Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

228 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY (1920-30)
Unlike agriculture, industry spent generous sums of money on research,
but only for its own commercial advantage. Bureau research, on the other
hand, reverted to the advantage of the public, for it led directly to decreased
costs of commodities, improved service, better quality and performance, and
reduced misrepresentation and exaggeration, all "constructive and wealth.
producing contributions to the economy." Rosa declared that raising the
per capita share of the Bureau appropriation by a single cent would yield
returns a hundredfold, and raising it fivefold "would accomplish wonders." 23
Among the many studies at the time in the causes and cures for the
depression, Rosa's analysis was one of the most thorough and was widely
studied.24 The Bureau of the Budget which he urged and which had been
under discussion for almost a decade was formally established in June 1921.
Much-needed civil service reform, including a slight upward adjustment of
salaries, came in July 1924. And Rosa's "wonders" in the national economy
were to be accomplished, but in ways and to a degree he could not have
foreseen.
A new and fabulous era in the Nation's history was about to begin.
The early years of President Wilson's administration had seen a continuation
of Federal efforts, begun under Roosevelt and Taft, to curb corporate mo-
nopolies and give a measure of Government back to the people. That reform
impulse had ended with the war, and the disillusionment of the postwar
period, climaxed by the severe depression, led to a massive rejection of the
age of idealism, of political experimentation, that swept the President and all
his policies off the scene.
The period of Republican ascendancy that followed, it has been said,
represented not the high tide of laissez faire but of the
deliberate pursuit by Government of policies favorable to large business
interests.'5 The trusts of the early century were to rise again in the mergers
of the twenties, and the soaring wealth of the Nation reflected kiting of values
as often as it did new capital investment. The consolidation of industries
and utilities, moreover, exercised measurable control over prices and produc-
tion, so that the cost of living, after a slight decline from its awful peak in
1920, was to hold steady to the end of the decade.26 Salaries in the middle-
"J. Wash. Acad. Sci., pp. 373—374; Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci., p. 107.
24 See "New York Times," May 30, 1920, sec. VII, p. 4. John F. Sinclair, in the
"Washington Evening Star," Mar. 19, 1924, p. 6, called Rosa's reports "the most
comprehensive and most intelligent survey from the plain citizen's viewpoint of Govern-
ment finances which was ever undertaken."
25 Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914—1932, p. 103.
'° The cost of living index, based on 1913= 100, had by 1920 reached 286. By 1926 it
had subsided to 241 and remained at that approximate level to the end of the decade.
Historical Statistics, p. 127.