tee. Our duties and work are very sharply defined, and we want to keep within our own fences." At best, that answer was evasive and misleading. Ames might have meant that the matter had never come up for a formal vote before the full committee; but, as early as 1921, “Dr. Stratton stated that the committee had given a great deal of consideration to this question" 47 which was never far removed from the Committee's numerous consultations and recommendations over the ensuing four or five years. Ames's statement demonstrated that the NACA had retreated from the battlefield and wished to be excused from further debate. Hereafter the NACA would keep within its own fences, in the narrow area of fundamental research, and leave to other bodies the broader field of aviation policy. This was a concession of the first water, just the sort of compromise that helped pave the way for passage of civil-aviation legislation.

The Morrow board completed its work quickly and efficiently, contributing to a groundswell of support for civil-aviation legislation in the 69th Congress. It endorsed the niche in the federal hierarchy that the NACA had chosen for itself, and it recommended legislation similar to what the NACA had been supporting all along, prompting Victory to describe the report as a "beacon light of good sense in the aeronautical haze." 48 Events of the latter half of 1925 had stirred public interest in the issue, creating in turn some real interest in Congress. Congress as a body had never been opposed to the legislation; it simply had been unable to decide among the positions of the numerous and shifting interest groups lobbying for one proposal or another. Now all the interest groups were exhausted by the fight, and many like the NACA were willing to accept flawed or incomplete legislation rather than go on fighting to no good end. The solution was one familiar to Congress: make the bill simple, noncontroversial, and vague if necessary. Amendment was always possible, after some experience had been gained. But for now-pass something.49

S. 41, introduced on 8 December 1925, provided for a Bureau of Aeronautics within the Department of Commerce through which the secretary of commerce would establish rules and regulations for the control and encouragement of civil aviation in the United States. There would be no separate air service, no direct subsidy to industry. The NACA would neither be the central advisory and coordinating body it formerly had tried to become, nor would it be transferred to the Department of Commerce; rather, it would remain an independent aeronautical research organization.

All things considered, the Committee had every reason to be pleased with S. 41, and still more pleased when five months later it became the Air Commerce Act of 1926. In the same year, apparently swayed by the same enthusiasm, the Congress passed the Army Air

Corps Act providing for a 5-year expansion program and for appointment of an assistant secretary of war for air, and a similar act for naval aviation. Combined with the Kelly Air Mail Act of the previous year, these laws meant that the federal government would now give precisely the support to aviation in the United States that the NACA had set out to obtain in 1918.50 Along the way the NACA had ceased to be an advisory committee and had become instead a research agency, chastened by its encounters with Washington politics and resolved to be more circumspect in the future.

4

Tunnel Vision, 1919-1925

Even as the NACA was backing away from the advisory function implied by its name, it was gravitating toward the role its founders had had in mind all along: aeronautical research at a national laboratory. As early as 1915, suggestions appeared before the Committee on how it should formulate and execute a research policy, but the exigencies of war had prevented much progress in that direction. Only with the armistice did the NACA take up the subject in earnest, addressing itself first to the structure of a research program and then to its content.

GEORGE LEWIS: THE ORGANIZATION

The NACA emerged from World War I in poor shape. The criticisms by Joseph Ames, John Victory, and Leigh Griffith quoted at the end of chapter 2 had surfaced before the end of the war, echoing similar objections from less sympathetic observers outside the Committee and noting a lack of purpose or direction in the NACA's course to date. Ames spoke for them all when he lamented the “lack of . . . an established program . . . [and a] vision as to what the future should offer us." Victory voiced a common sentiment when he called for a clear statement of the "methods and program of work" the NACA meant to pursue.

The Main Committee took scant notice of this chorus of concern until postwar budget reductions began to squeeze the NACA. In the spring of 1919 the Committee's budget request for $325,000 was cut almost in half, to $175,000, prompting Victory to recommend to the Executive Committee that the "research programs of the various subcommittees be coordinated and consolidated into one general program." This in turn led to an examination of the entire committee system within the NACA and a resolve to reorganize.3

In its first four years, the NACA had created no less than 32 subcommittees, of which 18 were still in existence at the close of the war. These ran the gamut from the sturdy and perennial Power Plants

for Aircraft to the short-lived Fireproof Coverings. The number and variety of these subcommittees reflected both the NACA's inability to define the major issues in aeronautics and the Committee's tendency to answer every problem by creating a new subcommittee. For example, when the chief signal officer of the army asked the NACA in 1916 about general specifications for aeronautical instruments, the Committee created a Subcommittee on Specifications for Aeronautic Instruments. The following year the title was changed to just Aeronautic Instruments. In 1918, this subcommittee was absorbed by a new Subcommittee on Navigation of Aircraft, Aeronautic Instruments and Accessories. But after two years and as many changes in title, the subcommittee had done nothing. Late in 1918 the chairman could report that he had just then obtained from the army the "necessary information to make up a program.

"4

In the spring of 1919, the NACA abolished all but two of the 18 World War I subcommittees and replaced them with only four new ones. These six were full technical committees, no longer called “subcommittees" as they had been at times in previous years. Three of them were to last the duration of the NACA and account for 88 percent of the reports published by the Committee. They were the old committee on Power Plants for Aircraft, and the new committees on Aerodynamics and on Aircraft Construction, the latter then called Materials for Aircraft. (Appendix B lists all the NACA committees and explains the titling convention used in this volume.) These three technical committees were to monitor NACA research.5

The other three committees formed in 1919 reflected the NACA's concern with the administrative structure that would make the research possible. The Committee on Governmental Relations formed in 1916 was continued, a clear indication of the NACA's intent to cooperate with other government agencies. The new Committee on Personnel, Buildings, and Equipment, concerned at first with outfitting the laboratory facility it had acquired in 1917 at Hampton, Virginia, concentrated on finding adequate staff and office space in Washington as the field installation grew more self-reliant. By far the most important of the nontechnical committees to emerge from World War I was the Committee on Publications and Intelligence. This committee supervised not only the production and distribution of all NACA reports but also the work of the Office of Aeronautical Intelligence, through which the Committee hoped to become the clearinghouse for aeronautical information. Partly, this office was intended to aid the research staff at the Virginia laboratory and to assist the Committee in Washington in making intelligent decisions about what research had been done and what needed doing. But it was also intended to make the NACA indispensable as a source of information.6