[125] The NACA had more reason than most to view the economic bubble of the late 1920s through rose-colored glasses. The wave of prosperity and optimism that swept the country toward over expansion carried the aviation industry on its crest. From 1926 to 1929, the dollar value of American aircraft production increased fivefold, while the stock in certain companies jumped tenfold in even shorter periods. Aircraft manufacturing - of both airframes and engines - achieved the growth and vitality that the members of the NACA had espoused and had all along considered essential to American aeronautical supremacy. And in the wake of Lindbergh's flight to Paris, passenger aviation showed signs of becoming a popular and self-sustaining industry in its, own right.¹

The NACA rode the same wave. In 1929 it won its first Collier trophy; its laboratory was widely conceded to be the best and most productive in the world; and Congress had recently approved even more new equipment. Everything grew at a great rate, and the horizon looked limitless. In June 1929, just four months before the stock-market crash that burst the bubble, John Victory wrote to a friend:

Things have been so dull in the stock market .... I think things will get even a little lower toward the end of the fiscal year and that after the middle of July they will definitely be on the up-trend. Moral, buy early in July - most anything.

Nor was Victory the only one in the NACA convinced that things had nowhere to go but up. In the fall of 1929 the Committee took delivery of a new staff car, a $4000 Pierce-Arrow to replace the Franklin that had served since the comparatively lean days of 1924.²

[126] The Great Depression, of course, turned on questions of business and economics, and the NACA was nominally a government agency at least one remove from the vagaries of the marketplace. Still, the NACA was always very much alive to the condition of the aircraft industry and the national environment in general, so the Depression was bound to affect the Committee's behavior. Like most institutions, the NACA at first responded somewhat ambiguously, discounting the gravity of the crisis and conducting business as usual. But as the Depression deepened, as the Committee encountered financial problems of its own, and as charges of corruption and profiteering were leveled at the aircraft industry, the NACA sought to put some distance between its own skirts and the crumbling and discredited world of commercial enterprise. While continuing to assist the aircraft industry and allowing a high proportion of industry representatives on its technical subcommittees, the NACA retreated from the organizational commitment it had made to commercial aviation in the heyday of the late 1920s.³ This retreat appears most clearly in the shifting committee structure of the early 1930s.

In 1930, the Committee on Problems of Air Navigation and its three subcommittees constituted a group second only to the Committee on Materials for Aircraft in the proportion of industry representatives. These committees suffered heavily in the Depression. In 1931 the subcommittee on Problems of Communication - the only NACA committee before World War II to have an industry representative as chairman - was discharged, ostensibly because its functions overlapped those of the Liaison Committee on Aeronautic Radio Research of the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce. In 1935, the entire Air Navigation Committee was discharged, as was its Subcommittee on Instruments. The only survivor was the Subcommittee on Meteorological Problems, which was transferred to the Committee on Aerodynamics.⁴

The Committee on Materials for Aircraft, another bastion of industry representation, underwent similar changes, though here technological forces were also at work. In 1931 a new Subcommittee on Miscellaneous Materials absorbed the dated and moribund subcommittees on Woods and Glues and on Coverings, Dopes, and Protective Coatings. This move away from wood and cloth aircraft bodies of the 1920s into all-metal, stressed-skin aircraft also was reflected in the creation of the Subcommittee on Research Program on Monocoque Design, which sat from 1931 to 1936. The industry lost no representation in this shuffle, but the NACA achieved a committee structure at once more workable and more justifiable on the basis of where the NACA sought industry representation.⁵

[127] The blurring of industry visibility within the NACA was prompted in part by the Committee staff's growing preference for government members on committees. The NACA got along well with other government agencies; by 1930 it felt free for the first time to disband its charter Committee on Government Relations. Government representatives were readily available in Washington to attend meetings of technical committees and there was little suspicion or tension among them over confidentiality and the advancement of special interests in the meeting room.⁶

During the Depression the NACA emphasized research of primary interest to the military services, in the belief that the results would eventually trickle down to commercial aviation. Of the Committee's investigations on airships, for example, "the major portion [were] made at the request of the military services." But, as the NACA made clear in a resume' of that research, the Committee "endeavored to arrange the work so as to obtain data of general application and thereby acquire for public use knowledge essential to the development of airships."⁷

NACA research on airships, which began in 1922, peaked in the 1930s, after the creation of the Subcommittee on Airships in 1927, chaired first by Edward P. Warner and then by Jerome Hunsaker. The United States enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the world's supply of helium, a safer though less efficient gas than volatile hydrogen; to many enthusiasts, including some within the NACA, this suggested a bright future for lighter-than-air craft in America, in spite of the accidents that continually plagued airships. After the crash of the Roma in 1922, George Lewis predicted that "one, two, or three such accidents can not definitely stop the development of lighter-than-air craft." But by the time this strange era in aviation history was over, more than a third of the world's 161 airships had been destroyed in accidents, the most dramatic being the Hindenburg crash of 1937. That disaster virtually eliminated airships from American skies, though it did not end military interest in the craft nor diminish NACA enthusiasm for their potential, including their usefulness in fundamental research on bodies-of-revolution in a fluid stream. The Subcommittee on Airships survived until World War II, and as late as 1948, John Victory was still advising the Bureau of the Budget that airships had great promise and were still far from the "zenith" of their development.⁸ So long as the military services continued to believe in a project, the NACA was not reluctant to make public its own support.

Seaplanes presented a similar case. Though the NACA recognized the commercial potential of seaplanes and noted this advantage when creating its Subcommittee on Seaplanes in 1935, still it populated that committee entirely with government members under the chairmanship [128] of a naval officer. Some new NACA committees (like Aircraft Fuels, also formed in 1935) had interests equally applicable to commercial and military aviation, but the drift of committee structure was away from obvious ties to the industry and toward more apparent service to the military.⁹

Behind the scenes, the NACA was more accommodating to industry. Most importantly, the Committee worked out procedures in these years to conduct research for industry on a reimbursable basis. During the 1920s, the NACA had generally refused to test industry models in its wind tunnels on the grounds that the NACA was in the business of conducting fundamental research applicable to all flight, not isolated research on specific prototypes. Furthermore, argued the Committee, an inordinate amount of time was required to clear a wind tunnel, set up an industry model, and run the tests - time that could be more advantageously spent on basic research. Finally, the results of NACA investigations were by definition public property that the Committee could not in good conscience promise to keep secret for the benefit of private interests. Thus it had advised the industry to use private wind tunnels or those at educational institutions.¹⁰ This last argument, of course, lost its force after the NACA became the only agency in the country with such specialized tools as the variable-density wind tunnel or the propeller-research tunnel.

Sometime in the first half of the 1930s, the NACA position changed. Prodded by the Bureau of the Budget while preparing its fiscal-year 1932 appropriation request, the Committee began to consider how and under what circumstances it might conduct research for industry. Rejecting a BoB suggestion that it seek legislative approval for such action as the National Bureau of Standards had done, the Committee established a policy on conducting investigations for private industry and developed a table of fees. The policy, first approved in 1931 and amended in 1936, restricted the Committee to answering specific requests from American sources for research that only the NACA was equipped to perform. The requestor had to make a deposit equal to the estimated cost plus a 100-percent fee, supply the model and any other special apparatus needed, and make a deposit covering additional costs before any additional work would begin. The NACA agreed to forward to the manufacturer the results of the investigation but retained the right to use them for the benefit of the government, and most importantly to release them to the public at its own discretion. The manufacturer thus gave up absolute proprietary rights to the results on the understanding that the NACA would not release the information unless it was deemed to be in the national interest.¹¹ By establishing this costly fee system and by failing to guarantee the confidentiality of new ideas, the NACA once more created a policy that, [129] however unconsciously, favored the large manufacturers at the expense of the small, and widened the gap between those hoping to enter the aircraft business and those already established. More than one Langley staff member felt that Martin Aircraft Company and Boeing Aircraft Corporation, for example, abused the privilege of access to the Committee's facilities and in fact used the laboratory for research and development work neither covered by the regulations nor constituting a proper function of the Committee.¹²

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Such criticisms, however, were kept within the NACA family, as were other observations on the growing role of the industry in the affairs of the NACA. In 1931, for example, when the death of Samuel W. Stratton created a vacancy on the Main Committee, Joseph Ames wrote candidly to Victory about the advisability of choosing a replacement from among three industry men who seemed the most qualified [130] for membership. Allowing that "the President may prefer to appoint some university professor rather than a man identified with the aircraft industry," Ames argued that there was then no qualified professor of aeronautics on the east coast, making it "necessary to look elsewhere than to universities at this time." Ames's memorandum is clearly sincere and well intentioned, free of the slightest taint of cronyism or conflict of interest.¹³ But Ames, in Baltimore, was more detached from the realities of Washington politics than were Lewis and Victory and the staff at the White House. Ames's recommendation, which sought to bring the greatest possible expertise to the Main Committee, was rejected, and Charles A. Lindbergh was chosen to succeed Stratton. Not only was Lindbergh free of public ties to industry, but his enormous prestige and popularity also lent weight to the NACA letterhead.

Some of the committee shuffling during the Depression was done in response to criticisms of the NACA, or in attempts to head off further criticism. Throughout its history, the NACA faced opposition from two classes of critics. First were those, generally outside the government, who felt that the NACA did its work badly and should be abolished. Second were those, generally within the government, who felt that the NACA did its work well but would be more effective or efficient if absorbed by another agency. The politics of the Depression made bedfellows of these otherwise incompatible factions.

The first group campaigned through the 1930s in league with the critics of American aviation in general. Its litany ranged from Billy-Mitchell-style advocacy of a unified air force to Max-Munk-like protests about retarding aviation progress by failing to appreciate genius. The chorus sang "aviation trust" - the familiar plaint about a small group of conspirators' gaining monopolistic control of the aviation industry, aided and abetted by government officials who were either inept or corrupt. This trust, chanted the critics, blocked the real progress of aviation by excluding new ideas and new people and by putting its own narrow self-interests before the interests of the country and the human race. This campaign was a holdover from the 1920s; it continued on and off through the 1930s.¹⁴

In the opening year of the latter decade, the critics focused their wrath upon the NACA (not that they had ignored the NACA earlier, for ever since the cross-licensing agreement the Committee had been a target of those who believed in an aviation trust.)¹⁵ In 1930, however, the NACA was singled out for a particularly scathing attack.

In an Aero Digest editorial entitled "Why the NACA?", Frank Tichenor surveyed the record of a decade of NACA research and found [131] the Committee wanting.¹⁶ With "the largest, the most splendidly equipped and the most modern laboratories, and facilities for aeronautic research" in the world, the NACA had failed to give "an adequate return of the money spent." Tichenor doubted that the Committee's engine research had improved a single engine.

The free-flight tests of the Committee were more fruitful, but they failed the NACA's own measure of success, for "no free flight test [had] been a scientific test nor dealt with investigation of fundamental phenomena of nature." Wind-tunnel research, which Tichenor thought should have been the NACA's most productive, was instead its most disappointing effort. The results produced were obvious or trivial or beside the point. The NACA had ignored "the research having most of the scientific element in it, that dealing with the rotating cylinder," a method of increasing lift by boundary-layer control. The autogyro, a forerunner of the helicopter, was to Tichenor "the most painful subject of all," for the Committee had passed up an early opportunity to advance this important new field of flight. "The only line in which the N.A.C.A. [had] contributed to aeronautics by way of its own experimental research" was the development of the NACA family of wing sections, but even this research, "so admirably begun, [had] never been continued." Even the NACA cowling failed Tichenor's scrutiny because it "was a development rather than an original work," it could not be "regarded as scientific work" for it did not "involve the study of new and fundamental phenomena of nature," and in any event the Townend ring was "definitely superior to the N.A.C.A. cowling." Tichenor concluded: "There is hardly one research project of scientific value, and only a few of technical value. There is an enormous gap between the principles of research laid down and those applied."

According to Tichenor, there was a "keen feeling of disappointment throughout the industry about the outcome of the N.A.C.A. research," and he undertook to explain why the act had fallen so far short of the promise. First, he surmised, "scientific knowledge cannot be amassed by a committee any more than an opera can be written by a committee." Members of the NACA committees had neither the time nor the motive to do more than rubber-stamp the program suggested by the staff. The real blame lay there, particularly with George Lewis, whose most important roles were "diplomacy" and "organizing." "Only secondarily need he exhibit any scientific spirit." Likewise, the leading officials at Langley were "not research engineers at all". but "mere routine engineers, and hardly that; .... mere bureaucrats, signing letters and unwrapping red tape." "Nearly all good research engineers [had] left the N.A.C.A.," said Tichenor, " and the few older men who [had] stayed with the organization [were] for the greatest part less capable than those who left." The NACA had, in fact, run upon [132] the shoals that threaten all bureaucracies, the pursuit of survival at the expense of the mission. Said Tichenor:

If the results of the N.A.C.A. could be computed according to their worth in dollars and cents, the Committee would long ago have been bankrupt. But it is not a money-making organization; it is a money-spending organization. That leaves much energy free, and unfortunately the conditions in such a case are favorable to the survival of those most unsuitable for carrying on scientific research.

Tichenor's final judgment of the Committee was a strongly worded call for "radical changes in the management":

The activity of the N.A.C.A. has become a mere building of new laboratories without distinct ideas of what to do with them after they are built, and it has become a mere weighing and measuring of less value than the weighing of a grocery clerk. No concerted efforts are made to advance science; no efforts are made to apply the results of the tests to any logical system, to digest them, and to interpret their significance in the sum of general knowledge. The truth is that the tests cannot be interpreted that way because the program has not been guided by scientific reasoning. Weighing for weighing's sake is not scientific research, but at best a kind of indoor golf.

George Lewis and other members of the NACA staff saw Max Munk's hand in this article. They were probably right. Since leaving the Committee, Munk had spent three years "in industrial employ," but had failed to match the brilliant record he had achieved when the resources of the Committee and its staff were available to him. In 1928 and 1929 he had petitioned the NACA to publish an article he had written, and he had come away angry when the piece was rejected. In 1930 he was reduced to rather pathetic letters soliciting subsidies for his work, letters in which he styled himself "the foremost aerodynamic expert of the world" and asserted that it was "generally conceded throughout the civilized world that all special scientific methods by which aircraft is computed [sic] nowadays, most experimental methods, and types of equipment for such experiments have been originated by me." In spite of the hyperbole, made worse by his ineptitude with the English language, there was some truth to these assertions; but the presence of these letters in the NACA files suggests that he was making his pleas to friends of the Committee who were not likely to be sympathetic to one who had fallen from grace with George Lewis. By the time the Tichenor editorial appeared in late 1930, Munk was listed on the masthead of Aero Digest as a consulting editor. He had joined the [133] opposition, and the tone and syntax of the Tichenor piece suggests he was providing ammunition as well. ¹⁷

Many of the assertions made by Munk and Tichenor were simply not true, or at least so exaggerated as to be misleading and unfair. These the NACA had little trouble dismissing. The basic premise, however, was less easy to dispel. Was the Committee doing fundamental scientific research as it professed, or was it simply doing unimaginative pedestrian engineering that produced some technical progress without advancing basic knowledge and understanding in proportion to the excellence of the research facilities available to the NACA staff? Here were Munk and Lewis squared off again, the scientist calling for genius, theory, and abstraction while the engineer defended teamwork, practicality, and steadiness.

Ames and Lewis refused to enter the debate, but members of the staff and at least one member of the Committee took up the gauntlet. Their responses were both predictable and enlightening. The only staff member to address the basic question at length was Elton W. Miller, head of the Aerodynamics Division. While conceding that "very little of our work could be classified as fundamental, according to general acceptance of the term," Miller insisted that the research was scientific nonetheless. Science, he suggested, could be defined as "accumulated and accepted knowledge, systematized and formulated with reference to the discovery of general truths on the operation of general laws," and research as "careful or critical examination in seeking principles or facts." just because their research had a practical object, he said, did not disqualify it as scientific; after all, "research need not necessarily be aimless to be scientific."¹⁸

Miller's response was meant for internal consumption in the NACA; Edward P. Warner's was not. As editor of Aviation, he replied in kind to Tichenor. Unfortunately, Warner uncharacteristically contributed more heat than light to this debate and thereby played into the hands of Tichenor. Unlike Miller, he skirted the definition of "scientific research" and devoted himself instead to the comparatively easy task of refuting some of Munk's more exaggerated criticisms of the NACA. This no doubt provided considerable comfort to the Committee's friends, but it did little to blunt the main thrust of the Tichenor piece. Warner mentioned scientific research only to say that it was properly the province of the universities. The NACA, consciously or not, subscribed to this belief throughout its history, as did most other aeronautical institutions in the United States throughout the age of flight. The NACA profitably employed theorists like Theodore Theodorsen, H. Julian Allen, and R.T. Jones, but it avoided duplicating the role of the universities. Warner and others of the NACA considered this a reason-[134] able division of labor, especially after the Committee's unpleasant experience with Max Munk.¹⁹

Tichenor retorted that Warner was ignoring "the keynote of the N.A.C.A.'s shortcomings." In fact, Tichenor concluded from Warner's editorial that "our [presumably Tichenor's and Munk's] principal criticism, the absence of scientific research, is tacitly admitted" in the Warner piece. In an extravagant prophecy that bears the imprint of Max Munk and speaks to a central issue of the NACA's history, Tichenor concluded:

Aeronautics has not yet reached its goal. The final shape of airplanes will eventually be quite different from what we have now. We want that development hastened. We want a critical and scientific survey, an exploration of all known possibilities. It may be possible (it probably is possible) to increase the specific lift to ten times what we have now, and we want a central institution of research to give us light on that. It may be possible to reduce the specific drag to one-tenth what we have now; the theory of air motion producing drag is still entirely in the dark. Friction of air, as such, does not account for more than one-twentieth of actual drag. We want to have some light on that too. We want knowledge concerning boundary layer control, concerning the effect of rotating cylinders, of vibrating surfaces, of lubrication, of autogiros, of Flettner cylinder, of jet action, of shooting action, of sound wave action, and of chemical action. Indeed the possibilities are without limit. We want a national agency to explore these unexplored regions, and to do so with scientific spirit, systematic thought and honest endeavor. We are not satisfied with useless pressure measurements and with the building of wind tunnels which will never be really usefully employed. Build small laboratories and do big things in them: not the other way. Only then will the nation attain high rank in world aviation.²⁰

Words by Frank Tichenor; music by Max Munk. This chorus of criticism rang so stridently and abused the facts so recklessly that it deafened the NACA to the overtone of truth imbedded within it. Munk and Tichenor were demonstrably wrong in their overall conclusion, for the United States did "attain high rank in world aviation" without adhering to their advice. Furthermore, they showed themselves ignorant of NACA activities which in fact included a general research program in boundary-layer control incorporating many of the specific techniques they advocated. But the main thrust of the criticism - that the NACA had embraced what historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn calls the "normal science" of "problem solving" at the expense of radical and imaginative conceptualization - had some merit.²¹ The problem always was how to draw on the good ideas of people like Munk without letting them run away with the program and indulge in [135] crackpot hunches that could be politically embarrassing and institutionally suicidal. Never having had a clear mandate laying out exactly what it was to do, the NACA had always tended to do what was safe, what would please its customers and satisfy the public and Congress. Relying on the universities for theory while claiming to be doing fundamental scientific research placed the NACA in the potentially awkward position of being responsible for a phase of aeronautical research which it had in large measure left to others. If the Committee did not relish this position, it embraced it nonetheless.

Had this debate over the Committee's mission and method confined itself to the pages of the aeronautical journals, it might have done the NACA no immediate harm. Though both sides claimed support from most knowledgeable people in the aeronautics field, there seems little doubt that a majority sided with the NACA. And of course the NACA's committees included men from the most important segments of the aeronautical community. Such men, many representing companies and organizations that relied on the NACA for work and information, naturally sided with the Committee.²²

When the debate spilled into the public arena, however, as it did in 1932, the NACA found itself vulnerable. As the Depression deepened and political incumbents sought to demonstrate in an election year that they were doing something about it, economy and efficiency became watchwords of Washington life. Aero Digest found a ready audience, then, when it proposed the "elimination of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics." In a February 1932 editorial addressed to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the journal suggested that merging the NACA with the National Bureau of Standards "would save non-productive millions and give 100 per cent more in scientific investigations." Labeling Lewis and Victory "politicians" exploiting the prestige of the prominent men on the Main Committee in order to "hold their excellent berths - snug and warm, safe and secure," Aero Digest said the NACA was engaging in too much politics and not enough engineering. The following month, in a longer editorial, Tichenor repeated many of his criticisms of the previous year, calling on President Hoover to overhaul the NACA.²³

Victory later recalled that in this period "Congress lent itself to the disgrace of the country to listening to the snipers" - that is, to the critics of the Committee. It is unclear how far Congress acted in response to Tichenor and his adherents or to the Depression, but one thing is certain. In the spring and summer of 1932, the NACA was in its most serious trouble to date with the Congress. In the same month as Tichenor's call for merger of the NACA, Congressman Carl E. Mapes introduced a bill to reorganize the Department of Commerce, including a provision that it absorb the NACA. Two days later, the [136] chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, acting in his new role as chairman of the recently formed ad hoc House Economy Committee, asked Ames to suggest "where consolidations may be made and duplications eliminated in the interest of economy and efficiency." Ominously he reported: "The Committee feels that there can be a very substantial saving effected in this way in the activities of your office." By April Victory found himself writing to a friend: "As you can imagine from what you see by the papers, I have been more than up to my neck, for we have not only had ....'Congress on our hands', but we have had Congress literally at our throats.²⁴

The worst was yet to come. In April 1932, the NACA appropriation for fiscal 1933 encountered opposition in the House though Congressman Woodrum was able to get it passed relatively intact. In June, however, when it came up in the Senate, it met stronger opposition and fewer friends. The Senate was then attempting to reduce all appropriations by 10 percent; when the NACA bill reached the floor, three senators backed an amendment to apply the same cuts. It was Saturday, and only the bill's sponsor was present to head off the attack. The arguments of the attackers were those heard most often when Congress took to criticizing the NACA: duplication and special interests. Said one senator:

There has been an enormous waste in the aeronautical activities of the Government ..... Instead of consolidating all of the aeronautical activities of the Army and the Navy and other departments of the Government, we are diffusing them, and we are trying to take over some of the duties and some of the experimentation and scientific work which are being done by private manufacturers of airplanes, who have technical staffs that are infinitely more competent than the technical staffs which the Government of the United States provides. This whole organization ought to be abolished; and, if it is not abolished, the appropriation ought to be reduced one-half.

In a curious reversal of the complaint by Tichenor and others who felt that the NACA was not doing enough for the industry, the same senator suggested "that while this organization may have done some good, it is a sort of an appendage to the Army and to the Navy, and is doing work - what little is being done - for the private manufacturers of America." When the appropriation-bill sponsor suggested that, under proposed cuts, the NACA "would go to pieces," the critic replied, "That would be a blessing rather than a calamity."²⁵

The amendment to reduce the NACA appropriation was approved, as was a motion to reconsider on Monday all the items in the NACA budget. Over the weekend the friends of the Committee rallied enough support to hold the line on the budget, and on Monday they were able [137] to fight off any further reductions. The most telling point in that debate was the charge that the campaign to save the NACA budget was another instance of the business interests of the country lobbying to save the government agencies that favored them. The NACA's main defender countered that any benefit the industry derived from NACA research was a second order consequence, an inevitable trickle-down of the advances made primarily for the military services:

As always happens when we build up a science for the sake of getting the national defense perfected, we benefit incidentally commercial activities along the same lines; but. the Senator must not have the idea that the chief activities of this committee are to benefit commercial aeronautics, because that is not true.

Incongruously, the effect of this oration was a motion to reconsider the entire NACA appropriation; fortunately for the NACA the bill ended up in a conference committee, where Congressman Woodrum succeeded in restoring almost the entire amount cut by the Senate.²⁶

The NACA, however, was not yet out of the woods. The same session of Congress passed and sent to the president an economy bill which empowered him to propose drastic reorganization of the executive branch of government in the interests of economy and efficiency. President Hoover - who had as secretary of commerce approved a plan to transfer the NACA to his department - was of course a confirmed cynic with regard to government agencies. "No one with a day's experience in government," he once said, "fails to realize that in all bureaucracies there are three implacable spirits - self-perpetuation, expansion, and an incessant demand for more power." It is little wonder then that his reorganization plan - revealed in December, after he had already failed of reelection - included transfer of the NACA to the Department of Commerce. What did seem to surprise at least some within the NACA was that this particular phase of the plan was created on Hoover's personal initiative. Apparently the Committee had not been as successful as many had believed when it prevailed upon him in 1925 to reconsider the Department of Commerce proposal.²⁷

Once more the members of the NACA manned the barricades. Victory began at once to line up congressional support to defeat the measure, and the Main Committee met within the week to decide on a course of action. At the request of a friendly senator, the Main Committee forthwith resolved itself into a Special Committee on Proposed Consolidation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics with the Bureau of Standards and unanimously adopted a draft report (prepared in advance, no doubt by Victory). The report contained testimonials by Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and even Hoover; [138] presented figures on the economic value of the Committee's work; and argued that the proposed transfer would not effect the economies that were claimed for it.²⁸

As it turned out, this report was unnecessary, for the Democrats in the House voted almost unanimously to defeat not just the NACA transfer, but the entire Hoover reorganization plan. Any reorganization, they argued, should be left to President Roosevelt, who would, after all, have to live with it. Years before, when he was assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt had provided a key endorsement of the plan to create the NACA in the first place. No evidence from the intervening years suggests that he had become any less favorably disposed to the NACA. If anything, he seemed to have grown more friendly to it and to its supporters, at least more friendly than Hoover. As it turned out, Roosevelt and his administration made no effort to abolish or transfer the Committee. The NACA experienced other attacks during the Depression but, once Roosevelt was in the White House, the most serious episode was over.²⁹

In its struggle for survival during the Depression, the NACA employed and refined the same defenses that it was to use through all of its remaining years. It collected and circulated endorsements from its friends and clients. It presented evidence of the efficiency of its operation and a complete lack of duplication of effort. It waved the banner of military necessity. And it courted key congressmen and executive branch officials, most often during trips to the Langley laboratory.

John Victory took upon himself the task of collecting endorsements. For example, when the chief engineer of Boeing wrote to Lewis in December 1930 deploring the Tichenor attack in Aero Digest and offering a statement backing the NACA, Victory wrote in the margin, "Get it." Lewis in turn requested the endorsement, noting that "letters of this type are of great value to the Committee, especially if the matter is brought up by a congressman, in which case the letter can be shown and not made public." Friends of the Committee were thus assured that they could endorse the NACA without having to do so publicly.³⁰

With other endorsements, Victory was less circumspect. Any incoming correspondence complimentary to the NACA he flagged for inclusion in his "bouquet file." He would mark the appropriate passage, often lifting it entirely out of context, and direct a secretary to "card" it. From these excerpts Victory compiled over the years a 3- by 5-inch card file more than 2 feet high. In it were compliments for all occasions that could be selected and quoted for any purpose, especially to justify the continued existence of the Committee. The more notable [139] the correspondent or the more glowing the praise, the more likely that the quote would come to the attention of the appropriate authorities.³¹

Reading the letters of praise received by the NACA over the years, one senses that the approval was genuine and that the correspondents sincerely appreciated what the NACA did.³² The impression given by Victory's card file, however, is something entirely different. Selecting his material with care and quoting it out of context, Victory compiled a set of endorsements more in keeping with his views of the Committee than with those of his correspondents. What he failed to mention in presenting the endorsements was that some had appeared in bread-and-butter letters written after the correspondent had been a guest of the Committee at the annual research conference. Some came after the correspondent had received a free set of Committee reports or some similar favor. They were naturally generous and complimentary. Victory failed to note that some of the compliments had been written by him and merely signed by the endorser - for example, the president's letter transmitting the Committee's annual report to Congress. He was especially fond of quoting these. Nor did he mention that some of the endorsements were written by members of the NACA, that some came from industry and military personnel dependent on the Committee for assistance and information, and that some had been solicited by the Committee.³³

Endorsements may well have been necessary for the survival of the NACA. Without them, Congress and the Bureau of the Budget would have been hard pressed to evaluate the Committee's work - partly because the Committee's job was arcane to the layman and beyond his capacity to judge, partly because the Committee's job was never entirely clear in the first place. But collecting endorsements entailed serious dangers. First, the process became self-serving and biased, for the Committee chose what to reveal and what to conceal. Second, the Committee and some of its friends spent too much time reading and believing their own clippings; often it became unclear whether Victory and others could distinguish between the statements in the bouquet file and the actual happenings within the NACA.

The second defense the Committee used against detractors was the efficiency argument. This took two forms. First and oldest was to refute the charge of duplication. Congress always wanted to know (especially during the Depression) if the NACA was duplicating the work of any other federal agency. With the military services and the Bureau of Standards conducting aeronautical research, it appeared that the NACA might be redundant and might profitably be merged with one of these other agencies.

To this complaint the Committee always replied that - far from duplicating the work of other government agencies - the NACA actually [140] prevented duplication. It did fundamental research categorically different from that done at the Bureau of Standards or in the services; by providing a forum where representatives of all aeronautical research establishments could meet regularly to survey the entire field, the NACA ensured that no agency would inadvertently stray into the territory of another. It was conceivable, for example, that the Bureau of Standards and the NACA could both decide to pursue similar investigations on boundary-layer control, but because the NBS was represented on the NACA committee on Aerodynamics (which would have to approve any such program within the NACA) there existed a sure check against such duplication.

Very often congressmen failed to comprehend the difference between the fundamental research conducted by the NACA and the engineering research or testing conducted by other government agencies, but in such cases Victory always had a pile of endorsements ready to demonstrate that those who understood such matters believed there was no duplication.³⁴

The other form of the NACA's efficiency defense was that the Committee's research resulted in savings for aviation that made the dollars invested in the NACA a profitable use of the taxpayers' money. Frank Tichenor set off this line of argument when he accused the Committee of giving a poor return on the money appropriated to it. Even though there was no precise and objective way to measure the worth of the Committee's work, the NACA demonstrated in 1933 that it could match statistics with Tichenor. In a paper entitled "Economic Value of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics," the Langley staff undertook to prove that just "six researches completed within the last few years .... [resulted in] savings in money ..... in excess annually of the total appropriations for the Committee for the eighteen years of its existence." The proofs seem to fit John Victory's aphorism that a statistician is "a man who draws a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion," but this caveat does not negate the premise: the government did get, especially in the early years, a sizable return on the dollars it invested in aeronautical research. The federal government was still, after all, the major institution in the country concerned with aviation, and flying was still a young enough enterprise to need all the refinement it could get. So the NACA used the argument unabashedly, and Ames (perhaps relying on the authority of his position as a scientist and university president) went the Langley staff one better. Writing to a friendly senator in 1933, he claimed that $10 in aviation costs were saved annually for every dollar invested in NACA research.³⁵

The third NACA argument against proposals to abolish was that old reliable - military necessity. Congress might question the need for [141] aeronautical research or the advisability of nurturing a growing bureaucracy in Washington, but never the need for adequate national defense. To the extent that the NACA could ally itself with the military services and demonstrate that its work was essential to national defense, it could assure itself of continued existence and appropriations. The Committee was created in World War I largely in response to that conflict. Its organic legislation appeared in a naval appropriations bill. It was quartered for years in offices provided by the military services. Two representatives from each service sat on the Committee. Military requests for research were always honored. And military endorsements were among the first sought when moves were afoot to abolish or transfer the Committee. "If the NACA ever sets itself aside from the Army and Navy," Lewis often remarked, "it is a 'dead duck.'" ³⁶

During the aviation boom of the 1920s, when war and the threat of war seemed most remote, the NACA had strayed as far as it ever did from under the military umbrella. Publicly and privately it increased its attention to the problems of the aircraft industry and commercial aviation. When the Depression struck, however, and attacks on the NACA began, the Committee retreated to the high ground of military necessity. When scandal shook the aviation industry in 1934, the NACA put greater distance between itself and industry while closing ranks with the armed services. Through President Roosevelt's dramatic cancellation of the airmail contracts flowing from the so-called "spoils conference" of 1930, the Nye Committee hearings into the "merchants of death," and the round of allegations about startling and excessive profits within the aircraft industry, the NACA gathered in its skirts. While never abandoning the industry nor reneging on its commitment to foster commercial aviation, the Committee kept a more discreet distance than it had in the past.³⁷

Lastly, the Committee refined during the Depression one other mechanism for combating movements to abolish or transfer it. John Victory courted a select number of congressmen and executive department officials with trips to the Langley laboratory, especially in sessions at the camp. Inviting a congressman to visit Langley in 1931, Victory said: "Frankly, we are somewhat proud of what we have accomplished and are anxious to make a personal report of our stewardship to those few members of Congress that we feel are genuinely interested."³⁸ That sentence has the ring of sincerity to it, and rightly so. The Committee was indeed proud of its work, and visitors came away from Langley impressed not only with the monumental array of wind tunnels and laboratories and airplanes and machine shops, but also with the spirit of enthusiasm and devotion that pervaded the laboratory. To visit Langley was to become enamored of it.

The perfect complement to such a visit was a stay at the NACA camp, where men could relax in comfort and contemplate by the quiet waters of Back River the advances in aeronautics being made at Langley. In 1939 Victory reported to the chairman of the NACA:

Friday night I accompanied nine members of Congress on a boat trip to Old Point Comfort and a visit to the Committee's laboratories on Saturday, after which the), stayed over at the Oak Point Club for some fishing. They developed a unanimous sentiment for additional research facilities in aeronautics.³⁹

In spite of these defenses, the attacks sustained by the NACA in the early years of the Depression took their toll. In 1933 and 1934 the Committee's budget for general purposes declined for the first time in the Committee's history. It fell by more than $100,000 in 1933, by more than $200,000 in 1934, a total drop of one-third from the 1932 level. Only in the year following World War II and the year following the Korean War would the Committee again suffer a decrease in its appropriation for general purposes, and neither would be as precipitous as in these early Depression years.⁴⁰

[143] Of course, times were bad for everyone, and all federal agencies were experiencing budget reductions. In 1932 the Senate was applying its 10-percent reduction formula across the board. The furlough of government employees affected almost all government agencies, as did the accompanying salary cuts. Federal revenue fell by 50 percent between 1930 and 1932 and did not reach the 1930 level again until 1935. Federal expenditures stagnated from 1931 through 1933.⁴¹

The NACA suffered more than most agencies, for two reasons. First, as a scientific agency, it became associated by the public with the policies responsible for the Depression. Historian A. Hunter Dupree has said that, in the campaign of 1932, Hoover "seemed to equate scientific research with the prosperity of the 1920's, the economic system then reigning, and the voluntary program he had developed as secretary of commerce.....Thus basic research became linked in the American mind with overproduction and the Depression, with long-term goals pursued at the expense of present needs, with intellectual projections blinded to practical realities." The result, according to Dupree, was something like a backlash, and even though the new administration was more sympathetic to the NACA than its predecessor had been, "the large sums of money that the government began to spend during the first hundred days of the New Deal were designed to care for the unemployed and revive the economy, not to aid the hardpressed scientific bureaus of the government nor to attack the depression by a long-range research program."⁴²

Sad irony for the NACA, then, that the other reason for the disproportionate reduction in its budget in early Depression years was the strange alliance formed by the Committee's enemies: outside critics on one hand, and government efficiency experts on the other. Thus Hoover damaged the Committee twice, once by aiding those who would eliminate or transfer the Committee and again by contributing to a general sentiment against large expenditures for scientific research. That the Committee weathered these lean years as well as it did is more remarkable in light of the forces aligned against it in the early 1930s.

More serious in the long run than the decline in general-purpose funds in 1933 and 1934 was the refusal of Congress to appropriate a penny of construction funds to the Committee from 1931 until 1937. Since receiving its first appropriation for a laboratory in 1917, the NACA had grown by following up construction with more people and more work: get Congress to approve a new research facility, and once it was in place argue that the money would be wasted unless operating funds were increased. Expansion of the Committee's budget over the years had followed this push-pull pattern, until (by 1932) the budget for general expenses topped the million-dollar mark, approaching the [144] record $1,200,000 appropriated for construction in the heyday before the Depression. Now the Committee had to look elsewhere for hope of continued growth.

The answer, of course, was the New Deal. Congress might balk at direct appropriation to the NACA for construction, but it went along with the pump-priming philosophy that lay behind the Public Works Administration. Money that the NACA could not get from Congress directly, it got in the name of economic recovery. In 1933 the Committee won approval of a $200,000 allotment for miscellaneous construction, later augmented by almost $48,000 to repair damage from a hurricane that had flooded Langley Field. The following year the Public Works Administration granted the Committee almost half a million dollars to construct a new wind tunnel capable of speeds up to 500 miles an hour, the range in which the aircraft of the 1940s would fly.⁴³

With the impetus of these construction funds, the NACA general-purpose budget began to rise again. In 1935 it increased 10 percent. The following year it jumped more than 50 percent, carrying it over the $1,000,000 level it had achieved so briefly in 1932. Never thereafter did it fall below this mark. The trick that had rescued the NACA from the doldrums of the Depression was not lost on at least one congressman. When the 1936 NACA budget was on the floor of the House, Congressman Otha D. Wearin charged that congressional intent had been circumvented by the PWA funding and the consequent NACA demand for increased salaries and expenses. Wearin, a believer in what he called the "air trust," expressed serious doubts about the independent functioning of the NACA, which he preferred to see consolidated with other government agencies dealing with aeronautics. But that was not his specific complaint. At this juncture he wanted only to delete any increase in the NACA appropriation

to operate equipment purchased with P.W.A. funds that this Congress has never had an opportunity to authorize for that particular purpose. I object to the policy of the P.W.A. purchasing materials of that kind and then coming to the Congress with an apparent club over our heads and asking funds to use in the operation of the equipment that we did not authorize. ⁴⁴

Once more, Congressman Woodrum stepped into the breach and saved the NACA appropriation, but it was apparent that the method used by the Committee to increase its budget was not going entirely unnoticed in Congress and was not without its critics - critics still nursing old grievances over the "aircraft trust" and its roots in the cross-licensing agreement.

[145] But by this time the critics were growing less vocal and less numerous, and things were looking up for the NACA. As early as mid-1934, Victory could report, with obvious relief, that "for the immediate present we are not confronted with any threat of abolition." The budget was on the rise again. New construction was under way, and the personnel cuts of the early Depression years were being restored. The Federal Aviation Commission, as part of a general study of American aviation following the scandals in 1934, recommended that the NACA step up its program, an idea echoed by the NACA's own Special Committee on Research Policy. Reporting in March 1935, the special committee recommended supplemental appropriations of $338,050 to make up for the work deferred during the lean years of the early 1930s. Both the Bureau of the Budget and Congress approved this sum. For the NACA, at least, the Depression was over by the middle of 1935.⁴⁵

It was not without cost, however, that the NACA survived the Depression. The costs were of two sorts. The first, and ultimately more important, was not immediately apparent. The Committee had lost objectivity, impartiality, self-confidence, and equanimity. It became further removed from the business of aeronautics, closer to the business of survival that Hoover said was the main interest of all Washington bureaucracies. If the Langley staff kept an eye on the ball, it was in spite of continual distractions from Washington. One day they would be escorting congressmen and other VIPs around the lab and attending to their needs at the camp. The next day they would be estimating the cost per hour of running a wind tunnel so that the Washington office could present yet a new set of efficiency statistics. The day after that they would be refuting arguments of Max Munk and Frank Tichenor. The annual budget cycle of preparing estimates and composing justifications that laymen could understand was quickly turning into a year-round enterprise.

The NACA's organic legislation was cast in vague terms that did not - at least in the minds of many congressmen - fully justify the existence of the Committee or explain how it differed from other aeronautical research facilities or why it had to remain independent; thus, the NACA was under constant pressure to justify its existence. Compounding this disadvantage, only the haziest of boundaries divided the various categories of aeronautical research: the fundamental research that the Committee claimed to be doing; the scientific study of the problems of flight, which was in its charter; the theoretical research conducted at universities; the engineering research conducted by the military services; and the design and development done by manufacturers. The NACA, weak and vulnerable in its early years, was forced to choose a territory that infringed on no one else's; the ground it called its own was really a no man's land carved out of dead space between [146] larger and more powerful institutions. No wonder, then, that the Committee was hard pressed to answer Tichenor when he pointed out the basic contradiction between what the Committee said it was doing and what it was doing in fact. Although the NACA fought off that attack in the Depression years, it never really resolved the contradiction, and this did not enhance the staff's ability to perceive reality and understand just what the NACA's place was in the order of things. Because the criticisms of Munk and Tichenor were closer to the mark than the NACA cared or dared to admit, the Committee embraced a shrill and rigid denial. Repeated often enough, this denial took on the aura of truth to the very people who should have recognized it - at least in their own circle - as an expedient for public consumption.

The leaders of the NACA thus sowed in the Depression the seeds of a self-deception that would bear a bitter harvest in later years. More immediately, the Committee faced another loss incurred in the hard years of the early 1930s. Though the NACA had recovered from the Depression by 1935, earlier than most other agencies and institutions in the United States, it had lost valuable time in the international race for aeronautical supremacy. The years of budget reductions and the years during which Congress appropriated no funds for construction had taken their toll. The NACA still claimed in mid-1935 to be the leading aeronautical research laboratory in the world, but that claim would soon be challenged.

1. John B. Rae, Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920-1960 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), chap. 3.

2. Victory to Porter Adams, 21 June 1929, in 60 A 635 (11), 1-36, Adams, Porter; and 57 A 415 (64), 50-4, "Office Procedure."

3. In 1928, industry representatives held 19 percent of t e committee memberships; in 1938 they held 16 percent. The reduction was directed not o much at industry as at increasing government representation; over the same period, representation from private life other than industry fell from 18 percent to 3 percent. See appendix B.

4. Minutes of the Executive Committee meeting, 23 Apr. 1931; "Reorganization of Subcommittees (as recommended by Dr. Lewis)," 10 Apr. 1935; and appendix B.

5. The Subcommittee on Coverings, Dopes, and Protective Coatings held only one meeting, 15 Oct. 1920, before being abolished in 1931. Charles H. elms to Lewis, 29 Jan. 1935, in NA RG 255, file 1-1 (2).

6. At the Executive Committee meeting 20 Jan. 1931, Ames offered his opinion that "the most useful subcommittee members were those who were otherwise connected with the Government service." Minutes.

7. "Resume of Airship Investigations Made by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics," 2 June 1933.

8. Lewis to John J. Ide, 25 Feb. 1922, in 57 A 415 (66), 5 6g, 1921-1923; Rae, Climb to Greatness, pp. 35 38; Peter W. Brooks, The Modern Airliner: Its Origins and Development (London: Putnam, 1961), p. 32; and Victory to Elmer B. Staats, 1 June 1948.

9. AR 1935, p. 20.

10. Lewis to N.J. Medeveff, 21 Jan. 1927 and to T.P. Wright, 18 Dec. 1929, both in 57 A 415 (11), 13-6, general, 1927 1933.

11. "R.V.K." to Colonel Roop (director, Bureau of the Budget), 14 Aug. 1930; Roop to Lewis, 14 Aug., Lewis to Roop, 18 Sept. 1930; minutes, NACA annual meeting, 22 Oct. 1931; 57 415 (11), 13-6, general, 1940; and Lewis to C.G. Taylor 7 Dec. 1931, ibid., 1927-1933. In explaining the new regulations to the Langley staff, stressed the importance of maintaining independence:

It is the policy of the Committee, in conducting work on any special type of aircraft . . . not to obligate itself to the manufactures by accepting gratis parts or other equipment for the tests. The Committee, investigating the characteristics of any particular aircraft, should be free to make an independent investigation of such a character that it will not be construed as giving engineering and consulting services to a manufacturer. In order to retain its independent action, it is desirable for the Committee to purchase outright any equipment necessary for the conduct of the tests. (Lewis to LMAL, 18 Nov. 1931, in 57 A 415 (22), 21-14, 1921-1933)

12. Starr Truscott to H.J.E. Reid, 17 Aug. 1936, with Reid's endorsement of 17 Nov. 1936 and Lewis's note of 19 Feb. 1937, in 57 A 415 (11), 13 6 general, 1936; Carl J. Wenzinger to Reid, 3 Sept. 1937, ibid., 1937. For evidence of congressional interest in this subject, see Victory to Congressman Robert Crosser, 17 Feb. 1934, in NA RG 255, file 1-1, box 10.

13. Ames to Victory, 5 Nov. 1931.

14. With this group in mind Edward Warner complained to Senator Royal S. Copeland on 12 Mar. 1936 of

the extraordinary prevalence of professional witnesses upon aviation matters who haunt the corridors of Washington, and who will leap at a moment's notice into any empty witness chair to provide spectacular headline material. I know that no congressional committee escapes acquaintance with some gentlemen of that order, but aviation certainly seems to have more than its share. Some of them have done nothing of importance for a number of years; some of them never did anything of importance; but they all have a story of outrageous mistreatment, and of fantastic ineptitude and iniquity on the part of the Government's aviation authorities, down pat and ready to be recited at the drop of a hat. I hope that when you receive from the witness chair long recitals of how America is ten years behind the rest of the world in aviation; of how American aviation is the victim of an elaborate conspiracy on the part of reactionaries whose personal fear of the air makes them eager that the art of flying should be stifled; of how the American aircraft industry is manned by eighty percent knaves and twenty percent fools; and of how revolutionary developments of world shaking importance have been melodramatically stifled, to the accompaniment of murder, mayhem, and subornation of perjury, by a 'trust' of vast size and incomparable malignancy; I hope that when you hear all this you will, before allowing yourselves to become too much alarmed, call for specific facts, and then have the fads checked with great care, and not let the checking remain exclusively in the hands of authorities proposed to you by the author of the initial presentation. The have been almost thirty separate investigations of American aviation since the World War. Unless yours is unique, you will hear some strange stories. They will be absolute monochrome, a painting in unrelieved blacks they will be spectacular, and they win no doubt excite the press, as spectacular condemnations always do....We as a people seem to be peculiarly susceptible to the manner of the muck-raker. We seem to be peculiarly ready to believe the very worst of the achievements of our fellow citizens, and to watch with friendly appreciation the casting of a shadow of infamy even upon undertakings which ought to be valued as a glory to the flag under which they were accomplished.

15. A Brief Historical Review Outlining the Origin and Operations of Manufacturers Aircraft Association, Inc. Following its Organization at the Instigation of the Government in July, 1917, dated 24 Sept. 1935, records the continuing controversy over the cross licensing agreement. In his Oct. 1962 interview with Alfred Hurley, Victory said, "Every time we went up to Capitol Hill for anything we were always on the defensive because of the barrage of questions from people who ought to know better and ought not to listen to all d e complaints about setting up a patent trust" (p. 3-14).

16. Frank A. Tichenor, "Why the N.A.C.A.?" Aero Digest (Dec. 1930), pp. 47 ff. This article appeared in Tichenor's regular monthly column entitled "Air Hot and Otherwise."

17. On 12 Dec. 1930, Lewis wrote to William H. Miller: "I have every reason to believe that the article was prepared wholly by Dr. Max Munk and was published by Mr. Tichenor. From our records, Mr. Tichenor has never visited the Committee's laboratories at Langley Field, although he has been invited to attend all of our aircraft manufacturers' conference [sic], so that I know he is not personally well acquainted with our activities." This letter is in 57 A 415 (14), 13-9, which contains other evidence of Munk's having written the article.

On the rejection of Munk's article entitled "Obstacles on the Lift of Airports" (which was judged interesting but wrong), see 57 A 415 (73), 53 2, 1929 . The quotations are from Munk's letters to Gibbs and Cox, Inc., 11 Apr. 1930, and to Sen. Hiram Bingham, 7 Apr. 1930. In the former Munk also claimed to be the "originator of most of [Ludwig] Prandtl's theory."

18. Ames wrote to V.E. Clark on 7 July 1931:

I cannot sanction the assumption by the Committee of a defensive attitude with a magazine publisher. So far as I am concerned the Committee's work must continue to speak for itself in the collective mind of the aircraft industry and others competent to judge. If any element of the industry seeks to cripple or destroy an agency useful to the industry as a whole, that, as I see it, is an affair for the industry to handle as effectively as may be necessary or itself suffer the consequences of its impotency or neglect. (55 A 312 (5), 11-10, Clark, V.E.) Miller's comments appeared in a 19 Dec. 1930 memorandum for the engineer-in-charge forwarded to headquarters as an enclosure to H.J.E. Reid's memorandum for Lewis entitled "Comments on the Article in the December, 1930 Issue of Aero Digest, Entitled 'Why the N.A.C.A." dated 2 Jan. 1931.

19. Aviation, 30 Jan. 1931): 3-4.

20. Frank A. Tichenor, "The NACA Counters," Aero Digest, Feb. 1931, pp. 50 ff.

21. On boundary-layer control, see appendix F. See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2d ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

22. Warner wrote to Lewis on 5 Jan. 1931:

One thing you never need to worry about in any year is the worth-whileness of the work that you are guiding. I have never overheard so much comment on anything that appeared in Aero Digest as on Frank Tichenor's attack on the Committee, and the comment has been about ninety-eight per cent unfavorable-and I have already begun receiving congratulations, other than your own, on my mild retort. (57 A 415 (14) 13-9)

23. "Page Mr. Byrns", Aero Digest, Feb. 1932, and Frank A. Tichenor, "Take Politics Out of Research," Aero Digest, Mar. 1932, pp. 33 ff.

24. Transcript of interview with Alfred H. Hurley ct. 5, pp. 3-14; the Mapes bill was H.R. 9742, 72/1, 25 Feb. 1932; Joseph W. Byrnes to Ames 27 Feb. 1932, reprinted in minutes of the Executive Committee meeting, 2 Mar. 1932; Victory to Porter Adams, 26 Apr. 1932, in 60 A 635 (11), 1-36, Adams, Porter. Victory's comment wins my award for the longest sustained metaphor in a single sentence by a dramatic actor in a supporting role

25. Minutes of NACA meeting, 21 Apr. 1932; Senator Williams H. King (D, Utah) in Congressional Record, 72/1, Vol. 75, Pt. 13, 1932, pp. 13961-62.

26. Congressional Record, 72/1, Vol. 75, Pt. 13, 1932, pp. 14024-27. Ames, who was in Paris at the time, received summaries of these events from Victory (28 June 1932) and Lewis (2 July 1932).

27. Executive Order 5960, "Consolidation and Coordination of Governmental Activities Affecting United States Commerce," 9 Dec. 1932; Clifford L. Lord, ed., Joseph E. Vaughan and Charles E. Baker, assoc. eds., Presidential Executive Orders, Numbered 1-8030, 1862 -1938 (2 vols.; New York: Books, Inc., 1944) vol. 1, p. 494; Hoover quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (Vintage Books; New York: Random House, 1948), p. 291; Victory to Ames, 10 Dec. 1932. Ames wrote to Albert C. Ritchie on 8 Dec. 1932:

I can assure you that the situation so far as the independent existence of the Committee is concerned is serious. It is very difficult to ascertain what the real reasons are animating those who wish either to d away with the Committee or merge its activities with other Government agency. No one can question, however, that we have our enemies, and it is essential that those who are in real authority should be led to appreciate the work that the Committee is doing, and that can only be done with the present organization (57 A 415 (36), 25-9, 1930-1934) See also Lewis to C.N. Monteith, 30 Dec. 1932, in 57 A 415 (14), 13-9.

28. Minutes of the special meeting of the Executive Committee, 15 Dec. 1932, to which is attached a copy of the Special Committee report.

29. New York Times, 20 Jan. 1933, and the United States Daily, 20 Jan. 1933; minutes of the NACA meeting, 20 Apr. 1933.

30. C.N. Monteith to Lewis, 27 Dec. 1930; Lewis to Monteith, 7 Jan. 1931 and 3 Feb. 1931; Monteith to Lewis, 4 Feb. 1931; all in 57 A 415 (14), 13-9.

31. The card file is now in the NASA History Office. I have found no file of criticisms.

32. See, for example, the complimentary letters in 57 A 415 (14), 13-9A. Most are from industry in the years 1919-1943.

33. For an example of how the quotations were used, see "Some Comments on the Work of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics," and the enclosure to Ames' letter of 24 Feb. 1932 to Congressman F.H. LaGuardia. Compare these in the letters in 57 A 415 (74), 54-13B, most of which were solicited by the NACA at the time of the 1932 Hoover Executive Order transferring the Committee to the Department of Commerce.

34. In the debate on the 1933 NACA budget, for example, one senator asked if the army and navy were not doing "the same sort of technical research work" as the NACA. The Committee's defender had no ready answer, but by the time the issue arose again on the floor of the Senate, the Committee's friends were armed with a whole string of endorsements, including a statement by the navy that "we have no aeronautical research" and a statement by the army that its aeronautical research was "devoted primarily to engineering experimentation." The critics then fell silent on the issue of duplication. Congressional Record, 72/1, Vol. 75, Pt. 13, 1932, pp. 14025.

Congressmen were not the only ones confused by the question of which government agencies did which research. Ames explained the distinctions to the chief of the Bureau of Efficiency in 1932:

Aeronautics is a young, rapidly growing, engineering science and, as in other engineering sciences, progress is dependent upon the continuous prosecution of well-organized scientific research on the fundamental problems. The conduct of such research is the major function of this Committee. The Army and Navy air organizations do not conduct fundamental research, but refer their fundamental problems to the Committee. The Bureau of Standards and the Forest Products Laboratory have no function to initiate aeronautic research, but some aeronautical problems for the investigation of which their facilities are well adapted, are assigned to them by the Committee, by the Navy, and by the Department of Commerce, and are financed by transfers to funds. So far as aeronautic research is concerned, the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce is limited by the Air Commerce Act of 1926: to advising with and assisting other agencies in carrying forward research connected with the development of radio communication facilities, airway and airport lighting, and other air navigation facilities, which work is done largely at the Bureau of Standards. Aside from this special authority, the Aeronautics Branch has no function to initiate aeronautic research. The net result is that there is, in fact, no duplication in this field. (Ames to Herbert D. Brown, 23 Apr. 1932, in 57 A 415 (17) 19-5, 1933)

35. Lewis asked the Langley staff to prepare the analysis of economic value in a memorandum of 22 Nov. 1932 on "Preparation of material for Committee's hearings before the House Appropriations Committee for fiscal year 1934"; the Langley paper was dated Jan. 1933; Victory's aphorism appears in a typescript entitled "DEFINITIONS Collected by John F. Victory through the years," 11 Dec. 1950; Ames's comments appear in a letter to Sen. Hiram Bingham, 11 Feb. 1933, in 57 A 415 (36), 25-9, 1931-1934.

The NACA also gathered information during the early years of the Depression to prove that foreign countries were investing huge sums in aeronautical research while the United States devoted comparatively little. It appears, however, that the figures did not support the conclusion and the NACA dropped this line of inquiry. See 57 A 415 (17), 19-5B, FY 1934, "U.S. & Foreign Aviation Costs."

36. Lewis's remark was quoted by Charles H. Helms in a brief' description of NACA military relations dated 3 Aug. 1948.

37. On the criticism faced by the aircraft industry in the mid 1930s, see Nick A. Komons, Bonfires to Beacons: Federal Civil Aviation Policy under the Air Commerce Act, 1926 -1938 (Washington: Federal Aviation Administration, 1978).

38. Victory to Fred M. Vinson, 18 Mar. 1931, in 57 A 415 (36), 25-9, 1930-1934.

39. Victory to Vannevar Bush, 28 June 1939, in NA RG 255, series 13, box 1, 22-1, site for Ames 1939.

40. See appendix C.

41. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (2 vols.; Washington: Bureau of the Census, 1975), 1: 1105.

42. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A His of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 346-47.

43. For the Committee's justification of a full speed wind tunnel, see Ames to Harold L. Ickes, 12 Dec. 1933. On the storm damage from the 1933 hurricane, see 64 A 125 (18), storm damage ($47 944)-1933.

44. Congressional Record, 74/1, Vol. 79, Pt. 1, 1935, pp. 385-86.

45. Victory to William F. Durand, 6 June 1934, in NA RG 255, series 3, box 7, Durand, 1920-1939; Lewis, "Recommendations of Federal Aviation Commission relating to work of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics,' memo for record, 18 Mar. 1935; report of Special Committee on Research Policy, 18 Mar. 1935. The committee consisted of Maj. Gen. Benjamin D. Foulois, chief, Air Corps, chairman; R. A m. Ernest J. King, chief, Bureau of Aeronautics; Eugene L. Vidal, director, Bureau of Air Commerce; and Lewis. For evidence of the NACA's conviction that it had to make up for lost time by 1935, see Lewis to J.L. Keddy, BoB, 26 Mar. 1935.

 

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