From Progressivism to Engineering Studies: Edwin T. Layton’s Revolt of the Engineers
Edwin T. Layton Jr. begins his pathbreaking and still widely read The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession with a statement of the book’s premise.1 “The engineer is both a scientist and a businessman. Engineering is a scientific profession, yet the test of the engineer’s work lies not in the laboratory, but in the marketplace” (p. 1). Thorstein Veblen had assumed in 1919 “that an irrepressible conflict between science and business would thrust the engineer into the role of social revolutionary” in a soviet of technicians, and Veblen had inspired Layton. But he drew on literature in the sociology of bureaucracy in the 1950s and 1960s to transform Veblen’s argument.2 By thinking that the tensions between science and business could be resolved through revolution, Layton writes—still on his first page—that Veblen “missed the essence of the engineer’s dilemma which is, at base, bureaucracy, not capitalism. The engineer’s problem has centered on a conflict between professional independence and bureaucratic loyalty, rather than between workmanlike and predatory instincts. Engineers are unlikely to become revolutionaries because such a role would violate the elitist premises of professionalism and because revolution would not eliminate the underlying source of difficulty.”3
What, then, was the “revolt of the engineers”? Why should the mild reforms of Progressive-Era engineers in the United States be considered a “revolt” when they did not seriously challenge the political and economic order? The question has come up ever since the book was first published in 1971. In his review for Science, Charles Rosenberg wrote, “In the broadest perspective—Layton’s own evidence makes this clear enough—there was no ‘revolt’ of engineers (Layton notes that even at its height the struggle for professionalism was ‘only dimly understood by most engineers’) but rather a series of elitist gestures, sometimes petulant, sometimes earnest, but gestures inevitably.”4 Peter Meiksins critiqued the anatomy of the “revolt” in 1988, describing complex relationships between the engineering establishment, the patrician reformers at the heart of Layton’s study, and rank-and-file engineers who led a “second revolt of the engineers” by pushing bread-and-butter issues.5 In a recent Ph.D. dissertation on engineers and social responsibility in the U.S. during the cold war, Matthew Wisnioski acknowledges a large debt to Layton but refers to the “so-called ‘revolt’” of the Progressive-Era engineers.“Despite the heated rhetoric and the internal dissent within the professional societies, the engineers’ political maneuverings prior to the First World War could hardly be called a ‘revolt.’ Moreover, the only measurable reforms had taken place within the professional societies, again with quite limited reach.”6
In his new preface to the 1986 reprint, Layton explained how “revolt” came to be in the book’s title. Responding to complaints by the original publisher, the Case Western Reserve University Press, that his proposed “title lacked ‘pizzaz,’” Layton “offered the new title, although with some misgivings.” (He had used the phrase “revolt of the engineers” in an earlier essay on the conservationist Frederick Haynes Newell.) “Revolt seemed appropriate because of the radical nature of the challenge to established values and loyalties presented by these reformers.” But Layton also acknowledged in 1986 that “clearly, all the reformers were not radicals. Most of the reforms discussed were far from revolutionary.” At best, it was a “failed” revolution.7
What has made the book a classic, I would argue, does not hinge on the veracity of the rather narrow claim that the actions of engineering reformers from 1900 to 1930 amounted to a “revolt,” but on the book’s rich and insightful account of the struggles between “progressive” and “conservative” engineers to remake the profession of engineering, mostly within engineering societies. In large part, the reformers adhered to a model of professionalism based on autonomy and social responsibility. Moreover, as a graduate student at UCLA in the 1950s, Layton set his social and intellectual history in the broad political and economic contexts of American history as defined at the time. As Samuel Haber observed in his review for Technology and Culture, Layton was “ostensibly” writing about the revolt of engineering progressives who tried to reform engineering organizations and American society. “Both remained unshaken, however; and in order to show why this was so, Layton undertakes a much broader study.”8 This broader scope helps explain the book’s enduring value.9
In explaining the rise and fall of the reform movement, Layton described how engineering was (re)defined as a profession within, and often in opposition to, the national engineering societies in terms of tensions between professional ideals and business demands, and the “‘status-crisis’ theory of progressivism,” then prevalent among American historians (n. 1, p. 101). The main context for these struggles was a shared “ideology of engineering,” which Layton reconstructed chiefly from speeches of engineering leaders. This ideology, a “philosophy of professionalism,” maintained that the engineer, as an applied scientist, was the “agent of all technological change” and a “logical thinker free of bias,” who thus had a special role to play in ensuring the responsible use of technology (p. 57). In the “first wave of engineering reform” beginning about 1900, leaders of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), followed by the American Institute of Mining Engineers, instituted changes in membership standards, enacted codes of ethics, and dealt with policy issues. The initiatives favored business interests, especially on the codes of ethics, and ended by World War I.
A more militant and successful wave of reform, which covered broader social issues, began about 1915 in the fields of civil and mechanical engineering. Central to this movement was Frederick Haynes Newell in the conservation movement and Morris Llewelyn Cooke in scientific management, an “extension and codification of engineering ideology” (p. 140). But despite strenuous efforts, Cooke did not succeed in removing pro-business elements from the code of ethics of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Attempts to unify the engineering profession by establishing a powerful umbrella organization on the lines of the American Medical Association were frustrated at every turn. The American Association of Engineering (AAE, led initially by Newell), the Engineering Council (the national engineering societies’ response to the AAE), and the Federated Association of Engineering Societies (whose first president was Herbert Hoover) were ineffectual; the latter two were short-lived.
Layton attributed the decline of the progressive reforms in engineering to the failure of scientific management to achieve its larger social goals, and to the decline of the broader progressive movement. As noted by Meiksins, Layton laid the blame on the reformers. This was in contrast to David Noble, whose influential America by Design argued that the revolt of the engineers was an anomaly led by corporate liberals; its failure was inevitable because of the corporate control of engineering.10
In reviewing the reprinted edition of The Revolt of the Engineers for Technology and Culture in 1986, I noted its strengths and classic status while criticizing it (rather mildly) for not treating the Great Depression as comprehensively as the other periods. Missing was an account of the work on accreditation and codes of ethics by the Engineers Council for Professional Development, which was established in 1936 and is the forerunner of today’s Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology. I also noted the good work that grew out of Revolt, including Bruce Sinclair’s book on the ASME in 1980, my Ph.D. adviser Terry Reynolds’s book on the American Institute of Chemical Engineering in 1983, and Michal McMahon’s book on the AIEE and its successor organizations in 1984.11 I also drew heavily on Layton in my 1992 biography of Charles Steinmetz, the socialist chief engineer of General Electric and president of the AIEE. In fact, I used a metaphor from an earlier paper by Layton—a “patchwork of compromises between professionalism and organizational loyalty”—to characterize how Steinmetz negotiated conflicts between his notions of professionalism and the demands of his employer.12
None of this scholarship, including my own, questioned Layton’s concept of professionalization. The claim that esoteric knowledge, autonomy, and social responsibility comprised the “professional values adopted by American engineers,” which were the “same as those of other professions” (p. 4), seemed evident to me from reading the American engineering journals published at the turn of the twentieth century. The standard theory of professionalization, which Layton cited in The Revolt of the Engineers (n. 8, p. 20), also supported his claim.
In 1999 this view was successfully challenged by Ruth Oldenziel in her book titled Making Technology Masculine.13 Oldenziel argued convincingly that engineers treated professionalization as a project in masculinization, in a way similar to that shown by Margeret Rossiter for scientists in the United States before World War II.14 In this light, Oldenziel reinterpreted three issues usually discussed separately in the historiography of engineering—shop versus school culture in education, reactions against unionism, and debates about whether or not engineering was an applied science—as cultural conflicts that shaped engineering almost exclusively as a masculine, middle-class, white profession. Oldenziel noted that ideals of genteel masculinity gave way to middle-class notions of masculinity as engineering became less of an elitist profession and more of a mass occupation.
While Layton had seen the enactment of membership standards based on the ability to supervise engineering projects as a reform of engineering societies, Oldenziel saw them as a way to exclude women, mainly because women were thought to be incapable of managing men. Nora Stanton Blatch, the first woman to graduate in civil engineering from Cornell University, for example, sued the American Society of Civil Engineers on this score in 1916 for refusing “to elect her as an associate member because she was a woman.” The lawyer for the ASCE said Blatch did not meet the criterion of having been in “charge of responsible engineering work.”15 While Layton assumed that the social-contract model of professionalism, derived by patrician reformers from medicine and law, was universal in the period under study, Oldenziel placed it alongside two other models of professionalism common at the time: management ideals of command and control, favored by the shop culture; and unionism, a favorite of some rank-and-file engineers. She reinterpreted struggles between these groups as struggles over concepts of professionalism, and the control that entailed, rather than over the progressive reforms themselves. By emphasizing jurisdictional competition among the professions, sociologist Andrew Abbott has also helped change the way historians and sociologists of science and technology think about professionalism.16
Women—who are absent in The Revolt of the Engineers—find a prominent place in Oldenziel’s Making Technology Masculine. In her account, women struggle to gain an engineering education on male-dominated campuses, and they write novels about male engineers as supportive wives and daughters. A few activists like Blatch challenge the professional hierarchy and press for their own reforms. On the other hand, Lillian Gilbreth, a Taylorite, presents an assimilationist face to the early women’s movement in engineering, in which strategies of stoicism and over-qualification help reinforce gender discrimination. The women who found the Society of Women Engineers in 1950 face the dilemma that if they combat sexism too strenuously, they risk alienating female engineers and prospective female students, the vast majority of whom are not feminists.17
The Revolt of the Engineers still holds a prominent place in the historiography of technology and engineering.18 But its interpretation of professionalization has been revised and extended beyond the historiographic concerns of postwar scholarship on the Progressive Era. As noted by Layton in the preface to the 1986 edition of Revolt, the book found favor in the burgeoning area of engineering ethics. Established by moral philosophers and engineering faculty as an academic field during the renewed questioning of technology in the 1970s, engineering ethics was embraced vigorously by activist groups within engineering societies. In 1971, for example, Steve Unger and colleagues founded the forerunner of the present-day Society on Social Implications of Technology within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They soon supported the case of three whistle-blowing engineers who were fired by the Bay Area Rapid-Transit District in 1972 for reporting safety concerns.19 Any reader of recent literature in the field of engineering ethics will find plenty of references to The Revolt of the Engineers.20 By explaining how social responsibility was defined and debated by the American engineering profession in the past, Revolt has become a foundational text in the field of engineering ethics.
For historians of technology, Layton’s book is still an invaluable outsider’s account of the U.S. engineering profession in the Progressive Era. Revolt is also required reading in the related new field of “engineering studies,” which now has its own journal by that name, edited by anthropologists of science and technology Gary Downey and Juan Lucena.21 The presence of almost a dozen historians of technology on its interdisciplinary editorial board, including Atsushi Akera, Ann Johnson, Scott Knowles, Eda Kranakis, Antoine Picon, Bruce Seely, Amy Slaton, Rosalind Williams, Matthew Wisnioski, and myself, should make Layton proud.
1. The Revolt of the Engineers was first published in 1971 by the Press of Case Western Reserve University and reprinted with a new preface by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1986.
2. Edwin T. Layton Jr., “Veblen and the Engineers,” American Quarterly 14 (1962): 64–72; and Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” pp. vii–xxi, on pp. xiv–xv. The citation for the book’s Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology praised Layton’s use of sociology and psychology. See “The Dexter Prize,” Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 432–33, on p. 433.
3. The relevant work by Veblen is The Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1921), reprinting a 1919 essay; and The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York, 1914).
4. Charles Rosenberg,“Rolesand Professions,” Science 174 (1971): 280–81, on p. 280. See also the review by Gene D. Lewis in The Journal of American History 58 (1972): 1037–38.
5. Peter Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 219–46, quotes on p. 235.
6. Matthew H. Wisnioski, “Engineers and the Intellectual Crisis of Technology,1957–1973” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2005), n. 9, p. 7, quotes on pp. 173 and 176.
7. Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” pp. vii–viii.
8. Samuel Haber, review of The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, by Edwin T. Layton Jr., Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 100–104, on p. 101.
9. For example, Wisnioski (pp. 168–76) draws heavily on the book to describe the movement for social responsibility in American engineering before World War II.
10. Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” 220–21; and David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977).
11. Ronald R. Kline, review of The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, rev. ed., by Edwin T. Layton Jr., Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 835–36.
12. Ronald R. Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, 1992), 174. The phrase comes from Edwin T. Layton Jr., “Science, Business, and American Engineering,” in The Engineers and the Social System, ed. Robert E. Perruci and Joel E. Gerstl (New York, 1969), 51–72, on p. 54. Layton used a similar phrase, “patchwork of compromises between professional ideals and business demands,” in The Revolt of the Engineers (p. 5).
13. Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 (Amsterdam, 1999).
14. Ronald R. Kline, review of Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America, ed. Roger Horowitz, and Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945, by Ruth Oldenziel, Isis 94 (2003): 775–76; and Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Strategies and Struggles to 1940 (Baltimore, 1980).
15. Oldenziel, 148 and 169, and “Old Men Bar Miss Blatch,” New York Times, 12 January 1916, p. 7 (quotes).
16. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988); Ronald R. Kline, “Construing ‘Technology’ as ‘Applied Science’: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880–1945,” Isis 86 (June 1995): 194–221; and Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundaries of Science,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (London, 1999), 393–443.
17. Oldenziel, chap. 5.
18. In addition to drawing heavily on the book for the period before World War II, Wisnioski (n. 6 above) observes that the ideology of engineering described by Layton “remained largely intact when discussions of professionalism began anew in the 1960s, despite the fact that the critique confronting engineers had changed substantially” (p. 176).
19. Layton, “Preface to the 1986 Edition,” xv, and Karl D. Stephan, “Notes for a History of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 25, no. 4 (2006): 5–14.
20. See, e.g., Deborah Johnson, “Do Engineers Have Social Responsibility?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 9 (1992): 21–34; Caroline Whitbeck, “Investigating Social Responsibility,” Techné 8 (2004): 79–98; and Joseph Herkert, “Ways of Thinking about and Teaching Ethical Problem Solving: Microethics and Macroethics in Engineering,” Science and Engineering Ethics 11 (2005): 373–85. Even a critic finds it necessary to rebut Layton’s account; see Michael Davis, “Three Myths about Codes of Engineering Ethics,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 20, no. 3 (2000): 8–14.
21. The homepage of engineering studies is
©2008 by the Society for the History of Technology.
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