ABSTRACT
US science rose from modest beginnings to become, by the midpoint of the twentieth century, a bulwark of national power. Its foundations were laid in the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the creation of the science-based university and the blossoming of scientific professionalism. The first decades of the new century found corporate America exploring the advantages of industrial R&D and a new breed of scientific expert moving into the political arena, expanding previous footholds in government and embracing the Progressive Era faith that life could be rationally managed. Scientist-entrepreneurs like George Ellery Hale and Robert Millikan exploited opportunities offered by the Great War to articulate expansive, ambitious visions and form a national cadre of scientific leaders based in new institutions like the National Research Council. During the decades following the Great War, this elite assembled a network of academic, industrial, and philanthropic leaders that brought American science up to global standards. Industrial R&D expanded beyond the largest corporations, while business and academia explored cooperative programs. Private philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution of Washington funded disciplinary programs, built scientific instruments, and sponsored exchanges between European and American schools that allowed young PhDs to master the best of European science. By 1933, the MIT physicist John Slater said of foreign visitors at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society that “European physicists were here to learn as much as to instruct.” 1
