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

TOWARD A REDEFINITION OF BUREAU FUNCTIONS 329
The consumer movement responded to a real public need and
persisted as a militant force throughout the decade, but it was unable to
present the united front, as did industry, labor, and agriculture, necessary
to make a place for itself in the alphabetical agencies of the New Deal.89
Sparking that movement, Schlink and Chase in 1927 had brought out their
Consumers' Research Bulletin, as a mimeographed letter of the Consumers'
League of New York. Two years later, upon the acquisition of laboratory
facilities, the Bulletin appeared under the irnprimatur of Consumers' Re-
search, Inc. In 1933 the Consumers' Council of the Agricultural Adjust-
ment Administration (AAA) inaugurated a biweekly Consumers' Guide,
and in 1936 Arthur Kallet's organization, Consumers Union, began publica-
tion of Consumer Reports. A number of city and State agencies established
consumer laboratories, as did the "New York Herald-Tribune" and the maga-
zines Delineator, Modern Priscilla, and Good Housekeeping. By the end
of the decade, as textbooks became available, some 25,000 secondary schools
were giving consumer education courses, and in 1937 Stephens College, in
Missouri, set up one of the first of the college and university consumer
laboratories.90
The Bureau, as its extensive correspondence files witness, was never
entirely happy in its relations with these consumer groups. It was, by law
and organization, oriented to industry, as the Consumers' Advisory Board
said. Schlink's avowed objective in setting up his Consumers' Research was
"to translate everything that the National Bureau of Standards and the Na-
tional Physical Laboratory [in England] had done into consumer terms."
But except in the most general terms, this was not possible with the technical
reports of the Bureau, since its tests centered on the determination of those
physical properties and characteristics of commodities or materials which
made them most suitable for Government use. Efforts of Schlink and others
to obtain useful and authoritative test results from the Bureau by sending
consumer products to its laboratories had to be rebuffed. They were referred
to commercial testing laboratories.92
80 Sorenson, pp. 19, 20.
Wecter, p. 279. Among widely used textbooks were Charles S. Wyand's The Eco-
nomics of Consumption (New York: Macmillan, 1937), Alfred H. Hausrath and John
H. Harms's Consumer Science (New York: Macmillan, 1939), and Leland J. Gordon's
Economics for Consumers (New York: American Book Co.. 1939).
°' Interview with F. J. Schlink, June 7, 1962.
See Consumers' Research General Bulletin, II, 309 (January 1933); public and con.
gressional correspondence with the Bureau, largely incited by Schlink's publication,
in NBS Box 356, AG; Schlink's own correspondence with the Bureau, in NBS Box 4.00,
AG; and D. W. McConnell, "The Bureau of Standards and the ultimate
Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. 173, 146 (1934).