The "Revolt of the Engineers" Reconsidered

Recent scholarship on the history of American engineers has focused on the years surrounding World War I as crucially important to the formation of the modern engineering profession. This is hardly surprising, since these were the years during which the so-called revolt of the engineers (to use Edwin Layton's phrase) took place. Mechanical and civil engineers in particular seemed to be searching for a redefinition of their place in society, to be seeking a more active role in solving the problems (both technical and social) of the day. Many of them seemed to have concluded that engineers, by reason of their training, experience, and social position, could develop a different, and superior, kind of leadership than that exercised by business. Their search spawned a number of important "causes" (ranging from the scientific management movement to efforts to create a unified engineering profession) and often turbulent debates about the meaning of engineering professionalism. But this activity rather rapidly came to an end in the probusiness prosperity of the 1920s. Looking back, historians have concluded that this was a kind of formative crisis within the engineering fraternity. It was during this period in their history that the engineers came to grips with fundamental questions about their relationship to business, their rightful degree of social responsibility, and the appropriate mode of organization for the profession as a whole. Consequently, a study of this period should yield important insights into the nature and social role of the engineering profession in 20th-century America. Unfortunately, there has been no unanimity as to what precisely those insights might be. In the most important analyses, two subtly