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

TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 327
setting up the Tennessee Valley Authority, and planning hydroelectric power
dams such as that at Passamaquoddy Bay.81 But science proved unamenable
to planning. In the latter half of the decade, the National Planning Board
and its successors, the National Resources Board and National Resources
Committeç, all sought, unsuccessfully, to establish a sound Federal relation
with scientific research that would harness the scientific resources of the
Nation.82
As stirring in its implications for the Bureau as the search for the
role of Government in scientific research was the revival in the thirties of
concern for the consumer. In the national emergency of 1918, Bernard
Baruch had shown the possibilities of an economy oriented to "engineered
consumption" instead of uncontrolled production for individual profit. A
controlling idea in the early years of the New Deal was the plan to shift from
a producer economy to a consumer economy. Thus arose "consumerism"
as a major remedy for the depression, its mystique in the recent books of
Stuart Chase, Schlink, Kallet, and others.83
Hope for Government support and direction of consumer interests
centered in the National Recovery Administration, Roosevelt's chief pre-
scription for recovery, set up on June 16, 1933, as a cooperative system of
industrial self-government under Federal supervision. Under an NRA code
system, industry, in exchange for Federal aid in regulating prices, would
increase minimum wages and shorten work hours, thereby accelerating con-
sumption. To maintain a balance between the interests of management,
labor, and the consumer, NRA was to have the advice of three official boards,
an Industrial Board, to secure the cooperation of the trade associations in
support of NRA codes; a Labor Advisory Board, to work with the labor
Among civic structures whose completion provided much needed employment was the
new monumental Commerce Building at 14th and E Streets in Washington, its corner-
stone laid on Apr. 5, 1929. Its acres of office space, reported the "New York Sun," were
to house all the scattered activities of Commerce "except * * * the experimental gentle.
men of the Bureau of Standards—perhaps the most interesing single agency of the
Government of these United States" (file in NBS Box 263, AG).
The remarkable "study of Federal Aids to Research and the place of research (includ.
ing natural and social sciences) in the Federal Government," prepared by the science
subcommittee of the National Resources Committee, under Dr. Charles H. Judd, Uni-
versity of Chicago psychologist, made two notable recommendations, destined to be
implemented in the vast Federal research of World War II and after: That
research agencies of the Government be authorized and encouraged to enter into con-
tracts for the prosecution of research projects with * * * recognized research agencies,
and that research agencies of the Government extend the practice of encouraging decen-
tralized research in institutions not directly related to the Government and by individuals
not in its employ. National Resources Committee, Research—A National Resource. I.
Relation of the Federal Government to Research (Washington, D.C., November 1938),
p.2.
Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, pp. 128—130.