0.4 Science for the public good: natural science perspectives on  (Page 3/8)

The most ambitious pre-Civil-War attempt to institute a national science policy was spelled out in John Quincy Adams’s 1826 message to Congress. Ibid., 39-43 Adams asserted that the rapid development of the United States required some measure of federal authority over such tangible internal improvements as roads and canals, and that government had a duty towards knowledge as “among the first, if not the first, instrument for the improvement of the condition of man.” He called for the establishment of a national university and a national observatory, and for voyages of discovery. His congressional allies proposed a Constitutional amendment giving Congress authority to “make surveys . . . to construct roads . . . to establish a National University . . . and to offer and distribute prizes for promoting agriculture, education, science and the liberal and useful arts.” Ibid., 41-41 But the amendment failed, as did virtually all of Adams’s other proposals. Subsequently, as a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, he helped shape the contours of the Smithsonian Institution.

This bequest of James Smithson to the United States to establish a scientific institution was at first opposed in Congress on the by-then-familiar internal improvements grounds. Adams, however, managed to broker an agreement that would make the Smithsonian a research facility, forswearing any ambitions to become a national university. Congress appropriated no funds, simply accepting and providing shape and substance to a private bequest, and stipulated that a political, non-scientific Board of Regents would oversee the Smithsonian’s scientific work. The first secretaries of the Smithsonian (in particular the very first, Joseph Henry, who had been a distinguished professor of physics at Princeton University), drawn from outside government and not beholden to Congress for resources, enjoyed a degree of autonomy comparable to that of the heads of non-governmental institutions, even though they were federal employees and remained legally accountable to the president and the congress.

Prior to World War II, a strict reading of the Tenth Amendment (granting to states all authority not explicitly conferred on the federal government) held sway in congress, thus denying the federal government any authority over education at any level. One result was a resolute hands-off federal policy regarding non-governmental scientific institutions. Even after the war, when the federal government began providing research grants to university faculty, it devised a system whereby funds were provided not for universities but for specific scientific projects to be conducted by specific faculty members.

Congressional reluctance notwithstanding, the geographical expansion, industrialization, and urbanization of the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries highlighted the importance of science to the federal government in discharging its growing responsibilities and promoting the public good. There was a steady expansion of the government’s scientific bureaus and capabilities, and increasing awareness that government could benefit from the growing capabilities of American science. By 1938, proponents could argue openly in Relation of the Federal Government to Research that the federal government should: