In this small book, the noted business historian Coleen Dunlavy carefully recounts the history of the movement for standardization and “simplification” of industrial practices in the United States in the early twentieth century. Although there were earlier presentiments, mostly surrounding the idea of scientific management in the nineteenth century, the full-blown standardization movement was the product of war planning in WWI, where a reduction in the types, styles, and sizes of products was seen as essential for conserving resources for the war effort. Herbert Hoover and his Commerce Department breathed new life into the movement after the war, touting the elimination of industrial “waste” as a surefire means to spur to economic growth.

This book will certainly serve as a useful resource for scholars studying industrial policy in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, however, the book fails to make the case asserted in its subtitle, and in crucial ways it misleads readers about the actual nature and effects of the standardization movement. This is because Dunlavy appears to take at face value the pronouncements of the historical figures she is writing about, whom she follows into a jumble of confusion and misdirection.

It is a longstanding argument in economic history that nineteenth-century American mass production benefited not only from a large market but also from a willingness of American consumers (unlike their British counterparts) to accept standardized products. This is Dunlavy’s jumping-off point. Like Hoover and his contemporaries, she is sure that by working to reduce the diversity of products, the government was helping manufacturers to produce at greater output levels and thus to benefit from economies of scale. While it is certainly true that some government-inspired standardization was of this sort, much of what Hoover’s department pushed for was actually a quite different kind of standardization. And product standardization for the sake of manufacturing (rather than economic) efficiency was far from an unambiguous benefit to American industry, let alone to consumers.

The example of Henry Ford was firmly in everyone’s mind: producing a standardized product at high volume meant low cost and rapid learning economies. But Ford had not needed the Commerce Department to put this idea in his mind. Moreover, consumers continued to have access to a wide variety of distinctive cars they could purchase for a higher price. By the nineteen twenties, American consumers were richer than British consumers had been in the nineteenth century, and they did not always want to trade away desirable product features for a lower price. Even if inducing manufacturers to make more standardized products generated improved manufacturing capabilities—and Dunlavy never provides any evidence of this—consumers may not have been better off. Contemporary proponents of product standardization typically assumed that economies of scale were unbounded. In reality, minimum efficient scale was often reached quickly, and the main effect of standardization was to reduce consumer choice.

Perhaps more significantly, much of the standardization of the era was not of the Model-T sort. As the book’s title suggests, Dunlavy is interested in the standardization of product sizes. Her favorite example is mattresses. But she never seems to notice that standardizing mattress sizes was entirely about network effects, not mass production. Standard sizes benefit me when I buy complements like sheets and bed frames, not because they make mattresses cheaper. Mattresses were and are made by hundreds of manufacturers, and there were and are a few significant economies of scale in production. This is not to say that such standardization was not valuable, nor that some government coordination would not have been important in overcoming transaction costs. But none of that kind of standardization turned the United States into a manufacturing powerhouse.

Standardization of product sizes is often a pure coordination game, like the famous example of choosing which side of the road to drive on. None of the players cares about which alternative is chosen; all anyone cares about is that some (reasonable) alternative is chosen. However, in many other cases, sometimes including sizes, participants do care which alternative is chosen. The principals of the early-century standardization movement universally considered consumer preferences to be beneath concern. For one source that Dunlavy cites often (Homer Hoyt, “Standardization and Its Relation to Industrial Concentration.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 82 [1919]: 271–77), consumer tastes are but “eccentric notions,” “fads and luxuries,” and “useless frills.”

In the end, the most surprising part of Small, Medium, Large is that Dunlavy never appraises, let alone criticizes, her subjects, unless by letting them speak in their own often supercilious voices she intends to imply critique. And though she shows clearly the obsessive character of the standardization movement—proponents frequently pushed for standardization of sizes even when there were neither economies of scale nor network effects involved, as in paper grocery bags (p. 85)—she never examines standardization as an ideology and never places it in the context of the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century.