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

308 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
Navy Department factories and foundries, Government Printing Office supply
plants, Army and Navy clothing and leather factories, the Post Exchange
organization, a wide range of Farm Board enterprises, and many of the Fed-
eral prison industries.
Nowhere in the 253-page report of the committee was the Bureau of
Standards mentioned by name, though it might have answered to the in-
dictment of "overdevelopment of industrial research in Government labora-
tories," buried in the last pages of the report. Much of that research had
been initiated by industry itself, the committee found, but had "grown be-
yond the original intent or desired objective in many instances." 29 The
Bureau might also have answered to the charges that technical specialists in
the Government, acting as industrial consultants, thereby competed with
professional consultants, and that Government patents taken out by Federal
scientists on behalf of the public "prevented exclusive development by in-
dustry." Since the congressional committee felt that neither the intention
nor extension of Government research for industry could be accurately de-
fined, it recommended only "curtailment by limitation of funds appropriated
for such investigations," as a brake on Federal competition.3°
The report of the committee appeared at the depth of the depression,
just as the incoming administration launched its massive drive against Fed-
eral expenditures. Curtailment of Bureau funds, and the investigations of
Bureau activities that followed, were to end more of its research for industry
than industry bargained for.
LYMAN JAMES BRIGGS
It has been said that any Republican could have been elected President
in 1928. That the Republican was the incumbent Secretary of Commerce
made Hoover the unluckiest President in American history. With the stock
market crash, the national income between 1929 and 1932 fell with the
value of the dollar from $87.4 billion to $41.7 billion. Unemployment, from
an irreducible peacetime low of 1.8 million in 1925 (representing 4 percent
of the civilian labor force), reached 4.3 million (8.7 percent) in 1930. In
Report of Special Committee appointed to investigate Government competition with
Private Industry (72d Cong., 2d sess., H.R. 1985), Feb. 8, 1933, p. 236 (L/C:
HD3616.U45A3).
Ibid., p. 237. The House questionnaire on Government competition, with Bureau
answers, appears in letter, LJB to Hon. Joseph B. Shannon, Aug. 24, 1932 (NBS Box 339,
AG). For the Chamber of Commerce attack on the Bureau's "overdevelopment of in-
dustrial research," see memo, Office of Secretary of Commerce for LJB, Oct. 4, 1932
(ibid.).