Abstract
World War I, with its poison gases, had been the chemists’ war; World War II, with its radar and atom bombs, would become known as the physicists’ war. And as Paul Forman of the Smithsonian Institution has quoted physicist Jerrold Zacharias, “World War II was in many ways a watershed for American science and scientists. It changed the nature of what it means to do science and radically altered the relationship between science and government.”1
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Notes
Paul Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 18 (1987), p. 152.
Milton Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1975), p. 35.
Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, pp. 5–6.
Simon Rottenberg, “The Economy of Science: The Proper Role of Government in the Growth of Science,” Minerva, Vol. 19, No. 1 (March 1981), p. 56.
Merton England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945–1957 (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1983), p. 7.
Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,”p. 157.
A. Hunter Dupree, “The Great Instauration of 1940: The Organization of Scientific Research for the War,” in The Twentieth-Century Sciences: Studies in the Biography of Ideas, edited by Gerald Holton (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), p. 457.
Ibid., p. 462.
Daniel J. Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942–1945: A Political Interpretation of Science — The Endless Frontier,” Isis, Vol. 68, No. 1 (March 1977), p. 12.
Vannevar Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1960/1945), p. 1.
G. Paschal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997), pp. 218–19.
Alan T. Waterman, “Introduction,” Science — The Endless Frontier, p. vii.
Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier, pp. 3–4.
Waterman, “Introduction,” Science — The Endless Frontier, p. vii.
Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier, p. 2.
Ibid., pp. 5, 8.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 17.
Waterman, “Introduction,” Science — The Endless Frontier, p. vii.
Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier, p. 32.
Ibid., p. 20.
Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, pp. 221–22, 224.
Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier, p. 74.
Ibid., pp. 83–84, 77–78.
Quoted in Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942–1945: A Political Interpretation of Science — The Endless Frontier,” p. 19.
Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier, pp. 91–92.
Ibid., p. 75.
Ibid., pp. 96, 93–94.
Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, pp. 4, 295.
Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier, p. 115.
Ibid., p. 35.
Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, pp. 232–33.
The Politics of American Science: 1939 to the Present, edited by James L. Penick Jr, Carroll W. Pursell Jr., Morgan B. Sherwood, and Donald C. Swain (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1965), p. 35.
Quoted in Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942–1945: A Political Interpretation of Science — The Endless Frontier,” p. 11.
The Politics of American Science: 1939 to the Present, pp. 42–44.
Waldemar Kaempffert, “Horizons of Science,” The American Mercury (October 1943), p. 441–47.
American Association of Scientific Workers collection, http://library.temple.edu/collections.
L.A. Hawkins, “Regimentation of Science,” Electrical World (June 26, 1943), pp. 45–47.
“A National Science Program,” The New Republic (July 30, 1945), p. 116.
Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier, pp. 85–86.
Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942–1945: A Political Interpretation of Science — The Endless Frontier,” p. 7.
The Politics of American Science: 1939 to the Present, pp. 54, 57.
Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, pp. 252–53.
Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942–1945: A Political Interpretation of Science — The Endless Frontier,” p. 23.
Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, pp. 252, 328.
The Politics of American Science: 1939 to the Present, pp. 87–88.
Quoted in ibid., p. 82.
James D. Savage, Funding Science in America: Congress, Universities, and the Politics of the Academic Pork Barrel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 36.
Oliver E. Buckley, Frank Baldwin Jewett 1879–1949 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1952), p. 244.
Science in America: Historical Selections, edited by John C. Burnham (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 398.
Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation, p. 46.
“Testimony of Dr. Frank B. Jewett,” Hearings on Science Legislation S. 1297 and Related Bills, U.S. Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Subcommittee on War Mobilization, Washington, DC, pp. 427–47, passim.
Quoted in The Politics of American Science: 1939 to the Present, pp. 85–86.
Quoted in Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation, p. 48.
England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945–1957, pp. 29, 25, 10.
Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation, p. 56.
England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945–1957, pp. 78, 59, 48.
Quoted in ibid., p. 96.
Quoted in ibid., pp. 36, 45–46.
Quoted in ibid., p. 381.
John R. Baker, Science and the Planned State (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1945), pp. 9, 15, 48.
Quoted in ibid., pp. 11, 16.
Ibid., p. 41.
Martino, Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel, p. 229.
Lance E. Davis and Daniel J. Kevles, “The National Research Fund: A Case Study in the Industrial Support of Academic Science,” Minerva, Vol. 12 (April 1974), p. 220.
Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” Journal of American History, Vol. 61, No. 1 (June 1974), p. 117.
Ibid., pp. 120, 119.
Herbert Hoover, “The Nation and Science,” Science, Vol. 65, No. 1672 (January 14, 1927), pp. 26–29.
Davis and Kevles, “The National Research Fund: A Case Study in the Industrial Support of Academic Science,” pp. 210–11.
Hoover, “The Nation and Science,” p. 28.
Davis and Kevles, “The National Research Fund: A Case Study in the Industrial Support of Academic Science,” p. 214.
Ibid., pp. 217, 219.
Lankford and Slavings, “The Industrialization of American Astronomy, 1880–1940,” p. 40.
England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945–1957, p. 7.
Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation, p. 31.
England, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation’s Formative Years, 1945–1957, p. 347.
Lomask, A Minor Miracle: An Informal History of the National Science Foundation, pp. 33, ix.
Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century, pp. 369–70.
Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” p. 157.
Quoted in ibid., p. 149.
Quoted in ibid., p. 181.
Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, p. 1.
Ibid., pp. 8, 14.
Chandra Mukerji, A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. x.
Ibid., pp. 4, 6, 104.
Roger L. Geiger, Knowledge & Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 2.
Ibid., p. 136.
Mukerji, A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State, pp. 7–8.
Dan Kevles, “Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 1945–56,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1990), pp. 250, 263.
Frank B. Jewett, “The Future of Scientific Research in the Postwar World,” in Science in America: Historical Selections, pp. 399–413, passim.
Quoted in Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” p. 186. Eventually, some scholars dared to peer into the science pork barrel. James D. Savage, who had studied academic earmarking for the Congressional Research Service in the early 1990s, wrote in 1999, “Sixty percent of academic research is funded by the federal government,” and while peer or merit review, the preferred methods for allocating such dollars, have their own problems — namely, favoritism and a tendency to support those with conventional views over scientific rebels — academic earmarking by members of Congress brings to science all the elegance and subtlety of the political pork barrel. Yet peer review does indeed favor elite institutions and can be just as ridden with good old boy networks as a Chicago road-building appropriation. As Savage explains the critique, “Peer review, it is claimed, is an old boys’ network that helps the rich get richer. It rewards the same old schools, the same old scientists, and the same old science, and thereby denies funding for new and innovative research efforts for scientists other than the privileged few.” Savage, Funding Science in America: Congress, Universities, and the Politics of the Academic Pork Barrel, pp. 5–7.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People,” January 17, 1961, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws.
McDougall, “Technocracy and Statecraft in the Space Age — Toward the History of a Saltation,” p. 1032.
Quoted in Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” p. 226.
Jerome B. Wiesner, Where Science and Politics Meet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 13, 17.
Quoted in Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” p. 166.
Wiesner, Where Science and Politics Meet, p. 43.
Quoted in Martino, Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel, p. 85.
Ibid., p. 88. In the early 1980s, a lawsuit by California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) shed an interesting light on the question of how government-subsidized research advantages some and disadvantages others. The CRLA, acting on behalf of nineteen farm workers, filed suit against the University of California, charging that the UC had subsidized agricultural research with a “basic policy goal” of developing “machines and other related technology in order to reduce to the greatest extent possible, the use of labor as a means of agricultural production.” In other words, the activists alleged that the state was subsidizing mechanization and the consequent elimination of manual labor farm jobs, especially for those who aided in the planting and harvesting of tomatoes, grapes, oranges, peaches, and lettuce. Not being of a particularly libertarian bent, the CRLA did not merely demand that the state refrain from subsidizing mechanized agriculture; instead, it requested that the University of California set up a retraining fund for such workers, to be paid out of a fund which would be capitalized by licensing and royalty payments from the inventions of its researchers. Whether or not this mechanization was a good or bad thing is not the point here. Philip L. Martin and Alan L. Olmstead, professors of agriculture at the University of California-Davis, argued in Science that “Mechanization reduces the arduous nature of harvest work and permits remaining farm workers to operate equipment and sort commodities for longer periods,” while critics claim that it pushes farm workers out of productive outdoor employment and onto the unemployment or welfare rolls. Wherever the truth lies, it is unarguable that publicly funded — as distinguished, crucially, from privately funded — mechanization research is a putatively “neutral” state intervention in applied science whose consequences are anything but neutral. In fact, these interventions privilege certain actors and harm others. Even in a relatively uncontroversial field such as agricultural research, state-subsidized science has broad ramifications. Whether or not one thinks that the applied research is a boon to the agricultural economy, it is anything but “neutral.” See Philip L. Martin and Alan L. Olmstead, ‘The Agricultural Mechanization Controversy,” Science, Vol. 227, No. 1687 (February 8, 1985), pp. 601–606.
Quoted in Martino, Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel, p. 372.
Quoted in Rottenberg, “The Economy of Science: The Proper Role of Government in the Growth of Science,”p. 57.
Randolph E. Schmid, “Obama Promises Major Investment in Science,” Associated Press, April 27, 2009.
Jeffrey Mervis, “A $3 Billion Bonanza for NSF?” Science Insider, January 16, 2009, http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider.
Martino, Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel, p. 301.
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Bennett, J.T. (2010). Dr. Bush Fathers a Foundation. In: The Doomsday Lobby. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6685-8_3
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