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

326 THE TIME OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1931-40)
conservation, and for the creation of new industries was not apparently what
the administration had in mind. The Science Advisory Board was dissolved.78
The year 1935 came and the depression persisted. The WPA and
other relief agencies were at their peak, giving work to 20 million persons,
and Federal employees, numbering 588,000 when the depression began,
headed toward the total of 1,370,000 reached in 1941. But across the Nation
over 11 million remained unemployed and close to that same number would
still be unemployed on the eve of war.79
Industry was moving again but cautiously, and consumers, growing
wary of the rising public debt, tended to hoard the little they had. To the
economists and social scientists of the administration more planning was the
answer. To scientists, including Dr. Briggs, who wrote and spoke repeatedly
on the subject, new inventions, and enterprises were needed to
prime the economy, stimulate the consumer, and start up industry again.80
Federal agencies, notably the Public Works Administration (PWA),
successfully employed tens of thousands in reclaiming and developing the
natural resources of the country, completing Boulder [Hoover] Dam in
Nevada and the Triboro Bridge in New York, harnessing the Mississippi,
78 Science Advisory Board, Report, 1933—34, PP. 267 if.; Dupree, Science in the Federal
Government, pp. 353—358.
Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, p. 294; Wecter, The Age of the Great
Depression, p. 82.
Dr. Briggs's promise of "rich returns in employment in new industries" was made
repeatedly, in a speech of Mar. 25, 1936 (NBS Box 400, PAC), memoranda for the Secre-
tary of Commerce between July 26 and Nov. 4, 1936 (NBS Box 394, AG; Box 400, PA;
Box 401, PRA); letter to the Civil Service commission, Dec. 22, 1936 (NBS Box 394, AP).
Before the House Appropriations Subcommittee in 1938, Briggs said: "We need more
industries in this country; but new industries must have something to work with—
new facts, new discoveries which they can develop. To get new discoveries and new facts
we must support research" (Hearings * * * 1939, Jan. 31, 1938, P. 139).
Stimulated as much by the need to replenish the stock of pure science as to create
out of it new industries that would absorb some of the unemployed, Roosevelt from
1936 to 1941 gave his approval to a number of bills proposed in both the House and
Senate designed to support programs of basic research in physics, chemistry, metal-
lurgy, and engineering. in several of the bills the research was to be carried out by
the National Bureau of Standards and other nonprofit research institutions, through
grants administered by the Bureau and the National Research Council. Other bills
proposed basic research stations affiliated with State universities, in cooperation with
the Department of Commerce, or engineering experimental stations at the land.grant
colleges, on the model of the Department of Agriculture experimental stations. To Dr.
Briggs, the most promising was the Lea (H.R. 3652), proposed in 1939, which called
for almost $60 million to be expended over a period of years, 75 percent of that
sum going to research in the natural sciences and engineering. Half of the funds were
to be appropriated to the Bureau, the other half to universities for specific research
projects. By June 1941, as war approached and debate continued, all chances of
enactment ended. See correspondence in NBS Blue Folder Boxes 30, 31, 58.