But by this time the critics were growing less vocal and less numerous, and things were looking up for the NACA. As early as mid-1934, Victory could report, with obvious relief, that "for the immediate present we are not confronted with any threat of abolition." The budget was on the rise again. New construction was under way, and the personnel cuts of the early Depression years were being restored. The Federal Aviation Commission, as part of a general study of American aviation following the scandals in 1934, recommended that the NACA step up its program, an idea echoed by the NACA's own Special Committee on Research Policy. Reporting in March 1935, the special committee recommended supplemental appropriations of $338,050 to make up for the work deferred during the lean years of the early 1930s. Both the Bureau of the Budget and Congress approved this sum. For the NACA, at least, the Depression was over by the middle of 1935.45

It was not without cost, however, that the NACA survived the Depression. The costs were of two sorts. The first, and ultimately more important, was not immediately apparent. The Committee had lost objectivity, impartiality, self-confidence, and equanimity. It became further removed from the business of aeronautics, closer to the business of survival that Hoover said was the main interest of all Washington bureaucracies. If the Langley staff kept an eye on the ball, it was in spite of continual distractions from Washington. One day they would be escorting congressmen and other VIPs around the lab and attending to their needs at the camp. The next day they would be estimating the cost per hour of running a wind tunnel so that the Washington office could present yet a new set of efficiency statistics. The day after that they would be refuting arguments of Max Munk and Frank Tichenor. The annual budget cycle of preparing estimates and composing justifications that laymen could understand was quickly turning into a yearround enterprise.

The NACA's organic legislation was cast in vague terms that did not-at least in the minds of many congressmen-fully justify the existence of the Committee or explain how it differed from other aeronautical research facilities or why it had to remain independent; thus, the NACA was under constant pressure to justify its existence. Compounding this disadvantage, only the haziest of boundaries divided the various categories of aeronautical research: the fundamental research that the Committee claimed to be doing; the scientific study of the problems of flight, which was in its charter; the theoretical research conducted at universities; the engineering research conducted by the military services; and the design and development done by manufacturers. The NACA, weak and vulnerable in its early years, was forced to choose a territory that infringed on no one else's; the ground it called its own was really a no-man's-land carved out of dead space between

larger and more powerful institutions. No wonder, then, that the Committee was hard pressed to answer Tichenor when he pointed out the basic contradiction between what the Committee said it was doing and what it was doing in fact. Although the NACA fought off that attack in the Depression years, it never really resolved the contradiction, and this did not enhance the staff's ability to perceive reality and understand just what the NACA's place was in the order of things. Because the criticisms of Munk and Tichenor were closer to the mark than the NACA cared or dared to admit, the Committee embraced a shrill and rigid denial. Repeated often enough, this denial took on the aura of truth to the very people who should have recognized it—at least in their own circle-as an expedient for public consumption.

The leaders of the NACA thus sowed in the Depression the seeds of a self-deception that would bear a bitter harvest in later years. More immediately, the Committee faced another loss incurred in the hard years of the early 1930s. Though the NACA had recovered from the Depression by 1935, earlier than most other agencies and institutions in the United States, it had lost valuable time in the international race for aeronautical supremacy. The years of budget reductions and the years during which Congress appropriated no funds for construction had taken their toll. The NACA still claimed in mid-1935 to be the leading aeronautical research laboratory in the world, but that claim would soon be challenged.

7

Girding for War, 1936-1941

The NACA was the first to realize that it no longer led the world in aeronautical research. Not for nothing had it labored in the 1920s and 1930s to become a clearinghouse of aeronautical information. The problem was not the awareness of danger, but the national will to act upon it. For two years after learning of the frantic pace of aeronautical research in Europe, especially in Germany, the NACA was unable to convince the Congress or the Bureau of the Budget that a crisis was in the making, a crisis requiring a crash program in aeronautical research. Instead, these years were dominated by the same constraints of domestic politics that had robbed the NACA of its world preeminence over the course of the 1930s.1

DOMESTIC DISTRACTIONS

Throughout 1936, news of what was happening in Europe reached NACA headquarters with ever clearer portent. In March, the Executive Committee heard a report from John J. Ide, describing greatly expanded aeronautical research in England, France, Italy, and Germany. In May, Charles Lindbergh—a member but infrequent attender of NACA meetings-reported from his home in England on the aviation developments there and their possible effect on the United States. In August, George Lewis accepted an invitation to cross the Atlantic on the airship Hindenburg as guest of the Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei. Ames approved this trip explicitly so that Lewis could become better informed on aeronautical research in Germany and Russia. When Lewis reported back in the fall, he brought grave if not dire news.2

In the company of Dr. Adolf Baeumker, head of government aeronautical research in Germany, he had toured the vast facilities initiated or expanded under Hitler and had come to appreciate the unparalleled German commitment to aeronautical supremacy. Baeumker worked directly for General Goering, whom he described as "intensely interested in research and development." Goering in turn reflected the policies of

On 17 December 1936, the NACA Executive Committee met at the home of Orville Wright, after which it posed out front with the host in the front row, center. NACA's technical assistant in Europe, John J. Ide, an infrequent attender of NACA meetings, is in the center of the back row between John Victory and George Lewis. (National Archives)

"Chancellor Hitler," who reportedly had removed aeronautics from the Ministry of Transportation and made available for its development practically unlimited funds. "The cost is not considered," reported Lewis, describing the unprecedented facilities then in place or under construction. Much of the research equipment had been modeled on the NACA's; when Baeumker first visited Goering, he had taken with him as a conversation piece a photograph of the NACA full-scale wind tunnel, and Goering decided on the spot to build one for Germany. Since then, reported Lewis, the growth of aeronautical research facilities had been explosive. The old facilities at Aldershof and Göttingen had been greatly expanded-the former, said Lewis, "looks like a construction camp"-and two entirely new laboratories were being built. Yet it was not the facilities that concerned him most, for in 1936 he

still believed "that the equipment at Langley Field is equal to or better than the equipment in the German research laboratories." "But," he continued, "the personnel of the German research laboratories is [sic] larger in number, and the engineers have had an opportunity of having special training, which has not been afforded to many of our own engineers." Here, of course, he referred to the NACA practice of taking young engineering graduates right out of college and training them on the job. The quality of America's aeronautical engineers, at least in comparison with Europeans, had bothered Joseph Ames as far back as 1925, and apparently neither the Guggenheim Fund nor the growth of aeronautical-engineering education in the intervening years had closed the gap. Lewis estimated that Aldershof alone employed 1600 to 2000 persons compared with the 350 then at Langley. If the engineers among these were better trained than their American counterparts, then the prospects were grim indeed. 3

Faced with this crisis, the NACA did what it had done in the pastit created a committee. In fact, it created two committees. The Special Committee on Aeronautical Research Facilities was formed in March 1936 in response to the warnings from Ide. It quickly recommended a deficiency appropriation for 1936 and an increased budget request for 1938. Government expenditures for research were just then turning sharply upward in response to the later New Deal and the sabrerattling in Europe, so the NACA requests carried. The Special Committee on Relation of NACA to National Defense in Time of War, formed in October after Lewis's report on his trip to Germany, acted less quickly, unable or unwilling to formulate any recommendations until the summer of 1938. In spite of the worsening situation in Europe and the growing concern of the NACA, domestic politics continued through 1937 and most of 1938 to retard the expansion of aeronautical research that was deemed necessary to keep the United States in pace.

The most damaging and troublesome event of these years, from the NACA perspective, was the 1937 report by the Brookings Institution on government activities in the field of transportation. Commissioned by the Senate to suggest possible economies through elimination of duplicating or overlapping agencies, the Brookings report recommended abolition of the NACA and transfer of its research functions to a proposed department of transportation. As with many critics before and after, the Brookings staff found no great fault with the way the NACA executed its responsibilities. Rather, it criticized the NACA as an irrational anomaly, an independent establishment of unique composition running counter to the conventional wisdom about government structure and chains of command. At Brookings, as later at the Bureau of the Budget, the critics of the NACA preferred a traditional