0.3 Knowledge for governance: social science perspectives on science  (Page 6/10)

During his first months in office, Roosevelt tried without success to persuade Merriam to join his administration. Taking the first step in elevating Merriam’s concept of scientific (i.e., social scientific) planning to the federal level, Roosevelt did convince Merriam to become one of three members of a new, non-governmental advisory committee: the National Planning Board. Dupree, op.cit. , 354. The other two members were Frederic Delano and Wesley C. Mitchell, the latter a distinguished economist, research director of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and former chair of the Hoover administration’s Research Committee on Social Trends (for which Merriam had been vice-chair). Among the committee’s first actions was an April 1934 request that the National Academy of Sciences prepare a report on the role of science in planning. Ibid.

The science committee of the national resources committee

The next few years saw a dizzying series of committee name changes and remapping of the federal bureaucracy that added up to a steady expansion of the National Planning Board’s mandate, and its movement closer to the federal center of power. In 1934, it was replaced by the National Resources Board, which in turn became the National Resources Committee in 1935. The new board was a governmental organization chaired by Ickes and including the secretaries of several cabinet departments concerned with natural resources. The former three-member non-governmental National Planning Board members now were the advisory committee to the National Resources Board/Committee, and Frederic Delano was appointed its vice-chair.

Ickes had convinced the president that national planning was urgently needed to support federal initiatives in the management of land, water, mineral, and power resources. Technical committees were appointed in each of these areas. Then the National Resources Board decided to undertake the study of human as well as natural resources. In February 1935, the board invited the National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council on Education each to nominate five members to an advisory Science Committee. One of the three members designated by the National Academy of Sciences was John Merriam, a distinguished paleontologist, who was Charles Merriam’s elder brother.

Edwin B. Wilson, a mathematical physicist on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health, chaired the science committee. During 1936, the committee focused its attention on population problems and the social consequences of invention. Early in 1937, it convinced Delano to propose to the president that they study the “interrelations of government and the intellectual life of the nation, whether in research, in education, or in technology.” Dupree, op. cit. , 359. The following July, Roosevelt approved “a study of Federal Aids to Research and the place of research (including natural and social science) in the Federal Government.”