Managing a riot: Chester Barnard and social unrest

James Hoopes Division of History and Society, Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA

Keywords

Management theory, Human relations, Motivation, Leadership

Barnard and the Harvard human relations group

Relating Chester Barnard to his own era may help in assessing his relevance to a new millennium. By examining a dramatic incident in Barnard's career a ``riot of the unemployed'' as he called it this paper suggests that Barnard inaccurately underestimated the usefulness of power and money as management tools. By understanding what was inaccurate in Barnard's ideas as a response to his own historical circumstances we may better apply to our own times his still influential and important insights as to the usefulness of recognizing employees' dignity and power. In the late 1930s Barnard did for senior management what Elton Mayo and the Harvard human relations group a little earlier had begun to do for shopfloor supervision. Abandoning the conventional, Taylorist idea of the executive as a giver of order, Barnard, more than anyone else, created the modern idea of the manager as a ``leader.'' Rather than autocratically running the business from the top down, the leader, according to Barnard, creates a harmonious environment for human cooperation so that the organization can profit from the combined skills of able people working together. The essence of leadership lies in recognizing that real power and control in an organization flow from the bottom up. By recognizing the power and dignity of those who follow ``orders,'' the leader wins their cooperation and harnesses their energies to organizational purpose. Although Barnard's ideas on leadership are known mainly to us now through his The Functions of the Executive (Barnard, 1938), he won his initial influence not through writing but speaking. By delivering a once famous lecture on a ``riot of the unemployed'' at
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Abstract

This paper examines a key event in the life of Chester Barnard, a ``riot of the unemployed'' in Trenton, New Jersey in 1935 when Barnard was director of the state Emergency Relief Administration. In a later influential lecture at Harvard, Barnard used the incident to support the ideas of the Harvard human relations group that recognition and dignity were more powerful motivators than money and fear. Contemporary newspaper accounts show that the rioters were motivated more strongly by monetary concerns than Barnard admitted. Barnard was misled by the ideology of the Harvard human relations group to underestimate the importance of power and money, an underestimation that may still be important today, given his continuing influence. That a man of Barnard's integrity was misled by his ideology is grounds for us in our time to maintain some humility as to the extent of our managerial knowledge.

Management Decision 40/10 [2002] 10131023 # MCB UP Limited [ISSN 0025-1747] [DOI 10.1108/00251740210452872]

Harvard in the spring of 1938 he confirmed the conviction of key Business School faculty such as Elton Mayo, Lawrence Henderson, and the school's dean, Wallace Donham, that he had important new insights into leadership, ideas that drew on and developed the emphasis that they were already placing on human relations. Had the spread of Barnard's ideas depended on his writing they might well have languished unnoticed in his book where, with his unusual passion for precision, he explained leadership in abstract and rarefied language. His ``riot'' lecture conveyed his ideas most vividly and authoritatively to the Harvard human relations group, who asked for half a dozen encore performances in the late 1930s. They rewarded his renditions of the ``riot'' lecture by disseminating his ideas throughout the academic and business worlds. Barnard formed his ideas on leadership and recognition at least partly under the influence of the Harvard human relations group. As a distinguished former Harvard student (but not a graduate) he served on some of the University's visiting committees and in the middle 1930s came into touch with the human relations group. Barnard, though president of New Jersey Bell, had not heard of the Hawthorne experiment at Western Electric, the Bell system's manufacturing subsidiary. Only through contact with the Harvard group did Barnard acquire the intellectual framework in human relations that in turn enabled him to contribute important ideas on leadership to management theory. Although the human relations group enjoys a reputation as a liberating force in management, it had quite conservative political and social objectives, aiming not merely to humanize capitalism but to correct excesses in the democratic political system that, in their view, exposed society to dangerous divisiveness. The Harvard group wanted to downplay the role of monetary incentives in favor of psychological factors

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and especially the satisfactions of community at work. Fearing the breakdown of social order during the Great Depression and in the aftermath of the First World War, they distrusted the ability of the democratic political process to handle the social stresses of industrialism and the radical political ideologies of Bolshevism and Fascism spawned by those stresses. Accordingly, they hoped to develop at the Harvard Business School a managerial elite who would restore in the workplace the unifying human relations that industrialism had destroyed in society at large. The Harvard group was scarcely alone in their worries about democracy. The early twentieth century was a time of profound questioning of traditional democratic theory with its emphasis on protection of the individual against established power. As political theorists of the time strove to come to terms with new forms of institutionalized power in giant corporations, labor unions, professional organizations, and government agencies, they recognized that much of the good from these new organizations could only be accomplished at the expense of giving up democracy's traditional, Jeffersonian idea of protecting individual freedom by minimizing institutional power (Kloppenberg, 1986; Purcell, 1973). New Deal technocrats, corporate public relations counsel, leaders of scientific and professional organizations all engaged in the difficult transition from traditional democratic values to an accommodation with a modern society of managerially intense organizations. The Harvard group, generally more fearful for social stability than many of these other thinkers, tilted toward a conservative accommodation between older notions of democracy and new forms of administrative power. Workplace humanism would conserve, not challenge, the established order. The three key members of the Harvard group who most directly influenced Barnard were Elton Mayo, Wallace Donham, and Lawrence Henderson. Mayo, the dominant voice among them, was the well-known interpreter of the Hawthorne experiment, which provided the empirical basis for the human relations movement. Less widely understood is the fact that Mayo interpreted the Hawthorne results in the light of a longstanding skepticism toward democracy that he had developed in his youth, when he lived in Australia with its bitter class divisions and labor strife. Mayo looked to the business corporation to restore in the workplace some of the social harmony that he believed modern democratic societies had

inadvertently destroyed. As society grew more complex and reliant on technical and managerial expertise it was ever more threatened by what Mayo saw as the ``outstanding failure of democracy'' (Mayo, 1919, p. 59), the ``failure to appreciate the social importance of knowledge and skill'' (Mayo, 1919, p. 59). Psychologically astute management would create at work a ``common social purpose'' (Mayo, 1919, p. 72) that would defeat what Mayo saw as the typical democratic politician's ``immoral endeavour'' (Mayo, 1919, p. 28) of encouraging neurotic fears ``in order to attach them to the social and industrial conditions his own quack remedies profess to cure'' (Mayo, 1919, p. 32). Wallace Donham, Dean of the Harvard Business School, offered institutional protection to the human relations group, but he was also a vitally interested participant in its intellectual life. Looking for a way to raise the then low status of the Harvard Business School by giving it a professional mission higher than the training of mere moneygrubbers, Donham aimed to create an administrative elite for US business that would serve a broader social role as well. Like many establishment leaders in the 1930s, he feared that the Depression and, before that, the First World War signaled the onset of a new age of darkness. Taking as his touch-stone text Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (Spengler, 1980), Donham aspired to educate at the Harvard Business School a class of leaders skilled not in the use of hierarchical corporate power but in the insightful practice of human relations on which he believed the future of civilization depended (Cruikshank, 1987). Donham wrote:
Either we must succeed in providing a rational coordination of impulses and thoughts . . . or . . . see the collapse of the upward striving of our race (Donham, 1931, p. xxix).

Finally, and most importantly to Barnard, Lawrence J. Henderson, director of the Fatigue Laboratory at the Business School, supported the need for elitist leadership in all social groups. A distinguished scientist who made discoveries in blood plasma and human salt retention that saved the lives of countless wounded soldiers, automobile crash victims, summer athletes, and steel workers laboring in extreme heat, Henderson also exerted enormous influence in the development of US sociology through his advocacy of the ideas of the Swiss-Italian sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto and his idea that justice and ethical concerns were rationalizations for the role of dominant social elites in maintaining social

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order. A passionate political conservative whose beard was red, as one Harvard wag put it, but ``not his politics'' (Henderson, 1968, p. 7), Henderson taught a famous Harvard seminar in ``concrete sociology.'' He invited a number of visitors to the seminar to offer unblinkered interpretation of their own social experiences by analyzing them in the light of Pareto (Henderson, 1968; Horvath and Horvath, 1973; Keller, 1984). Barnard, one of the seminar's guest speakers, offered the students his analysis of the ``riot'' along lines suggested by Pareto.

The riot
The second floor of the Old Post Office Building, Trenton, New Jersey, Tuesday, April 23, 1935. In the bleak sixth year of the Great Depression, 18 representatives of Trenton's unemployed citizens are meeting with Chester Barnard, director of New Jersey's Emergency Relief Administration, on which 15 per cent of the state's population depends for food, clothing, and shelter. Outside, a large crowd sings that year's popular hits. A total of 2,000 boisterous relief recipients have accompanied their leaders to the meeting with Barnard to demonstrate their anger at the state's treatment of the unemployed. The crowd's presence and noise signal what Barnard will later describe as ``revolutionary conditions'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 62). Police reinforcements have just arrived. Only days earlier Barnard, President of New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, has accepted the governor's request that he take the job of state relief director in order to correct mismanagement of the program. One of Barnard's first steps has been to agree to the request of leaders of relief recipients for this meeting to discuss their grievances. But the noisy crowd singing in the street below is a surprise element. He has nevertheless shaken hands with each of the 18 leaders of the unemployed who have trooped into his conference room. ``Large and powerful'' but ``badly dressed,'' these men suffer so obviously from ``worry, malnutrition, and desperation'' that Barnard, as he will later admit, underestimates ``their intelligence, experience, and previous social status'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 64). Suddenly the crowd's singing turns to shouts. Rushing to the windows, Barnard and the leaders of Trenton's unemployed look down into a street full of mayhem. The police, night-sticks flying, are attacking the crowd. The retreating demonstrators knock down and trample some of their comrades, then

scatter and run. Five of the protestors are arrested, one of them needing hospitalization because of the police beating. Inside, the demonstrators' spokesmen lament the violence and urge Barnard to postpone the meeting. He sets the next Tuesday to reconvene and suggests that eight representatives of the unemployed will be enough. Departing soon after the men, Barnard declines the police offer of a motorcycle escort. From his chauffeur who has been waiting in the street he gets an explanation of how the violence began. An accidental shove and a few harsh words, the driver reports, brought a violent overreaction from the police (Barnard, 1948, p. 58). Barnard will nevertheless later describe the incident as a ``riot of the unemployed'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 58), not a police riot, in a famous lecture that he delivered half a dozen times at Harvard a few years later. But in 1935, in Depression-era New Jersey, dealing with dissatisfied relief recipients, Barnard draws not only on abstract theory but also on his considerable practical experience as President of New Jersey Bell, an operating company of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, the national telephone monopoly that also owns Bell Labs and the Hawthorne Plant. Barnard will resolve the crisis by putting to work knowledge gained from 26 years' experience in practicing human relations within the AT&T bureaucracy. An ardent advocate of public assistance to the unemployed, Barnard had served the state relief program once before. In 1931 and 1932, also at the request of the governor, he had created New Jersey's system of relief assistance, organizing state aid to the needy whose numbers had outrun the capacity of charities and churches. Barnard's work in New Jersey, acclaimed for both efficiency and humanity, became a model for publicly funded relief efforts elsewhere, making him a pioneer of the modern managerial state in which social problems are delegated to expert administrators. Now in 1935, both the relief recipients and the general public believe that the New Jersey program has run downhill, with the result that Barnard has been pressed back into service. To Barnard's dismay, this new stint running the relief program has begun with a potential public relations disaster in the ``riot,'' part of an outbreak of aggressive activism by Trenton's unemployed. Influenced by radical students from New York and by local socialists, the relief recipients had organized themselves, elected leaders, and begun to push aggressively for

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increased benefits, a move that Barnard believed would only hurt their cause. Barnard set himself the job of snuffing out protests by the Trenton unemployed in order to protect the relief recipients from themselves. Their militancy ``threatened the demoralization of the relief organization of the entire state'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 69). Much of the tax-paying public resented the expensive relief program, which by 1935 consumed more than half of the state government's budget. Conservatives thought of relief as a boondoggle laden with graft and chiseling. If the protest by the Trenton unemployed flared into a state-wide movement, political support for relief might evaporate, leaving tens of thousands of families to beg or go hungry. The ``revolutionary conditions'' would be intensified. Who knew what might happen? Putting to work in the public arena the cool civility that he had learned in corporate life, Barnard aimed to reduce tension as the first step toward controlling the situation. The wounded feelings of the unemployed seemed certain to be further tormented by the trial, just two days after the riot, of four of the arrested demonstrators (the fifth was still in the hospital). Later, in his Harvard ``riot'' lecture, Barnard reported tersely that he ``had requested indirectly that the least possible punishment be given'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 65) to the men, his lack of detail indicating the unseemliness of what he likely did, working behind the scenes to influence the outcome of a trial. The day of the trial, the defendants' supporters filled the courtroom and jeered when the chief of police testified that only one of his men had used his nightstick on the crowd. Barnard, who knew the truth, may have gotten word to the judge, who dismissed the charges, saying that the police as well as the demonstrators had ``lost their heads'' (Trenton State Gazette, 1935a). The judge may also have spoken Barnard's views when he lectured the courtroom full of unemployed citizens that they would be dealt with harshly for any further disorder and that they should purge their ranks of radical elements. Courts were one thing, public opinion another. Fearing that newspaper coverage hostile to the unemployed would heighten tension (Barnard, 1948, p. 65), Barnard made a statement to the Trenton Evening Times that government assistance to the state's 160,000 families on relief was a simple matter of ``public decency'' (Trenton Evening Times, 1935a). The statement carried weight coming from Barnard who, as President of New Jersey Bell, already enjoyed the public's gratitude

for his company's no lay-off policy during the Depression. Telephone service was still a labor-intensive industry, with thousands of operators manually connecting calls. Most operators were women, with no other skills and few alternatives for employment. Yet New Jersey Bell, having lost 100,000 customers in the first three years of the Depression, had to reduce its workforce (Communication, 1977). Barnard spread the pain evenly by cutting back all employees' hours instead of dismissing some. Thanks to falling prices during the Depression, lower pay from shorter hours did not necessarily leave employees much worse off than before (Scott, 1992, p. 68). With his state-wide reputation as a socially responsible employer and his record of efficient administration of the relief program, Barnard had credibility when he claimed to be working in everyone's interest. ``Fortunately,'' opined the Trenton Evening Times in a statement aimed at reassuring both needy citizens and the tax-loathing public:

. . . Mr Barnard, even while entertaining rational faith in the sincerity and integrity of the rank and file unemployed, recognizes the continuing need for a maximum of vigilant economy (Trenton Evening Times, 1935a).

So Barnard had done everything he could to calm feelings when, on the following Tuesday, he resumed the meeting with representatives of the unemployed that had been interrupted by the riot. Just as he had requested the week before, the relief recipients sent eight representatives instead of the unmanageable 18 from the first meeting. Barnard went alone, exposing himself, he later said, to the risk of physical violence, the risk of verbal attack from eight different points of view, and the risk of misquotation after the meeting. The offsetting advantage in going alone lay in reducing tension. The relief recipients' representatives, outnumbering him by eight to one, had less reason to fear his superior social status and power than if he had brought other officials. For two hours Barnard listened sympathetically to grievances against the relief program. Recipients resented the bureaucratic system's waste of money that should have been stretched as far as possible to cover their needs. They could not even get an aspirin until a doctor wrote a prescription in return for a state fee of $1.50, a substantial sum in the deflationary era of the Depression. One social worker, they complained, drove a new Buick, a conspicuous waste of government money. Some social workers treated the unemployed

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with disdainful rudeness, asking nosy questions and playing favorites (Barnard, 1948, p. 72). The food allowance of six cents per meal per person was inadequate, the men said, even when paid in cash. But it was often distributed in vouchers usable only at officially approved stores, limiting recipients' ability to shop for the best price. Able-bodied men could get the food allowance in cash, plus a 20 per cent bonus, if they accepted jobs on public works, cleaning parks, sweeping streets, repairing buildings, and so forth. But some of their work supervisors treated them harshly, knowing that the men had to take the abuse or else lose the bonus that stretched the food allowance far enough to feed their families. Just one missed day, even for illness, cost a man his bonus and put him back on voucher payment. After the unemployed had aired their complaints, Barnard made a short speech, correcting some of their misunderstandings. The new Buick belonged to a relief worker, not the state, so it took no public funds or food from the mouths of the unemployed. He wished the relief workers treated recipients with more respect, but he had to hire ``ordinary human beings'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 73), imperfect people who were certain sometimes to fail in courtesy. Admitting the justice of many of the other complaints, he promised that he would correct them as far as possible. Having shown all the respect and sympathy he could muster for the aggrieved protestors, Barnard turned to his agenda, his goal of quelling their rebelliousness. Moving swiftly from a sympathetic to a confrontational stance, he vowed to the men that he would:
. . . be God damned if I will do anything for you on the basis that you ought to have it just because you want it, or because you organize mass meetings . . . For the kind of behavior which you have been exhibiting is alienating from you the very people upon whom you or I depend to get the money for relief, and I assure you there are many who object to giving it now (Barnard, 1948, pp. 73-4).

just one jump ahead of the bread line (Barnard, 1948, p. 74).

The most radical member of the group, a socialist agitator, agreed with Barnard:

He's dead right. That's the crowd we have to fear (Barnard, 1948, p. 75).

Tension in the room dissipated. Barnard and the relief recipients had found a common enemy the slightly better off proletarians, still working, who held the unemployed in contempt and, fearful for their own futures, resented every penny of taxes that the government took to help those further down the social scale. After another hour of talk, the men agreed that they could trust Barnard to do his best for them and left everything in his hands. He had apparently achieved his objective of getting them to give up their political activism. What a triumph of managerial people handling! Three years later, visiting L.J. Henderson's Harvard seminar in ``concrete sociology,'' Barnard presented the experience as a ``case'' that became famous at the Business School, a primary example of what could be accomplished by an able manager skilled in human relations. Barnard credited his success in controlling the unemployed to the recognition and respect he had shown them by shaking their hands, by meeting them alone as a gesture of trust, and by not taking advantage of his superior status. He seemed to have met the situation with exquisite sensitivity and tact: ``As I look back on it,'' Barnard told his Harvard audience:
. . . I do not think I had ever before made a purely personal accomplishment the equal of this, or that I am likely to equal it again (Barnard, 1948, p. 75-6).

Barnard's interpretation of the riot

Barnard did handle the situation sensitively and tactfully. The respect and courtesy he showed the unemployed unquestionably helped resolve the situation, not incidentally adding credibility to Barnard's emphasis on the importance of managers' recognition of employees' dignity and power. Barnard's message that the manager's job is moral leadership in order to win employees' willing cooperation in shaping and fulfilling organizational purpose constituted an undeniably important contribution to managerial knowledge. Yet, as is often the case with proponents of new management ideas, Barnard underestimated older techniques, including power and money, not just as management tools in general but also in his own confrontation with the Trenton ``rioters.''

One of the men, red with anger, jumped to his feet to denounce Barnard's idea that there was serious opposition to spending money on relief. Only the rich, he claimed, were so ignorant of hard times that they begrudged aid to the unemployed. ``No,'' answered Barnard:
. . . the well-to-do . . . are grumbling about taxes . . . . But they're not the people who are opposed to you. The people who are most opposed to you and whom you and I must pay attention to are those nearest to you those

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His account of the event left a number of obvious questions unanswered. For example, he presented himself as resolving the situation through superior psychological insight while giving little credit to the unemployed and their representatives. Yet they seem to deserve plenty of credit for restraint if nothing else. He says that ``fortunately'' the initial delegation of 18, when they looked out of the window and saw their friends beaten by the police, were not ``hostile or bellicose'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 64). Given his analysis of their motives in other parts of the lecture, it is surprising that he offers no explanation of this initially cooperative behavior. Nor does he stop to commend their constructive suggestion of rescheduling the meeting for the next week, their cooperation with his suggestion that they send only eight representatives the following week, or their restraint in not bringing street demonstrators to the second meeting. Nor did Barnard raise the possibility that, just as he had tried to meet the psychological needs of his social inferiors, they may have worked to meet his, including his need for a sense of managerial power and mastery. He had listened to their grievances for two hours, he said, to meet their need for ``selfexpression, self-respect.'' But after his speech condemning their activism there was an ``hour's discussion'' of which Barnard said nothing except to relate the men's conclusion that ``we would be smart to let him [Barnard] work it out for us'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 73). Was that hour filled with ritualistic back-pedaling by which the men slowly worked toward Barnard's position, preserving their selfrespect while gratifying his need to feel himself the manager of the situation? Given the gaps in his story, readers of Barnard's account, were it the only version available, could justifiably wonder if he made up the whole thing. Or, if it really happened, it would seem likely from his account that he over-dramatized the crisis, especially the need for him to guide the unemployed out of an activism that endangered their cause. After all, they had not staged another street demonstration. Maybe they had already decided before Barnard's harsh warning that mass marches were counter-productive. If so, instead of lashing out at them, he might have congratulated them for their good sense. Fortunately, there are contemporary accounts of the riot in the local Trenton newspapers, but rather than confirming or refuting Barnard's story they only add to the puzzle. For newspaper coverage shows that Barnard far understated the significance and danger of the movement he quelled. The riot

climaxed a two-week old strike, unmentioned by Barnard, of 1,600 unemployed men in the Trenton area who refused to report for public work. The strike, deeply offensive to a public already worried about the relief program's cost, deprived the taxpayers of any return on their money. Public projects calling, according to a newspaper estimate, ``for eventual employment of slightly more than 6,000 men'' were put ``virtually at a standstill'' (Trenton State Gazette, 1935b). Barnard was surely right that, if the strike had spread beyond Trenton to the rest of the state, it would have been a political disaster for the New Jersey relief system. Yet even though the strike demonstrated both the strength and importance of the social movement he subdued, Barnard left it completely out of his account. Why did Barnard omit from his Harvard version of the story so many of the facts, including especially the ``strike'' by the unemployed, that gave significance to the case? Why did he not explain the full danger and importance of the crisis he had resolved? Part of the explanation may lie in the simple lapse of three years between the riot and Barnard's lecture, leaving him plenty of time to unconsciously, unintentionally accentuate the elements of the story that remained most interesting to him. A somewhat understated man of intellectual integrity, Barnard would never deliberately have misinterpreted an event like the riot. Yet he had subtle pressures working on him, including the ideological influence of the Harvard human relations group. Barnard had helped Henderson write the introductory lectures for the course in ``concrete sociology'' and understood very well that the general purpose of the course was to apply Pareto's theory of elites to the visiting lecturers' personal social experience (Barnard, 1948, p. 55). In the riot lecture itself, Barnard told the students that for ease of communication:
. . . I shall use many of the terms of Pareto's general sociology . . . with which I assume you are well acquainted (Barnard, 1948, p. 59).

Barnard lived with all of the moral challenges of managerial power, including the intellectually and ethically dangerous opportunity to explain the behavior of those beneath him by whatever theory he chose. No doubt adding to the influence of the Harvard group on Barnard was their taking him up as a model manager, an ideal type of the new corporate executive they hoped to train at the Harvard Business School. Taking a broad view of his social responsibilities, the new manager, like Barnard, would aim not just to make money for his firm but also to

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serve society at large. Accordingly, the new manager had to combine concrete operational knowledge with a theoretical understanding not just of human relations within the firm but the broad processes of social change outside it, just as Barnard seemed to have done in his impressive handling and subsequent analysis of the Trenton riot. Barnard, an unusual combination of the practical and the cerebral, perfectly exemplified the rare mix of hands-on skill and intellectual sophistication that Mayo, Donham, and Henderson believed the new executive had to possess. The most intellectually gifted businessman of his generation, Barnard was not only an apparently masterful manager but also a sophisticated scholar. Living a sort of double life as corporate executive by day and ascetic student by night, he read voraciously, in several languages, across the disciplines, especially the social sciences. The Harvard human relations group can only have been astounded to find a corporation president who not only had read Vilfredo Pareto's sociological writings in French but had done so before meeting Henderson. Yet Barnard was no mere armchair scholar. His behindthe-scenes maneuvering in the Trenton newspapers and municipal court, along with his psychologically skillful confrontation of the protest's leaders, seemed just the sort of elitist action on which Pareto said social equilibrium depended. Henderson admired Barnard for his dazzling virtuosity, his worldly exercise of elitist managerial and political power, while simultaneously living a second life as a scholar, pursuing the civilized arts whose preservation necessitated and justified a topdown social order. Both Henderson and Barnard were aloofly distant and formidably intelligent men who did not make friends easily. But they developed an affinity in the late 1930s, exchanging house visits and dozens of abstruse letters, sometimes 5,000 words long, on the state of the social sciences in general and on Pareto in particular. Far too independent to follow anyone blindly, Barnard admired Pareto but not as unreservedly as Henderson. Near the end of his life Barnard recalled that in Henderson's ``ardor of behavior regarding Pareto, he was off-balance considerably'' (Wolf, 1972, p. 17). At dinner after the ``concrete sociology'' meetings, several of which Barnard attended in addition to the one at which he spoke, he impressed the other participants by daring to criticize some of Pareto's ideas in Henderson's presence (Barnard, 1946). In his lecture on the riot, he suggested that the

Swiss-Italian sociologist had not sufficiently recognized the importance in small group behavior of the need to preserve individual dignity through social recognition or, in Pareto's terminology, the ``instinct of personal integrity'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 76). Although this correction to Pareto ran the risk of offending Henderson, it had the effect of moving Pareto's system closer to the emphasis by the rest of the human relations group on group identity. Barnard also agreed with the Harvard group's downplaying of economic motives by reporting that his personal experience of the business world convinced him that most statements of economic interest are ``largely derivation,'' explaining in a footnote that ``derivation'' was ``Pareto's term for nonlogical or illogical statements and arguments'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 77). Barnard also supported the deeper belief of the Harvard group that business managers educated in human relations could help preserve social order thanks to their insight that statements of economic interest were seldom what they seemed. The Depression era's ``social discord and friction,'' Barnard said:
. . . is due to the illusion that economic interests govern behavior almost exclusively in business, industrial, and political situations (Barnard, 1948, p. 78).

So Barnard's account of the Trenton riot both drew on and reinforced the ideological setting in which he told the story the managerially liberal but politically conservative ambience of the Harvard human relations group in general and Henderson's Pareto seminar in particular. Barnard analyzed the riot and its aftermath in the light of Pareto's conception of human behavior as governed by basic social sentiments ``residues'' and by irrational ``derivations'' of those sentiments. Hence Barnard attributed his Trenton triumph to the respect and consideration he had shown the demonstrators' leaders, assuaging their desire for recognition and sociability or what Pareto called the Instincts of Personal Integrity and Combinations. Also influenced by Pareto's notion of society as a dynamic system held in equilibrium by a dominant elite, Barnard treated the Trenton riot as an example of ``revolutionary conditions'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 62) where human behavior so defies integrity and common sense that only a rational elite, not an irrational democracy, can maintain social order. Henderson, in one of the Pareto seminar's opening meetings, had presented a similar situation from

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Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian Wars:

Revolution brought upon the cities of Hellas many terrible calamities . . . [as successive insurgents attempted] . . . to outdo the report of all who had preceded them by . . . the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things but was changed by them as they thought proper.

Barnard, citing the same passage from Thucydides in his riot case, compared dishonest and irrational human behavior in antiquity with that of the Communists during the Depression (Barnard, 1948, pp. 62-3). From classical times to the present, politicians had shown, just as Elton Mayo had said, that they lacked the skill at human relations needed to preserve social order. The Trenton riot, as told by Barnard, seemed to confirm the idea of the Harvard human relations group that the fate of modern civilization rode with corporate society's managerial elite. The ideological context in which he was working so minimized economic interests in favor of dignity and sociability that Barnard ended up making a statement upon which he was far too decent ever actually to have acted. The Trenton protestors, he said, had been driven less by their hunger than by their desire for society to recognize their dignity, a need:
. . . literally more important to these personalities than more or less food for themselves or their families (Barnard, 1948, p. 71).

money for relief in Trenton (Trenton Evening Times, 1935d). Contrary to what Barnard told his Harvard audience, money was a powerful driver of the Trenton unemployed, and they made much, not ``little'' of it. With three years' distance from the event and dealing with a Harvard seminar interested in Pareto, Barnard, no doubt acting honestly, nevertheless had selected his facts to fit a theory. Barnard was well aware of this danger and cautioned the students that his analysis was ``pure rationalization . . . concocted by me after the events'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 57). Only his years of practical experience in human relations gave:
. . . grounds for probability that, in many respects at least, my present analysis is correct (Barnard, 1948, p. 58).

His analysis included the idea that:

. . . economic considerations or interests were negligible . . . . . . one who observed only what the men said would have perhaps reached a contrary opinion (Barnard, 1948, p. 77).

Although he admitted that:

Thus Barnard came close to claiming that he understood better than the protestors their material hardships. The food allowance, he said, was ``insufficient'' but ``little was made of it'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 72). A fact comprehensible in view of the greater importance attached to social recognition by the human relations ideology. All very neat but not true. The Trenton newspapers reported, contrary to Barnard's Harvard statement that the relief recipients ``made little'' of the food allowance, that the strikers demanded ``that the present amount for food relief be increased by 35 per cent'' (Trenton Evening Times, 1935b). One newspaper quoted Barnard himself as announcing after meeting with relief recipients that they wanted ``a very large increase in food allowance'' (Trenton Evening Times, 1935c). Moreover, Barnard brought the strike of the unemployed to an end not merely by his sophisticated people handling, as he suggested in his Harvard lecture, but by promising, according to newspaper accounts, to ask the relief council to allocate more

Under the ideological influence of Pareto and the Harvard group, Barnard not only misrepresented what the unemployed ``said'' about money but left out what they did about it, omitting altogether the two-week strike by 1,600 men demanding a higher food allowance. Barnard's strange omission of the strike and the unemployed Trentonites' political activism becomes understandable in the face of the emphasis they placed on food and money. The fact that the riot took place in the context of a strike for a higher food allowance did not square easily with the human relations ideology of the Harvard group or with Pareto's emphasis on personal integrity as a primary human motivator. Nor would it have supported the Harvard Business School doctrine that recognition could be a more important motive than money. The politically conservative ideology of the Harvard group, devaluing economic forces in favor of psychologically skillful human relations as a way by which elite administrators could preserve social order, offered no scope for money to drive a political movement of the unemployed. Ideology charms us to the degree that it provides comforting assurance that we understand our otherwise dangerous world. Once under its charm, even people of great integrity will cling to the comfort of their ideology, justifying it through convoluted ratiocination they would otherwise see through in a moment. Barnard's emphasis on the need of the unemployed for social

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recognition raised a problem since their leaders had in fact ``made little'' of it, just as Barnard, wrongly, claimed that they had made little of money. But for Barnard their relative silence on recognition only indicated its importance:
. . . men often cannot talk about what they most want . . .,

Next to the question of authority as source of learned confusion, Barnard places ``the exaggeration of the economic phases of human behavior'' (Mayo, 1945, p. 48).

Barnard explained to his Harvard audience:

They could not say either to me or even to each other, ``I am starving to be recognized as a man, as a citizen . . .'' Dr Mayo said to me once, ``I do no longer ask what men mean by what they say,'' I ask ``Why do they say it?'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 71).

The danger of managerial ideology in licensing unwarranted certainty by the powerful as to the motives of the weak is clearly demonstrated in the reasoning, by a man of Barnard's intelligence and integrity, that little discussion of food during his meeting with the unemployed proved they were not driven by hunger, while even less discussion of social recognition was evidence of their desperate craving for it. Sharing in the universal human weakness of judging others by a different standard from himself, Barnard failed to ask to what degree his response to the riot and its aftermath might have been driven by his own need for recognition. Deference to his managerial authority and superior social position would, of course, have seemed to a man of Barnard's social skills an inappropriately personal goal, needing rationalization by his description of his efforts to minimize his own authority and enhance the men's self-respect. As Barnard told the story at Harvard, getting control of the unemployed had everything to do with their egos and nothing to do with his. Some of Pareto's disciples in the audience, including Henderson, saw that it could not have been that simple and pointed out Barnard's failure to examine his own motives (Henderson, 1938). Although dissatisfied with Barnard's lack of self-analysis, his Harvard audience was otherwise thrilled with his riot lecture. Henderson called it the best case presentation he had ever heard (Henderson, 1938). Barnard's riot story fitted wonderfully not just into the Pareto seminar but also into the developing Harvard Business School doctrine as to the importance of group identity and social recognition as organizational forces, superior even to money as a motivator. Mayo, who believed that at Hawthorne he had discovered the art of managing workers by minimizing the use of power and money, credited Barnard with extending such views to the executive offices:

The still deeper appeal of Barnard's riot story to the Harvard group lay in its congruence with their elitist conception of the corporate manager as civilization's front-line warrior against barbarism. As the only businessman among the seminar's visiting lecturers (Henderson, 1968, p. 41) mostly academics with ``concrete'' experience far less dramatic than quelling protests by the lumpenproletariat Barnard awed his bookish audience with his combination of worldly grit in handling the unemployed and intellectual deftness in analyzing the situation. By squashing an insurgency, he had demonstrated the social usefulness of the modern executive skilled in human relations. In the first half of the twentieth century, torn by war and weakened by depression, not only firms in search of profit but also society in search of order needed such masterful managers of the dangerous classes.

Implications for the new millennium

Barnard eventually exercised significant influence on managerial practice, especially in his well-known idea that real authority in an organization flows from the bottom up. Workers do not follow orders but consent to them in order to escape the fearsome burden of responsibility shouldered by leaders. Authority, according to Barnard, is a fiction used by an organization to cover up the consent for which employees do not wish to accept responsibility. One of the moral qualifications Barnard stipulated for managers is the courage openly to consent to organizational purpose and accept responsibility for achieving it. But able managers, he believed, intuitively know that they cannot achieve their purpose through power, intuitively understand that their authority is a fiction and that they must win employee consent through moral influence and recognition of employee effort. The deepest purpose of his managerial writings was to bring this intuitive knowledge to the level of consciousness where it could be made part of the education of managers. It does not impugn the importance of Barnard's insights to suggest that he overemphasized them, even as he underestimated the reality and importance of power and money as managerial tools as, for instance, in his account of the Trenton riot. In the general intellectual context of the

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time, as social theorists attempted to come to terms with the reality of a managerial society, the idea of authority as a social fiction and of organizational power as bottom-up can only have been a deeply appealing ideological solution to the problem of reconciling democratic social ideals with the giant corporations that had arisen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Barnard's idea of the corporation executive not as a wielder of power but as a moral leader fostering cooperation would have had special appeal to those like the Harvard group who feared for social order and doubted, as Mayo once put it, that:
. . . ``democracy'' . . . will act as a magic talisman . . . and solve the problem of cooperation (Mayo, 1945, p. xii).

It is a sobering warning for us in our time to maintain some humility as to the objectivity of our managerial knowledge when we consider that Barnard, a profound student of Pareto's explanation of the role of ideology in sustaining elite power, missed the ideological content in his own ideas. Barnard in effect warned against ideology and formal systems of knowledge in his lecture when he said that at the time of the riot he had acted ``intuitively'' as do:

. . . men of affairs . . . in those matters in which they are most skillful, although they frequently, if not usually, take statements literally in matters in which they are not skillful (Barnard, 1948, p. 71).

Although he alerted the students to the fact that ``my presentation of the case in this lecture hall constitutes a case in itself'' of ``my social behavior,'' he nevertheless described the case as ``intended for knowledge, not action'' (Barnard, 1948, p. 58). By this somewhat factitious distinction between knowing and acting he underestimated the degree to which he was a social actor in the Harvard seminar and in danger of taking Pareto and the ideology of the human relations group ``literally.'' As a young man Barnard had come of age in the early twentieth century, an era resembling in some respects our own time in the early twenty-first century, both periods marked by great social optimism promising limitless future prosperity through internationalism, free trade, and technological progress. One great difference between the two periods lay in the degree of society's comfort and adaptation to the managerially intense organizations through which, in the modern world, these social forces largely exert themselves. In Barnard's youth, even as society looked optimistically to the future, the corporation was the subject

of intense political contention, a symbol to many of unscrupulous greed and undemocratic practices by malefactors of great wealth. Barnard was not least among those who helped accommodate democratic society to corporate life by a new ideology according to which many of us now live, an ideology in which the manager fills a benign social role of muted elitism, fostering cooperation within the firm and acting as a public-spirited servant of the community without. As the halcyon days of the early twentieth century gave way to social and political disaster world wars, economic depression, and, subsequent to the period with which this paper deals, the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation it was natural enough that some would find in the manager a solution to the social crises that democracy had not prevented and to which it seemed slow to respond. Such was the more or less explicit position of the Harvard human relations group as it helped stimulate and, later, drew on Barnard's denial of the reality of managerial power and his minimizing of economic incentives in order to emphasize the social value of the psychologically astute manager, resolving crises by fostering cooperation rather than wielding power. In our own time of massive globalization when business corporations are taking on power and prestige dwarfing those of many nation states, when managerial values exercise increasing influence not just within the corporation but in all of society, it is important that we not mislead ourselves by overestimating how humane and bottom-up corporations are capable of being. Unrealistic claims that business organizations depend exclusively on bottom-up cooperation fostered by powerless but psychologically skillful managers surely impair the ability of those who hold power to use it humanely and productively. Still more importantly, maintaining and adapting democratic political institutions to a global economy, not hopeful reliance on managerial morality to surmount the temptations of power, remain humanity's best bet for whatever freedom and justice are possible in a morally ambiguous world. Recognition of managers' top-down power and authority may be vital not only to preserving within business organizations a role for the moral leadership and bottom-up cooperation for which Barnard spoke but also to preserving a nonmanagerial, democratic polity in the broader society outside the corporation.

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Barnard, C.I. (1938), The Functions of the Executive, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Barnard, C.I. (1946), ``Letter to G. Homans 7 Feb.'', Barnard Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. Barnard, C.I. (1948), Organization and Management: Selected Papers, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Communication (1977), ``Fifty years of service'', Vol. 4 No. 3, p. 13. Cruikshank, J.L. (1987), A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School, 1908-45, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Donham, W.B. (1931), Business Adrift, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Henderson, L. (1938), ``Letter to Barnard 10 May'', Barnard Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA. Henderson, L. (1968), in Barber, B. (Ed.), On the Social System: Selected Writings, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Horvath, S.M. and Horvath, E.C. (1973), The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory: Its History and Contributions, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Keller, R.T. (1984), ``The Harvard `Pareto Circle' and the historical development of organization theory'', Journal of Management, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 193-203. Kloppenberg, J.T. (1986), Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920, Oxford, University Press, New York, NY.

References

Mayo, E. (1919), Democracy and Freedom: An Essay in Social Logic, Macmillan, Melbourne. Mayo, E. (1945), The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, Boston, MA. Purcell, E.A. (1973), The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, MA. Scott, W.G. (1992), Chester I. Barnard and the Guardians of the Managerial State, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. Spengler, O. (1980), The Decline of the West, Atkinson, C.F. (Trans.), Allen & Unwin, London (originally published 1926). Trenton Evening Times (1935a), ``Sympathy and prudence'', April 30, p. 6. Trenton Evening Times (1935b), ``Thousand marching strikers surround ERA headquarters'', April 23, p. 1. Trenton Evening Times (1935c), ``Confusion hides status of strike'', May 1, p. 2. Trenton Evening Times (1935d), ``ERA strike at end'', April 30, p. 1. Trenton State Gazette (1935a), ``New violence is reported as court frees ERA group'', April 25, p. 1. Trenton State Gazette (1935b), ``Barnard will hold conference with arbitration committee of Mercer ERA strikers on tuesday'', April 25, p. 1. Wolf, W.B. (1972), Conversations with Chester Barnard, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

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