant water supply to better public health and education, to making such hazards as the stagnant Erie Canal and street level railroad crossings things of the past. For GE, management attitudes would not freeze into the simple anti-union attitudes of the most reactionary parts of U.S. business. Instead, a new management, would adopt a professionalized version of George Emmons's flexible pragmatism.
During that 1910-1920 decade, GE had taken advantage of the good growing weather to add new works and factories at new locations. For example at Bridgeport, CT, an arms factory built to meet wartime demands became empty in the post-Armistice cutbacks. It became over the next two decades one of GE's major Works. The GE Schenectady Works was by 1921 just one of 40 GE manufacturing locations stretching across the Northeast U.S. in an arc from Baltimore to Chicago. It was still the biggest of those works, but had fallen in relative size from over one-half of GE employment in the 1890s to under one-third in the 1920s.
In its first generation, GE sales had multiplied by a factor of 12, from $20 million in 1892 to $240 million in 1922. Over those same 30 years, the U.S. GDP had multiplied by a factor of only 2. GE had retained its dominant role in a booming electrical manufacturing industry while expanding well beyond that industry. This expansion in scope followed from GE's continuing reliance on the fast follower strategy. In this strategy, the main role of research was not discovery, though discoveries of up to Nobel Prize quality would be made. The more important role of research was to be smart and knowledgeable enough to understand new inventions made anywhere, pick the ones likely to lead to profitable products and productive processes, follow fast, and where possible pull ahead. Researchers could leave it to the lawyers to turn this fast following into (sometimes dubiously valid) patents.
Wartime government funding supported, amplified, and speeded up this exploitation effort. By 1920, GE seemed poised to step into such new areas as electric ship propulsion, airplane superchargers, radio, vacuum tube electronics, sound movies and medical diagnostic equipment. GE had proved itself a critical resource in time of war. Its new technological and managerial initiatives of those war years 1914-1920 were not due to new management strategies. They were adaptations to the social, political, economic, and global constraints of those war-dominated years.
The war also had assured the failure of two challenges to the capitalist order, unions and socialism. The individuals who had led those challenges faded into the background. George Lunn became a conventional Democrat politician. He rose to the post of Lieutenant Governor of New York, then lost the Gubernatorial nomination to newcomer Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The one-time Socialist firebrand then settled for a state political appointment and a home in the GE Realty Plot.
Onetime socialist and labor radical Martin Clune, now a full foreman, became in 1920 Chairman of the GE Schenectady Works Foremens' Association. In March, 1921, he and his family went to the Schenectady Train Station to receive the coffin of his son, returned from France. At the reception ceremony, Martin collapsed and died. For the March 28, 1921, double funeral of Donald and Martin Clune hundreds of mourners filled St. John's Catholic Church, Schenectady's largest. The procession to the cemetery, led by the Metal Polishers, passed flags that, by order of Mayor George Lunn, were lowered to half mast. (241)
Charles Proteus Steinmetz kept his Socialist faith. He made an impressive, though losing, run on that party's ticket in 1921 for the elective post of state engineer. He exchanged letters with the new leader of Russia, Lenin, offering his aid in that country's electrification. (At the same time, a Vice President of GE International was quietly exploring resuming business with Russia and its new regime, though that agreement would not be finalized until 1928. (242)
Steinmetz remained active right up to his sudden death in 1923. Novelist John Dos Passos would memorialize that death in his novel The 42nd Parallel:
Steinmetz was the most valuable piece of
machinery General Electric had,
until he wore out and died. (243)
As that ambiguous tribute suggests, Steinmetz had uneasily combined the role of progressive socialist and capitalist tool. He engaged, perhaps excessively, in manipulating his own myth. He overrated his ability to devise a mathematical theory of everything, sociopolitical as well as scientific. Yet all this faded before his commitment to, and effectiveness at, making life better for his fellow citizens. He would best memorialize himself in the introduction to his 1916 book America and the New Epoch. Addressing the issue of giant capitalist corporations, he wrote that "If I was an unknown and unimportant employee, I would rather take my chances with the huge impersonal industrial corporation than with the most well meaning individual employer." Reflecting on his own experience, he concluded.
Other less heralded Schenectady Socialists, not yet worn out, remained also committed to the idea of everyone sharing in the advantages that were confined to the few. John Bellingham and William Turnbull, for example, stayed loyal to the union idea while back at work at the Turbine Department of the GE Schenectady Works. Addressing the War Labor Board in 1919, Bellingham had said: "keep your eye on what the Schenectady and the allied plants are doing. What Schenectady thinks today, the United States does tomorrow, so far as organized labor is concerned." By 1920, this seemed highly unlikely. Yet Bellingham would live to see it happen — and Bill Turnbull would live to help make it happen. (245)Now, personally, I have no fault to find with existing society. It has given me everything I wanted. I have been successful professionally in engineering and have every reason to be personally satisfied, and the only criticism that I can make is that I would be far more satisfied with my advantages if I knew that everyone else could enjoy the same. (244)
Notes
- Dos Passos, John. 1930. U.S.A. p. 294.
- For a general understanding of the role of U.S. industry in World War I, this book relies on Hawley, Ellis. 1992. The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order. St. Martins. Cuff, Robert D. 1969. Woodrow Wilson and Business-Government Relations During World War I. Review of Politics. 31. 385-407. Koistinen, Paul. 1967. The Industrial Military Complex in Historical Perspective: World War I. Business History Review. 41. 378-403. Rockoff, Hugh. 2004. Until It's Over Over There. [free PDF viewer required] NBER 10580.
- The GE-Morgan contracts are in Box 6a Series 4000-5000 Contracts, FF 4036-FF4078. MiSci. Dated 1915-1917, they cover such topics as field artillery ammunition for Russia, and fuses and cartridge cases for Great Britain.
- F. H. McKnight to General Electric Co. 27 May 1915, Secretary's File, General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci. GE Annual Report for 1915. Schenectady Wages. Shop Cost Indicator - Motors. 5 Dec 1924. Swope Papers, MiSci.
- A Summary of GE's World War I work is in a series of articles in the magazine GE Review, 1919.
- McBride, William. 1992. Strategic Determinism in Technology Selection: The Electric Battleship and U.S. Naval Industrial Relations. Technology and Culture. 33. 248-277.
- Brittain, James. 1992. Alexanderson. Johns Hopkins.
- Neil Reynolds Collection, Box 1, Folder 8, Series 1. Extracts from Sales Committee Minutes. p. 31.
- The following story relies on Wise, George. 1986. Willis R. Whitney. Columbia.
- Details of the GE vacuum tube story are in The Development by the GE Company of Radio Receiving Tubes. CONFIDENTIAL. 1 Mar 1924. MiSci.
- Works News 16 July and 10 Dec 1920.
- Herman, Arthur. 2012. Freedom's Forge. Random House.
- The following description of life at the Works combines Hearings of the General Electric Co. Before a Section of the War Labor Board, 22 June 1918. National Archives RG 2. WLB Case Files. With excerpts from Idwal Jones. Steel Chips.
- Works News. July 1917. p. 8.
- Schenectady Gazette 12 Jan 1915. Works News Jan 1918, Vol. 2 p. 6. Schenectady Gazette 27 Feb 1920 p. 18.
- Obenauer, Mark L. "Investigation into the Displacement of Men by Women," 17 July 1918, in Hearings of the General Electric Company Before a Section of the War Labor Board, 22 June 1918. Case #20.
- 1910 U.S. Census, Schenectady Ward 1, Dist. 177, Sheet 3A. Wise, George, 1986. Willis R. Whitney. Columbia.
- Jones, Idwal. 1929. Steel Chips. Knopf. p. 7.
- Works News Feb. 1919 Issue 2, p. 6.
- McCartin, Joseph N. 1987. Labor's Great War. U. North Carolina, pp. 41-46, 123-129.
- Montgomery, David. 1979. Workers Control in America. Cambridge. pp. 444-452. Albany Argus 23 Mar 1919.
- July 2 1920. Butler County Press, Hamilton, OH July 2 1920 p. 1. Albany Knickerbocker Press 17 Oct 1920. The ending of the strike is described in New York Herald Tues 17 May 1921.
- Schenectady Gazette 29 Mar 1921.
- Kline, Ronald. 1992. Steinmetz. Johns Hopkins, p. 256. GE 374th Board Meeting, 8 Nov 1928 p. 121.
- Dos Passos, John. 1930. The 42nd Parallel, Houghton Mifflin. p. 257.
- Steinmetz, Charles Proteus. 1916. America and the New Epoch. Harper. p. viii.
- The Bellingham quote is from McCartin, Joseph A. 1997. Labor's Great War. U. North Carolina. p. 225.