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.

THE CRITICS ATTACK

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 BillyMitchell-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

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

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 moneyspending 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

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

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