The fate of a progressive science: the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, athletes, the science of work and the politics of reform

In the early twentieth century, fatigue research marked a site of conflicting scientific, industrial, and cultural understandings of working bodies. Many fatigue researchers understood fatigue to be a physiological fact and allied themselves with Progressive-era reformers in urging industrial regulation. Reformers clashed with advocates of Taylorism, who held that productivity could be perpetually increased through managerial efficiency. Histories of this conflict typically cease with the end of the First World War. I examine the work of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory in the 1920s and 1930s to explore the impact that the introduction of biochemical methods had on the relationship between science and reform. The Laboratory developed sophisticated techniques to study the blood of exercising individuals. In particular, it found that exercising individuals could attain a biochemically “steady state,” or equilibrium, and extrapolated from this to assert that fatigue was psychological, not physiological, in nature. In contrast to Progressive-era research, the Laboratory reached this conclusion through laboratory examination, not of workers, but of Laboratory staff members and champion marathon runners. I present the Laboratory's institutional history, scientific work, and finally how common cultural understandings of athletes and work lent plausibility to its efforts to make authoritative statements about industrial conditions.