0.3 Knowledge for governance: social science perspectives on science

Research is one of the Nation's very greatest resources and the role of the Federal Government in supporting and stimulating it needs to be reexamined .

—Franklin D. Roosevelt to Frederic A. Delano, July 19, 1937

The history of science as a facet of federal policy effectively begins with the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Before then, science in government fell haphazardly under the purviews of various government agencies and the military, with no central coordination by the president’s office.

In November 1938, Roosevelt’s Science Committee—part of the National Resources Committee—issued a report entitled Relation of the Federal Government to Research , the first in the three-volume Research: A National Resource . ( Industrial Research and Business Research , the second and third volumes in the series, were issued in December 1940 and June 1941, respectively.) Because it made a strong, sweeping case for the federal government's interest in (and, to some extent, responsibility for) scientific research outside of its own bureaus, Research: a National Resource —and particularly Relation of the Federal Government to Research —is the first comprehensive federal government attempt to articulate a national science policy. National Resources Committee, “Relation of the Federal Government to Research,” in Research: a National Resource (Washington, DC: US General Printing Office, 1938).

Chaired by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, the National Resources Committee's membership included the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor and War, and Works Project Administrator Harry Hopkins. Frederic A. Delano, President Roosevelt’s maternal uncle, served as vice chairman of the full committee as well as chairman of its five-member, non-governmental working group. Prominent among the latter was Charles E. Merriam, chairman of the University of Chicago's innovative political science department, founder (in 1923) of the Social Science Research Council, and (in 1936-37) a member of Louis Brownlow's three-person Committee on Administrative Management. That committee’s 1937 report would lead to creation of the Executive Office of the President.

In post-World-War-I America, there were three distinct sectors for scientific research: the government, academic, and industrial. Each had been established and developed during different periods. From the Washington presidency (1789-1797) until the Civil War (1861-65), government bureaus, including military departments, were virtually the sole institutions conducting professional scientific work.

After the Civil War, several old-line colleges transformed themselves into research universities based on a model that had emerged in Germany around 1820, and a number of new research universities were founded. See, e.g., Richard C. Atkinson and William A. Blanpied, “Research Universities: Core of the US Science and Technology System,” Technology in Society 30 (2008), 30-48 The early twentieth century saw establishment of the nation’s first industrial research laboratories. Their number and significance increased substantially as a result of World War I; by 1930, industry was the primary funder and conductor of scientific research. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: a History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1957), 326-68.