Politics and Society in Modern America

Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley

Margaret O'Mara

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400866885
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

What is the magic formula for turning a place into a high-tech capital? How can a city or region become a high-tech powerhouse like Silicon Valley? For over half a century, through boom times and bust, business leaders and politicians have tried to become "the next Silicon Valley, " but few have succeeded. This book examines why high-tech development became so economically important late in the twentieth century, and why its magic formula of people, jobs, capital, and institutions has been so difficult to replicate. Margaret O'Mara shows that high-tech regions are not simply accidental market creations but "cities of knowledge"--planned communities of scientific production that were shaped and subsidized by the original venture capitalist, the Cold War defense complex.
At the heart of the story is the American research university, an institution enriched by Cold War spending and actively engaged in economic development. The story of the city of knowledge broadens our understanding of postwar urban history and of the relationship between civil society and the state in late twentieth-century America. It leads us to further redefine the American suburb as being much more than formless "sprawl, " and shows how it is in fact the ultimate post-industrial city. Understanding this history and geography is essential to planning for the future of the high-tech economy, and this book is must reading for anyone interested in building the next Silicon Valley.

Part One

INTENT

1

Cold War Politics

BUILDING a city involves money, power, and the right location. In the case of the city of knowledge, these required elements flowed from an American Cold War scientific research and development (R&D) effort that created giant new streams of federal financing for academic and industrial science. While the United States had long valued science and technology for its important role in industrial production and contributions to intellectual life, the Cold War made science more important than ever before. It enlarged and refocused the definition of “science” to encompass activities that were now in the interest of national security as well as economic well-being: academic disciplines ranging from physics to chemistry to mathematics and engineering; a wide spectrum of industries that developed advanced consumer products like transistors, military hardware like warplanes, and specialized equipment like semiconductors and computers. The military buildup, the new emphasis on educational excellence, and the desire for significant economic growth all worked to privilege—to an unprecedented degree—American scientists and the institutions and industries in which they worked.

The city of knowledge came to be because of the new opportunities that the Cold War presented to research universities and the professional scientists who worked in and around them. And the city of knowledge came to be located where it was because of the way Cold War strategic concerns intersected with economic ones, the way in which power and money was distributed institutionally and geographically, and because of the larger social and economic context in which the Cold War defense complex grew. Cold War politics did not occur in a vacuum. As scientific professionals and institutions became highly valued and celebrated members of American culture, the shape of the nation’s urban landscape underwent radical change. Suburban areas benefited at the expense of central cities, and the South and West grew as the Northeast and Midwest stagnated or declined. Within the context of these changes, policy choices made in the earliest years of the Cold War vested scientific institutions and industries with the power to transform regional economies, while creating dynamics of institutional and regional competition that made this transformation more likely to occur in some places than in others.

Frameworks, 1945–1950

The Politics of Science

During the Cold War, “R&D” was a blanket term that encompassed a huge array of governmental activities and whose definition shifted over time. It included scientific research activities taking place in university laboratories, government facilities, and corporate research branches. The vast majority of this work, particularly in the early Cold War years, was “applied” research conducted for the purposes of developing technology with specific, relatively short-term military or commercial uses. The remainder was “basic” research: scientific inquiry conducted for the sake of greater scientific understanding. The basic research projects supported by the federal R&D effort included medical and social-scientific research as well as projects in the physical sciences; while applied research often occurred in government and industrial laboratories, basic research usually took place in universities. Beyond these activities, and occupying a far greater share of the national budget in the Cold War years, was the actual procurement and manufacture of military equipment, a process that created a powerful constituency of defense contractors and transformed regional economies through the influx of billions of dollars of federal spending. Taken together, all these activities made up a state-funded economic juggernaut that President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously and ominously labeled the “military-industrial complex” as he left office in 1961.¹

Although basic research was, in fiscal terms, the smaller part of the Cold War R&D apparatus, the process by which this kind of research became a Cold War priority marked an important step in the engagement of universities and their administrators in postwar politics and public life. During the 1920s and 1930s, the strength and scope of the postwar alliances between academia, industry, and the state was hard to imagine. Universities (particularly private institutions) and the scientists who worked in them tended to be highly suspicious of federal government involvement in their affairs. In contrast to the federally sponsored entities that would dominate American research in the latter half of the twentieth century, prewar science’s most influential representative body, the National Research Council, was a private, nongovernmental entity made up of “the elite of university science, industrial research, and the foundation world.”² Too much “outside” involvement could taint the research process, some academics and administrators argued. The less a scholarly project was influenced by nonacademic interests, the higher the quality of the scholarship.³

This profession of fierce intellectual and fiscal independence belied the fact that universities and their scientists were, in fact, already beholden to outside private- and public-sector interests. The U.S. government had subsidized university research activities for as long as there had been research universities in America. Beginning with the Morrill Act of 1862, which established the land-grant college system of technical and agricultural educational institutions, the federal government had devoted considerable funds to foster the advancement of science, the development of new technology, and the education of scientific professionals.⁴ Many large state universities, whose laboratories were funded largely by public dollars, had impressive research reputations. Yet private universities tended to be less significantly dependent on public money, and instead relied upon the contributions of American corporations and corporate-founded philanthropies.⁵

The corporate patronage of prewar universities reflected the fact that, during these decades, private industry, not the government, was at the center of the action when it came to the research and development of new technology. While federal grants and subsidies formed a crucial, if often hidden, underpinning of the American university system, direct support of scientific research was anemic at best. In contrast, American industry had engaged in industrial research efforts since the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century housed some of the world’s most innovative research laboratories and industrial scientists.⁶ Not seeing a role for government support of their own institutions, administrators of some of the nation’s top private universities saw little irony in their protestations of academic independence and their fear of government control of academic research agendas, while welcoming corporate support.⁷

The Second World War changed everything. The outbreak of war created an urgent need for the rapid production of new military technology. Roosevelt Administration officials and the military leadership marshaled the forces of American research universities and their top scientists through a flurry of research grants and contracts. The administration coordinated wartime research efforts through a new agency, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Over the course of the war, the OSRD funded hundreds of military research projects, many of them secret. It became one of the most visible signs of the quiet revolution in the relationship between the members of the scientific community and the federal government.⁸ Now, with huge wartime research projects under way, America’s top scientists went to work for the government and, in some cases, found themselves thrust into a highly politicized public spotlight.

The men of science who gained the most celebrity (or notoriety) as a result of the war were the atomic-bomb builders of the Manhattan Project. Scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer—the quintessentially detached academic who was so absorbed in his work that he had not bothered to vote until 1936—suddenly found themselves in the national limelight after the war-ending 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁹ The breathless prose that popular accounts often used to describe these men and their work built public awareness and support for the idea of federal financing of research, military and otherwise. Scientists “acquired something of the position in our society of the Mathematician-Astronomer-Priests of the ancient Mayas,” wrote journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, “who were at once feared and revered as the knowers of the mystery of the seasons, and the helpers of the sun and the stars in their life-giving courses.”¹⁰ Some of these scientists were reluctant celebrities. Most seemed to harbor deep uneasiness about the morality of using their scientific talents to create such murderous technology. But the lure of the military’s abundant resources for scientific research work was often more powerful than their moral qualms about performing it.¹¹ Military work not only gave scientists a lot of money, but it could allow plenty of creative latitude. As General Eisenhower wrote in a postwar memorandum on “Scientific and Technological Resources As Military Assets”: “Scientists and industrialists must be given the greatest possible freedom to carry out their research…. [They] are more likely to make new and unsuspected contributions to the development of the Army if detailed directions are held to a minimum.”¹²

The highly successful mobilization of university scientists during the war convinced President Truman and many in Congress that the federal government should stay in the business of scientific research in peacetime. Even when it was no longer necessary to manufacture thousands of airplanes and armaments, or quickly develop more advanced military technology to respond to the new weapons developed by the enemy, the United States had a vital interest in maintaining national technological strength. Germany and Japan had been vanquished, but now Soviet Russia posed a new and potentially greater threat. As U.S.-Soviet tensions heated up over the course of the late 1940s, government officials recognized that research was fundamental to preparedness. Even before the war had ended in the Pacific, the Truman White House and Democratic leaders in Congress were working on legislative efforts to establish a permanent government agency that could support peacetime scientific activity similar to the way OSRD had supported science in wartime. “No nation can maintain a position of leadership in the world of today unless it develops to the full its scientific and technological resources,” argued President Truman as he addressed Congress exactly one month after the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “No government adequately meets its responsibilities unless it generously and intelligently supports and encourages the work of science in university industry, and its own laboratories.”¹³

Scientists themselves stood at the center of this effort, drafting policy, testifying before Congress, and using publications to build public support for government science.¹⁴ The universities from which many of them came also lent their institutional support to the effort. University administrators now recognized that expanded government spending was not only in the government’s interest, but also in the economic and academic interest of universities. Institutions’ experiences in housing research projects during the war helped build this kind of political support, but universities had more pragmatic reasons as well. More than a decade of Depression and war had meant declining enrollments, reduced levels of support from a struggling private sector, and cost-intensive wartime mobilization activities; after this, even the most well-endowed universities needed more money. The situation became more dire after passage of the 1944 GI Bill that gave returning servicemen money for college and created a huge new student population that required new housing, new classrooms, and new services. Universities were getting much bigger, and they needed money that only the federal government seemed to be able, and willing, to provide.¹⁵

One of the most important figures in this process was Vannevar Bush, a physicist, former vice president of MIT, and head of the Carnegie Institute who already had a long and impressive record of government service. Bush had chaired the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), the only significant research-oriented federal entity of the interwar period, and during the war he headed the OSRD. Through this work, he became a full-fledged scientific celebrity, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1944 as the “General of Physics.”¹⁶ In early 1945, Truman asked Bush to draft a report outlining a political rationale for a permanent science agency and proposing its structure and function. Published in July of that year, Science, The Endless Frontier articulated a sweeping vision for government-funded academic science. The report forcefully argued that scientific innovation would be essential to political and economic success in the postwar world, and recommended that the federal government establish a National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund scientific education and basic research in universities. Bush’s choice of the term “foundation”—rather than the more familiar “agency”—revealed his strong feeling that the new entity not be just another government bureaucracy, but an independent body run by professional scientists rather than federal bureaucrats, whose mission centered on the promotion of basic research.

Picking up on a metaphor used two decades earlier by former president Herbert Hoover, whose corporatist views he shared, Bush employed the powerful and evocative idiom of the “frontier” of science.¹⁷ “The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation,” Bush wrote. “Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for his task. The rewards of such exploration both for the Nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.”¹⁸ The report argued that the foundation should not only support research that could have military applications, but that it also fund medical research and university education in the sciences. Another hallmark of Bush’s thought—and a strong undercurrent in the report—was an attitude best characterized as meritocratic elitism. Bush was hardly alone in his ideas about the existence of a ruling class based on talent, not birth, but he particularly emphasized the scientist as the epitome of this elite type. As a Bush biographer has noted, “he ranked the engineer as first among equals, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Discovering the City of Knowledge
• Part One: Intent
• Part Two: Implementation
• Part: Three Legacy
• Notes
• Index