0.3 Knowledge for governance: social science perspectives on science  (Page 3/10)

Had Relation of the Federal Government to Research not been overly concerned with political sensitivities, it might also have noted that the Hoover administration had also recognized the worth of the social sciences to government. Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends , published during the waning months of the Hoover administration (1929-33), compiled and analyzed indicators on a wide variety of societal matters that had been affected by World War I and the Great Depression. Barry. D. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 196-98. Charles Merriam, vice-chairman of that committee, was instrumental in convincing Hoover to appoint the committee and to have it organized through his Social Science Research Council. A decade earlier, the non-governmental Institute for Government Research (later called the Brookings Institution) had issued an extensive series of Service Monographs that provided a bureau-by-bureau analysis of scientific activities in the executive branch.

While Hoover was interested in planning as a means for creating programs, Roosevelt saw it as a guide for action. Very early in the New Deal, Merriam came to Washington in an advisory capacity. He was the most prominent American social scientist to serve the Roosevelt administration while not actually accepting a position in it, although he finally did do so at the end of the 1930s. While Merriam rarely if ever is regarded as a founding father of science policy (and probably never would have thought of himself as such), he had significant direct and indirect influence on the formulation of such a policy.

Louis brownlow

Although not an academic social scientist, Brownlow occasionally joked that the last examination he ever took was to obtain his driver’s license. Louis Brownlow was responsible for bringing the insights of applied social sciences to bear on governance. Barry D. Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal: the Genesis of Administrative Management, 1900-1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). He was among those who convinced Secretary Ickes to bring Merriam to Washington early in the New Deal. A reporter in his younger days, Brownlow had devoted the bulk of his career to the professionalization of public administration. He had been a Commissioner of the District of Columbia for five years during the Woodrow Wilson administration and had later served as city manager of Petersburg, Virginia, and Knoxville, Kentucky. His Chicago-based Public Administration Clearing House—created with the encouragement of Merriam—was conceived as an umbrella organization for maintaining communication and information exchange among separate professional organizations of public administrators and for encouraging broader development of the public administration field. While in Chicago, Brownlow not only grew personally and professionally close to Merriam, but also became a political ally of Ickes. During the early weeks of the New Deal, Brownlow suggested to Ickes that a national planning board be appointed to advise him on oversight of public works. He also recommended that its three members be Frederic Delano, Charles Merriam, and Wesley Mitchell, the latter two having served as the vice-chair and chair, respectively, of the Hoover administration’s Research Committee on Social Trends.