SCIENTISTS, BUSINESS, AND THE STATE,1890-1960

##### SCIENTISTS, BUSINESS, AND THE STATE, 1890–1960.

By Patrick J. McGrath. Univ. of North Carolina Press. 248 pp. $39.95

McGrath has written an extremely important intellectual history of American science in the 20th century. While delving into such familiar episodes as the Manhattan Project, the debate over the hydrogen bomb, the security hearing of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and various arms control issues, McGrath concentrates on the larger question of how scientists changed American political culture. His insights are sure to stir controversy.

An independent historian trained at New York University, McGrath argues that beginning in the 1890s, an elite group of American scientists forged a profitable alliance with the country’s corporate, political, and military elites. Initially, this alliance elevated the status of scientists in the public-policy arena. As expert technicians, these corporate scientists— such men as Frank Jewett, Karl Compton, David Lilienthal, Vannevar Bush, and James Conant—believed that science could transform America and inaugurate an era of economic progress, social stability, and national security. Inspired by that "Great Engineer," Herbert Hoover, they thought of themselves as progressives who could construct a "harmonious, classless meritocracy." In 1890, America had only four industrial research laboratories; by 1930, there were more than a thousand.

The meritocratic dream, together with Hoover’s presidency, collapsed in the Great Depression. During World War II and then the Cold War, McGrath argues, a different vision of American science prevailed. The relatively moderate progressive vision of Lilienthal, Bush, and Conant was supplanted by a scientific militarism. "Scientists and administrators such as Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss, and Ernest Lawrence, with their fullthroated militarism and anti-communism, pushed American scientists and their institutions toward a nearly complete and subservient devotion to American military interests."

Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower felt compelled to protest. When an official committee in 1957 advocated expanding the nation’s nuclear arsenal, Eisenhower said: "You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the street." Yet Bush, Conant, and the other moderates mostly stayed silent. "I kept in channels rather religiously, perhaps too much so," Bush once reflected. By the 1960s, this once idealistic class of corporate scientists had made so many compromises that they had become mere technicians serving military masters. These experts, as McGrath puts it, "did not openly challenge the policies of their allies and benefactors. They were simply good soldiers."

—Kai Bird