Appendix Toward the Centralization of Science: The National Research Council[110]

Scientific research before World War I was free, diffuse, individualistic, and independent, with very little guidance or control exerted by the federal government. Most scientists and Americans in general approved of this system, but there were always one or two visionaries yearning for an alternative. George Ellery Hale, one of the founders of astrophysics, the director of Mt. Wilson Observatory and one of the founders of the California Institute of Technology, was one of those visionaries, particularly after he was named to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1902. The NAS had been charted in 1863 as a private organization of scientists to consult with the government on scientific and military matters during the Civil War. By the turn of the 20th century, the NAS was moribund, forgotten by all, including the president of the United States. But George Ellery Hale, turning from the joys of science to the rather different joys of bureaucratic empire and power-building, had a different vision. He sought to make the NAS a vibrant, activist organization, and one of his most important visions was that the NAS should, with the aid of government, acquire a dominant, centralizing power over all scientific research in the nation. And sitting at or near the pinnacle of scientific power, of course, would be George Ellery Hale. He delivered a series of lectures and published articles at the NAS to that effect in 1913–14, but the old fuddy-duddies of the Academy weren’t listening.

George Hale did not come to his vision purely on this own. As director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, he had gained a powerful friend and political mentor—one of the most influential men of the Eastern Establishment: Wall Street lawyer, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, U.S. Senator from New York, and personal attorney for J.P. Morgan, Elihu Root. Root, the son of a professor of astronomy, informed Hale upon his election to the unknown NAS of the untapped potential of the agency for advising and coordinating science on behalf of the government. And it was clear that Root would do all he could to further that objective.[111]

Then, as luck would have it, the World War began in Europe. By the spring of 1916, Hale was champing at the bit to enter the war on the Allied side, averring his deep hatred for Germans, and bitterly attacking the anti-interventionist stance of Henry Ford and William Jennings Bryan. Hale was certainly succinct about what he would do with these dissidents. “They ought to be imprisoned as traitors,” he wrote, “or thoroughly chloroformed.”[112] Hale pressured the more laggard patriots of the executive council of the NAS to offer the services of the Academy to the federal government in case of war. After the surprised president learned of the existence of the NAS, Wilson accepted the offer.

George Ellery Hale quickly became chairman of the new NAS committee to plan the Academy’s services after war came. His most enthusiastic collaborator on the NAS was Robert A. Millikan, a University of Chicago physicist who had become a member in 1915. Hale exulted that war would be “the greatest chance we ever had to advance research in America.”[113] By June 1916, Hale and Millikan had decided that the NAS should create a new agency, the National Research Council (NRS), which would have the operating power to coordinate scientific research when war came. Under pressure from Elihu Root, Wilson approved the idea of the NRC in July. The next problem was to secure funding, since the NRC would be a privately-financed agency, and since the NAS had very little spare money of its own. Financial support was obtained from the Engineering Foundation, which committed its entire annual income of $10,000 to the project, in addition to a personal contribution of $5000 put in by the founder and chairman of the Engineering Foundation, the Cleveland machine-tool and telescope manufacturer Ambrose Swasey, an old friend of Hale.

Its financing secured, the National Research Council was launched in September, dedicated to: performing an inventory of all scientific researchers, projects, and equipment in the country, in preparation for war planning; to cooperate with educational institutions and research foundations; and to function as a “clearing house” to coordinate research projects and scientific information. Moreover, the NRC was to encourage research on national defense and resource problems.

The Board of the Engineering Foundation, launched in 1914, obtained representation of the various national engineering societies. Vice-chairman of the Engineering Foundation, and another old friend of the ubiquitous Hale, was another scientific visionary: the Serbian immigrant, physicist, inventor, and Columbia University professor, Michael Pupin. While recognizing the importance of individualism and freedom in science, Pupin insisted that there was a far more important requisite for the growth and success of science: “creative coordination,” which he explicitly defined as cooperation enforced by compulsion. Without coercion binding everything together, Pupin philosophized, all would be anarchy and chaos, including science. And, of course, as Pupin correctly noted, the State is overwhelmingly the most important instrument of coercion. Therefore, there must be centralization of science under State dictation. Pupin’s goal is what he termed, probably not ironically, “ideal democracy,” which consisted of the “state organism” being ruled and directed by the “trained intellects” guiding the destiny of the people. Of course, scientists were a crucial, if not the most vital, part of the trained intellect serving as brain of the social organism. Michael Pupin of course hailed the NRC as the first step toward the compulsory coordination of America’s intellectuals and their organizations.[114]

They were an effective team for a collectivized science: Michael Pupin the theoretician, and George Hale the activist, assisted by Millikan. To ensure the NRC’s stellar role in the war effort, Hale lobbied successfully to make the NRC an official department of the Council of National Defense, with sole responsibility for coordinating scientific resources for war. The NRC now happily set up subcommittees in each discipline: Hale’s good friend Edwin Conklin as chairman of the biology subcommittee. James McKeen Cattell in charge of the psychology subcommittee, and Pupin and Robert A. Millikan dominating the physics subcommittee.[115] Millikan, who became the major personality and ideological force in American science during the 1920s, was a former student and protégé of Michael Pupin. An assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago, Millikan had floundered in his researches from 1896 on, until finally becoming extremely successful; by 1912, he had embarked on his researches on electron charge that would win him the Nobel Prize. Millikan, was made a member of the organizing committee of the NRC in 1916, and went from there to become a member of the executive committee, and then vice president and chief administrative officers of the NRC, as well as chairman of the physics committee of the Anti-Submarine Council. So dedicated was Millikan to the war effort that he left Chicago to plunge into full-time war work in Washington, with a commission as an army officer.[116] Many of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers entered the armed forces. Thus, physicist Ernest Merritt, of Cornell, entered the navy in order to head up the New London, Connecticut anti-submarine warfare naval base staffed by university scientists.

Well before the end of the war, the problem uppermost in the minds of the scientists was to make the NRC permanent. The organized scientists and in particular the scientists connected with industry, from the beginning envisioned the NRC not merely as a wartime agency, but as a permanent government force sponsoring and coordinating the application to science in industry. Thus, George Hale circulated an anonymous, strictly confidential memorandum within the NRC executive council in May 1919, proclaiming the original intent and the future goal of the agency:

The Academy organized the National Research Council ... with a view to stimulating the growth of science and its application to industry and particularly with a view to the coordination of research agencies for the sake of enabling the United States, in spite of its democratic, individualistic organization, to bend its energies effectively toward a common purpose.[117]

As early as eight months before the Armistice, the organized scientists began to agitate for a quick presidential order making the NRC a permanent, peacetime agency. Since the agency, though governmental, had to be financed by private funds, the first step was to demonstrate secure, durable financing. The Carnegie Corporation, headed by none other than Hale’s friend and mentor, Elihu Root, happily obliged with a $5 million grant for an NRC building and an operating endowment. Soon, Hale’s old friends at the Engineering Foundation assumed continuing financial responsibility for the NRC, and at that point Elihu Root managed to persuade Colonel House to secure President Wilson’s approval.[118] Wilson created a permanent National Research Council by executive order on May 11, 1918.

By the time of Wilson’s imprimatur, the irrepressible George Hale was already circulating a letter proclaiming a shift in emphasis from military to permanent industrial research. To that end, he informed his colleagues of the NRC, he proceeded to create a new Industrial Relations Division. The Division was composed of six leaders from elite companies engaged in industrial research: Frank Jewett, director of the Western Electric labs, a wholly owned subsidiary of A.T.&T., J.J. Carty, long-time chief engineer at A.T.&T., Arthur D. Little, the nation’s engineering consultant, Raymond Bacon, director of the Mellon Institute, Charles E. Skinner, director of research at the Mellon-oriented Westinghouse Electric, and Willis Whitney, director of research at the Morgan-aligned General Electric.

On May 29, George Hale officially launched the Industrial Relations Division with a gala formal banquet at the University Club of New York, a banquet which symbolized and embodied the new, continuing alliance of the federal government with the top brass in industrial science and research. Addressing the banquet, George Hale proclaimed that “Hitherto, the National Research Council activities have been mostly devoted to war, but plans have been under contemplation for industrial research and the time has arrived to put these plans forward.” In their banquet speeches, Hale and Elihu Root stressed the need for national coordination of industrial resources.

Perhaps the most exuberant of the speakers was the original financier of the NRC, the industrialist Ambrose Swasey. Americans and other nations might at that moment be fighting and dying in one of the most devastating wars in history, but to Swasey the war was an exhilarating experience. “We who are living in these wonderful times,” Swasey exclaimed, “have thrilling opportunities and correspondingly weighty responsibilities.” Enumerating the great advances occasioned by the war, Swasey noted that “whereas a year ago this country produced no optical glass, it is now manufacturing this material by the carload.” Part of the great progress occasioned by the war, he pointed out, was due to the U.S. seizure of German patents. Swasey concluded with a brief demurrer before exulting over the war’s matchless benefits: “While deeply deploring the war,” Swasey proclaimed, “the marvelous advances it was bringing in the mental, moral and spiritual realms, with consequent great benefits to mankind ...”[119]

The main harvest of this banquet was the creation of an advisory committee of industrial leaders to the Industrial Research Division, and the publication of a pamphlet on the new division co-authored by some of the most distinguished leaders present at the banquet. Chairman of the advisory committee was the eminent Theodore N. Vail, president of A.T.&T., and other members included Cleveland H. Dodge, vice president of Phelps-Dodge mining and President Wilson’s favorite industrialist, George Eastman, head of Eastman Kodak, Andrew Mellon, head of the mighty Mellon banking and industrial family, and soon to become Secretary of the Treasury, Pierre DuPont, Ambrose Swasey, Elihu Root, Judge Elbert H. Gary, head of the Morgan-influenced U.S. Steel, E. Wilbur Rice, president of General Electric, and Henry S. Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.[120]

In the pamphlet, the various distinguished contributors beat the drums for a national coordination of science, a veritable coordinated government-science-industry complex. Thus, President Vail of A.T.&T. declared that

Organization and coordination of research for industrial purpose is urgently necessary. ... Plans should be formulated at once. ... Whatever is done should be national in its comprehensiveness. ... Industry may be expected to support generously any organization which promises to effectively coordinate and correlate efforts for the increase of knowledge, since it is now generally recognized that industrial progress and success are chiefly dependent upon our knowledge.[121]

In the midst of the wartime model, it is not surprising that military-like “discipline” was a common theme of these industrial, scientific and political leaders. Thus, Elihu Root in his article, “The Need for Organization in Scientific Research,” opined that “scientific men are only recently realizing ... that the effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by organization just as the effective power of a great number of laborers may be increased by military discipline.” In the war, Root added, the power of science has “amazingly increased the productive power of mankind.” After the war, that same power “will be applied again and the prizes of industrial and commercial leadership will fall to the nation which organizes its scientific forces most effectively.”

And Henry S. Pritchett, of the Carnegie Foundation, who had long admired the German model of a national physical laboratory and national coordination of science, called for post-war America to establish a similar system. Pritchett insisted that “The research men of a nation are not isolated individuals but an organized and cooperating army.”[122]

In early 1919, the NRC was formally structured for the post-war world into a number of divisions. One of the most active in serving and subsidizing industry was the Industrial Relations Division (later renamed the Industrial Research Division, and finally the Industrial Extension Division), which established cooperative research programs in various industries and initiated research projects in various areas of metals and electroplating. In particular, the Industrial Relations Division created a number of industrial research institutes in collaboration with various trade associations.[123]

Another very active division of the NRC was the Engineering Division, launched during the war in 1918. The Engineering Division was founded under the auspices of the Engineering Foundation which by now had become the research branch of the American Engineering Council, the umbrella organization of all the various engineering associations. Engineering Foundation head Ambrose Swasey also became a member of the new Engineering Division of the NRC. The function of the division was to encourage direct industrial research, the funds often to be supplied by the industry concerned, but the organizing and coordination to be performed by the NRC. The first project of the Engineering Division was a large-scale study of metal fatigue, financed by the Engineering Foundation and by General Electric. On the other hand, a project to study the heat treatment of carbon steel was financed by the federal government, and federal and state governments supported a program of highway research conducted by the division.[124]

Another important post-war arm of the NRC, the Research Information Service, also began during the war as the Research Information Committee, under physicist and Bureau of Standards head Samuel Stratton, to disseminate scientific information between the U.S. and its European allies. After the war, the RIS prepared scientific compilations, source books, abstracts, handbooks, and bibliographies and disseminated them, in George Hale’s words, to those who “can use it to advantage.” In the words of Charles L. Reese, research and chemical director of Du Pont, the service operated as an “intelligence agency.”[125]

The major dispute among the NRC-affiliated and connected scientists was whether or not scientific research in the postwar world should be thoroughly centralized under one governmental research institute and national laboratory, in physics and chemistry. George Vincent, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and his colleague Edward C. Pickering, head of the Harvard Observatory, had been agitating for the idea of a centralized research institute since 1913, trying to persuade the membership of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. During the war, Vincent, backed by Dr. Simon Flexner, head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, wrote a letter to the NRC executive proposing the plan for the postwar world. Hale, Pritchett, and Root were highly enthusiastic, but the more cautious Millikan and Whitney advocated three to six regional laboratories at existing university facilities. None of the contending parties, of course, had any desire to return to the good old days of decentralized, free and private scientific research. Finally, all parties agreed on a compromise plan, which provided for no national or regional laboratories, but did set up a massive fellowship program in graduate physics and chemistry, administered by the government NRC and financed entirely by the Rockefeller Foundation. The science centralizers might not have achieved all of their aims, but they were well on the road.

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Originally published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 1 (1989): 81–125.

[1] The title of this paper is borrowed from the pioneering last chapter of Weinstein’s excellent work, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918. The last chapter is entitled, “War as Fulfillment.”

[2] Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 123–58. For my own account of the collectivized war economy of World War I, see Rothbard, “War Collectivism in World War I,” pp. 66–110. [Editor’s remarks] See Chapter 12 above.

[3] F.A. Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 178 ff.

[4] On the conscription movement, see in particular Michael Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). See also John W. Chambers II, “Conscripting for Colossus: The Adoption of the Draft in the United States in World War I” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1973); John Patrick Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon: the Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974); and John Gany Clifford, The Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972).

[5] On ministers and the war, see Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms (New York: Round Table Press, 1933). On the mobilization of science, see David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), and Ronald C. Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science, 1919–1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971). [Editor’s footnote] See below, pp. 453–61.

[6] Cited in Gerald Edward Markowitz, “Progressive Imperialism: Consensus and Conflict in the Progressive Movement on Foreign Policy, 1898–1917” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971), p. 375, an unfortunately neglected work on a highly important topic.

[7] Hence the famous imprecation hurled at the end of the 1884 campaign that brought the Democrats into the presidency for the first time since the Civil War, that the Democratic Party was the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” In that one phrase, the New York Protestant minister was able to sum up the political concerns of the pietist movement.

[8] For an introduction to the growing literature of “ethnoreligious” political history in the United States, see Kleppner, The Cross of Culture; and idem, The Third Electoral System. For the latest research on the formation of the Republican Party as a pietist party, reflecting the interconnected triad of pietist concerns—antislavery, prohibition, and anti-Catholicism—see Gienapp, “Nativism and the Creation of a Republican Majority in the North before the Civil War,” pp. 529–59.

[9] German Lutherans were largely “high” or liturgical and confessional Lutherans who placed emphasis on the Church and its creed or sacraments rather than on a pietist, “born-again” emotional conversion experience. Scandinavian-Americans, on the other hand, were mainly pietist Lutherans.

[10] Orthodox Augustinian Christianity, as followed by the liturgicals, is “a-millennialist,” i.e., it believes that the “millennium” is simply a metaphor for the emergence of the Christian Church and that Jesus will return without human aid and at his own unspecified time. Modern “fundamentalists,” as they have been called since the early years of the 20th century, are “premillennialists,” i.e., they believe that Jesus will return to usher in a thousand years of the Kingdom of God on Earth, a time marked by various “tribulations” and by Armageddon, until history is finally ended. Premillennialists, or “millennarians,” do not have the statist drive of the postmillennialists; instead, they tend to focus on predictions and signs of Armageddon and of Jesus’ advent.

[11] James H. Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900–1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 7–8.

[12] Quoted in ibid., p. 33.

[13] The Progressive Party convention was a mighty fusion of all the major trends in the progressive movement: statist economists, technocrats, social engineers, social workers, professional pietists, and partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. Social Gospel leaders Lyman Abbott, the Rev. R. Heber Newton and the Rev. Washington Gladden, were leading Progressive Party delegates. The Progressive Party proclaimed itself as the “recrudescence of the religious spirit in American political life.” Theodore Roosevelt’s acceptance speech was significantly entitled “A Confession of Faith,” and his words were punctuated by “amens” and by a continual singing of pietist Christian hymns by the assembled delegates. They sang “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and especially the revivalist hymn, “Follow, Follow, We Will Follow Jesus,” with the word “Roosevelt” replacing “Jesus” at every turn. The horrified New York Times summed up the unusual experience by calling the Progressive grouping “a convention of fanatics.” And it added, “It was not a convention at all. It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts. It was such a convention as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp following done over into political terms.” Cited in Gable, The Bull Moose Years, p. 75.

[14] Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, p. 24.

[15] Quoted in Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, p. 27. Italics in the article. Or, as the Rev. Stelzle put it, in Why Prohibition!, “There is no such thing as an absolute individual right to do any particular thing, or to eat or drink any particular thing, or to enjoy the association of one’s own family, or even to live, if that thing is in conflict with the law of public necessity.” Quoted in David E. Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 9.

[16] Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, pp. 37–38.

[17] See David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 107.

[18] James A. Burran, “Prohibition in New Mexico, 1917,” New Mexico Historical Quarterly 48 (April, 1973): 140–41. Mrs. Lindsey of course showed no concern whatever for the German, allied, and neutral countries of Europe being subjected to starvation by the British naval blockade.

The only areas of New Mexico that resisted the prohibition crusade in the referendum in the November 1917 elections were the heavily Hispanic-Catholic districts.

[19] Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, p. 179.

[20] Quoted in ibid., pp. 180–81.

[21] Quoted in Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage, p. 78.

[22] Ibid., p. 116.

[23] Ida Clyde Clarke, American Women and the World War (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1918), p. 19.

[24] Ibid., p. 27.

[25] Ibid., p. 31. Actually Mrs. Tarbell’s muckraking activities were pretty much confined to Rockefeller and Standard Oil. She was highly favorable to business leaders in the Morgan ambit, as witness her laudatory biographies of Judge Elbert H. Gary, of U.S. Steel (1925) and Owen D. Young of General Electric (1932).

[26] Ibid., pp. 277, 275–79, 58.

[27] Ibid., p. 183.

[28] Ibid., p. 103.

[29] Ibid., pp. 104–05.

[30] Ibid., p. 101.

[31] Ibid., p. 129. Margaret Dreier Robins and her husband Raymond were virtually a paradigmatic progressive couple. Raymond was a Florida-born wanderer and successful gold prospector who underwent a mystical conversion experience in the Alaska wilds and became a pietist preacher. He moved to Chicago, where he became a leader in Chicago settlement house work and municipal reform. Margaret Dreier and her sister Mary were daughters of a wealthy and socially prominent New York family who worked for and financed the emergent National Women’s Trade Union League. Margaret married Raymond Robins in 1905 and moved to Chicago, soon becoming longtime president of the league. In Chicago, the Robinses led and organized progressive political causes for over two decades, becoming top leaders of the Progressive Party from 1912 to 1916. During the war, Raymond Robins engaged in considerable diplomatic activity as head of a Red Cross mission to Russia. On the Robinses, see Allen F. Davis, Spearhead for Reform: the Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

[32] For more on women’s war work and woman suffrage, see the standard history of the suffrage movement, Flexner, Century of Struggle, pp. 288–89. Interestingly, The National War Labor Board (NWLB) frankly adopted the concept of “equal pay for equal work” in order to limit the employment of women workers by imposing higher costs on the employer. The “only check,” affirmed the NWLB, on excessive employment of women “is to make it no more profitable to employ women than men.” Quoted in Valerie I. Conner, “‘The Mothers of the Race’ in World War I: The National War Labor Board and Women in Industry,” Labor History 21 (Winter 1979–80): 34.

[33] See Raymond B. Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 133. Also see Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (New York: New American Library, 1976), pp. 103–05. Fosdick was particularly appalled that American patrolmen on street duty actually smoked cigars! Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation, p. 135.

[34] The American Social Hygiene Association, with its influential journal Social Hygiene, was the major organization in what was known as the “purity crusade.” The association was launched when the New York physician Dr. Prince A. Morrow, inspired by the agitation against venereal disease and in favor of the continence urged by the French syphilographer, Jean-Alfred Fournier, formed in 1905 the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis (ASSMP). Soon, the terms proposed by the Chicago branch of ASSMP, “social hygiene” and “sex hygiene,” became widely used for their medical and scientific patina, and in 1910 ASSMP changed its name to the American Federation for Sex Hygiene (AFSH). Finally, in late 1913, AFSH, an organization of physicians, combined with the National Vigilance Association (formerly the American Purity Alliance), a group of clergymen and social workers, to form the all-embracing American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA).

In this social hygiene movement, the moral and medical went hand in hand. Thus Dr. Morrow welcomed the new knowledge about venereal disease because it demonstrated that “punishment for sexual sin” no longer had to be “reserved for the hereafter.”

The first president of ASHA was the president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot. In his address to the first meeting, Eliot made clear that total abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and even spices was part and parcel of the anti-prostitution and purity crusade.

On physicians, the purity crusade, and the formation of ASHA, see Ronald Hamowy, “Medicine and the Crimination of Sin: ‘Self-Abuse’ in 19th Century America,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1 (Summer 1972): 247–59; James Wunsch, “Prostitution and Public Policy: From Regulation to Suppression, 1858–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1976); and Roland R. Wagner, “Virtue Against Vice: A Study of Moral Reformers and Prostitution in the Progressive Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971). On Morrow, also see John C. Burnham. “The Progressive Era Revolution in American Attitudes Toward Sex,” Journal of American History 59 (March, 1973): 899, and Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 201. Also see Burnham, “Medical Specialists and Movements Toward Social Control in the Progressive Era: Three Examples,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays in Associational Activities in Modern America, J. Israel, ed. (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp. 24–26.

[35] In Daniel R. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 1917–1919 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 222. Also see ibid., pp. 221–24; and C.H. Cramer, Newton D. Baker: A Biography (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1961), pp. 99–102.

[36] Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation, pp. 145–47. While prostitution was indeed banned in Storyville after 1917, Storyville, contrary to legend, never “closed”—the saloons and dance halls remained open, and contrary to orthodox accounts, jazz was never really shut down in Storyville or New Orleans, and it was therefore never forced up river. For a revisionist view of the impact of the closure of Storyville on the history of jazz, see Tom Bethell, George Lewis: A Jazzman from New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 6–7; and Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans (Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1974). Also, on later Storyville, see Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, p. 218.

[37] See Hamowy, “Crimination of Sin,” p. 262 n. The quote from Clemenceau is in Fosdick, Chronicle, p. 171. Newton Baker’s loyal biographer declared that Clemenceau, in this response, showed “his animal proclivities as the ‘Tiger of France.’” Cramer, Newton Baker, p. 101.

[38] Clarke, American Women, pp. 90, 87, 93. In some cases, organized women took the offensive to help stamp out vice and liquor in their community. Thus in Texas in 1917 the Texas Women’s Anti-Vice Committee led in the creation of a “White Zone” around all the military bases. By autumn the Committee expanded into the Texas Social Hygiene Association to coordinate the work of eradicating prostitution and saloons. San Antonio proved to be its biggest problem. Lewis L. Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), p. 227.

[39] Davis, Spearheads for Reform, p. 225.

[40] Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation, p. 144. After the war, Raymond Fosdick went on to fame and fortune, first as Under Secretary General of the League of Nations, and then for the rest of his life as a member of the small inner circle close to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In that capacity, Fosdick rose to become head of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller’s official biographer. Meanwhile, Fosdick’s brother, Rev. Harry Emerson, became Rockefeller’s hand-picked parish minister, first at Park Avenue Presbyterian Church and then at the new interdenominational Riverside Church, built with Rockefeller funds. Harry Emerson Fosdick was Rockefeller’s principal aide in battling, within the Protestant Church, in favor of postmillennial, statist, “liberal” Protestantism and against the rising tide of premillennial Christianity, known as “fundamentalist” since the years before World War I. See Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, pp. 140–42, 151–53.

[41] Davis, Spearheads for Reform, p. 226; Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, p. 66; Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, p. 156.

[42] Eleanor H. Woods, Robert A. Woods: Champion of Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), p. 316. Also see ibid., pp. 201–02, 250 ff., 268 ff.

[43] Davis, Spearheads for Reform, p. 227.

[44] Mencken, “Professor Veblen,” p. 267.

[45] Quoted in the important article by Quandt, “Religion and Social Thought,” p. 404. Also see John Blewett, S.J., “Democracy as Religion: Unity in Human Relations,” in John Dewey: His Thought and Influence, Blewett, ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1960), pp. 33–58; and John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882–1889, J. Boydstan et al., eds. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–71), vols. 2 and 3.

[46] On the general secularization of postmillennial pietism after 1900, see Quandt, “Religion and Social Thought,” pp. 390–409; and Moorhead, “The Erosion of Postmillennialism in American Religious Thought,” pp. 61–77.

[47] Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), p. 92.

[48] Quoted in ibid., pp. 92–93. Also see Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” p. 89. For similar reasons, Thorstein Veblen, prophet of the alleged dichotomy of production for profit vs. production for use, championed the war and began to come out openly for socialism in an article in the New Republic in 1918, later reprinted in his The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts (1919). See Charles Hirschfeld, “Nationalist Progressivism and World War I,” Mid-America 45 (July, 1963): 150. Also see David Riesman, Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), pp. 30–31.

[49] Hirschfeld, “Nationalist Progressivism and World War I,” p. 150.

[50] Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 92.

[51] Hirschfeld, “Nationalist Progressivism in World War I,” p. 142. It is intriguing that for the New Republic intellectuals, actually existent private individuals are dismissed as “mechanical,” whereas nonexistent entities such as “national and social” forces are hailed as being “organic.”

[52] Quoted in Hirschfeld, “Nationalist Progressivism, and World War I,” p. 147. A minority of pro-war socialists broke off from the antiwar Socialist Party to form the Social Democratic League, and to join a pro-war front organized and financed by the Wilson administration, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy. The pro-war socialists welcomed the war as providing “startling progress in collectivism,” and opined that after the war, the existent state socialism would be advanced toward “democratic collectivism.” The pro-war socialists included John Spargo, Algie Simons, W.J. Ghent, Robert R. LaMonte, Charles Edward Russell, J.G. Phelps Stokes, Upton Sinclair, and William English Walling. Walling so succumbed to war fever that he denounced the Socialist Party as a conscious tool of the Kaiser and advocated the suppression of freedom of speech for pacifists and for antiwar socialists. See ibid., p. 143. On Walling, see Gilbert, Designing the Industrial State, pp. 232–33. On the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy and its role in the war effort, see Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 58–71.

[53] In fact, Jacob Lippmann was to contract cancer in 1925 and die two years later. Moreover, Lippmann, before and after Jacob’s death, was supremely indifferent to his father. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 5, pp. 116–17. On Walter Lippmann’s enthusiasm for conscription, at least for others, see Beaver, Newton Baker, pp. 26–27.

[54] Hirschfeld, “Nationalist Progressivism and World War I,” pp. 148–50. On the New Republic and the war, and particularly on John Dewey, also see Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, pp. 181–224, especially pp. 202–04. On the three New Republic editors, see Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). Also see David W. Noble, “The New Republic and the Idea of Progress, 1914–1920,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 38 (December, 1951): 387–402. In a book titled The End of the War (1918), New Republic editor Walter Weyl assured his readers that “the new economic solidarity once gained, can never again be surrendered.” Cited in Leuchtenburg, “New Deal, and the Analogue of War,” p. 90.

[55] Rexford Guy Tugwell, “America’s War-Time Socialism,” The Nation (1927): 364–65. Quoted in Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” pp. 90–91.

[56] In January 1927, Croly wrote a New Republic editorial, “An Apology for Fascism,” endorsing an accompanying article, “Fascism for the Italians,” written by the distinguished philosopher Horace M. Kallen, a disciple of John Dewey and an exponent of progressive pragmatism. Kallen praised Mussolini for his pragmatic approach, and in particular for the élan vital that Mussolini had infused into Italian life. True, Professor Kallen conceded, fascism is coercive, but surely this is only a temporary expedient. Noting fascism’s excellent achievement in economics, education, and administrative reform, Kallen added that “in this respect the Fascist revolution is not unlike the Communist revolution. Each is the application by force ... of an ideology to a condition. Each should have the freest opportunity once it has made a start. ...” The accompanying New Republic editorial endorsed Kallen’s thesis and added that “alien critics should beware of outlawing a political experiment which aroused in a whole nation an increased moral energy and dignified its activities by subordinating them to a deeply felt common purpose.” New Republic 49 (January 12, 1927): 207–13. Cited in John Patrick Diggins, “Mussolini’s Italy: The View from America,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1964), pp. 214–17.

[57] Born in Ireland, David Croly became a distinguished journalist in New York City and rose to the editorship of the New York World. Croly organized the first Positivist Circle in the United States and financed an American speaking tour for the Comtian Henry Edgar. The Positivist Circle met at Croly’s home, and in 1871 David Croly published A Positivist Primer. When Herbert was born in 1869, he was consecrated by his father to the Goddess Humanity, the symbol of Comte’s Religion of Humanity. See the illuminating recent biography of Herbert by David W. Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

[58] See Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door: America and China, 1905–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971).

[59] For a refreshingly acidulous portrayal of the actions of the historians in World War I, see C. Hartley Grattan, “The Historians Cut Loose,” American Mercury, August 1927, reprinted in Harry Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice, 2nd ed. (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Publisher, 1972), pp. 142–64. A more extended account is George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970). Gruber, Mars and Minerva, deals with academia and social scientism, but concentrates on historians. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words that Won the War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939), presents the story of the “Creel Committee,” the Committee on Public Information, the official propaganda ministry during the war.

[60] See the useful biography of Ely, Rader, The Academic Mind and Reform.

[61] Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State, pp. 239–40.

[62] Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State, pp. 180–81.

[63] John Rogers Commons was of old Yankee stock, descendant of John Rogers, Puritan martyr in England, and born in the Yankee area of the Western Reserve in Ohio and reared in Indiana. His Vermont mother was a graduate of the hotbed of pietism, Oberlin College, and she sent John to Oberlin in the hopes that he would become a minister. While in college, Commons and his mother launched a prohibitionist publication at the request of the Anti-Saloon League. After graduation, Commons went to Johns Hopkins to study under Ely, but flunked out of graduate school. See Commons, Myself. Also see Dorfman, Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 3, pp. 276–77; Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), pp. 198–204.

[64] Quandt, “Religion and Social Thought,” pp. 402–03. Ely did not expect the millennial Kingdom to be far off. He believed that it was the task of the universities and of the social sciences “to teach the complexities of the Christian duty of brotherhood” in order to arrive at the New Jerusalem “which we are all eagerly awaiting.” The church’s mission was to attack every evil institution, “until the earth becomes a new earth, and all its cities, cities of God.”

[65] Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 114.

[66] See Rader, Academic Mind and Reform, pp. 181–91. On top big business affiliations of National Security League leaders, especially J.P. Morgan and others in the Morgan ambit, see C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (New York Vanguard Press, 1929), pp. 117–18, and Robert D. Ward, “The Origin and Activities of the National Security League, 1914–1919,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (June, 1960): 51–65.

[67] The Chamber of Commerce of the United States spelled out the long-run economic benefit of conscription, that for America’s youth it would “substitute a period of helpful discipline for a period of demoralizing freedom from restraint.” Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon, p. 110. On the broad and enthusiastic support given to the draft by the Chamber of Commerce, see Chase C. Mooney and Martha E. Layman, “Some Phases of the Compulsory Military Training Movement, 1914–1920,” Mississippi Historical Review 38 (March, 1952): 640.

[68] Richard T. Ely, Hard Times: The Way in and the Way Out (1931), cited in Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking, 1949), vol. 5, p. 671; and in Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” p. 94.

[69] Ely drew up a super-patriotic pledge for the Madison chapter of the Loyalty Legion, pledging its members to “stamp out disloyalty.” The pledge also expressed unqualified support for the Espionage Act and vowed to “work against La Follettism in all its anti-war forms.” Rader, Academic Mind and Reform, pp. 183 ff.

[70] Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 207.

[71] Ibid., p. 207.

[72] Ibid., pp. 208 n.

[73] Ibid., pp. 209–10. In his autobiography, written in 1938, Richard Ely rewrote history to cover up his ignominious role in the get–La Follette campaign. He acknowledged signing the faculty petition, but then had the temerity to claim that he “was not one of the ring-leaders, as La Follette thought, in circulating this petition ...” There is no mention of his secret research campaign against La Follette.

[74] For more on the anti-La Follette campaign, see H.C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War: 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 68–72; Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), p. 120; and Belle Case La Follette and Fola La Follette, Robert M. LaFollette (New York: Macmillan, 1953), vol. 2.

[75] Thus, T.W. Hutchison, from a very different perspective, notes the contrast between Carl Menger’s stress on the beneficent, unplanned phenomena of society, such as the free market, and the growth of “social self-consciousness” and government planning. Hutchison recognizes that a crucial component of that social self-consciousness is government statistics. T.W. Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines, 1870–1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 150–51, 427.

[76] Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State, p. 207.

[77] Solomon Fabricant, The Trend of Government Activity in the United States since 1900 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1952), p. 143. Similarly, an authoritative work on the growth of government in England puts it this way: “The accumulation of factual information about social conditions and the development of economics and the social sciences increased the pressure for government intervention. ... As statistics improved and students of social conditions multiplied, the continued existence of such conditions was kept before the public. Increasing knowledge of them aroused influential circles and furnished working class movements with factual weapons.” Moses Abramovitz and Vera F. Eliasberg, The Growth of Public Employment in Great Britain (Princeton, NJ: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1957), pp. 22–23, 30. Also see M.I. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975).

[78] See Joseph Dorfman, “The Role of the German Historical School in American Economic Thought,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 45 (May, 1955): 18. George Hildebrand remarked on the inductive emphasis of the German Historical School that “perhaps there is, then, some connection between this kind of teaching and the popularity of crude ideas of physical planning in more recent times.” George H. Hildebrand, “International Flow of Economic Ideas-Discussion,” ibid., p. 37.

[79] Dorfman, “Role of the German Historical School in American Economic Thought,” p. 23. On Wright and Adams, see Dorfman, Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 3, 164–74, 123; and Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, p. 163. Furthermore, the first professor of statistics in the United States, Roland P. Falkner, was a devoted student of Engel’s and a translator of the works of Engel’s assistant, August Meitzen.

[80] Irving Norton Fisher, My Father Irving Fisher (New York: Comet Press, 1956), pp. 146–47. Also for Fisher, see Irving Fisher, Stabilised Money (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935), p. 383.

[81] Fisher, My Father, pp. 264–67. On Fisher’s role and influence during this period, see Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 4th ed. (New York: Richardson & Snyder, 1983). Also see Joseph S. Davis, The World Between the Wars, 1919–39, An Economist’s View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 194; and Melchior Palyi, The Twilight of Gold, 1914–1936: Myth and Realities (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), pp. 240, 249.

[82] Wesley C. Mitchell was of old Yankee pietist stock. His grandparents were farmers in Maine and then in Western New York. His father followed the path of many Yankees in migrating to a farm in northern Illinois. Mitchell attended the University of Chicago, where he was strongly influenced by Veblen and John Dewey. Dorfman, Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 3, p. 456.

[83] Dorfman, Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 4, pp. 376, 361.

[84] Emphasis added. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 363. For more on this entire topic, see Murray N. Rothbard, “The Politics of Political Economists: Comment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 74 (November, 1960): 659–65.

[85] See in particular Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State; and Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” pp. 157–69.

[86] David Eakins, “The Origins of Corporate Liberal Policy Research, 1916–1922: The Political-Economic Expert and the Decline of Public Debate,” in Building the Organizational Society, Israel, ed., p. 161.

[87] Herbert Heaton, Edwin F. Gay, A Scholar in Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952). Edwin Gay was born in Detroit of old New England stock. His father had been born in Boston and went into his father-in-law’s lumber business in Michigan. Gay’s mother was the daughter of a wealthy preacher and lumberman. Gay entered the University of Michigan, was heavily influenced by the teaching of John Dewey, and then stayed in graduate school in Germany for over a dozen years, finally obtaining his Ph.D. in economic history at the University of Berlin. The major German influences on Gay were Gustav Schmoller, head of the Historical School, who emphasized that economics must be an “inductive science,” and Adolf Wagner, also at the University of Berlin, who favored large-scale government intervention in the economy in behalf of Christian ethics. Back at Harvard, Gay was the major single force, in collaboration with the Boston Chamber of Commerce, in pushing through a factory inspection act in Massachusetts, and in early 1911 Gay became president of the Massachusetts branch of the American Association for Labor Legislation, an organization founded by Richard T. Ely and dedicated to agitating for government intervention in the area of labor unions, minimum wage rates, unemployment, public works, and welfare.

[88] On the pulling and hauling among Rockefeller advisers on The Institute of Economic Research, see David M. Grossman, “American Foundations and the Support of Economic Research, 1913–29,” Minerva 22 (Spring–Summer 1982): 62–72.

[89] See Eakins, “Origins of Corporate Liberal Policy Research,” pp. 166–67; Grossman, “American Foundations and the Support of Economic Research,” pp. 76–78; Heaton, Edwin F. Gay. On Stone, see Dorfman, Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 4, pp. 42, 60–61; and Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 152, 165. During his Marxist period, Stone had translated Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy.

[90] See Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920’s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 54 ff.

[91] Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, p. 140.

[92] Eakins, “Origins of Corporate Liberal Policy Research,” p. 168. Also see Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity, pp. 282–86.

[93] Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of the National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 187–88.

[94] Vice chairman of the IGR was retired St. Louis merchant and lumberman and former president of Washington University of St. Louis, Robert S. Brookings. Secretary of the IGR was James F. Curtis, formerly Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Taft and now secretary and deputy governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Others on the board of the IGR were ex-President Taft, railroad executive Frederic A. Delano, uncle of Franklin D. Roosevelt and member of the Federal Reserve Board, Arthur T. Hadley, economist and president of Yale, Charles C. Van Hise, progressive president of the University of Wisconsin, and ally of Ely, reformer and influential young Harvard Law professor, Felix Frankfurter, Theodore N. Vail, chairman of AT&T, progressive engineer and businessman, Herbert C. Hoover, and financier R. Fulton Cutting, an officer of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research. Eakins, “Origins of Corporate Liberal Policy Research,” pp. 168–69.

[95] On the Commercial Economy Board, see Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War, pp. 211ff.

[96] Alchon, Invisible Hand of Planning, p. 29. Mitchell headed the price statistics section of the Price-Fixing Committee of the War Industries Board.

[97] Heaton, Edwin F. Gay, p. 129.

[98] See Rothbard, “War Collectivism,” pp. 100–12. [Editor’s remarks] See Chapter 12, pp. 390–99.

[99] See Heaton, Edwin F. Gay, pp. 129ff.; and the excellent book on the Inquiry, Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 166–68, 177–78.

[100] Heaton, Edwin F. Gay, p. 135. Also see Alchon, Invisible Hand of Planning, pp. 35–36.

[101] In 1939 the Bureau of the Budget would be transferred to the Executive Office, thus completing the IGR objective.

[102] Moulton was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and vice president of the Chicago Association of Commerce. See Eakins, “Origins of Corporate Liberal Policy Research,” pp. 172–77; Dorfman, Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 4, pp. 11, 195–97.

[103] Gay had been recommended to the group by one of its founders, Thomas W. Lamont. It was Gay’s suggestion that the CFR begin its major project by establishing an “authoritative” journal, Foreign Affairs. And it was Gay who selected his Harvard historian colleague Archibald Cary Coolidge as the first editor and the New York Post reporter Hamilton Fish Armstrong as assistant editor and executive director of the CFR. See Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), pp. 16–19, 105, 110.

[104] Ellis W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover and Economic Stabilization, 1921–22,” in Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice, E. Hawley, ed. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1981), p. 52.

[105] Hawley, “Herbert Hoover,” p. 53. Also see ibid., pp. 42–54. On the continuing collaboration between Hoover, Gay, and Mitchell throughout the 1920s see Alchon, Invisible Hand of Planning.

[106] Alchon, Invisible Hand of Planning, pp. 39–42; Dorfman, Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 3, p. 490.

[107] One exception was the critical review in the Commercial and Financial Chronicle (May 18, 1929), which derided the impression given the reader that the capacity of the United States “for continued prosperity is well-nigh unlimited.” Quoted in Davis, World Between the Wars, p. 144. Also on Recent Economic Changes and economists’ opinions at the time, see ibid., pp. 136–51, 400–17; Eakins, “The Development of Corporate Liberal Policy Research in the United States, 1885–1965,” pp. 166–69, 205; and Edward Angly, comp., Oh Yeah? (New York: Viking Press, 1931).

[108] In 1930, Hunt published a book-length, popularizing summary, An Audit of America. On Recent Economic Changes, also see Alchon, Invisible Hand, pp. 129–33, 135–42, 145–51, 213.

[109]Department of Labor—FSA Appropriation Bill for 1945. Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Appropriations. 78th Congress, 2nd Session, Part I (Washington, 1945), pp. 258ff, 276ff. Quoted in Rothbard, “Politics of Political Economists,” p. 665. On the growth of economists and statisticians in government, especially during wartime, see also Herbert Stein, “The Washington Economics Industry,” American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings 76 (May, 1986): 2–3.

[110] [Editor’s footnote] Due to space constraints, Rothbard did not include this section in the final draft of his paper. It is published here for the first time as an appendix.

[111] Noble, America by Design, p. 151.

[112] Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science, p. 35.

[113] Ibid., p. 36.

[114] Michael Pupin, The New Reformation (1927); and Tobey, American Ideology of National Science, pp. 38 ff.

[115] Cattell was also a long-time advocate of the government-supported and controlled science. His power base was the Committee of One Hundred on Scientific Research of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which Cattell was secretary. The Committee was established in 1913 to try to organize a scientific inventory of the nation. When war came, Cattell coordinated the AAAS activities with the NRC.

[116] Robert A. Millikan was the son of an Iowa preacher, and attended the Yankee pietist stronghold of Oberlin College. From 1893 to 1895 he was the only graduate student in physics at Columbia, with Pupin one of his teachers. After obtaining his doctorate in 1895, Pupin loaned Millikan the money to do post-doctoral study at the University of Berlin.

[117] Noble, America by Design, p. 154; also Tobey, American Ideology of National Science, p. 52.

[118] The leading lights of the Engineering Foundation now included Hale’s old friend Gano Dunn, of the J.G. White Engineering Company, Frank B. Jewett, head of Bell Labs for the Morgan-oriented A.T.&T. and apostle of organized scientific research; Arthur D. Little, a Boston born chemical engineer and head of the nation’s largest engineering consulting firm; and president E. Wilbur Rice of Morgan-oriented General Electric. Jewett, son of a top engineer for the Morgan-dominated Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago, studying under Millikan, and eventually joined A.T.&T. as an electrical engineer. See Nobel, America by Design, pp. 115, 127, 155.

[119] Noble, America by Design, p. 156.

[120] The son of an astronomer, Henry Pritchett was one of the most prominent astronomers in the country, formerly professor at Washington University of St. Louis, superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, and then president of M.I.T., before becoming the founder and first president of the Carnegie Foundation. Pritchett had long sought centralized government standardization as part of national industrial competition against Germany. Ibid., pp. 72–73, 156.

[121] Ibid., p. 158.

[122] Ibid., pp. 157–58.

[123] By 1919, the chairman of the Industrial Relations Division was John Johnston, of U.S. Steel.

[124] In 1919, chairman of the Engineering Division was electrical engineer Comfort A. Adams, of Harvard, who was succeeded in 1923 by Frank Jewett. See Noble, America by Design, pp. 162–66.

[125] Ibid., p. 161.