They were stuck at a small hotel squeezed up against the side of a mountain high in the Tyrol, in a corner of Europe where the modern states of Austria, Switzerland, and Italy converge. It was the summer of 1869, and a thin-featured thirteen-year-old boy with straight blond hair, Fred Taylor, was traveling with his family through Europe.
That winter, they had stayed in Berlin. Then, in June, they had headed south for Dresden, Prague, Nuremberg, Munich, and Salzburg. Finally, they'd reached the Alps. In Innsbruck, where individual peaks gave way to a solid wall of mountains, they hired a carriage for an eight-day trip, over the switchbacking mile-and-a-half-high Stelvio pass into Italy, then back into Switzerland and over two other passes to the spa town of Bad Ragaz. For the first two days their route paralleled the Inn, the river that gave Innsbruck its name, along a road flanked by sudden upthrusts of rock to which greenery clung where it could. Higher up the slopes, green yielded entirely to rock, then, higher still, to snow.
If the scenery was unspeakably beautiful, the ride itself was dusty and unpleasant. Hour after hour, the team of horses hauled their heavily laden carriage up the dirt road. But at last, concluding a long, gradual ascent of a stretch of new road hacked from the solid rock face of the mountain, they reached Finstermunz. From their hotel, looking out across the road and beyond a tiny, dollhouse-like stone chapel that memorialized the men who had died building it, they could see Switzerland. South of the Finstermunz pass, not many miles distant, lay Italy.
The Taylors had planned to spend only a night here. But as they slept, a thunderstorm swept over the pass. Even on a cloudless summer day, the Inn, tinged an almost Caribbean blue-green, swept across the valley floor with a roiling ferocity. And the stream at the southern end of the pass that tumbled down a sheer, rocky cliff to feed the Inn was a barely contained waterfall. Now, swollen by the rain, it had swept away the wooden bridge that spanned it, depositing on the road heaps of rock and debris. The road was out. The bridge leading out of the pass was down. The Taylors were trapped in Finstermunz.
On Sunday, July 25, 1869, two dozen local men worked at clearing away what Fred, in his youthful, German-inspired spelling, called ''rubbisch.'' A twenty-minute hike up from the hotel, the bridge stood beside a stone fortress, all hulking granite and firing slits, built into the cliffs twenty years before. While the men worked--with no great industry, it seemed to Fred--he, brother Winslow, and cousin George climbed amid the tumble of rocks, hiked with their alpenstocks, even joined soldiers from the fort in their gymnastics exercises.
For the boys, it was all great fun. But Fred's father wanted to get going and, by that evening, was losing his patience. He, Fred, and the old coachman they'd hired to drive them through the Alps went up to the bridge site again to check on progress. By then, wrote Fred, ''there were but a few common workmen'' left, trying to fashion a temporary structure strong enough to bear the weight of their heavy carriage. It ought to be ready, they were told, by noon the following day.
It had better be, Mr. Taylor advised the coachman; if they couldn't leave the next morning, he'd have no recourse but to dismiss him. They would leave him and the carriage behind, and get their baggage carried across whatever ramshackle structure was by then in place, to the village on the other side. Then they'd continue to the Stelvio in one of the big mail coaches that regularly plied the pass.
"Well", wrote Fred, ''this stirred the old man up.'' The coachman returned the next morning to the bridge site, remonstrated with the road crew chief to hurry, conveyed Mr. Taylor's offer of twelve guldens for getting their carriage across, and even shouldered several loads of boards himself to speed progress. By early that afternoon, the bridge was finished, their carriage was borne across, and they were on their way to the Stelvio.
Mr. Taylor had gotten his way.
On almost every page of the journal Fred kept in Europe, money talks, just as it did at Finstermunz. One time, just back in Lucerne from a few days' sightseeing across the lake, they arrived at a boardinghouse during a heavy rain, only to be told by the proprietor they could not stay; there was a three-night minimum. ''Father induced her, however,'' noted young Fred matter-of-factly, ''to take us in at a higher price than usual.''
A week later, they were riding in a large, open traveling carriage up toward the Furka pass, out of Hospentahl, the little town on the floor of a green, secluded Alpine valley where they'd spent the night. An hour into the climb, with the town a speck below them, there were only the mountains, the fields of wildflowers, the winding road, and the clip-clop of the horses. Their seat backs pressed gently against them with each rhythmic surge of the horses against their harnesses. And then abruptly, eighteen-year-old Edith Wright, with whom they were traveling, realized she had left her watch back at the hotel.
Turn right around and return to Hospentahl? No need. Rather, the Taylors offered a guide they met along the road fifteen francs to bring it back. The guide sped down the pass and within an hour had caught up with them again; the watch was safe, aboard the next mail coach. The day was saved. The boys leisurely explored a glacier's clear green ice. That evening at the hotel, Edith had her watch.
In Europe, as all through his youth, Fred saw money--the promise of its gain or the threat of its loss--bending others to the service of him and his family. The Taylors weren't rich like the Rockefellers, but they were rich enough to experience life in all its sumptuous variety. They didn't wallow in luxury, but they were not ascetic, either. They spent freely to taste life's pleasures for themselves and their children. Money granted them freedom and release, bought convenience, compelled cooperation.
Earlier that year, in Berlin, we "had our windows thoroughly washed up today," wrote Fred. "It makes our rooms much lighter." The Taylors attended the theater. They bought works of art, lace, firearms. They employed servants. They stayed at fine hotels. Later, back in the States, when Fred was off at school and wanted a boat, he got a boat. When his father had a pair of fine boots made for him but worried they might not fit, he wrote to say that Fred could always send them back and they'd have another pair made.
For Fred Taylor as he was growing up, "privilege" wasn't luxury but that richness of experience made possible by means. The Taylors used their wealth to travel where they wished, for however long they wished, to nourish the highest and best parts of themselves, to buy reprieve from the grind endured by legions of the poor. And it all flowed so naturally from their circumstances in life that young Fred would have had to be far more alive to the nuances of social inequality than he was to realize how much it shaped him.
Later, in recounting his life before congressional committees, to college students and businessmen, or in court, Taylor did not deny his privileged circumstances. "My father had some means," he'd allow. But if he noted this fact, he did so in passing, as one among many, immediately swallowed up in his customary account of his days as apprentice, laborer, machinist, and engineer. By the time he became famous, his stint in the shop could seem all of a piece with his status as a gentleman, like two equal weights, occupying opposite ends of a balance scale and emblematic of the evenhanded regard for workman and boss with which he credited himself.
So delicate was this balance that, shift it but slightly and it could seem, as in abridged encyclopedia accounts, as if he'd worked his way up from nothing, Abe Lincoln-style. "He was apprenticed as patternmaker and machinist in a small Philadelphia firm" one encyclopedia entry had it, without reference to his family's wealth or social position. When Taylor died, a French champion of his views, Charles de Freminville, noted that many had attributed to him "a workingman's mentality" but that this was "an error very promptly dissipated" by the facts.
And a great error it was. When he was older, Taylor did serve an apprenticeship and did work as a laborer and machinist. But by then his values were formed. Looking back upon a period early in their marriage when he and his wife "were obliged to mingle with people from all parts of the country," Taylor would write, "we found the finest kind of men and women living in all ranks of society, and in the smallest and most out-of-the-way places. We both valued this experience, because of the enlarged sympathies it gave us," he concluded, "for our own kind."
Frederick Winslow Taylor was born on March 20, 1856, the second son of Franklin and Emily Taylor, in Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia. His brother, Edward Winslow Taylor, known as Win, was two years older. A sister, Mary Newbold Taylor, was born in 1858.
As a boy, he attended a Germantown private school.
Around the spring of 1868, when he was twelve, the family traveled to Europe, where they stayed for three years.
Soon after their return to Philadelphia, Fred was sent to Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire. The plan was for him to enroll at Harvard and become a lawyer.
In June 1874, after two years at Exeter, he took the Harvard admissions examination and passed with honors.
But he didn't go to Harvard, and he didn't become a lawyer. He went to work.
These are the raw facts of his early years. Taylor's life, even more than most, draws us irresistibly to this period. For the events that shaped his thinking all took place by the time he was twenty-five, and the great turn in his life, away from Harvard and the law, came when he was eighteen. Until then, his life had proceeded on a comfortably predictable course. Afterward, claiming almost religious insight granted by experiences normally alien to those of his own station, he would set out to preach a new industrial gospel to the nation and the world.
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