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

232 THE TIDE OF COMMERCE AND iNDUSTRY (1920-30)
program, were to continue for more than a decade before being merged
in the regular work of the Bureau.34
The nine were among the last of the special appropriations made to the
Bureau. Coming into office on an economy wave, Hoover in a public an-
nouncement declared: "This is no time to ask for appropriations to under-
take new work. It is the time to search for economy and reorganization, for
effective expenditure on essentials, the reduction of less essentials, and the
elimination of duplication." u The same regimen held true for the general
economy. Recalling the scene of widespread unrest and unemployment as
he took office, Hoover was later to say: "There was no special outstanding
industrial revolution in sight. We had to make one." His prescription for
the recovery of industry "from [its] war deterioration" was through "elimi-
nation of waste and increasing the efficiency of our commercial and indus-
trial system all along the line."
To do this, Hoover divided the direction of his bureaus between two
special assistants, "except Foreign and Domestic Commerce and Standards,
which I took under my own wing." These two bureaus represented ideal
instruments for jogging a lagging economy and putting industry back on
its feet. The "wing" actually proved to be Assistant Secretary J. Walter
Drake, brought to Washington from the Detroit automobile industry. But
Hoover himself was to give Bureau interests his wholehearted support, and
in his annual encounters with Congress at the side of Dr. Stratton pled the
Bureau's need for better salaries and for its research funds.
Where to commence jogging the economy was not difficult to see.
Wholly inadequate as a result of the war and beset by excessive costs, home
construction offered the most immediate means of reviving the greatest num-
ber of industries and providing work for the largest numbers of unemployed.
Because its stimulation would depend upon personal organization and mas-
sive publicity, Hoover organized the division of building and housing in
"See app. G.
A member of. Great Britain's National Physical Laboratory, visiting the Bureau in 1921,
found it "very considerably larger" in every sense than the Teddington plant, its chemical,
spectroscopic, and metallurgical work particularly on "a totally different scale than any-
thing at NPL." Impressed by the ceramics, refractories, and optical glass work at the
Bureau, the visitor reported that the effort at NPL in these fields, by comparison, "becomes
almost insignificant." NPL Annual Report 1922, pp. 197—199. For a comparison of the
Bureau with the German PTR in the 1930's, see ch. VI, p. 310.
Another comparison with NBS research, made by a member of the Bureau's National
Hydraulic Laboratory after a year's study of hydraulic programs in the laboratories in
Europe, appears in a report attached to letter, LJB to Martin A. Mason, June 28, 1939
(NBS Box 430, ID—Misc.)
""New York Times," Mar. 11, l92l,.p. 3.
"The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, II, 61.
Ibid., II, 42.