Coffin, Howard E. 1873-1937

American Decades | Date: 2001

COFFIN, HOWARD E. 1873-1937

Engineer

Background

Howard Coffin was born on 6 September 1873 in the small town of West Milton, Ohio. He attended the University of Michigan, majoring in mechanical engineering, and used his proximity to Detroit to get involved in the burgeoning auto industry. From 1902 to 1906 Coffin worked for the Olds Motor Works in Detroit and Lansing, advancing to the position of chief engineer. From 1908 to 1910 Coffin was employed by Chalmers Detroit Motor Company where he served as vice president. At the beginning of the new decade Coffin was named vice president at the Hudson Motor Car Company and spent the next twenty years of his career there. While at Hudson, Coffin worked to standardize parts in the auto industry and became the president of the Society of Automobile Engineers. He was one of the earliest proponents of standardization. Coffin's experience in industry prepared him for his work during World War I, where he helped to lead the effort to gear the national economy for war by spreading the gospel of standardization.

Preparedness Program

Coffin was the most prominent member of a small group of American engineers who pushed for industrial preparedness. Coffin's system centered on gathering data, centralizing administration, and gaining publicity. President Woodrow Wilson appointed Coffin to the Naval Consulting Board in 1915, where he worked diligently to lay the groundwork for the administration's larger preparedness program. With President Wilson's blessing, Coffin enlisted the help of engineering societies and Walter S. Gifford, a statistician at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Coffin and Gifford were joined in their effort to develop a national industrial inventory by another engineer, Hollis Godfrey, president of the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. These men were, as one historian described them, "technocrats who abhorred disorder and loved efficiency with a passion that perhaps exceeded their regard for profits."

Council of National Defense

The work of the engineers gave substance to the nationwide call for preparedness and led in August 1916 to the creation of the Council of National Defense, along with a Civilian Advisory Commission. While the council was a more official agency, composed of various cabinet secretaries, the civilian group brought together representatives from industry, finance, labor, and other sectors. Coffin and Godfrey were original members along with other luminaries, including Samuel Gompers of the AFL; Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck; and Bernard Baruch, who later served as chairman of the War Industries Board (WIB). The group met to coordinate the domestic war effort and to ensure a smoothly functioning partnership between business and the government. President Wilson backed the group, stating that the agency proved the "need of business organization in public matters and for the presence there of the best specialists in their respective fields…efficiency being their sole object and Americanism their only motive." The work started by Coffin and his fellow engineers and their relentless call for standardization set the tone for the war effort and the later successes of the War Industries Board.

Failure in Aircrafts

Coffin also took an active role in overseeing the fledgling aircraft industry, serving as the chairman of the Aircraft Board of the United States in 1917-1918. The aircraft industry could not build enough planes to keep up with the needs of the armed forces. Up to 1917, the industry had produced less than two hundred aircraft, but during the war it built more than fifteen hundred by turning to the automobile manufacturers for help. Coffin, who was affiliated with Orville Wright's Dayton Wright Airplane Company before he joined the WIB, facilitated the cooperation between the two industries. Both Coffin and his successor as chairman of the Aircraft Board, Edward A. Deeds of Delco, favored the automobile manufacturers when awarding government contracts. For example, Dayton-Wright received $2.5 million, while $6.5 million went to Lincoln Motors. Coffin and Deeds put their hopes in an American-built Liberty engine, but the engine was unusable for aircraft. More than twenty-five hundred Liberty engines were produced, but none was able to be used in the war effort. In fact, by the time of the armistice, not a single American combat plane was in France. Regardless of the enthusiasm showed by Coffin, Deeds, and President Wilson, the attempt to transform the auto industry to airplanes was a failure. The president was so frustrated with the results that he ordered an investigation into the matter headed by Justice Charles Evans Hughes. It showed that Coffin and Deeds abused their power by awarding contracts to their own firms. The airplane industry did not begin to recover until Charles Lindbergh's famous flight in 1927. In the late 1920s only three factories of the forty that had produced airplanes for the military in 1918 were still open.

Influence

Coffin's emphasis on standardization, gathering an inventory of national resources, and combining the efforts of labor, business, and the government set the stage for much of the preparedness effort of World War I. Although Bernard Baruch gained much more fame as chairman of the WIB, a case could be made that without Coffin's influence Baruch's work would have been much more difficult, if not impossible. Coffin and his cadre of engineers focused on industrial mobilization and stuck to the issues, slowly winning both public and private officials to their way of thinking.

Sources:

David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980);

Robert Sobel, The Age of Giant Corporations: A Microeconomic History of American Business, 1914-1992 (Westport, Conn,: Praeger, 1993).

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