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

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.

George Lewis, H.J.E. Reid, and John Victory stand behind eight members of the NACA at the ninth annual Aircraft Engineering Research Conference at the Langley laboratory, 23 May 1934. Committee members, left to right, are Charles A. Lindbergh, Arthur B. Cook, Charles G. Abbot, Joseph S. Ames, Orville Wright, Edward P. Warner, Ernest J. King, and Eugene L. Vidal. (LaRC)

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 they stayed over at the Oak Point Club for some fishing. They developed a unanimous sentiment for additional research facilities in aeronautics. 39

DECLINE AND RECOVERY

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

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 longterm 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

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 generalpurpose 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 crosslicensing agreement.