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

LYMAN JAMES BRJGGS 319
new administration toward his organization. The stature of the Bureau in
the Department of Commerce and its close identity with industry and com-
merce linked it with the policies of the Hoover administration and therefore
the depression.
Daniel C. Roper, Roosevelt's appointee as Secretary of Commerce,
said that his Department, "important under normal conditions, was at this
time from the fact that business was in the doghouse." 56 On the
other hand, as a living memorial to Herbert Hoover, it was "looked upon by
Congress as the 'last stronghold of sanity in the New Deal.' " To the New
Dealers the Department, whose body of civil servants continued in office dur-
ing the greater part of the Roosevelt administration, was anathema. At the
very outset of the new administration, Sam G. Bratton, Senator from New
Mexico, went so far as to propose a joint House and Senate committee "to
consider the advisability of abolishing the Department of Commerce and the
transfer of its indispensable services to other agencies." 58
The threat of dispersal persisted, and some it imminent when
at the start of his second term Roosevelt proposed to reorganize
the departments of the Government. Ignored at meetings and unable
to gain the President's ear, Roper wrote to his bureau chiefs asking them
whether they had "knowledge of any proposed action by other Government
agencies or by Congress looking to transfer of your Bureau or any part of
it from the Department." The bureau chiefs knew no more than the Sec-
retary. Badgered by rumors at fourth and fifth hand "that there would not
be much left of the Department of Commerce after this reorganiration," Sec-
retary Roper resigned in December 1939 to make way for Harry Hopkins.60
The talk of reorganization ended.
Apart from the drastic cuts made in its funds, the Bureau was in no
way further endangered by the political trafficking downtown. Yet through-
'° Roper, Fifty Years of Public Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1941),
p. 288.
"Grace Tully, F.D.R.—My Boss (New York: Scribner, 1949), p. 196.
Congressional Record, vol. 76, pt. 2, 72d Cong., 2d sess., 1933, pp. 1720—1721. The
National Association of Manufacturers maintained that "throughout both the New Deal
and the war production programs, Commerce was all but ignored. Special agencies and
executive offices were created by the dozen to perform functions that should naturally
have fallen to this department." Hearings * * * on First Deficiency Appropriation Bill
for 1946 (Oct. 25, 1945), p. 320.
"Letter, Administrative Assistant to Secretary of Commerce to Heads of Bureaus,
June 29, 1938, and attached correspondence (NBS Box 414, AG).
"Roper, Fifty Years of Public Life, pp. 347—348.