Thus when the Navy attempted in 1912 to introduce a British management system—less doctrinaire than Taylorism, though with the same ends of efficiency and increased production—workers at Charlestown were immediately on their guard. The system’s reorganization of the yard’s divisions also upset established power relationships between traditional sea (line) officers and newer and often younger engineering (staff) types, tilting the balance in favor of the latter. Not surprisingly, line and staff were polarized over the merits of the new order, accusing each other respectively of obstructing progress and overmanaging.
In this charged atmosphere, when two overzealous junior officers attempted to introduce minute Taylor-like task breakdowns at Charlestown, the metal workers at the yard took action. They asked their congressman to hand-deliver a protest to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Roosevelt agreed in principle with scientific management, he was generally sympathetic to labor and refused to implement a system that the yard workers opposed.
Machine shop workers pose for a group picture in Dry Dock 1, about 1905. At this time a little more than 2,000 employees worked at the Charlestown yard.
U.S.S. Whitney rises amid a forest of scaffolding. The keel of the 484-foot destroyer tender—the largest vessel ever built at Charlestown—was laid down in 1921. It took two and a half years to build. After surviving the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Whitney served in the Pacific during World War II.
Roosevelt’s visit to the yard in 1913, during which he let it be known that certain junior officers were being reassigned, focused national attention on the controversy and encouraged other yard workers around the nation. A delegation representing them lobbied against Taylorism, eventually persuading Congress to outlaw such management systems in navy yards. Yet when it was all over, the Charlestown yard was organized quite differently than in the 19th century, making it a more efficient builder and repairer of modern naval vessels and helping it to perform as it did during World War I.
U.S.S. Bridge, commissioned as the first American troops were enroute to France, exemplified the yard’s progress since the dark 1880s. Following a long campaign by a job-desperate Boston to have the ship built at Charlestown, Bridge was laid down in 1914 and launched two years later. It was the Navy’s first refrigerated supply ship, with a steel hull and a boiler that could burn oil or coal. Its 423-foot length made Bridge the largest vessel yet built at Charlestown and its first major ship since the 1870s.
After demonstrating its competence with Bridge, Charlestown was assigned Brazos, two other fuel ships, and a destroyer tender. The war-spurred building program helped Charlestown stay busy when peace came, as the last three vessels weren’t laid down until after the armistice. In fact the number of employees actually rose, to almost 13,000 in 1919. Besides the shipbuilding, there was work converting ships to troop transports to bring the soldiers home and stripping military gear from ships returning to civilian service. Charlestown repaired a large number of destroyers, subs, and battleships small enough for Dry Dock 2. To increase its docking capacity, the yard purchased in 1920 a new state-built dry dock in South Boston. At the time it was the country’s largest dry dock, becoming the nucleus of the yard’s South Boston Annex.
Events conspired in the 1920s to dampen the yard’s postwar prosperity. The 1922 Five-Power Treaty limited new ship construction and the overall number of vessels, meaning less repair and outfitting work for naval shipyards. In any case the political mood was to spend money on other things. After the destroyer tender Whitney was launched in 1923, there was no more construction at Charlestown, other than a couple of tugs, for the rest of the decade. And as the Japanese grew increasingly expansionist, much of the fleet was moved to the West Coast, further reducing work at the yard.