Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The shock of the fall of France in June 1940 marked a turning point in the relations between universities and government in the United States. At that time, the chief contacts between the two were the National Academy of Sciences, founded in 1863, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), founded in 1915. The former was a nongovernmental body electing its own members from American scientists and bound to advise the government, upon request, in scientific or technical matters. A dependent body, the National Research Council, had members from the government at large and representatives of over a hundred scientific societies to act as liaison between the academy and the scientific community. The NACA was a government agency which performed a similar function in aeronautics and did extensive research in its field with government funds. In 1938 Vannevar Bush, professor of electrical engineering and vice-president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an outstanding figure in applied mathematics and electronics, best known as the inventor of the differential analyzer (for mechanical solution of differential equations in calculus), became a member of NACA. The following year he became president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and chairman of NACA.

As France fell, Bush persuaded President Roosevelt to create a National Defense Research Committee with Bush as chairman. The twelve members served without pay, and consisted of two each from the army, the navy, and the National Academy of Sciences, with six others. Bush named Frank B. Jewett, president of Bell Telephone Laboratories and the NAS; Karl T. Compton, president of MIT; James B. Conant, president of Harvard; Richard C. Tolman, of California Institute of Technology; and others. They set up headquarters at the Carnegie Institution and Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard Byzantine research center in Washington.

The NDRC in its first year gave over two hundred contracts to various universities, and thus established the pattern of relations between government and the universities which still exists. In that first year it spent only S6.5 million, but in the six years 1940-1946 it spent almost $454 million. During that whole period, there was only one shift in the civilian personnel of the NDRC. In May 1941 a higher and wider organization was created, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), with Bush as chairman and Conant as his deputy. Conant took Bush’s place as chairman of NDRC, and Roger Adams, professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois, was added to NDRC. These groups were the supreme influence in America in introducing rationalization and science into government and war in 1940-1946, fostering hundreds of new technical developments and inventions, including the atom bomb. One of their earliest acts was to make a census of research facilities and a National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel (with 690,000 names); they did not hesitate to call upon the services of both as needed. When money ran short, they found it from private sources, as in June 1941, when, simply by asking, they obtained half a million dollars from MIT and an equal sum from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to pay salaries when congressional appropriations ran short.

Somewhat similar organizations grew up in Britain, in the Soviet Union, and in the enemy countries, but none worked so successfully as that of the Americans, who, here, as elsewhere, showed a genius for improvised large-scale organization. On the whole, the British were more fertile in new ideas than the Americans (probably because they were less conventional in their thinking processes), but the Americans were superior in development and production. The Soviet Union, which was very lacking in new ideas, was fairly successful (considering its obvious handicaps, such as enemy invasion and industrial backwardness) in development. Its organization was somewhat like that in the United States but much more centralized, since its Academy of Sciences controlled government funds and allotted both tasks and funds to university and special research groups. Germany, which had a high degree of innovation (comparable to that in the United States) was paralyzed by myriad conflicting and overlapping authorities in control of development and production and by the fact that the whole chaotic mess was under the tyranny of vacillating autocrats, Japan, almost lacking in innovation, achieved a surprising degree of production under a system of conflicting autocratic authorities almost as bad as that of Germany.

Rationalization of behavior, as represented in Operations Research, and the application of science to new weapons, as practiced by the English-speaking countries, were in sharp contrast with the methods of waging war used by the Tripartite aggressors. Hitler fought the war by basing his hopes on inspiration (his own) and willpower (usually, refusal to retreat an inch); Mussolini tried to fight his war on rhetoric and slogans; the Japanese tried to gain victory by self-sacrifice and willingness to die. All three irrational methods were obsolete as compared with the Anglo-American method of rationalization and science.

First news of the success of Operations Research in Britain was brought to the United States by President Conant in 1940 and was formally introduced by Vannevar Bush, as chairman of the New Weapons Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 1942. By the end of the war, the technique had spread extensively through the American war effort, and, with the arrival of peace, became an established civilian profession. The best-known example of this is the Rand Corporation, a private research and development firm, under contract to the United States Air Force, but numerous lesser organizations and enterprises are now concerned with rationalization techniques in political life, the study of war and strategy, in economic analysis, and elsewhere. Similar groups arose in Britain. One of the most complex applications of the technique has been Operation Bootstrap, by which the Puerto Rican Industrial Development Corporation, advised by Arthur D. Little, Inc., has sought to transform the Puerto Rican economy. Persons interested in OP have organized societies in England (1948) and the United States (1949) which publish a quarterly and a journal.

A great impetus has been given to the rationalization of society in the postwar world by the application of mathematical methods to society to an unprecedented degree. Much of this used the tremendous advances in mathematics of the nineteenth century, but a good deal came from new developments. Among these have been applications of game theory, information theory, symbolic logic, cybernetics, and electronic computing. The newest of these was probably game theory, worked out by a Hungarian refugee mathematician, John von Neumann, at the Institute for Advanced Study. This applied mathematical techniques to situations in which persons sought conflicting goals in a nexus of relationships governed by rules. Closely related to this were new mathematical methods for dealing with decision-making. The basic work in the new field was the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (Princeton, 1944).

Similar impetus to this whole development was provided by two other fields of mathematics in which the significant books in America were C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois, 1949), and Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1949). A flood of books have amplified and modified these basic works, all seeking to apply mathematical methods to information, communications, and control systems. Closely related to this have been increased use of symbolic logic (as in Willard von Orman Quine, Mathematical Logic, Harvard, 1951), and the application of all these to electronic computers, involving large-scale storage of information with speedy retrieval of it and fantastically rapid operations of complex calculations. These, and related techniques, are now transforming methods of operation and behavior in all aspects of life and bringing on a large-scale rationalization of human life which is becoming one of the most significant characteristics of Western Civilization in the twentieth century.