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

TOWARD A REDEFINiTION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 321
mobilization in the event of war.64 That war had come, a war of relief, re-
covery, and reform.
As the maj or experiments of the New Deal's planned economy, in-
dustry was mobilized through the National Recovery Administration (NRA),
agriculture through the Agricultural Adj ustment Administration (AAA).
Science was not included in the planning. As the adjunct of industry, iden-
tified with laissez faire and classical economics and divorced from modern
economic theory, science was suspect. To find a possible future place for it
in the social experiments of the New Deal, however, called for a reassessment
of the scientific agencies in the Government and the role of Government in
both the physical and social sciences.65
To that end, on July 31, 1933, an Executive order created a Science
Advisory Board under the jurisdiction of the National Research Council
and National Academy of Sciences to study the functions and programs of
the principal scientific agencies of the Government and propose a more
effective relationship between governmental and nongovernmental research
organizations. It was to examine the place of science in the Government
structure with a view to establishing a policy both for economic recovery
and for future national welfare.66 As it turned out, the Board at once be-
came more concerned with the current plight of Federal research agen-
cies than with the goal that was sought by the New Deal, namely, to
effect a conjunction between the natural and social sciences that would pro.
vide solutions pointing the way out of the depression.
The Bureau of Standards came under special scrutiny during the
study, since four of the nine members of the Science Advisory Board—its
chairman, Karl T. Compton, and Gano Dunn, F. Kettering, and
The two Baruch. reports were reprinted in a special edition as American Industry in
the War: a Report of the War Industries Board, with an introduction by Hugh S.
Johnson (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1941). For Roosevelt's great interest in Wilson's
wartime administration, see Roper, Fifty Years of Public Life, pp. 320 if.
65 Dupree, pp. 347—350.
An extremist point of view then current saw science as a cause of the depression. Notice
of the charge that the physicist and chemist made discoveries too rapidly for the good
of the world, and did not heed or care what misapplications were made of their discov-
eries, appeared in Science, 80, 535 (1934) and Science, 81, 4.6 (1935). For the
opposite viewpoint, that this country had succumbed to the depression because it had
lived on its resources and had not put science to work for the national welfare or to
combat its present difficulties, see Science Advisory Board correspondence in NBS Box
382, ID-Misc.
Science Advisory Board, Report, 1933—34 (Washington, D.C., 1934), pp. 9, 11, 13, 15,
40—42. The Board reported scientific services functioning in 41 Federal bureaus, of
which 18, on which the Board focussed its attention, could be called primarily scientific
and essential to the national welfare, in agriculture, manufacturing, commerce, health
and safety (p. 12).