Abstract

Private Standards, Public Power: Paul Gough Agnew and the Corporate Capture of Standards Setting

Business in the United States has long dominated the process of setting industry-wide standards. But this state of affairs was hardly a foregone conclusion in the early twentieth century, when federal bureaucracies like the Bureau of Standards and later, the Department of Commerce, came to play a significant role in setting standards for private industry. This paper explains how these initial experiments with government-sponsored standards came undone in the 1920s and 1930s. It does so by examining the career of Paul Gough Agnew, an engineer who steered a new private organization – the American Engineering Standards Committee, and later, the American Standards Association – to a dominant place in setting standards, effectively usurping government control over this critical area of economic power. The paper examines how this little-known engineer forged close connections to corporate interests, building a pro-business organization that would dominate standards setting for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.