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

THE BUREAU IN THE PUBLiC VIEW 305
ers in Washington," which was widely reprinted, rounded on "the paladins.of
precision" at the Bureau to which Congress had given "a blanket charter to go
as far as it likes * * * [investigating] everything under the round and shin-
ing sun." Other research agencies of the Government, particularly in the
Department of Agriculture, shared in the editorial complaints, but the Bureau
was the focus of the storm. The rumbling had been of some duration and
apparently had reached Congress. The "Post" editorialist, summing up the
questionable research, recommended that in the promised general shakeup
of Federal bureaus "this small dust in the balances of government may as
well be swept out. It will never be missed." 20
In this, as in each instance of attack, the answered with a
statement of the need and authority for its research. It was to little purpose.
Acting on complaints of industry, the Comptroller General in 1925 informed
the Bureau that it had no right to manufacture optical glass for the Navy
or to make special castings for the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Transferred
funds for those purposes would be withheld. The Bureau replied that it alone
manufactured a suitable optical glass in sufficient quantity for Navy require-
ments, and that its castings, made "in connection with the Bureau of Stand-
ard's investigation of such material," were experimental and noncompetitive.
Satisfied, the Comptroller General released the funds.21
Industry was not alone in its criticism of the Bureau, nor was Dr.
Agnew, executive secretary of the ASA, the only Bureau-trained censor. On a
wholly different tack was the private war of Frederick J. Schlink, former
technical assistant to Dr. Stratton and from 1922 to 1931 the assistant secre-
tary of the ASA. He was to carry his feud with the Bureau into the thirties
from the offices of Consumers' Research, Inc., which he founded with Stuart
Chase in 1929.
In 1925—27, while an officer of the AESC, Schlink, with Stuart Chase,
wrote a series of eminently readable articles for the New Republic (subse-
quently published as Getting Your Money's Worth) that had as a principal
target the Bureau of Standards.22 The authors estimated that the Bureau,
operating on a budget of $2 million, saved the Government better than a
hundred million dollars a year through its testing of products. That same
20 The editorial also appeared July 2, 1925 in the "Philadelphia Public Ledger" and "New
York Evening Post" (NBS Box 108, AG, and Box 139, PA).
Letter, GKB to Secretary of Commerce, July 21, 1925 (NBS Box 112, FPG); letter,
Acting Secretary of Commerce to Comptroller General of the United States, August 3,
1925 (NBS Box 111, FL); letter, GKB to Chairman, Navy BuOrd, June 14, 1926 (NBS
Box 170, IRG).
22While probably not endorsed by the AESC, the articles and book may have had some
support in the AESC's pique with the Bureau at the time. See Getting Your Money's
Worth: a Study in the Waste of the Consumer's Dollar (New York: Macmillan, 1927, re-
printed 1931), pp. 82, 98.