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By the turn of the century, distinctions were also being drawn between basic (or fundamental) research and applied research, with most arguing that direct government involvement should be goal-directed, and therefore limited to applied research, with universities being the appropriate sites for basic research.

Until immediately after World War II, the consensus held that the federal government had no constitutional authority for education, particularly in privately endowed universities where a good deal of the best research was being conducted. For their part, research universities, their endowments often supplemented with funds for special projects from private foundations, had no need for government support.

World war i and the 1920s

In 1916, Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order establishing the National Research Council and directing it to explore ways to mobilize the nation’s scientific resources in the event that it was drawn into the European war. The NRC was conceived as an organization that could call on a broader range of American scientists than was represented by the National Academy of Sciences’ strictly honorific membership. During World War I, it recruited qualified scientists for military research, with the recruits given service commissions and sent to work in military research facilities. In May 1918, near the war’s end, Wilson issued a second executive order permanently establishing the NRC.

World War I increased the number and prominence of industrial research laboratories in the United States. From a pre-war handful, their number grew rapidly during the war itself and the subsequent decade of prosperity. As Secretary of Commerce during the Harding and Coolidge administrations, Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer, recognized the contributions that government, university, and industrial science individually and collectively could make to national prosperity. He took steps to improve the Commerce Department's scientific bureaus, particularly the National Bureau of Standards, urging them to make greater use of federal contracting authority to obtain assistance from companies and universities. Hoover also exhorted business to invest more in its research laboratories and provide assistance to university research, proposing that industry establish a $2 million National Research Fund to endow projects in universities. Dupree, op. cit ., 340-43. Announced with great fanfare in 1926, initial enthusiasm for the fund waned after Hoover became president in 1929, and the fund itself expired quietly during the first years of the Great Depression.

The great depression and the early new deal

During the Great Depression, budgets and personnel in government research bureaus and industrial research laboratories were reduced substantially. Private universities, with their endowment incomes shrinking, also reduced support for basic research. A strong current of public opinion held the business-oriented scientific establishment responsible for many depression-era dislocations. Secretary of Agriculture Wallace addressed the situation during the first months of the New Deal by advising Roosevelt to issue his July 1933 executive order establishing the Science Advisory Board.

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Source:  OpenStax, A history of federal science policy from the new deal to the present. OpenStax CNX. Jun 26, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11210/1.2
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