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Chambers's proposal died aborning, but its principal ideas survived. Tracing what had to be abandoned and what retained will disclose the forces most actively at work in the creation of the NACA, forces that imprinted themselves indelibly on the Committee's history and thereby changed its course.

THE WOODWARD COMMISSION DEBACLE

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At the end of his 1912 "Report on Aviation," Chambers recommended that a commission be appointed to report to the president "on the necessity or desirability for the establishment of a national aerodynamical laboratory." Before President Taft acted on that recommendation, he suffered a humiliating defeat in the bitterly contested election of 1912, finishing third, behind Woodrow Wilson and (more painful still) his former benefactor Theodore Roosevelt. Furthermore, the election delivered both houses of Congress to the Democrats and revealed that "the country was now overwhelmingly progressive in temper. The "sinister special interests" popularly viewed as exploiting the federal government through ties to sympathetic Republicans were to be displaced by a dynamic new government committed to a more Democratic ethic. Chambers and other members of the Aero Club of America had only the remaining four months of a lame-duck administration and Congress to achieve their goals before a new set of officials with a new political philosophy would take office. Working under this pressure, they were at once too hasty and too late.

On 16 December 1912, Secretary of the Navy Meyer recommended to Taft the appointment of the commission suggested by Chambers. Three days later (soon enough to suggest a prior agreement) Taft appointed a 19-man National Aerodynamical Laboratory Commission chaired by Robert S. Woodward, president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Chambers was one of the seven members representing government: two each from the army and navy, one each from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Bureau of Standards, and the Weather Bureau. Zahm was among the twelve members from private life: four from aeronautical clubs, four from academic posts, and four whose principal qualification seems to have been membership in the Republican party.

President Taft could appoint such a commission but, if he wanted public funds to defray its expenses, he needed congressional approval. In 1909, Congress had taken exception to President Roosevelt's use of executive orders to create such presidential satellites as the Uplift Commission of the People of the United States and the Council of Fine Arts, orders which appeared to circumvent Congress and to usurp legislative function. A rider to the 1910 Civil Sundry Act required

congressional sanction before public funds could be expended or government employees could serve on such bodies.20 To meet the requirements of this law, congressmen sympathetic to aviation and the purposes of the Woodward commission introduced legislation in both houses early in January 1913 to approve the commission and provide $5000 to meet its expenses. The Senate bill passed the day after the House Committee on Naval Affairs reported favorably on the House version. Final passage appeared imminent. The commission held its first meeting five days later.21

Agreement was so complete among the members of the commission that the body went about its work with remarkable dispatch. At the first meeting 23 January, a proposal for "the establishment of a national aeronautical laboratory in the District of Columbia for the scientific study of the problems of aeronautics with a view to their practical solution" led quickly to the appointment of a subcommittee to draft legislation. The resulting proposal was forwarded the next day. In most respects it followed up the proposal for a laboratory contained in Chambers' 1912 "Report on Aviation." Apparently in imitation of the Woodward commission itself, the draft called for an advisory committee of 16 members, 6 government and 10 private. Only one feature of the bill was strikingly new: the laboratory was to be "an independent establishment of the government," not an appendage of the Smithsonian Institution or the National Bureau of Standards. 22

The following day, 25 January, the entire Woodward commission met, endorsed the proposal, and appointed one of its members (a former congressman) to draft legislation. The bill he circulated 29 January differed from the earlier version only in that it omitted the provision that the laboratory be independent. That single omission was critical: when a quorum of 10 commission members met 5 February to endorse the draft, seven of them came prepared to change it at the last minute to place the laboratory once more "under the direction of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution" as Chambers had wanted all along. Opponents cried foul. Naval Constructor David W. Taylor, director of the Bureau of Construction and Repair's model basin at the Washington navy yard, led the opposition. Taylor had been a principal in the navy's thwarting of Chambers's 1912 plan to have Taft establish an aeronautical laboratory in the Smithsonian, and he was not about to have the same proposition slipped past him with this bit of procedural trickery.23

The ensuing dispute between Chambers and Taylor was more than a mere bureaucratic squabble; they differed over the nature of aeronautical research. Chambers's constant model was Europe, especially the British Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. That body had described its purpose as the scientific study of the problems of flight, a phrase

Chambers adopted almost verbatim for his proposal.24 Such scientific research had been the work of Professor Langley, and its natural home seemed to be the Smithsonian, the one body in Washington (the National Academy of Sciences being currently moribund) most closely associated with science. In fact, Chambers's preference for the term “aerodynamical laboratory" reflected his concern for the aspect of aeronautics most closely associated with Langley and most nearly allied to the traditional sciences of physics and fluid mechanics. Had Langley, and science, not been so discredited by the success of the Wrights, Chambers might have been less intent on honoring them by his choice of words and institutions.

Taylor, on the other hand, viewed aeronautics as an engineering problem more properly the concern of the military services, surely out of the domain of the Smithsonian Institution. As he wrote to Professor William F. Durand, another member of the Woodward commission and a distinguished engineer at Stanford University:

This is a matter primarily and fundamentally of engineering research. It may, or may not, be of sufficient importance to warrant an independent establishment for the purpose of following this branch of engineering research. If it is of sufficient importance there should be an independent establishment. The Smithsonian so far as I am aware, has not to any extent entered the field of engineering research. There are at least three departments interested in this matter who are already in the field of engineering research and must necessarily remain therein and if this branch of engineering research is not of sufficient importance to warrant an independent establishment it should undoubtedly be under the direction of some department which is already engaged in this line rather than appropriate money to set up the Smithsonian in duplication of present governmental activities. 25

No one who would inflict such a paragraph on a friend should criticize others for duplication. Still, the point was of considerable importance. Before taking on the job of aeronautical research, the federal government needed to know just what it was and to which disciplines and functions it was allied. Richard Maclaurin, for example, sided with Taylor, but for somewhat different reasons. President of MIT, member of the Woodward commission as a representative of academia, and himself an engineer, Maclaurin felt that the laboratory should be located near an institution of higher education-presumably one like MIT. "The problems of aeronautics," said Maclaurin, “are engineering problems, and a national aeronautical laboratory should be developed under the stimulus of engineers," echoing a contention he had made earlier in the year in the Aero Club of America Bulletin. 26 While

admitting the Smithsonian to be "an admirable institution," he found it "not well adapted to exercise the particular functions that the Bill assigns to it."

At the 5 February meeting of the Woodward commission, the Smithsonian advocates won approval of the draft bill. Three of the ten members present-Taylor, General James Allen (author of the original language of an "independent establishment"), and Charles D. Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution-abstained. Walcott's abstention seems to have been mere decorum, for Taylor considered him to be behind the whole scheme, an empire builder for whom Chambers was a mere "catspaw." Others, though, were strongly opposed to the draft bill and intent on acting. Taylor insisted upon and was granted a final meeting at which all the members would be allowed to vote on the language of the report, and file minority reports if necessary. Another member of the commission-Dr. Samuel W. Stratton, director of the National Bureau of Standards and likewise an engineer, who would soon succeed Maclaurin as president of MIT-expressed himself the next day as "very indignant and intending to fight," reportedly because he wanted to see the proposed laboratory set up in his own National Bureau of Standards. Taylor considered Stratton's opposition alone enough to kill the proposal within the commission.27

Realizing that the proposed bill would fail in a vote before the full commission, the friends of the Smithsonian scheme tried two more ploys to have their plan approved. Chambers gave copies of the draft legislation to friendly members of Congress, who introduced it in both houses on 7 February.28 Five days later, Zahm circulated copies of the proposed legislation to members of the Woodward commission for their approval as part of a final report to the president. This version. retained the objectionable provision to establish the laboratory under the Smithsonian, but changed the membership of the proposed advisory committee to six government members and only seven private members.29 If the advocates of the Smithsonian scheme thought this alteration would make the rest of the bill palatable either to the majority of the Woodward commission or to Congress, they were soon disappointed. Their actions had served only to make the matter public and to air the "animus" that had developed within the commission.

Maclaurin filed a minority report. Taylor demanded another meeting of the commission. Charges and countercharges of empire-building and personal misconduct spread from the private correspondence of the commissioners into the newspapers. The participants saw in each other's behavior a petty struggling for place. Naval officers reportedly opposed the bill because it had the support of the Weather Bureau, which was trying to take the Hydrographic Office from them, and the Smithsonian Institution, which was trying to take the Naval Observa

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tory. 30 All this, of course, lent more heat than light, and in the wrangling the real issue was largely lost to view. The only exception was a brief notice in the Army and Navy Register, reporting that some officers suspected an attempt by the Smithsonian Institution to lay the groundwork for a cabinet-level department of science. Whether Walcott and the friends of the Smithsonian had so grand a plot afoot, or were simply trying to restore the prestige of Langley and the good name of science, the fundamental issue was: what were to be the respective roles of science and engineering in the federal hierarchy, and in which camp was aeronautics to be located? 31 Because the debate was never carried on in those terms, the issue was never resolved.

The idea of an aeronautical laboratory suffered even more grievously at the hands of Congress, which would not pass even a simple resolution to provide funds for the Woodward commission. When it was introduced on the floor of the House for unanimous consent, the powerful majority leader (James R. Mann of Illinois) objected on the grounds that the president had "violated the law" in appointing the commission in the first place, and that the legislative course of the authorizing resolution so far-i.e., through the friendly Committee on Naval Affairs-would give that committee "practically exclusive jurisdiction of the subject of air navigation in the House." Another con

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