American buyers take it for granted that they can walk into their local shopping center to find toilet paper that will fit their bathroom dispensers, “letter” paper that will fit their printers, and “queen-size” sheets that will fit their beds. In contrast to much of the typical scholarship on the history of standardization—often more interested in the development of technical standards, weights, measures, units, and the like—Dunlavy asks how this state of affairs came to be. From 8½ × 11 paper to the ubiquitous 2 × 4, how did firms collectively agree to these standard sizes?

To the extent this story has been told before, Dunlavy argues, it is portrayed as a “natural process of emulation and learning, set in motion by Henry Ford’s astonishing accomplishments” (p. 6). Firms saw the gargantuan productivity increases and falling prices at Ford and refashioned themselves to fit this new, “Fordist” model of cheap, mass-produced, standardized goods.

But, in analyzing the broad swath of American “middling manufacturers”—those perched between market behemoths such as Ford and the countless smaller shops engaged in specialty work—Dunlavy discovers a different story. For these middling firms, the logic of the market placed intractable obstacles in the path toward anything approximating Ford’s monochrome uniformity. Ford, after all, was a somewhat exceptional entity, uniquely positioned to exploit its “strong market position” and rock-bottom pricing to “[break] the tyranny of the consumer.” In other words, Ford was able to leverage its formidable market dominance and low prices to overwhelm any contrary consumer preferences for other colors or styles beyond the black Model T. Ford effectively “standardized the customer,” as Ford general manager James Couzens put it (p. 21).

But, for all the rest—those who lacked Ford’s size and enviable market position—market headwinds pushed against standardized mass production. As a result, when Dunlavy begins her story in the mid-1910s, product diversity was the norm. Buffeted by the relentless forces of competition (no firm wanted to lose out customers solely on the basis of a size or color not offered), hand-to-mouth buying (the tendency for purchasers to make frequent, smaller orders rather than acquiring massive stocks ahead of time), and the compounding detritus of “innovation” and “inertia” (when firms added new sizes and styles, they rarely eliminated older options from the catalog), middling manufacturers produced an almost endless variety of options and sizes (p. 16). Mattresses came in 78 sizes, paving bricks in 66, and writing paper in 40 (pp. 3, 43).

It was, Dunlavy argues, the federal government that took the lead in streamlining the kaleidoscopic nature of American manufacturing. Her story has two primary protagonists. The first is Chicago manufacturer and publisher Arch Wilkinson Shaw, who conceived and led the Commercial Economy Board (eventually reorganized into the Conservation Division of the War Industries Board) during the First World War. Total war called for efficient resource mobilization: Shaw thus took aim at the “chaotic condition” and “tremendous social waste” of American manufacturing (p. 29). Working with trade associations, Shaw’s agencies drew up conservation “schedules” for some 250 business sectors. Using a combination of carrot (appeals to patriotism and public pledges) and stick (government control of raw material allocations and purchasing), the federal government muscled firms into simplifying production. Some 40 varieties of flashlight battery became 6, 40 varieties of ledger paper became 5, and so on.

After the war was over, however, anxious business leaders returned to their old ways. Pressured by souring economic conditions, increasing organization and recalcitrance among buyers, and worried distributors sweating softening sales, diversity rebounded. Industrial streamlining not only stopped; it backtracked.

So enters the second major protagonist of Dunlavy’s work: Herbert Hoover. As Secretary of Commerce, motivated by his “associational” ideology, he created his own peacetime version of the old Conservation Division: the Division of Simplified Practice. Hoover understood that most business leaders actually detested the swirling diversity of products they had to offer: They wanted the government to resume strong-arming them into industrial simplification. Manufacturers, Hoover observed, saw “something of permanent value” in wartime simplification but felt caught in the vise of antitrust legislation preventing collective action on the one side and consumer preferences preventing individual action on the other (p. 65). Hoover thus offered “the friendly help of the Government” to coordinate the same sorts of simplification arrangements that had helped streamline production during the war (p. 75). Through a familiar process of collaboration, conferencing, and consensus building, the government worked with manufacturers over the course of the 1920s to craft official “simplified practice recommendations,” clearing the way toward product standardization. From the “common brick” and standard letter paper to the humble 2 × 4, official American sizes were given the imprimatur of government sanction.

Dunlavy’s writing is lively (at times even conversational), easy to follow, and compelling. While it is unfortunate that Dunlavy was not able to explore the international dimensions of her argument in this short volume, she nonetheless makes an important contribution to the history of standardization and American manufacturing. There is plenty of work on Hoover’s associationalism, the drive for standardization, and the businessperson’s quest to harness government regulation to stem ruinous competition, but the intricacies of this particular story on the origins of American standard sizes are laid out by Dunlavy more clearly than in these antecedents. The research is prodigious: 135 pages of text are joined to 81 pages of notes.

That said, the work does not quite deliver on its bold title. Hardly an account of “how government made the U.S. into a manufacturing powerhouse,” it begins in an era in which the United States was already the globe’s most important manufacturing nation and covers the much more restricted story of the roughly 10-year period in which the US government used the levers of power to reduce product diversity. It is an important argument, certainly, but there is little to suggest that these stories—say, the 1924 codification of the “standard board” by the government cajoling lumber manufacturers and retailers to hash out their differences over a mere 1/32 of an inch (p. 89)—together form the true origins of American manufacturing supremacy.