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

HERBERT HOOVER AND THE BUREAU OF STANDARDS 229
income bracket went up, and installment buying and liberal credit terms
became new measures of personal wealth. But the farmer, the professional
man, and the laboring man, unless he was in the automobile or radio industry,
had small share in the new wealth.
If the aura of prosperity of the golden twenties resulted principally,
as management was to claim, from increased mechanization of industry,
greater efficiency through scientific management, industrial research, and the
rising output of workers, no Federal Government ever before provided more
assistance to industry or a happier climate for free enterprise. Economies in
Government spending, a balanced budget, lower taxes, a high protective
tariff, and a supremely able and energetic Department of Commerce all acted
to accelerate the tide of commerce and industry.
HERBERT HOOVER AND THE BUREAU OF STANDARDS
The most capable man that came in with the Harding administration
was the new Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Clark Hoover. Considered
by many for a time the best man for the Presidency itself and tentatively
claimed by both parties, Hoover, by his efficient handling of the wartime
Food Administration and of Belgian relief had made his name a household
word. His enginering background and knowledge of industry were needed
as the Nation slid into depression. But by nature autocratic, often dogmatic,
and almost wholly apolitical, he was not the man party leaders sought.
When he subsequently accepted the Cabinet post it was with reluctance
and only on his own terms. His friend Oscar Straus, Commerce and Labor
Secretary from 1907 to 1909 under Theodore Roosevelt, once told him that
the office required only a couple of hours of work a day and "no other quali-
fication than to be able to put the fish to bed at night and turn on the lights
around the coast." 27 Hoover thought otherwise. He was quoted in the
press as saying that the department, composed of uncorrelated scientific and
semiscientific bureaus, had too long "been a Department of Commerce in
name only." 28 With Harding's promise to stand behind him, he intended to
expand foreign commerce through organized cooperation with industry,
aiming at lower production costs; and to assist domestic commerce in im-
Eugene Lyons, Our Unknown Ex-President (New York: Doubleday, 1948), p. 219.
Cf. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: the Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920—1933 (New
York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 42. (Hereafter designated as vol. II of the Memoirs.)
"New York Times," Feb. 25, 1921, p. 1.