ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the history of science policy in the United States primarily as a chronicle of developing governmental attitudes toward research and development and of the agencies that grew up and embodied these attitudes. The United States was born in the eighteenth-century Age of Reason and science; thus its leaders' interest in scientific endeavor is not surprising. In the nineteenth century, English and French intellectuals viewed people like Benjamin Franklin and Paine as remarkable innovators and inventors rather than as theoretical scientists. The moral nature of the World War II experience greatly influenced the development of relations between science and government both during and after the war. In its mobilization of science beginning in 1940, the US government, specifically President Roosevelt, accepted a radically new assumption regarding the role of research during wartime. The dramatic union of science and politics between 1940 and 1945 left an indelible mark on both estates after the war.
