Algorithmic Modernity by Ames Morgan G.;Mazzotti Massimo;

Author:Ames, Morgan G.;Mazzotti, Massimo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Statistical Control State

On March 4, 1933, the Bell System’s Walter Shewhart gave a lecture at the Graduate School on “The Specification of Accuracy and Precision.” The lecture was delivered in the same moment that FDR delivered his inaugural lines, “The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself.”39 The new president advocated that day for engagement “on a national scale in a redistribution … to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land … helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character.”40 This vision of America depended on a unified political order and the formation of an administrative bureaucracy that could control these projects at the state and institutional levels.

Emboldened by New Deal policy, the USDA Graduate School became a thriving educational center and a permanent feature of the Beltsville farm, though still not endorsed or funded by government bodies, which were predominantly under the control of subscribers to the associative politics of Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Throughout the 1930s, the school continued to receive widespread critique from local DC politicians and national interests that wanted separation between “university” and “government.” This political backlash heightened after the USDA began to implement New Deal legislation in 1933, the year FDR instated Henry A. Wallace as secretary of agriculture. Like his father, Wallace believed that the USDA had an important role in implementing New Deal programs on the state and regional levels. It was the USDA’s role to educate the scientific community and public on what they referred to as first principled research and to implement this policy through establishing a new bureaucratic order that could sustain it.

Efforts to establish control at the state level and in scientific practice collided in the pedagogical initiatives of the USDA Graduate School that were developed for both USDA employees and the public. This included courses for USDA employees, a USDA Graduate School printing press, and a number of public lectures and conferences. A long-standing tradition of the school was to host visiting speakers from statistical experimental stations around the world. Edwards Deming directly facilitated exchanges with statisticians at Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Rothamsted Station. As early as 1927, Deming had become interested in the work of Shewhart and Bell Laboratories. By 1933, Deming facilitated Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Department of Agriculture to co-sponsor Shewhart’s commissioned talks. These talks were organized under the umbrella topic of “The Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control,” which would later become the title of Shewhart’s influential 1939 book, due largely to the support of the Graduate School.41 Throughout 1933, Shewhart gave four talks at the Graduate School on statistical control and the limits of variability.

Deming’s reflections on SQC make clear the collapse between industrial manufacturing and agriculture under the formation of data-driven research. He said, “we in agriculture are faced with the same problems” as in manufacturing.42 However, he argued that agriculture

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