"What's on the worker's mind": class passing and the study of the industrial workplace in the 1920s

Posing, living, and laboring as American workers, several 1920s reformist labor investigators sought to develop an alternative to Frederick Taylor's famous characterization of a typical manual laborer as mentally akin to an ox. Through their experiences as workers, they believed that they gained real if limited access to working-class psychology. Accordingly, they presented views of the worker's mind that significantly loosened the strictures of hereditarian and, especially in the case of foreign-born workers, scientific racist thought. But their efforts were shaped by their own backgrounds and biases, and by those of the academic authorities upon whose work they built, and were also mediated through the complexities of their efforts to pass across the class line. Their work finally lent itself less to the purposes of industrial democracy and reform than to those of the rising 1920s schools of industrial psychology, industrial sociology, and personnel relations.