0.6 The science-government compact: 1945-1950  (Page 2/16)

As a result, by the end if 1945 the notion of linking U.S. science with national social and economic objectives seemed a lesspartisan issue than it had during the late 1930s. Since science-based technology had contributed demonstrably to military success, it was almost self-evidentthat science could be mobilized to provide peacetime benefits, contributing to national security and domestic prosperity. As Roosevelt put it, “New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision,boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.” Vannevar Bush, Science—the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar ScientificResearch . Washington, DC: National Science Foundation (July 1945, reprinted May 1980), 3.

Postwar optimism about the promise of science was part of a broader, nationally shared conviction that the United States had both thematerial resources and the moral authority required to assure domestic health and prosperity and maintain a beneficent world order. William D. Carey, who hadcome to the Bureau of the Budget in 1942 with a master’s degree from Harvard’s Littauer School of Government, later recalled:

You have to think of the atmosphere. This was post war, most of the world in ashes, the U.S. riding very, very high, dreaming great dreams—theFull Employment Act, United Nations arrangements, Point IV, the Marshall Plan. And then, along in parallel, there was to be a new age of science, ofcreativity. This was all to be part of a great strategic thrust toward the good society: high employment, unlimited opportunities, superb education, civilrights. And so we come to the institutional arrangements.

And the opportunities presented themselves. The atmosphere was that we had a new world, and all wouldgo well. There was a very short window of idealism and optimism that closed very abruptly. Out of that, the progression of the institutional arrangements thatfollowed were cast in instrumental terms—in terms of national needs. Author’s interview with William D. Carey, December 1986.

A striking example of postwar optimism about the efficacy of science-based knowledge for policy-making was the establishment ofthe Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) in the Executive Office of the President as part of the Employment Act of 1946. The most obvious example of a comparableforeign policy initiative was the Marshall Plan, implemented in 1948.

The genesis of the CEA is already implicit in arguments, advanced in the 1937 Report of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management , that specialized knowledge and objective data are prerequisites for effective governance. Thatproposition was also explicit in Vannevar Bush’s 1940 plan for a National Defense Research Committee and its successor, the Office of Scientific Researchand Development. The assumption that in peacetime science merited at least special political consideration, if not special access to the president,underlay creation of the Atomic Energy Commission In 1975, the Atomic Energy Commission was absorbed into the newly-created Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), whichalso incorporated bureaus from the Departments of Commerce and the Interior. In 1977, ERDA was absorbed into the new Department of Energy (DoE). in 1946 and the National Science Foundation in 1950. And to a remarkable extent,that assumption was accepted by the Bureau of the Budget and the Congress.