In the late afternoon of June 15, 1922, Herbert Hoover dropped in to a meeting of forty-four engineers who had assembled in a conference room at his Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. Hoover, who earned international fame as the “Great Humanitarian” by guiding relief efforts during World War I, turned his talents and energies toward the American economy when he was named secretary of commerce by Warren Harding in 1921. Hoover was, in the pre-Depression era, a living and breathing icon of the triumph of rationality, organization, and the progressive spirit of the engineering profession – the “engineering method personified” in the words of one admiring colleague.

Several of Hoover’s contemporaries – such as the social theorist Thorstein Veblen and the radical engineers Howard Scott and Morris Cooke – believed that technical expertise could reform society and engineer a new age of efficiency and abundance. But the meeting at the Department of Commerce was not some sort of revolutionary “Soviet of Technicians.” Instead, it was a meeting of the leaders of the American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC), a private group of engineers who had a more modest and pragmatic goal: to order the inconsistent patchwork of codes, tests, and standards used in American industrial practice. Although the AESC sought (and found) support from Hoover and other government officials, their method of work – consistent with the American mentality that Tocqueville observed in the mid-nineteenth century – depended on private cooperation to create standards that would, in turn, be adopted on a voluntary basis throughout American industry. Unlike their peers abroad, they did not depend on kings (Tocqueville’s “men of rank”) or presidents (“men of government”). Instead, their success would hinge on their ability to convince industrial managers and executives that industry standards would make business less wasteful and more profitable.