Origins: The 1940 Manpower Crisis

This section explains where Training Within Industry came from. It is the story of why a government emergency service was created in 1940, what problem it was built to solve, and who built it.

By the end of this section, you should understand:

• the First World War precedent for the same problem, and the foresight it gave TWI's founders,
• the wartime conditions that created an urgent shortage of capable supervisors,
• how and when TWI was established, and under whose authority,
• who the four men were who developed and directed it — the "Four Horsemen" — and why their earlier experience mattered,
• the founding goal that shaped everything TWI did: a fast, reliable, repeatable way to make supervisors capable.

1The lesson of the last war

This was not the first time the United States had faced the problem. The First World War brought the same crisis in miniature: a sudden, massive expansion of war production — above all shipbuilding — and nowhere near enough skilled workers or capable instructors to meet it. To close the gap, a vocational educator named Charles R. Allen organized training for the shipyards under the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and set down his approach in a 1919 handbook, The Instructor, the Man and the Job. At its center was a simple four-step method — preparation, presentation, application, testing — that an ordinary supervisor could be taught and use to bring a green worker up to standard fast.

When the war ended, the urgency faded and the method largely lapsed in American industry — but not among the people who had used it. Walter Dietz, who two decades later would help lead TWI, had worked with Allen's method in that first war. So when a second war loomed, the response was not improvised: men who had watched production strain once already had the foresight to act early, and to argue that a dedicated national training program was needed before the crisis arrived, not after. Allen's four-step method would become, almost unchanged, the heart of Job Instruction.

2The setting: a workforce expanding faster than it could be taught

TWI was one of the first emergency services the U.S. Government established after the fall of France in June 1940. Even if the United States never entered the widening war, it would still have to produce enormous quantities of goods and supplies for those who did.

The problem was not simply that more workers were needed. It was that the people available had not done this kind of work before. At the time, more than eight million U.S. citizens were unemployed, and most of them had never been inside a shipyard or a factory. Gearing up for wartime production meant rapidly bringing in millions of inexperienced workers, supervisors, and managers — and doing it fast.

Even before the country entered the war, the pressure was already extreme. From June 1940 to June 1941, the nation's airplane production rose by 300 percent, tank production by 600 percent, and production of gunpowder and ammunition by 1,000 percent. According to a 1945 TWI report, the human side of that ramp-up looked like this:

That last sentence is the heart of the crisis. Experienced people were leaving the plants for military service, and the people moving up to lead were green — promoted into supervision with no background in directing the work of others. The factories were filling with first-line supervisors who had never been taught how to teach, how to lead, or how to improve the work. Without a way to make those supervisors capable quickly, the rapid expansion risked turning chaotic.

3The founding: an emergency service, 1940

TWI was established in 1940 as part of the U.S. Government's war-production apparatus. It originated in the Council of National Defense in August 1940 and operated, through several reorganizations, as one of the services of the Bureau of Training under the War Manpower Commission. It closed in the fall of 1945, when the War Manpower Commission itself ceased to function.

Through all those reorganizations, two things stayed constant: the same fundamental pattern of organization, and the same leadership. That continuity is part of why TWI was able to do what it did.

TWI described its own purpose plainly. It was:

Its objectives were to help contractors get out better war production, faster — so the war might be shortened — and to help industry lower the cost of war materials.

In its early form, TWI did more than train. It was set up with a field organization of district offices around the country, staffed by experienced industry people and vocational instructors on loan for the duration of the war, and its mission also included disseminating information and consulting on in-plant problems. Over time it would narrow its focus to training; that shift, and the method that came out of it, is the subject of the next section.

4The Four Horsemen

You cannot understand TWI without looking at the four men who developed and directed it. The 1945 TWI Report makes this point directly, then names them:

Director

C. R. Dooley

Industrial relations manager at Socony-Vacuum Oil in 1940, after Westinghouse and Standard Oil of New Jersey; planning and direction of training had been part of his work throughout.

Associate Director

Walter Dietz

Joined Western Electric in 1902; personnel relations manager of its Manufacturing Department in 1940. Headed TWI's development group; worked out Job Relations and Program Development.

Assistant Director

M. J. Kane

Personnel manager at General Electric before the First World War, then a staff engineer at AT&T on the training of supervisors, instructors, and conference leaders.

Assistant Director

William Conover

Came from U.S. Steel, where he was assistant director of industrial relations; earlier connections included Philadelphia Gas, Western Electric, and Lycoming Manufacturing.

Each came from a senior industrial-relations or training role and joined TWI in 1940 on loan from his employer, without government compensation:

• C. R. Dooley — Director. His career ran through three companies — Westinghouse, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, where he was industrial relations manager when he came to Washington in 1940. In each, the planning and direction of training had been part of his responsibilities.
• Walter Dietz — Associate Director. He joined Western Electric in 1902 and was personnel relations manager of its Manufacturing Department when he came to Washington in 1940. He headed TWI's development group, and was specifically responsible for working out the Job Relations and Program Development programs.
• M. J. Kane — Assistant Director. He had been a personnel manager at General Electric before the First World War, then went to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, where he was a staff engineer on the training of supervisors, instructors, and conference leaders when he came to TWI in 1940.
• William Conover — Assistant Director. He came to TWI in 1940 from the United States Steel Corporation, where he was assistant director of industrial relations; his earlier connections included the Philadelphia Gas Company, Western Electric, and Lycoming Manufacturing.

The decisive point is that these men were not strangers thrown together by the emergency. As the Report puts it, "They had known each other for years and shared the same philosophy of training for production, although each brought with him to TWI his own special experience and talent."

That shared history reached back to the previous war. Dooley, Dietz, and Kane had all been borrowed by the government during the First World War for industrial-training work. They returned in 1940 carrying not only that earlier wartime experience but also a hard lesson from it: the valuable training experience of the first war "had not taken root in very many industrial establishments." They already knew how difficult it would be to convince management to take training seriously. As the Report says, "This time, the work had to go deeper into the consciousness of management."

5The founding goal

The crisis defined what TWI had to deliver, and the leaders' prior experience defined how they approached it. The goal was not a body of new management theory. By TWI's own account, there was nothing new in its programs at all:

This is the founding idea, and it sets up the rest of the story. TWI's leaders had watched good principles fail to take root after the First World War. So they set out to build something different: not a statement of what supervisors should do, but a fast, reliable, repeatable way to make supervisors actually able to do it. In TWI's words, establishing principles and even getting managers to accept them "have practically no value in increasing production." Knowing "what to do" was not enough. "It is only when people are drilled in 'how to do it' that action results."

That conviction — that the answer was a standardized, drillable method that could be multiplied across thousands of plants — is what the next section is about.