est be furthered by rational methods of management and a problem-solving approach to issues. ("Technocracy," a term popularized in this same era, had originally a more specific but related meaning of government by technical experts.) This was an outlook much in vogue in the 1920s. As businesses grew in size, traditional methods of management -- derived from customary practices in the workshops and small factories of an earlier time -- were giving way to the professional concept of management that we now take for granted. Whereas even large companies had formerly been essentially family firms scaled up, corporations were increasingly private bureaucracies, with elaborate tables of organization and, standardized management hiring and promotion practices in place of dependence on personal relationships.
All of these tendencies were accelerated by the experience of World War I, when rationalized systems introduced for the war emergency had achieved astonishing feats of organization and production.
For a variety of "progressive" businessmen and their allies in the professions and social sciences, the wartime experience had strengthened an earlier vision of managerial progress through scientific inquiry, expert administration, and coordinated group action (Hawley, 1962, p. 46).
Herbert Hoover exemplified these values, and brought them to bear in his role as Secretary of Commerce. The Department of Commerce, then one of the least-established cabinet departments, had previously the essentially negative role of enforcing the Interstate Commerce Acts, along with certain limited and inherited roles such as fisheries management. Hoover, however, saw a far more expansive role for the department as promoter and coordinator of American industrial development. It was to be
"a dynamic laboratory for his theory of a federal government eager to encourage private associations as the surest path to progress for all without domina...