Hot Science/Cold War: The National Science Foundation After World War II

President Truman’s signature on the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 marked the end of a seven-year battle to create a postwar federal science agency.’ Dramatically different visions separated the two sides in the struggle. Populists and many New Dealers advocated an agency that would link scientific research directly to economic development and make the results of federally funded research widely available for commercial use. They also wanted an agency that would be readily accountable to the American public, ultimately through the president. Elite scientists and their business allies, in contrast, favored an agency that would be controlled by scientists and would have the narrower mission of supplying resources for what they called ”basic” or ”fundamental” research. After winning the legislative war of the 1940s, elite scientists faced the problem of securing the peace. Two intimately related issues in particular would plague the agency for the indefinite future. The first concerned the relationship between the agency’s work and the national welfare. The foundation’s leaders had to convince members of a cost-conscious and practical-minded Congress to appropriate tax dollars for “basic” scientific research, where the practical payoffs of such research were by no means transparent either to legislators or their constituents. Explaining the agency’s relevance to national needs therefore promised to be an ongoing and arduous task. We call this the problem of releunnce. The second issue concerned control of the agency. The ideology that informed the practices of the science elite in charge of the agency suggested that scientific progress would be impeded if the foundation’s programs were subject to the same political pressures