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ISBN 0-8078-2655-3

Published: Fall 2001

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Copyright (c) 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction

Scientists allied themselves with America's corporate, political, and military elites between 1890 and 1960, and they did so not just to improve their professional standing and win more money for research but for political reasons as well. They wanted to use their expertise and their new institutional connections to effect a transformation of American political culture. They succeeded, but not in ways that all scientists envisioned or agreed upon. By 1960 America's governing ideology was organized around two key goals: increasing prosperity and enhancing military strength, and the centrality of consumerism and militarism owed much to the ideas and institutions which leading scientists created and used in the corporate and political sectors over the preceding decades.

Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientists stressed their own importance to expanding the scope and effectiveness of national institutions. By doing so, they helped create a new kind of national authority, one that was rooted in the large corporations, the universities, the professions, and the federal government. They also helped foster a new conception of how social change occurred in American life. By stressing the evolutionary and transformative quality of their creations, they argued that scientific innovation was the central force driving American progress, prosperity, and national security. This new notion of social change led some scientists and intellectuals to formulate a new definition of democracy itself, one that rejected the old model of adversarial party politics in favor of a vision of a harmonious, classless meritocracy in which all members of the society would enjoy an improved standard of living provided by the corporate culture, and the talented would have more opportunities to enter the professional world.

In short, the leaders of American science in collaboration with corporate, political, academic, and later military elites created a new governing ideology in America in the years from the early twentieth century to the 1960s, one that relocated social authority away from local elites and political parties and toward a new national class of interrelated elite institutions in the public and private sectors. But this process was characterized by conflict every step of the way: between scientists and their powerful institutional collaborators and among the scientists themselves. This book is a study of those conflicts and the ideological, professional, and political factors that were under dispute.

It is also a study of the larger cultural consensus within which those conflicts occurred. The new governing ideology and the new conception of political authority that I examine were fashioned in conjunction with the rise of a powerful corporate economy. New monopolistic businesses used science and professionalism to legitimate their power, and scientists and professionals in turn used this new corporate system to enhance their status and achieve greater opportunities for wealth, power, and prestige.

Corporate elites and scientists engaged in collaboration and mutual exploitation, and in Chapter 1 I examine the cultural terms on which that exchange was carried out. It was hardly a placid relationship. It had built-in ideological tensions, which I describe in Chapter 2, and these tensions were largely responsible--as I argue in Chapters 3 and 4--for leading a group of scientific administrators in the late 1930s and early 1940s to forge a partnership with the military and the state which had profound consequences for American politics and culture.

The organizational and ideological terms on which scientists collaborated with the state were, I argue in Chapters 5 and 6, continuations of the terms on which they had been collaborating with the corporate sector over the preceding generation. Many of the same problems that existed in the corporate world reappeared in the relations between scientists and the military and political elite: who would make decisions about the kind of scientific work performed? Who would control its uses? Would scientists be equal partners and collaborators or mere functionaries and technicians?

Paradoxically, the very ideas that scientific elites used to create their collaborative relationships with corporate and military elites would be used by other political and scientific leaders to subordinate the scientists and to make it brutally clear, as in the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, that scientists were regarded as mere "technicians," not governing partners. The very same ideas and institutional strategies that made scientists partners with the powerful also led to their abject humiliation and to the rise of a militaristic conception not only of American science but also of American political culture.

That paradox points to another that I would like to offer as one of the themes of this book: a new system of elite governance emerged that allowed scientists to enjoy greater influence in public life, but individual scientists continually found themselves receding from, or being pushed out of, the limelight and back into the obscure shadows of the organizational and professional structures from which they emerged. Consequently, historians have rarely taken the political ideas of scientists seriously. Specialization among historians partly accounts for this situation. Historical attention to the emergence and growth of American science has been artificially segmented from the scholarship on American intellect, politics, and culture. The periods of specialization that prevail in the historical profession have constricted understanding about the connections between science and the larger stream of political life.

Histories of particular scientific institutions have been written, and many works cover science in the nineteenth century, the pre- and postwar years, and the Cold War.[1] Many of these studies have been excellent in excavating the internal history of American science, but they have failed to place these discrete stories in the larger context of the transformation of American political culture from the 1890s to the 1960s. The use of science was central to that transformation, and scientists and their institutions did not simply respond to events in the political world but actively helped shape those events. And they shaped them in the confines of an existing and changing cultural setting.

The America of 1890 was still a political economy dominated by "courts and parties," as the scholars Morton Keller and Stephen Skowronek observed.[2] New scientific innovations emerging from urban technical communities and financed by New York's investment elites led to the creation of large, science-based corporate monopolies in the electrical and chemical fields. These monopolies were faced with the difficult task of effectively managing their far-flung enterprises and the even trickier task of gaining public legitimacy in a political culture that was hostile to monopoly power and badly divided along class and racial lines.

The leaders of these companies, in conjunction with intellectual and scientific elites who had their own professional and political agendas, fashioned an ideology in which the process of corporate production and innovation was elevated to a central place in American culture. The production of abundance through corporate science and expert management was offered as the justification for this new political economy. This emerging ideology continued to shape American science during World War II and the Cold War period, but its terms were continually contested. Ideological conflicts over the meaning and purpose of American science were simply continued in new forms and in different contexts. Issues of militarism and national security made American science more intensely politicized than it had been, and the explosion of state support for scientific research represented both a radical departure and a continuation of the ideological issues that had accompanied American science in the prewar decades.

Twentieth-century Americans were still trying to work out a set of ideological and cultural values for the new economic world in which they found themselves. The people who achieved dominant positions in the scientific profession in the 1940s and 1950s tried to answer those unresolved questions: What was the role of the professions, the state, and the business elite in a complex, technically driven national economy? How were problems of class relations, social mobility, and political power to be handled in this new setting? What were the new rules of the game? What was to be the new way of things?

Scientists and scientific administrators such as Frank Jewett, Karl Compton, David Lilienthal, Vannevar Bush, and James Conant sought to create an institutional partnership that included business, the professions, the military, and the political elite through which (they hoped) the very act of cooperation would resolve all problems related to national security, economic progress, and social stability.

But the associational visions of these men, which were derived from the dreams of social harmony expounded by Herbert Hoover and other Progressives, were supplanted by the ideas of a more militaristic faction of scientific leaders. Scientists and administrators such as Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss, and Ernest Lawrence, with their full-throated militarism and anticommunism, pushed American scientists and their institutions toward a nearly complete and subservient devotion to American military interests. The visions of science propounded by these men took the ideologies of preceding generations of scientific leaders and manipulated them through a set of political and institutional actions into a new ideology: scientific militarism. One vision of American science won out over another, with important consequences for American political culture. The public role of scientists receded further and further into the institutions of corporate science and the state and away from the people, whose volatility was feared and whose approbation was solicited. It made, by 1960, for a very strange political culture in which scientists and their institutions were central to America's governing structure, and yet they were largely invisible to the public.

I have chosen to focus my attention primarily on the scientific elites and on the way political change was refracted through and caused by their arguments with each other. It makes sense to study such an elite group for several reasons. The first is a selfish one: these people constitute a manageable set of historical subjects. But they are also the right people to be studying. They were the ones who created the system of relations between science, the state, the universities, and the corporate sector. They certainly did not control that system, but they created the ideas that were its ligaments, holding it together.

This story of the interplay between ideas and institutional politics, between professional cultures and political factions, has its own intrinsic historical fascination. But there is a larger purpose to this effort as well. I want to illuminate something of the way in which historical change itself was occurring in twentieth-century American political culture. The institutional complexity of American life in that period has always somewhat confounded scholars, particularly with regard to the interplay between ideas and institutional change. What was driving the process of change in these years?[3]

My story does not provide an answer in terms of any one class or any one theory. Instead I show how the ideological conflicts and the clashing professional and institutional cultures of scientists propelled and shaped social change. I am trying to combine intellectual history with institutional and political history because I am concerned with discovering how these overlapping processes resulted in the ideologies that governed political life in twentieth-century America.

I have operated on the assumption that ideological change is a staggered process: the old ways of thinking and acting do not suddenly depart and conveniently make way for the new. The new ways rise out of the problems, the contradictions, the weaknesses, and also the strengths of the old. But neither ideas nor institutions, and certainly not science and technology, are ever conceded dominance in this narrative. My focus is on the way specific people, in specific times and places, used ideas and institutions.

I must say at the outset that in the events I discuss my book does not represent an exploration of untouched historical ground. The debates over the creation of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the organization of postwar scientific institutions, and the controversies over arms control and nuclear proliferation in the 1950s have been examined by other scholars. But their emphasis has been different from mine. I have taken some familiar episodes and some not so familiar and cast them in a larger chronological and cultural framework than most histories of American science or Cold War militarism have used. Rather than examining the military or diplomatic or professional implications of these events, I am principally concerned with the ways in which they shaped the boundaries of scientists' political and professional ideas and how those ideas shaped American politics generally. The different perspective I provide and the different questions I raise about these events offer a deeper level of understanding than has been provided by the narrow conceptual and chronological constraints of the existing literature on the history of American science.[4]

The people who created what I call corporate science and state science sought to achieve an ideological compromise between the values of their profession, the values of America's governing institutions, and the political and cultural values of the public, as they understood it. They tried to demonstrate how the values they prized could be effected by working within a system that would absorb and in some cases pervert their values. By the 1960s, the point at which, roughly, my story breaks off, the system they helped establish and the militant Cold War ideology that sustained it were firmly fixed at the center of America's political culture.

But the triumph of scientific militarism was not inevitable. It was not the result of the "evolution" of science or some mystical triumph of the machine or the result of sheer bureaucratic or technical momentum. It was the result of certain ideological, institutional, and political choices made by actual human beings. This book is about those people, their choices, and the consequences that followed from their actions.