¹ One of the earliest important historians of the relationship called the changes provoked by the war “a great instauration”; see Dupree, A. Hunter, “The Great Instauration of 1940: The Organization of Scientific Research of War,” in The Twentieth-Century Sciences: Studies in the Biography of Ideas, ed. Holton, Gerald (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. The most widely read recent historian, who saw the aftermath of the war as the triumph of “best-science elitism,” is Daniel Kevles; see The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. Recent scholarship, much of it inspired generally by what Louis Galambos called “the organizational synthesis,” has emphasized the continuities rather than the dramatic breaks between the prewar and postwar eras, exploring the institutional foundations of Cold War science that were laid during the first half of the century in the form of burgeoning universities and industrial R&D laboratories, as well as in the entrepreneurial strategies that were carried over from one period to another. See Geiger, Roger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Owens, Larry, “MIT and the Federal ‘Angel’: Academic R&D and Federal-Private Cooperation before World War II,” Isis 81 (1990): 188–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lowen, Rebecca, “Transforming the University: Administrators, Physicists, and Industrial and Federal Patronage at Stanford, 1935–49,” History of Education Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1991): 365–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For recent studies of the new civilian-military cooperation that emerged from the war, see Needell, Allan, “From Military Research to Big Science: Lloyd Berkner and Science-Statesmanship in the Postwar Era,” in Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, ed. Galison, Peter and Hevly, Bruce (Stanford, Calif., 1992)Google Scholar; Needell, , “Truth Is Our Weapon': Project TROY, Political Warfare, and Government-Academic Relations in the National Security State,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 3 (1993): 399–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peter Galison, “Physics between War and Peace” and Hoch, Paul, “The Crystallization of a Strategic Alliance: The American Physics Elite and the Military in the 1940s,” in Science, Technology, and the Military, ed. Mendelsohn, Everett, Smith, Merritt Roe, and Weingart, Peter, 2 vols. (Boston, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar; and Hooks, Gregory, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War H's Battle of the Potomac (Urbana, III., 1991)Google Scholar. The best overall studies of the changes that the war worked in American universities are Geiger, Roger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York, 1993)Google Scholar, and Leslie, Stuart W., The Cold War and American Science (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

² The New York Times, 3 Jan. 1943. OSRD has not attracted the attention it deserves despite a growing volume of studies of wartime and Cold War science. Perhaps the enormous variety of its widely scattered activities and the massive volume of relevant records, even considering just those held by the National Archives, have made it difficult to get one's arms around it. For an early “house” history, see Baxter's, James PhinneyScientists Against Time (Boston, Mass., 1947)Google Scholar; Baxter was the agency's official historian, and his book won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1947. In addition to Baxter, one can consult the series of histories produced under OSRD supervision and published by Little, Brown, especially Stewart, Irvin, Organizing Scientific Research for War: The Administrative History of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (Boston, Mass., 1948)Google Scholar.

³ Out of OSRD-sponsored university and industrial laboratories came a host of new and improved weapons, including radar and the proximity fuse, which helped create a new electronic environment for war. Other contributions included rockets and high explosives, specialty vehicles like the Dukw and the Weasel; medical advances such as anti-malarial drugs, blood substitutes, and the quantity production of penicillin. OSRD helped insinuate mathematicians, economists, and other experts into military planning at all levels in the new discipline of operations research; see Fortun, M. and Schweber, S. S., “Scientists and the Legacy of World War II: The Case of Operations Research (OR),” Social Studies of Science 23, no. 4 (1993): 595–642CrossRefGoogle Scholar. OSRD's most notorious achievement was the atomic bomb, a project for which the agency bore primary responsibility until its transfer to the army at the end of 1942; on Bush and the bomb, see Goldberg, Stanley, “Inventing a Climate of Opinion: Vannevar Bush and the Decision to Build the Bomb,” Isis 83 (1992): 429–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; more generally, see Rhodes, Richard, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986)Google Scholar, and Hewlett, Richard G. and Anderson, Oscar E. Jr., The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, vol. 1: 1939–1946 (University Park, Pa., 1962)Google Scholar.

⁴ The most important members of the group, in addition to Bush himself, were James Conant, Harvard's president; Frank Jewett, the head of Bell Labs and president of the National Academy of Sciences; and Karl Compton, the president of MIT.

⁵ Born during America's Victorian Age, when engineers could be seen as the torchbearers of a new technological civilization, Bush was an inventive pioneer who looked back to a more self-sufficient time when government was small and science largely the beneficiary of private wealth; he retained a life-long commitment to individualism, private enterprise, and the creativity of the marketplace. Although Bush was less apprehensive than some colleagues like Frank Jewett about the dangers of federal support, he still had little sympathy for what he called that “whole New Deal philosophy that is reflected in that sort of urge for a great bureaucratic organization controlling everything in sight.” (Bush to Jewett, 17 March 1947, Jewett folders, 1947–49, Vannevar Bush Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). “While the scientific commonwealth had, in fact, done quite well,” Bush noted in 1954, “we do not want research programs in this country run in accordance with the bright ideas of bureaucrats.” The nation, he opined, could not hope to avoid “the evils of bureaucracy forever.” (Bush to Eric Hodgins, 16 Dec. 1954, box 50, “Eric Hodgins folder [(1947–55]), Bush Papers. For a brief biography of Bush, see Owens, Larry, “Vannevar Bush,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Holmes, Frederic L. (New York, 1990), 17: 134–38Google Scholar. On the political beliefs of many in OSRD's inner circle, see Reingold, Nathan, “Vannevar Bush's New Deal for Research: Or the Triumph of the Old Order,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17 (1987): 299–344CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Conant, see Hershberg, James, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁶ R&D had also become increasingly expensive and, by the Depression, had stretched the limits of private support. Even before the outbreak of war forged an emergency partnership between the government and the private sector, therefore, and despite ideological reservations about the state as patron, exceptional entrepreneurs had begun to explore arrangements with a federal sponsor itself in need of technical expertise. See Geiger, To Advance Knowledge; Owens, “MIT and the Federal ‘Angel.’”

⁷ For the best presentation of the organizational perspective, see Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacity, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; material on the Bureau of the Budget can be found in Berman, Larry, The Office of Management and Budget and the Presidency, 1921–1979 (Princeton, N.J., 1979)Google Scholar. For more on the growth of presidential power, see Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex.

⁸ Cuff, Robert, “American Mobilization for War, 1917–1945: Political Culture vs. Bureaucratic Administration,” in Mobilization for Total War: The Canadian, American, and British Experience, 1914–1918, 1939–1945, ed. Dreisziger, N. F. (Waterloo, Ont., 1981)Google Scholar; see Owens, “MIT and the Federal ‘Angel’”; and Reingold, “Vannevar Bush's New Deal for Research.” There was a radical scientific element that developed during the 1930s, especially, whose history is being reconstructed; see Kuznick, Peter, Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America (Chicago, III., 1987)Google Scholar.

⁹ On the associational vision in the political culture of the 1920s, see Hawley, Ellis, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917–1933 (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, especially chap. 6, “The Associative Vision at Home and Abroad, 1925–1928”; and Cuff, Robert, The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I (Baltimore, Md., 1973)Google Scholar. The comparison with the WIB is instructive. Admittedly, OSRD's mission was scientific rather than industrial mobilization, and its crucial figures were scientists, engineers, and laboratory managers rather than business people and financiers. Nevertheless, both turned to private elites to meet the needs of national planning and both struggled to protect their public-private arrangements from the interference of politicians and bureaucrats at large. If OSRD's record outshines the modest success of the WIB, the reasons are clear: OSRD organized a year and a half before the United States entered the war; the WIB got up steam only months after U.S. entry into a much shorter war. More important, whereas the WIB's power was little more than advisory, OSRD managed to become an operating agency with contractual authority at a time when both the administrative resources of the central state and the nation's R&D base were much greater than they had been earlier. See also Karl, Barry, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 (Chicago, III., 1983)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ The United States and Great Britain mobilized their industries more successfully than did the other protagonists of the Second World War, a feat that R. J. Overy explains was the consequence of integrating civilian managers into R&D for new weapons in a manner that acknowledged the self-interests of their capitalistic economies; see The Air War, 1939–1945 (London, 1980)Google Scholar, especially chap. 7, “The Aircraft Economies.”

¹¹ Roland, Alex, Model Research: The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, 1915–1958 (Washington, D.C., 1984)Google Scholar.

¹² Bush to Eric Hodgins, 10 April 1941, box 50, “Eric Hodgins folder,” Bush Papers.

¹³ Formally, NDRC was established as a committee of the Council of National Defense, an inactive organization, consisting of the cabinet secretaries, first established in 1916 to assist Woodrow Wilson with industrial mobilization. This ad hoc arrangement was a quick and convenient way of legitimizing NDRC's contractual powers while providing it easy access to presidential funds; see, for example, Alice Day to George Clark, 16 June 1945, “Evolution of OSRD Contract Form,” RG 227, Office of the Historian, 1943–46, Subject Files, box 3, “Contracts” (National Archives, Washington, D.C.).

¹⁴ Admiral Julius A. Furer, the navy's coordinator of research and development during the war, claimed that “one reason for the lag in research before WWII, as compared to later years was that very few individuals in the armed services, whether civilians or in uniform, had any ideas of the weapons possibilities lying dormant in science.” Furer, J. A., The Administration of the Navy Department in World War II (Washington, D.C., 1959), 760Google Scholar. Furer was exaggerating, but only slightly; for the navy's prewar involvement with radar, see Allison, David, New Eye for the Navy: The Origin of Radar at the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, D.C.: Naval Res. Lab. Report 8466, 1981)Google Scholar; see also Sapolsky, Harvey, Science and the Navy: The History of the Office of Naval Research (Princeton, N.J., 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War; see also Bush memorandum to Compton, Conant, Jewett, and Tolman, 21 June 1940; and “NDRC—Notes on the Second and Final Informal Conference, June 25, 1940,” RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Org— NDRC (6-19-40–6-30-40).”

¹⁶ See Bush, Vannevar, Pieces of the Action (New York, 1970), 31–32Google Scholar. The original “end run” refers to the fact that Frank Jewett and the National Academy of Sciences were omitted—inadvertently Bush claimed—from the Executive Order that originally created the NDRC; see Bush to Lee Anna Embrey, 22 May 1968, MC 78, 17/BBS—Embrey, MIT Institute Archives, Cambridge, Mass.

¹⁷ Bush to Compton, et al., 21 June 1940. Stewart asked Civil Service Commissioner Arthur Flemming for advice on contracts; Flemming directed Stewart to Oscar Cox, the assistant general counsel of the Treasury Department, which had been advising other defense agencies. The decision to tap into the “largest law department in Washington” was a crucial one for Bush, for Cox's expertise proved essential to OSRD's success as a contractor; see Stewart to Bush, 8 Aug. 1940, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Org (8-40–6-41).”

¹⁸ Eventually, scientists learned the advantages of the less restrictive grant:

As a rule, individual investigators prefer the grant-in-aid to the contract. Grants allow the investigator to follow promising paths wherever they lead. He need not be concerned with deviating from the terms of a contract. He has fewer authorities with whom to deal and there are fewer inspectors and less supervision. Moreover, the entire initiative rests with him. He selects the field, the problem, and the specific subject and, having complete freedom in the conduct of the work, is under no obligation to “find anything,” or to meet a fixed time schedule. His proposal and his results are judged by his peers, and the original grant implies a moral commitment to continue support if the work has been of a high order.

See Steelman, John, Science and Public Policy: A Report to the President (Washington, D.C., 1947Google Scholar), in five volumes; the quotation comes from vol. 5, p. 60, “Research Men Prefer Grants.” But even during the war, there had been opposition to Bush's contractual strategy. Officials of the Public Health Service, who fought with Bush during the war for control of medical research, had always preferred the grant and, after the war, the extramural programs of the National Institutes of Health largely reverted to that less restrictive mechanism, a preference that come to be shared as well by the National Science Foundation. See Fox, Daniel, “The Politics of the NIH Extramural Program, 1937–1950,” Journal of the History of Medicine 42 (1987): 447–66Google ScholarPubMed. Eventually, what was once a hard and fast distinction between grants and contracts has become blurred, overwhelmed by the massive nature of federal patronage: see Kidd, Charles, American Universities and Federal Research (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 5–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Bush to Fassett, 3 Aug. 1969, MC 78, 16, MIT Institute Archives; Bush, Pieces of the Action, chap. 1.

²⁰ Servos, John, “Changing Partners: The Mellon Institute, Private Industry, and the Federal Patron,” Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 221–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Servos, , “The Industrial Relations of Science: Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900–1939,” Isis 71 (1980): 531–49Google Scholar; also Servos, , Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling: The Making of a Science in America (Princeton, N.J., 1990)Google Scholar; Geiger, To Advance Knowledge; Lowen, “Transforming the University.”

²¹ Owens, “MIT and the Federal ‘Angel.‘”

²² Carl Buest to Carroll Wilson, 23 Oct. 1940, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Contracts—Patent Clause.”

²³ RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Contracts.”

²⁴ Stewart to Rush, 19 Aug. 1940, ibid.

²⁵ Inter-office memo, C. G. Cruickshank to Stewart, 20 May 1942, attached “Recapitulation of 1941 Funds,” Admin. Office, General Records; “OSRD Cost Analysis of Research and Development Work and Related Fiscal Information, May 1, 1947,” RG 51 (RoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Demobilizing and Liquidation.”

²⁶ “Geographical Distribution…, Sept. 26, 1941,” OSRD, Office of Historian, 1943–46, Subject Files, box 3, “Contracts.”

²⁷ “Major Laboratories,” RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “Budget Corresp. FY 42–45”; on expenses for fiscal year 1945, see ibid.

²⁸ Jewett to Bush, 29 Oct. 1942; Bush to Jewett, 30 Oct. 1942, Bush Papers, Jewett folders.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ “OSRD Full-time Employment,” RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Correspondence.”

³¹ Jewett to Bush, 18 Feb. 1941, Bush Papers, Jewett folders, 1941.

³² Stewart to Cox, 20 Feb. 1941, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Contracts—Patent Clause.”

³³ Harvey Bundy to Frank Jewett, 11 May 1945; Jewett to Bundy, 14 May 1945, Bush Papers, Jewett folders, 1945.

³⁴ Thompson to Stewart, 9 Feb. 1942, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Contracts—Patent Clause.”

³⁵ Bush remarked on its importance after the war:

Contracts for research… are unlike any other contracts entered into by the government. Neither the government nor the research contractor knows… either what will be found, how it will be found or how much it will cost to find it. A research contract, accordingly, cannot contain specifications, it cannot be made the subject of competitive bidding, it cannot require performance bonds, and it cannot contain restrictions on the methods of research. The research contractor gives full performance merely by applying his skill and facilities to a research problem and reporting the results. He is paid for his time and the application of his talent regardless of whether he succeeds in resolving his research problem.

Bush to Harley Kilgore, 14 Dec. 1945, RG 227, Legal Division, Series 30, “Patents—Investigation.” A. Hunter Dupree remarked on the genius of the OSRD contract in “The Great Instauration of 1940”; see also, Dupree, A. Hunter, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Stewart to Bush and Ruebhausen, 14 Aug. 14, 1945, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Appropriations.”

³⁷ Bush to Stewart, 18 Aug. 1940, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Org (8-40–6-41)”; Stewart, “Conversation with Oscar Cox, Assistant General Counsel, Treasury Department…,” 21 Aug. 1940, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Accounting”; for the initial budgetary arrangements among NDRC, the Council of National Defense, and the Bureau of the Budget, see Stewart to Bush, 15 Aug. 1940, with attached memo, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Org (8-40–6-41).”

³⁸ William Snow to F. L. Foster, 26 Oct. 1940; Foster to Killian, 30 Oct. 1940; Compton to Stewart, 1 Nov. 1940, with attached memo from Bush, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Contracts.”

³⁹ Stewart to Compton, 7 Nov. 1940, ibid.

⁴⁰ Norcross to Stewart, 14 July 1941, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Accounting—Allotments.”

⁴¹ Even before Pearl Harbor, estimates for FY 1942 had increased from $11 million in April 1941 to almost $26 million in August; see Bush to William McReynolds, 16 April 1941, RG 227, ibid.; Bush to Harold Smith, 4 Aug. 1941, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Estimates FY 1942–45.”

⁴² Bush to Smith, 29 Jan. 1942, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Accounting—Allotments.”

⁴³ Wayne Coy to Bush, 5 Nov. 1941, RG 227, ibid.; Charles Stauffacher to Bernard Gladieux, 2 Feb. 1942, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Correspondence.”

⁴⁴ Stauffacher to Gladieux, 2 Feb. 1942.

⁴⁵ “Memorandum for General Styer,” 20 Nov. 1942; Bush to Smith, 1 April 1942, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Transfer of Funds—Incoming.”

⁴⁶ Charles Dasher to Martin, 30 Nov. 1942, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Correspondence.”

⁴⁷ Bush, “Memorandum for Dr. Conant,” 30 Dec. 1942, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Transfer of Funds—Incoming”; “All Research for 1944 Budget,” 4 Jan. 1943, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Correspondence.” The transfer of funds had been approved in a very general way, in the executive order that established OSRD. The issue was how easily and with what supervision transfers would occur.

⁴⁸ Bush to Smith, 6 April 1943, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Correspondence, FY 1942-45.”

⁴⁹ E. J. Bounds and W. H. Shapley to Smith, 5 March 1945, RG 51 (BoB), 39.27, Office of the Director, General Records, 1939–46, box 82, “Scientific Research and Development”; on the RBNS generally, see Kevles, Daniel, “Scientists, the Military, and the Control of Postwar Defense Research: The Case of the Research Board for National Security, 1944–46,” Technology and Culture 16 (1975): 20–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ “Memorandum,” Chairman of NDRC to Chiefs of Divisions and Panels, 17 Nov. 1944, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Demobilizing and Liquidation”; Shapley to Howard Stone, 20 Jan. 1945, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Correspondence.”

⁵¹ Bounds and Shapley to Smith, 5 March 1945.

⁵² Roosevelt to Bush, 31 March 1945, and Roosevelt to the Secretary of the Navy, 31 March 1945, RG 51 (BoB), 39.27, Office of the Director, 1939–46, box 82, “Scientific Research and Development.”

⁵³ Smith to Furer, 14 June 1945; Julius Furer Papers, Library of Congress.

⁵⁴ Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex, 79.

⁵⁵ Many of the problems, both large and small, can be tracked in Stewart's contract files, which have survived the passage of half a century: RG 227, Admin. Office, Contract Records, National Records Center, Suitland, Md. [hereafter, Contract Records]. Stored in cardboard boxes, arranged alphabetically by contractor, they are frequently humdrum and sometimes duplicate material more conveniently organized at the Main Branch of the National Archives. Nevertheless, the material is often remarkable, and even the straight-forward alphabetical arrangement has its merits. Free from the hierarchical organization of higher-level files and reports, and thus distant from the opinions (and inevitable distortions) of wartime leaders and postwar historians about what was important and what was not, they expose a fascinating cross-section of OSRD's scientific routine. Among the more general impressions provoked by these files are that engineering was often more important than science, practice more important than theory, and the ability to mediate, to move comfortably among university, government, military, and industry—sectors traditionally separate and often antagonistic—most important of all. Such analysis suggests that we miss the story by paying too much attention to the higher-level centers of power and the documentation they produced and influenced. There might be another story entirely contained in the records of a branch of OSRD still little studied—the Office of Field Service, which served as a land of clearinghouse, or better, as a dating service, that assisted in properly matching up civilian and military.

⁵⁶ Pursell, Carroll, “Science Agencies in World War Two: The OSRD and Its Challengers,” in The Sciences in the American Context: New Perspectives, ed. Reingold, Nathan (Washington, D.C., 1979)Google Scholar; Kevles, Daniel, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942-1945: A Political Interpretation of Science— The Endless Frontier,” Isis 68 (1977): 5–26CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

⁵⁷ Jewett to Bush, 28 Jan. 1941; Jewett to Stewart, 30 June 1941; Jewett to Bush, 5 Aug. 1942; Bush to Jewett, 6 Aug. 1941; George Meid, “Overhead Expenses,” 6 Aug. 1941. During the late 1930s, the NRC was working only a handful of government contracts worth $30—40,000 a year; see Albert Barrows to Stewart, 26 July 1941—all RG 227, Admin. Office, Contract Records, “NAS” [National Academy of Sciences].

⁵⁸ Jewett to Stewart, 24 Sept. 1941; Stewart to Jewett, 2 Oct. 1943, ibid.

⁵⁹ Conant to Bush, 8 Aug. 1940, Bush Papers, J. B. Conant folders.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Bush, Pieces of the Action, 43.

⁶² Warren Weaver to Marshall Stone, 6 Dec. 1943; Stone to Weaver, 14 Dec. 1943, RG 227, Contractors' Reports, Applied Mathematics Panel. For more on OSRD and wartime mathematics, see Owens, Larry, “Mathematicians at War: Warren Weaver and the Applied Mathematics Panel, 1942—1945,” in Rowe, David and McCleary, John, eds., The History of Modern Mathematics, vol. 2: Institutions and Applications (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁶³ W. E. Joor to Stewart, 19 Sept. 1942, Contract Records.

⁶⁴ Lane to Bush, 20 Jan. 1947, Contract Records, box 132, Herb Lamb Productions.

⁶⁵ Independent Engineering Co. to S. S. Prentiss, 1 May 1944, Contract Records.

⁶⁶ Offner to Edward L. Moreland, 2 April 1945, Contract Records, box 139, MIT rc-180.

⁶⁷ Offner to Moreland, 27 April 1945, ibid.

⁶⁸ See, for example, Stewart to A. A. Dodd, 19 Aug. 1942; Dodd to Stewart, 1 Sept. 1942, Contract Records.

⁶⁹ See the patent correspondence throughout the GM files, including H. Hogan to Stewart, 10 June 1943; Bush to Stewart, 19 June 1943, Contract Records; OSRD's most serious dispute over patent policy might have been with Raytheon; see material in Contract Records, box 139, MIT sr-262; for an overview of OSRD's attempt to devise a coherent policy, see Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War, chap. 15, “Patent Policy.”

⁷⁰ For a massive study of R&D at Du Pont, see Hounshell, David and Smith, John K. Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902–1980 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁷¹ The difficulties of the RDX project can be detailed in “Du Pont de Nemours Company—General, July to December 1942,” and “… 1943, 1944, 1945,” Contract Records, box 64.

⁷² Bush, “Memorandum for Dr. Chadwell,” 19 December 1941, ibid.

⁷³ Chadwell to Bush, “Memorandum of Conference,” 21 Jan. 1942, ibid.

⁷⁴ John Connor to Charles Rittenhouse, 2 Nov. 1942; James Donovan to Captain Lavender, 31 May 1943; H. W. Elley to Irvin Stewart, 12 June 1942; Irvin Stewart to Charles Rittenhouse, 30 Sept. 1942, all ibid.

⁷⁵ Stewart to Rittenhouse, 30 Sept. 1942.

⁷⁶ Thompson to Bush, 24 Jan. 1942, RG 227, Legal Division, General Records, Series 30, “Contract Procedure.”

⁷⁷ L. A. DuBridge to K. T. Compton, 3 Nov. 1943; Hunter to Alan Waterman, 25 Jan. 1944, both in RG 227, Office of Field Service [OFS], Project Files, box 313.

⁷⁸ Notes of CIC Committee Meeting, 15 Nov. 1943, ibid.; see also Thiesmeyer, Lincoln and Burchard, John, Combat Scientists (Boston, Mass., 1947), 258–61Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ DuBridge to R. W. Blue, “Summary of C.I.C. Survey, June 19, 1944,” RG 227, OFS, Project Files, box 313.

⁸⁰ COMINCH to Coordinator of Research and Development, 27 July 1944, ibid.

⁸¹ “Contract Proposal,” 3 Feb. 1945, OSRD, Records of Division 17.3, box 11.

⁸² C. T. Morgan to Harvey Fletcher, P. M. Morse, and G. R. Harrison, 16 July 1945, “Progress, plans and finances of the CIC project,” ibid.

⁸³ Fred Guterl, “The Education of BBN,” Business Month, Aug. 1987, 36–41.

⁸⁴ Compton, “Memo, of Conversation with P. M. Morse,” 25 Oct. 1943, RG 227, OFS, Project Files, box 313.

⁸⁵ Note of conference between Alan Waterman and Beard, 26 June 1944, ibid.

⁸⁶ Note of telephone conversation between Alan Waterman and Beard, 21 July 1944; C. T. Morgan, “Notes on OFS conference, May 27, 1944,” both in ibid.

⁸⁷ “L. L. Beranek to N-109 Research Personnel,” 26 Oct. 1943, RG 227, Records of Div. 17.3, box 11, p. 18; DuBridge to Compton, 3 Nov. 1943, RG 227, OFS, Project Files, box 313.

⁸⁸ For a good account of the way in which the antagonism between the navy and civilian experts slowed the war against the submarine, see Meigs, Montgomery C., Slide Rules and Submarines: American Scientists and Subsurface Warfare in World War II (Washington, D.C., 1990)Google Scholar.

⁸⁹ Warren Weaver, diary, 21 Jan. 1945, RG 227, Applied Mathematics Panel, box 1.

⁹⁰ Cited in Christman, Albert, Sailors, Scientists, and Rockets: Origins of the Navy Rocket Program and of the Naval Ordnance Test Station, Inyokern (Washington, D.C., 1971), 85Google Scholar. On naval research, see Sapolsky, Science and the Navy, and Allison, New Eye for the Navy.

⁹¹ For a sophisticated account of efforts to unify the military establishment within the larger organizational contexts of American history, see Skowronek, Building a New American State.

⁹² Rear Admiral J. A. Furer, “Narrative History of the Office of the Coordinator of Research and Development, A Report Written for the Secretary of the Navy, dated 28 July 1945,” p. 8, box 10, Julius Furer Papers.

⁹³ Allison, New Eye for the Navy.

⁹⁴ In considering the future development of the CIC project, Beranek stressed the importance of keeping free of bureaucratic complications; “Notes on OFS conference, May 27, 1944”; that included not getting the approval of divisional superiors before getting reports to the navy: Morgan to Fletcher, 20 July 1945, RG 227, Records of Division 17.3, box 11.

⁹⁵ On the military concern with managerial control in postwar R&D, see Noble, David, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ On plans for the Pacific Branch, see Thiesmeyer and Burchard, Combat Scientists.

⁹⁷ Compton to Bush, 11 Aug. 1945, RG 227, OFS, Project Files, box 312; fortunately, Compton had the assistance of Harvard's Don Leet, who had actually witnessed the bomb test.

⁹⁸ This usage of “market” is OSRD's own; see Stewart to Smith, 26 Feb. 1944, RG 227, Admin. Office, General Records, “Appropriations (1945)—Budget.”

⁹⁹ Jewett to Bush, 6 Jan. 1942, Bush Papers, Jewett file, 1376.

¹⁰⁰ Bush to Compton, 24 Jan. 1942, Contract Records, box 143, MIT sr-262, “Org— Overhead—Personnel—Procurement.”

¹⁰¹ Quoted in Lowen, “Transforming the University,” 376.

¹⁰² Christman, Sailors, Scientists, and Rockets; for the story of how Caltech's work on rockets during the war led to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, see Koppes, Clayton, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, Conn., 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰³ F. L. Hovde, “Information Concerning Contract OEMsr-418—California Institute of Technology,” RG 227, Office of Historian 1943–46, Subject Files, box 3, “Contractors.”

¹⁰⁴ C. G. Cruickshank to Stewart, 13 March 1944; Stewart to NDRC, 17 March 1944, Contract Records, Caltech, sr-418, box 15, “Contract Data and Correspondence.”

¹⁰⁵ “Report of Conference Held in the Bureau of Ordnance…,” 10 Jan. 1944, Contract Records, Caltech, sr-418, Box 15, “Misc. Subjects #1,” p. 2.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 3.

¹⁰⁷ See Leslie, The Cold War and American Science, chap. 1, “A University Polarized Around the Military.

¹⁰⁸ Alice Day, “Selection of Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Site for the Radiation Laboratory,” Oct. 1945, RG 227, Legal Division, General Records, “Contract Policies Investigation.”

¹⁰⁹ John Trump to Stewart, 16 Oct. 1943; John Loofbourow, “Memorandum,” 2 Jan. 1945, Contract Records, box 153, MIT sr-262, Subcontract Files, “Educational Orders.”

¹¹⁰ Loofbourow, ibid., p. 2.

¹¹¹ Loofbourow to Stewart, 18 Jan. 1945, ibid.

¹¹² See Carol Gruber's article on overhead and the universities, “The Overhead System in Government-Sponsored Academic Science: Origins and Early Development,” forthcoming in Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences.

¹¹³ Lloyd Morey to Stewart, 7 March 1942, “Report on Visit to Massachusetts Institute of Technology …,” Contract Records, box 143, MIT sr-262, “Org—Overhead— Personnel—Procurement.”

¹¹⁴ Compton to Stewart and John Trump, 10 March 1942, Contract Records, box 138, MIT Summary; W. F. Edwards to Contact Folder, 12 Jan. 1944, Contract Records, box 139, MIT sr-262. MIT maintained the 50 percent rate for its smaller contracts while negotiating ceilings for overhead reimbursements for all contracts; comprehensive over-head reimbursements were finalized at the end of the war at MIT and at other large contractors by special-purpose “overhead” contracts.

¹¹⁵ “Summary Statement …,” Contract Records, box 141, MIT sr-262, “Contract Data and Correspondence.”

¹¹⁶ Embrey to Fred Fassett, Jr., 13 Aug. 1969, MC 78, 5, “Correspondence—Lee Anna Embrey,” MIT Institute Archives.

¹¹⁷ C. G. Cruickshank to Stewart, 20 Oct. 1943, Contract Records, “Contracts— Advanced Payments,” p. 4.

¹¹⁸ W. H. Claflin, Jr., to Stewart, 17 Nov. 1943, Contract Records, box 95, Harvard, general files at beginning.

¹¹⁹ DuBridge to A. L. Loomis, 12 June 1945, “Future Program for the Radiation Laboratory,” Contract Records, box 141, “MIT,” sr-262. Another argument for the extension: five hundred men under thirty would be suddenly released; with subsequently lapsed deferments, they would find themselves in the army; late to be drafted, they would be late to be discharged, and “their training as scientists would be interrupted at a time when the need of the country for scientists will be very great.

¹²⁰ For an overview of MIT in its first century that includes its associations with the military, see Henry Etzkowitiz, “The Making of an Entrepreneurial University: The Traffic among MIT, Industry, and the Military, 1860-1960,” in Science, Technology, and the Military, ed. Mendelsohn, Smith, and Weingart. OSRD itself was still in business as late as December 1947. That November, OSRD's acting secretary, R. C. Bowker, sent the draft of a presidential executive order, to take effect 31 Dec. 1947, officially terminating the agency to W. H. Shapley at the Bureau of the Budget. OSRD still had on the books 260 contracts not officially closed because of patent matters; its staff was down to fourteen from a wartime high of one thousand paid and four hundred “working without compensation” (WOC) personnel; the lease on its headquarters in the Carnegie Institution lapsed at the end of that December. See Bowker to W. H. Shapley, 20 Nov. 1947, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Demobilizing and Liquidation.” Not all schools sought federal support as aggressively as MIT; for a school that tried to go it on its own, see S. S. Schweber, “Big Science in Context: Cornell and MIT,” in Big Science, ed. Galison and Hevly.

¹²¹ For Bush's own thoughts about postwar policy, see Science—The Endless Frontier. A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research (Washington, D.C., July 1945)Google Scholar; Daniel Kevles has written a valuable commentary on Bush's report in its 1990 reissue by the National Science Foundation on the NSF's fortieth anniversary; for Bush's intensified fears of the Cold War, see his Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy (New York, 1949)Google Scholar, which was pub lished just as the news of the first Soviet atomic explosion was released.

¹²² The Bureau of the Budget recognized that OSRD's success had “been in large measure due to its independent status.” Roger Bounds and W. H. Shapley, 31 Aug. 1944, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Demobilizing and Liquidation.”

¹²³ Bush to Luke Hopkins, 3 Feb. 1944, War Dept. General and Special Staff Records, Special Planning Division, 1943–46, 350.6, Study 114, National Archives.

¹²⁴ Bush's concern for the central oversight of military and civilian defense is evident throughout OSRD's files, especially in those devoted to postwar planning. “There is nothing more important to our national security than the creation and proper handling of a unitary program of research and development on new weapons. It would be a catastrophe if this degenerated into an uncoordinated scramble between services.” Bush memorandum to the Joint New Weapons Committee, 20 Dec. 1945, RG 218, JCS, JNW, box 7, “Joint Chiefs of Staff;” “Dr. Bush discussed very forcefully the need for a single control of the research and development programs of the Army and Navy”: W. H. Shapley to the record, 25 March 1946, RG 51, (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Correspondence.”

¹²⁵ Except for the AEC and NSF, there is still relatively little work on these first tentative attempts to organize the new government-science relationship. For information on the RDB, see Needell, “From Military Research to Big Science”; Kevles, “Scientists, the Military, and the Control of Postwar Defense Research,” 20–47; and also Larry Owens, “Bush and the Generals,” in progress. For the NSF and AEC, see Smith, Alice Kimball, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945–17 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971)Google Scholar, and England, J. Merton, A Patron for Pure Science: The National Science Foundation's Formative Years, 1945–1957 (Washington, D.C., 1982)Google Scholar; on ONR, see Sapolsky, Science and the Navy.

¹²⁶ The trail of Bush's failures and frustrations—especially with regard to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Research and Development Board, and the National Science Foundation—can be followed in Smith, A Peril and a Hope; Hewlett and Anderson, The New World; and England, A Patron for Pure Science. Bush put a generally happy face on matters in his 1970 autobiography, Pieces of the Action, but his real feelings are evident throughout the files of OSRD and the other agencies with which he was involved.

¹²⁷ OSRD offered many models for the organization of R&D; see Teitelman, Robert, Profits of Science: The American Marriage of Business and Technology (New York, 1994)Google Scholar, especially chap. 2, “The World of Tomorrow”; and particularly the early chapters of Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge.

¹²⁸ Conant to Bush, 11 May 1944, Contract Records, box 170, “NAS.”

¹²⁹ “Notes on OFS conference…,” 27 May 1944, RG 227, OFS, Project Files, box 313.

¹³⁰ “A society based on contract,” William Graham Sumner wrote in 1883, “is a society of free and independent men, who form ties without favor or obligation, and cooperate without cringing or intrigue.” Sumner, , What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York, 1883)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

¹³¹ Conant is quoted in Bush to Fassett, 23 Oct. 1967, MC 78, 17/BBS—Fassett, MIT Institute Archives.

¹³² Nieburg, H. L., In the Name of Science: A Report on the Military-Industrial Complex in America and the Making of the “Contract State” (Chicago, III., 1966)Google Scholar; Price, Don, Government and Science: Their Dynamic Relation in American Democracy (New York, 1954)Google Scholar, chap. 3, “Federalism by Contract.”

¹³³ Price, Government and Science, 74. In the long run, massive federal patronage and the growth of the defense economy overwhelmed the ideological distinctiveness of the contract and its sharp differences with other support mechanisms like the grant, which had made it such an appealing means to people like Bush for mediating public-private enterprises. Still, defense-related R&D has generally used contracts, whereas more clearly civilian research has come to rely on grants.

¹³⁴ By the beginning of 1946, approximately 25 percent of OSRD's end-of-the-war program had been transferred to the military: about two-thirds to the navy, one-third to the War Department. See Shapley to Ramsey, 2 Jan. 1946, RG 51 (BoB), 39.19, box 61, “OSRD Budget Correspondence.”