Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900-1945

ROBERT E. KOHLER is professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania.

The publication of this book has been supported in part by a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The contents of the book, however, do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1991 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1991

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45061-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72641-0 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kohler, Robert E.

Partners in science : foundation managers and natural scientists. 1900–1945 / Robert E. Kohler.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-45060-0 (cloth).—ISBN 0-226-45061-9 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-2267-2641-0 (ebook)

1. Science—History—20th century.   2. Science—Endowments—History—20th century.   3. Science—United States—Endowments—History—20th century.   4. Scientists.   5. Naturalists.   I. Title.

Q125.K62 1991

507.9—dc20

90-43520

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

PARTNERS in SCIENCE

Foundations and Natural Scientists 1900–1945

ROBERT E. KOHLER

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Frances

mea cum confuge maius perfectum

Contents

Illustrations

Tables

Figures

Preface

1. Systems of Patronage

PART I: CREATING A SYSTEM, 1900–1920

2. Troubled Beginnings: The Carnegie Institution

3. Reluctant Patrons: The Rockefeller and Carnegie Boards

4. The National Research Fellowships

5. A Limited Partnership

PART II: INSTITUTIONAL RELATIONS, THE 1920S

6. Americans in Paris: Wickliffe Rose, Augustus Trowbridge

7. Making the Peaks Higher: European Science

8. Developing American Science

9. The Rockefeller Foundation in Transition

PART III: DISCIPLINARY RELATIONS, THE 1930S

10. Warren Weaver and His Program

11. Biological Communities and Disciplines

12. Weaver and the Biomolecular Set

13. Instruments of Science

PART IV: CONCLUSION

14. Partners in Science in Perspective

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1. Robert S. Woodward

2. Henry S. Pritchett

3. James R. Angell

4. General Education Board

5. George E. Vincent

6. Edwin Embree

7. Arthur A. Noyes, George E. Hale, Robert A. Millikan

8. National Academy of Sciences Building under construction

9. National Academy of Sciences Building

10. Wickliffe Rose

11. Augustus Trowbridge

12. Halston J. Thorkelson

13. IEB map of European centers of physics

14. IEB map of U.S. centers of physics

15. Raymond B. Fosdick

16. Max Mason

17. Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cell Physiology

18. Warren Weaver, University of Wisconsin

19. Warren Weaver in his office at the Rockefeller Foundation

20. Warren Weaver in retirement

21. Grasshopper culture, University of Iowa

22. Cell physiology laboratory, University of Iowa

23. Frances O. Schmitt

24. John Runnström

25. The Svedberg

26. Ultracentrifuge, University of Uppsala

27. Linus Pauling

28. Electron diffraction apparatus

29. George W. Beadle and assistant

30. Dorothy Wrinch holding cyclol model

31. Spectroscopic biology laboratory, University of Chicago

32. Oscilloscope, Washington University

33. George von Hevesy

34. George von Hevesy, Niels Bohr, and high voltage accelerator

35. Medical cyclotron, University of California

Tables

1.1. Rockefeller and Carnegie Philanthropies in Science

4.1. Foundation Contributions to the National Research Council, 1916–1939

5.1. Rockefeller Foundation Expenditures in Natural Sciences, 1915–1928

5.2. Carnegie Corporation Expenditures in Natural Sciences, 1915–1933

6.1. International Education Board Appropriations in Natural Science, 1923–1928

8.1. General Education Board Appropriations in Natural Science, 1923–1931

9.1. Rockefeller Foundation Expenditures in Marine Biology, 1929–1933

9.2. Rockefeller Foundation Expenditures in Natural Science (General), 1929–1933

9.3. Rockefeller Foundation Expenditures in Natural Science (Europe), 1929–1933

9.4. Rockefeller Foundation Expenditures in Natural Science (U.S.), 1929–1933

10.1. Weaver’s Program for Natural Sciences Division, 1933

10.2. Proposed Program in Natural and Medical Sciences, 1933

Figures

11.1. Rockefeller Foundation projects in general physiology, 1930–1945

13.1. Rockefeller Foundation projects in biophysics, 1930–1945

Preface

MY INTEREST IN FOUNDATIONS and patronage dates from about 1974, when I wandered into the newly opened archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, which at the time was shoehorned into temporary quarters in a second-story warehouse on Manhattan’s West Side. A recent convert to history from chemistry and biochemistry, I came looking for material on the history of heavy isotope research in biochemistry, which I knew the foundation had sponsored. I was not disappointed: half-a-dozen files of correspondence detailed a behind-the-scenes story that, for an ex-scientist used to working only with published sources, was a revelation of what doing history could be. Even more eye-opening were the vast files in the foundation’s program and policy series, to which I was pointed by the foundation’s archivist, Dr. William Hess—the first of many times he was to point me in a fruitful direction. Here was revealed an almost daily record of the activities of a small group of people who, together with groups of academic scientists, were creating new relationships between science and society: reshaping their institutions to accommodate extramurally sponsored research. And, astonishingly, these records had been seen by almost no one since they had been written. That day I was hooked on excavating archives and was committed, willy-nilly, to an institutional approach to the history of science.

Gradually, through working with the records of foundation managers, I became aware (as many others were at the time in other ways) that science was a complex social system with many actors, in which securing resources, negotiating with patrons, creating departments and disciplines, competing for talents, designing products and services, and projecting public images were no less essential than bench research. More precisely, I became aware that these aspects of science were proper subjects for history. As an apprentice chemist I had seen that this was how science really worked, but that did not seem to be what the most respected historians of science wrote about. Rummaging through the letters, diaries, and reports of foundation officers and their academic allies, I was drawn from a history of science, that is, of finished intellectual products, to a history of scientists, that is, of science as social process.

The history of scientists: the idea was at the time a reproach and rebuff to those who wanted to enlarge the horizons of their discipline.¹ But it became for me the emblem of an actor-centered, pluralistic history, which dealt evenhandedly with everything that scientists did; that valued equally the social and intellectual products of science; that gave equal weight to the aims and perceptions of all the diverse social actors, who gave their own meanings to science and in doing so made the system work. Science and scientists mean something quite different to university presidents, congressmen, businessmen, and foundation officers, and their views are no less valid and worthy of study than the view from the laboratory bench. All are essential actors. None has a privileged historical value. Science is the sum of their views and activities.

When my first articles on the history of foundations were published in the mid-1970s, only a handful of historians were working on the subject, most notably Stanley Coben, Donald Fisher, Nathan Reingold, and (in partnership) Barry Karl and Stanley Katz. Since I sat down to write this book about five years ago, there has been a veritable flood of work on foundation activities (thanks in part to the Rockefeller Archive Center’s generous program of research grants-in-aid). And the flood continues. As I revised, I learned of John Heilbron’s work on the diffusion of cyclotron technology, Finn Aaserud’s on the role of foundations in Niels Bohr’s embracing of nuclear physics, Pnina Abir-Am’s on the Cambridge theoretical biologists, Larry Owens’s on Warren Weaver’s activities in World War II, and Thomas Glick’s on Rockefeller funding of physics in Spain—topics central to the story I hoped to tell. Studies appear almost monthly that throw new light on some aspect of foundation patronage that I missed or set aside. My aim in writing this book was to give a comprehensive view of foundation patronage of natural scientists: how the partnership was constructed, and how it worked and evolved in different regions of the scientific world. It will not be long, I think, before the interpretations I offer will face informed scrutiny from many directions.

Anyone who has tried to write history that deals with many scientific disciplines and national institutions knows how easy it is to make mistakes. I am grateful to colleagues who read chapters and set me right on matters both technical and contextual, especially John Heilbron, Tom Glick, Finn Aaserud, Nathan Reingold, Pnina Abir-Am, and Robert Olby. I am grateful, too, to sponsors who supported the researching and writing of this book: the Commonwealth Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the National Science Foundation (SE81–19490). Helen Weaver and Martha Thorkelson Riddell Kohler kindly provided family recollections and photographs. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the many archivists and records officers on whose knowledge I and all historians depend. I want especially to thank the remarkable staff of the Rockefeller Archive Center, above all Dr. J. William Hess, Dr. Joseph W. Ernst, Thomas Rosenbaum, Emily Oakhill, Harold Oakhill, Melissa Smith, and Dr. Darwin Stapleton. Without their expert and enthusiastic participation, doing history would be a lot less fun.

CHAPTER ONE

Systems of Patronage

THE IMPORTANCE OF PATRONAGE in modern science is almost too obvious to dwell upon. Since the late nineteenth century, competing in fast-paced research fronts has become ever more dependent on the ability to command resources. It takes money to improve facilities, compete for research talent, keep up with changing laboratory technologies, and produce papers as fast as the competition. Also, it takes organizational know-how to use resources effectively and to keep the knowledge produced in circulation. For scientists in universities, material resources and organizational skills have come increasingly from extramural patrons. The bread-and-butter service of university scientists—collegiate teaching—produces neither the money nor the organizational experience that modern science requires. Thus, for academic scientists, the practice of science has meant a more complex social relationship with extramural sponsors, whose institutional values and agendas are not quite the same as the values and agendas of their clients. Often, sponsors were skeptical of conventional boundaries between academic departments and disciplines. They had their own ideas of how science should be organized and practiced. Getting and managing grants, and managing sponsors, has gradually become a constitutive part of doing research and making careers in academic science, along with teaching, department and discipline building, or professional service.

Who would argue? And yet for some historians of science (and many scientists), grant-getting and the organizational work of science seem far less interesting and important than the production of knowledge as such. These activities are often regarded as necessary evils, as non-creative distractions from the real business of bench research. This seems too narrow a view of the complex reality of scientific careers and practices. It does an injustice to scientists who find satisfaction in solving problems of organization. It rends apart the production process, in which mobilizing resources, building disciplines, and maintaining boundaries are integral parts. Assembling the material and human resources for doing research is no less a part of the creative process than doing experiments. Good ideas are essential (obviously), but so too are the skills that infuse good ideas into research teams and schools. Ideas are often made good by the process of securing resources, enlarging disciplinary boundaries or tearing them down, lining up allies. Fundability has become, for better or for worse, an important element in the system by which credibility is allocated to researchers and their work.¹

The production process of science is a complex social system, and we will not understand it better if we impose upon its elements an artificial hierarchy of values. It will not pay to make arbitrary distinctions between insiders and outsiders. It is not just the people who work in laboratories who do science, but everyone who takes part in sponsoring, producing, justifying, or making use of scientific knowledge. Foundation managers were doing science no less than the scientists whose work they helped to make possible. We need, as Bruno Latour exhorts us, to take a holistic and inclusive view.²

The hardest part of working on the history of patronage is knowing where to stop, how to keep it from becoming a history of science in toto. How much need one say, for example, about the institutions and disciplines that benefited from foundation largess? How far should one go in describing the work done with foundation grants and in assessing the influence of foundation patronage on research fashions? How can the subject of patronage be contained without leaving out some essential part of the seamless web?

I have tried to do so by focusing on the social system of patronage itself: the evolving partnership between patrons and recipients. I am interested in the process of giving and getting grants, in how the social machinery of sponsorship was constructed, in the people who kept the machinery in running order. There is something about bench research in this book, but there is far more about how research methods and agendas figure in interactions of patrons and clients. I have avoided the question of the influence of foundation patronage on scientific disciplines (I think it is an unanswerable question), but disciplines figure as key elements in my account of how systems of patronage worked. I want to show how workable systems of sponsorship were constructed and how they were embodied in institutions and in the conventions, expectations, and rituals of the patron-client relation. The social system itself is the object of study here, not its effects on something else.

TABLE 1-1

ROCKEFELLER AND CARNEGIE PHILANTHROPIES IN SCIENCE

Choices of what to put in and what to leave out in this volume derive from this basic principle. I focus on university scientists, because it was with them that the tensions between patron and recipient were sharpest and most interesting. The activities of the research institutes endowed by John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie are outside my scope, except for their extramural grants programs. This book deals with only the largest foundations, the seven founded by Carnegie and Rockefeller (see table 1.1), because they were the most self-conscious and programmatic in their relations with scientists. They created the system and accounted for 85–90 percent of foundation expenditures on science in the interwar period.

I have also confined myself to the natural sciences, omitting the social sciences, medicine, and public health. This is perhaps less defensible, not just because the Rockefeller and Carnegie boards spent vast sums in these fields but because these programs preceded those in the natural sciences and constituted a body of practical experience upon which the later programs drew. (Also, the social and health sciences offer opportunities for social history that the natural sciences cannot.)³ The trouble is that the social bases of the natural, social, and health sciences are so different as to make it impracticable to do all of them at once. With one group it becomes possible to look at the fifty years in which foundations were their chief sponsors, to see how the creators of the system meant it to work, how it did in fact work, and how it changed through being worked.

Finally, I have tried to maintain an even balance in this history between ideas and practices. Chapters tend to alternate in a dialectical fashion between internal foundation politics and policymaking, and what foundations actually did in the field. The relation between boardroom policy and field practice is about as straightforward as that between party platforms and practical politics. Patronage, like politics (or science itself), is the art of the possible. New modes of patronage evolved out of existing modes, in the field, just as new scientific practices derived from existing ones, at the bench. Projects were constructed with an eye to what officers knew from experience would survive the process of review by university officials and foundation trustees. Grant-givers and grant-getters were no less constrained by academic subcultures and conventions of academic careers. To understand who got what, we need always to keep in mind how the process of grant-giving really worked as well as how it was supposed to work.

The following chapters are divided into three groups, which correspond to three periods or stages in the evolution of the private system of sponsorship. The first group (2–5) begins with an examination of the extramural grants program of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. It is a story of misunderstanding and conflict between trustees, managers, and scientists, and it reveals most clearly the basic assumptions and limitations of the nineteenth-century system of individual grants-in-aid. It also sets the stage for the invention of a new system of patronage, in which the National Research Council mediated between foundations and individual scientists and universities. Just after World War I, the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation provided a handsome endowment fund and grants for national research fellowships to the National Research Council. I will focus on these key decisions and show how, in the process of negotiation, basic assumptions of the old system of patronage were discarded for a new rationale for large-scale patronage. I will show also how in practice this was a limited relationship and how efforts to expand it failed.

The second group of chapters (6–9) focuses on the activities of the International and General Education Boards. These educational foundations, unlike the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation, were direct operating agencies and created a system of large institutional grants to university science departments, a system that was quite unlike earlier individual grants and much more expandable. The emphasis of this segment of the story will be less on policy than on field experience, which was rich and diverse. I give a systematic account of this experience, both in Europe and in the United States, and try to explain large-scale patterns of distribution—who did well and why. It is an ecology of patronage, which shows how the distribution of resources was shaped by the social systems of science in which foundation officers operated.⁴ In the case of institutional grants, who got what depended on location in national educational systems—old elite universities and the up-and-coming; those in cosmopolitan or provincial centers and on undeveloped peripheries. This group of chapters concludes with the reorganization of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928, which brought the era of institutional grants to a close and set the stage for a new system of grants for individual or group projects.

The third group of chapters (10–13) concerns the natural science programs of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s, managed by Warren Weaver, the quintessential manager of science. (The Carnegie Corporation abandoned natural science in the 1920s.) Again the approach is ecological—who got what and why is the question. But the story turns not on institutional systems but on disciplines, research schools, and laboratory practices. A group of projects in experimental biology was shaped by the structure of discipline communities (or their lack of structure). Projects in molecular biology were inspired by Weaver’s desire to encourage transdisciplinary careers in science, careers in transit from physical to biological science or vice versa. A third group of projects, in biophysics, was patterned by the technical and social characteristics of different kinds of laboratory instruments, like cyclotrons and radioisotopes. In the 1930s system of projects, grant-giving and grant-getting was a more intimate and personal experience, and to understand it we need to look at strategies of making careers, the ways in which scientific territory is divided up, and the conventions of laboratory practice.

As a byproduct of the ecological approach, many things will be said about science between the wars: about university reform movements, the emergence of leadership elites, efforts to carve out space for new disciplines like general physiology and biophysics, the synchronous appearance of novel instruments for biomolecular research, and holistic movements in biology. Systems of patronage took their shape from large-scale structures in the world of science; they amplified long-term trends. One of the pleasures of studying the history of patronage is the opportunity it affords to cross boundaries of expertise that divide historians of the different disciplines and different national contexts.

The common thread of all these diverse experiences, however, is the process of making projects, the dynamic partnership between grant-giver and grant-seeker. Each project is an occasion to see a system of patronage being constructed or renegotiated. On the foundation side, the key players are the small cadre of officials—the managers of science—who gave substance to official policies by making projects in the field. On the university side are the entrepreneurial scientists who created common ground between disciplinary and philanthropic agendas. The principals of my story are middling people, people on the shop floor of science and philanthropy. Bench researchers and department heads figure more prominently than university presidents and deans. On the foundation side, John D. Rockefeller remains entirely offstage, and Rockefeller, Jr., and Andrew Carnegie appear only as minor players whom the managers of their fortunes had to steer tactfully onto new tracks. It is the first two or three generations of foundation managers whom I want to bring to life, people who left academic research or administration for the unfamilar world of large foundations.

Most of the material for this book comes from the records left by foundation managers, especially from the extraordinary wealth of correspondance, diaries, applications, and field reports left by the officers of the Rockefeller boards. I have tried to see the system of patronage through the eyes of grant-getter as well as grant-giver. (It is hard not to see both sides where so much of the documentation has to do with negotiation.) But as the managers of science are the central characters in this story, they will have the most lines. In fact, a good part of the excitement and fascination of philanthropic records is that they enable us to see the enterprise of science through the eyes of people who were participants but not bench scientists. While I would not claim any privileged status for their point of view (or for any actor’s view), I know of no participants in the system of science who had a more comprehensive view of science between the wars. Foundation officers approached science and scientists with an equal blend of sympathy and skepticism, idealism and common sense, and that made them unusually canny observers. They made it their business to see the whole show, in every region of Europe and the United States, and in a dozen disciplines. I know of few people with a more varied and cosmopolitan experience, and none whose experience offers historians a better chance to see how science really works in the modern world.

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY SYSTEM

We need first, however, to take a brief look at how the system of sponsorship worked before the large foundations appeared on the scene. In the United States, academic scientists operated in a system (such as it was) of genteel poverty and laissez-faire. They admired and envied the accomplishments of European academics with their state-supported institutes, but they feared the strings attached to government support. Scientific leaders like Harvard astronomer Edward C. Pickering had been propagandizing the well-to-do for decades, hoping to divert some of the vast wealth created by the new mass-production industries into academic science, but with little success.⁵ Hence the sensation when, in 1902, steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie announced that he was giving $10 million to found a new institution for promoting science—the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW). Carnegie’s benefaction, following hard upon John D. Rockefeller’s endowment of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901, seemed to open a new era in the patronage of academic science.

No one, however, seemed to know exactly what to do with a windfall of $400,000 a year. Everything seemed possible, but there was little in the experience of late nineteenth-century academic scientists to suggest what a large-scale system of sponsorship should look like. Certainly Carnegie did not know: his deed of gift gave his trustees a blank check to recruit youthful talents, sponsor individual research projects, help federal scientists expand their professional horizons, and aid publication and diffusion of knowledge. Invited to share their dreams openly in the pages of Science, academics poured forth plans for special professorships and European-style institutes for research elite, small grants-in-aid to the underprivileged academic rank and file, fellowships for graduate students, great national research institutes to rival the Royal Institution and Prussian Academy, and so on.⁶

One provision of Carnegie’s deed of trust especially captured the imagination of both elite and middling academics: To discover the exceptional man in every department of study whenever and wherever found, inside or outside of schools, and enable him to make the work for which he seems specially designed his life work.⁷Discover the exceptional man—the phrase resonated with deeply held social values: American particularism and manifest destiny, a belief in self-improvement and upward mobility, and a sense that everyone should be able to participate in elite cultural activities, including scientific research.

The condition of American colleges and universities circa 1900 made Carnegie’s plans for the exceptional man especially resonant. Since the 1870s, colleges and universities had proliferated in response to local demands for higher education, unrestrained by state regulation or effective gatekeeping by the old Eastern elite institutions. This made the American system of universities very broad based, but also very uneven in quality. Many small colleges announced graduate programs in the 1890s in the hope of capitalizing on the growing market for better-quality teachers, as Johns Hopkins, Bryn Mawr, and a few others were doing. Many institutions aspired to university status but lacked the means to support research. Many college teachers were inspired by the research ideal, but few could hope to realize that ideal. Even in universities like Harvard or Princeton, research was valued mainly for its use in teaching college teachers.⁸ The history and political economy of American universities strictly limited internal resources available for research, while at the same time they encouraged a large rank and file to hope they too might one day make the research ideal a reality for themselves. Thus, in 1900 there was an exceptionally large number of undiscovered geniuses in American colleges and universities. Some had arrived at their prime years knowing nothing but a frustrating struggle for minimal resources; others were entering their careers hoping that things would be easier for them than for their elders. To all, Carnegie’s plan to rescue the exceptional man from obscurity seemed to speak directly and personally.

Scientists’ expectations of Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s millions reflected their very limited prior experience with extramural patronage. What small endowment there was for research was held in trust by national scientific societies like the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was derisory by later standards—the several research funds of the National Academy added up to $94,000 in 1890 and produced an annual income of less than $4,000. These modest funds were doled out in small grants—a few hundred dollars on average—to deserving individuals selected by committees of academicians.⁹ For scientists, this early form of peer review had the advantage of limiting intervention by overly zealous gatekeepers into individual decision making. But the system had the great disadvantage that it was not an attractive object for wealthy philanthropists. Aiding obscure academics to pursue their miscellaneous private researches was not competitive with traditional forms of civic philanthropy—colleges, museums, libraries, churches—that delivered real public services. The only benefactors of the National Academy and American Academy were their own members, and even the wealthiest of them were far from wealthy on the scale of the great industrial families.

There was one minor exception to this pattern: in 1884 a New York philanthropist, Elizabeth Thompson, created an independent endowment of $25,000 to support scientific researches. (In 1878 she had given $10,000 for research on yellow fever.) In its operations, however, the Elizabeth Thompson Science Fund followed the pattern of the scientific societies. Mrs. Thompson had hoped that the fund would be managed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, but when that fell through the endowment was put in the charge of a group of Harvard scientists led by embryologist Charles S. Minot and the ubiquitous Edward Pickering.¹⁰ In effect, this group acted as a peer review panel, though it did not represent a national society. It had no definite program. The fund’s grants were extremely eclectic: obviously, the committee did not want to be criticized for favoring particular disciplines or places. Grants were small, mostly $50–$250 with a cap for individuals of $300.

The managers of the Elizabeth Thompson fund did make some effort to use grants as carrots to make American scientists more competitive in disciplines where Europeans dominated: making grants to Europeans, for example, was meant to put Americans on their mettle. Minot and Pickering also used grants as a stick. Recipients who failed to publish in due course were publicly named in the fund’s brochures; some were requested to give the money back, and the names of those sinners too were made public. Pickering lost no chance to boast of the 93 percent success rate achieved by these methods.¹¹ Pickering would have gone even further in using extramural funds to get scientists to be more business-like in their research, less individualistic and more focused on important problems. He hoped that wealthy industrialists might be more inclined to make large endowments for research if they could see that academic scientists shared their own business habits and values.

Pickering’s hopes were doomed on both counts, however. Scientists resented his efforts to organize them. They regarded with deep suspicion Pickering’s guileless but insensitive suggestion that Harvard’s board of overseers would be an ideally disinterested body to hold research endowments for the nation.¹² After one of Pickering’s organizing committees collapsed, a colleague observed: The whole subject was filled with dynamite and he [Pickering] didn’t know it.¹³ Wealthy benefactors responded to Pickering’s pleas for Harvard’s observatory (a familiar kind of gift to a local scientific cause), but none stepped forward to endow research in general.

Pickering was tactless and heavy-handed, but his frustrations highlight the basic limitation in the nineteenth-century system of patronage: scientists resented any interference in their work by outside agencies; philanthropists saw little point in aiding academic scientists in their private and individualistic endeavors. It was not that philanthropists undervalued scientific research; quite the contrary, they thought research too important to leave to part-time academics.

Both Carnegie and Rockefeller opted for freestanding research institutes, against the advice of their academic advisors, who advocated institutes attached to universities. Carnegie decided against a national university because he feared it would only compete with nearby Johns Hopkins.¹⁴ Rockefeller’s scientific advisors, like William Welch, favored an institute connected with Columbia University. But Rockefeller, Sr. (or Jr., it is not clear), and Starr J. Murphy, a lawyer engaged by the Rockefellers to assess the options, preferred an independent institute.¹⁵ The philanthropists believed in a functional division of labor: the raison d’être of medical schools was to teach and of hospitals to care; both could do research that pertained specifically to these missions. But only a separate institute with research as its sole mission could take up the problems where the medical schools leave them, and treat them in their broadest aspects. In Murphy’s view, [H]ospitals and the medical schools, so far as they carry on research work, will lead up to and be feeders for the Institute, which will be the crown of the whole system.¹⁶ The same argument applied to universities and research in the natural sciences: research could best be done separated from teaching, and any effort to combine them would only compromise both. In this view, grants to academic scientists were not an appropriate use of endowments earmarked for research. That was how the trustees of the CIW saw the matter and why they too, like the founders of the Rockefeller Institute, chose to devote most of their income to in-house research departments rather than to programs of extramural grants.

It is not surprising, then, that scientists’ eager anticipation of their new patrons soon turned to disappointment and conflict. These conflicts, symptomatic of fundamental changes in the system of patronage, are the subject of the next chapter.

PART I

Creating a System, 1900–1920

CHAPTER TWO

Troubled Beginnings: The Carnegie Institution

THE CIW’S GRANTS PROGRAM has gone down in history as a footnote to the history of the institution’s research departments and as a failed experiment in the patronage of science.¹ In fact, it was the first significant experiment in large-scale sponsorship of academic science. On average, over $100,000 per year was spent on individual grants between 1903 and 1920.² This was twenty times the expenditure of any other grants fund and more than all such funds put together.³ The CIW’s grants program was not a failed but a troubled experiment, marked by conflict and misunderstanding between academic recipients of grants, the CIW’s board of trustees, and the CIW president, Robert S. Woodward.

The unprecedented wealth of Carnegie’s endowment, plus the vagueness of his directives, brought to the surface fundamental conflicts about the purpose of research endowments and how they should be managed. Within the CIW there was competition for authority between the president and the board of trustees. The first president, Daniel Gilman (emeritus president of Johns Hopkins), resigned over this issue, and Woodward spent a decade battling the executive committee for control of programs and budgets. No less divisive was the competition for authority between the president and the CIW’s extramural scientific constituents. (With the heads of the in-house departments, conflict was minimal.) The extramural grants were the source of chronic, grinding friction between grant-givers and grant-getters. Woodward was constantly complaining about the irresponsibility of his academic clients in not abiding by the standards of practice of the CIW’s research departments. Academics never ceased to believe that Woodward was trying to impose his personal agendas on the scientific community and subverting funds earmarked for individual grants to the CIW’s departments.

These conflicts have usually been taken as signs of personal failure or mismanagement; in fact, they are symptoms of a new system of patronage in the making—more precisely, of a nineteenth-century system displaying its inability to work in twentieth-century conditions. The sudden scaling-up of the patronage system created conflicts because it was not accompanied by any change in practices or expectations. Academics used to the laissez-faire of grants committees run by friends and colleagues were unprepared for a granting agency that had its own agenda and its own ideas of how academic science should be practiced. So, too, boards of trustees were unaccustomed to full-time scientist-managers exercising an independent authority. In hindsight, Woodward was the first modern manager of science, and his experience is a window for historians on a new patron-client partnership as it was beginning to take shape.

In this chapter we will examine in turn the policies and politics behind the grants program, then Woodward’s conflicts with the board, and finally the troubled relations between Woodward and the CIW’s academic constituents. We will see how expectations from the nineteenth-century system of patronage resulted in mutual misperceptions on both sides, and how conflict cleared the way for a fundamentally new system of patronage by the end of the 1910s.

THE CIW GRANTS PROGRAM: ORIGINS

It was clear from the beginning that the CIW would have both research departments and an extramural grants program. The only question was what the balance would be. Grants overshadowed departments in the first few years because organizing departments took more time and effort.⁴ Eager to do something while advisory committees pondered and politicked, the trustees appropriated several hundred thousand dollars for a system of minor grants (up to $3,000) for academic scientists. (A few larger grants were also made for expensive but once-only undertakings like field expeditions.)⁵ The early grants program of the Rockefeller Institute was likewise partly a stopgap while in-house programs were organized, though it remained much smaller than the CIW’s program (it never topped $15,000 per year).⁶ The CIW’s grants program survived the organization of the departments because it was the vehicle for Carnegie’s dream of discovering the exceptional man.⁷ At least, that is how the all-powerful executive committee saw it.

The key people on the board’s executive committee were the medical politician, John Shaw Billings, and Charles D. Walcott, the chief of the U.S. Geological Survey. They virtually ran the CIW during its first few years. Aging, gentlemanly, and uncertain of his new role, Daniel Gilman was no match for ambitious and energetic people like Billings. Relations between Gilman and the executive committee became increasingly strained, and Gilman resigned after only two years, tired of being pushed around by Billings and his friends.⁸

As chairman of the executive committee, Billings was the single most influential person in determining what kind of institution the CIW would become. His preeminence in the library world (he more or less created the National Library of Medicine and the New York Public Library) gave him great authority with Carnegie, the great benefactor of public libraries. Carnegie’s deed of trust to the CIW echoed memoranda prepared for him by Billings. It was Billings who persuaded Carnegie to overrule Gilman’s counsel to emphasize education over research. He also took credit (perhaps undeservedly) for putting the idea of the exceptional man in Carnegie’s mind. In any case, Billings was certainly the strongest advocate of using minor grants to bring obscure talents to light.⁹ Billings saw the CIW not simply as a research institute but as a general trust fund for encouraging research throughout the United States, complementing the funds of the national scientific societies.¹⁰ He was an unrelenting protector of the grants program, and that made him Robert Woodward’s arch antagonist.¹¹

Billings’s vision of patronage was rooted in a lifetime’s experience of science politics. Sixty-three years old in 1901, Billings had spent his entire career in public institutions. From his base in the Army Surgeon General’s Office, he had had a hand in most of the campaigns of the previous thirty years to organize national institutions of science and medicine. His ambitions were vaulting and eclectic, and he liked to shape events from behind the scenes by controlling executive committees.¹² Billings believed in organized, programmatic research, but he took a middle ground between the laissez-faire ideals of most academics and the mission science of the federal bureaus:

No doubt many of the younger scientific men . . . have beautiful dreams as to what might be done by collectivism if they could have the direction of it, set the questions and assign them to special investigators. No doubt also the tendency of most of the older men is conservative, and to think that what has been done in science . . . by individual workers following their own bent is a good argument for aiding such workers now. But there are also a number of young and old men who think that much can be done by cooperation. . . . They think it wiser to give to the exceptional men the means of working where they are. . . . They believe that the present policy of the Carnegie Institution should be cooperative and not collectivism. Out of this cooperation, a form of collectivism may ultimately develop, but it does not seem wise to try to create it at first.¹³

Billings was arguing not for the invisible hand of laissez-faire but for the visible hand of a managed marketplace—to borrow a phrase from historian Alfred Chandler. A program of individual grants seemed to him the most natural way of improving a highly dispersed and disparate community of scientists.

Not surprisingly, academic scientists did not behave like ideal citizens of Billings’s cooperative commonwealth. Most of them—and they were legion—simply hoped to get a bit of Carnegie’s largesse, which they took to be unlimited and theirs by right. The publicity in Science and the press produced an avalanche of applications. No fewer than 1402 were received by November 1903, requesting a total of $2,200,398—one-fifth the CIW’s entire endowment. Ten expert advisory committees appointed to design intramural departments came up with projects that would cost $911,500 more.¹⁴ Applicants resented any effort to impose criteria of selection and took for granted that if the money ran out Carnegie would provide more from his deep pockets. In short, academics expected the CIW’s patronage to be just like the individual grants-in-aid programs of the national scientific societies, only lots bigger.

GROWING CONFLICTS

Charles Walcott and Billings, who managed the extramural grants, quickly became disillusioned with academic grant-seekers. When Woodward succeeded Gilman as president in December 1904, he was warned by Billings and Walcott to expect trouble. A few months later, Walcott wrote to Billings: I am very much interested and somewhat amused to hear of the experiences Dr. Woodward is having with University and other men. I told him that it was a duplication of what you and I had been through and that he would probably come to the same conclusions before long.¹⁵ Woodward soon did, recalling later: No vagaries of fiction could surpass the realities of the unrealizable ideals and of the dreams of avarice developed in this wave, which culminated in 1905–06 and is only now [1911] slowly subsiding.¹⁶

Woodward was in fact an old hand in the grants business when he came to the CIW. As treasurer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), he had managed its grants program smoothly for twelve years and expected that the CIW’s grants program could be run in the same way.¹⁷ He soon realized how wrong he was. After only six weeks on the job, he wrote to his friend George Ellery Hale that he was almost buried under an avalanche of importunities and good advice to say nothing of bad advice. Every recipient of a grant expected it to be continued, whether or not they had produced results. Many of those who received grants lacked the facilities to carry out the research, and those who did not get grants denounced the CIW’s policies and damned Woodward’s management. Woodward’s letters, to Harvard chemist Theodore W. Richards, for example, reveal an increasingly harassed and embattled man.¹⁸ The grants program consumed three-fourths of his time, he reckoned, though it accounted for only one-fourth of the CIW’s expenditures.¹⁹ It reminded him altogether too much of the political patronage that plagued the lives of Washington scientists. Many of the evils of the ‘spoils system’ already confront us, he wrote. Some applicants file claims; many are impatient for speedy action; and many . . . speak in the possessive case with respect to grants long before they are awarded. Some, indeed, came armed with demanding letters from their congressmen.²⁰

Woodward knew all too well about the spoils system, having spent the first two decades of his professional career as a federal scientist with the U.S. Lake Survey (1882–1884), the U.S. Geological Survey (1884–1890), and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (1890–1893). Woodward had left the Geological Survey when Congress demolished its Irrigation Survey (as chief geographer in charge of the division of mathematics he was especially vulnerable). His departure from government service for a chair of mathematical physics and a deanship at Columbia University in 1893 coincided with the political dismemberment of the rest of John Wesley Powell’s scientific empire.²¹ With this diverse experience behind him, Woodward came to the CIW with a belief in managed research and an expectation that his reception as a patron would be a cordial one. There was no reason to expect that managing the CIW’s extramural grants would be any different from the experience of the much smaller AAAS and National Academy programs. Hence, no doubt, his intense and personal reaction against academics when the CIW grants began to sour.

Woodward was surprised and dismayed when some colleges and universities cut internal funds for research when their faculty received grants from the CIW.²² It is easy to see why this happened: heads of small colleges and universities naturally viewed outside grants as contributions toward their institutional mission, which was to teach and provide some minimal opportunity for faculty research. From Woodward’s perspective, they were selfishly subverting the CIW’s mission of increasing funds for research. Until academics understood the CIW’s special place in the system of scientific institutions, he warned, grants might actually diminish local resources for research.²³ Whether or not the abuse was as serious as Woodward alleged (probably it was not), it was a good argument against the grants.

What happened, apparently, was that a sudden increase in wealth from outside collegiate walls disrupted the moral economy of a community accustomed to genteel poverty. Where extramural grants were occasional and small, college and university administrators were not tempted to make individual grants part of their financial calculations. When such grants became larger and more systemmatic, however, it was hard not to take the windfall and forget that the purpose of granting agencies was not identical with those of academic institutions. A gap opened up between expectations, based on experience in the nineteenth-century system, and the new reality of a more extensive and active patronage. Just what were the mutual obligations of patron and client? Where grants were few and small, it was not an urgent question; but the sudden scaling-up of the CIW’s grants program brought it into sharp focus.

Within a year Woodward had concluded that the conflict of interest in the grants program could never be resolved. Research belonged in institutions whose mission was research; colleges and universitites should be left to educate. Except in a small way, it will prove impracticable to cooperate with other institutions organized for other purposes, he wrote to Richards. The CIW had to work out its own destiny.²⁴ That destiny was to take two forms: in-house departments, and a small number of full-time extramural research associates.

Woodward’s plan was to give grants only to individuals who had already demonstrated their capacity for productive research and who had institutional backing. Fewer grants would be made, but they would be larger and for longer periods of time. Recipients would be in effect employees of the CIW, not attached to any particular department but salaried by the CIW and accountable to it. Woodward proposed to give individuals so honored the title research associate, to remind them that they would be held up to the same standards of productivity and efficiency as researchers in the CIW’s departments. Woodward expected that associates would devote their whole time to research: they would be a special elite of research professors or, from another point of view, external research staff of the CIW.²⁵

Well aware that this plan might not be looked upon favorably by the trustees and recipients of minor grants, Woodward took no hasty action.²⁶ He prepared a statistical report on the minor grants program, which showed that only about 60 percent of recipients had published any results, a poor showing in comparison with the AAAS grants.²⁷ An opinion poll of academic scientists and administrators showed that a majority (60 percent) liked the present system of minor grants, although some of the most eminent university presidents did not.²⁸ Woodward gathered numerous letters from academic scientists applauding his idea of research associates, especially from those who already had grants and had been encouraged by Woodward’s hints that they would be strong candidates for long-term support.²⁹

The response of the executive committee to Woodward’s plan was not what he hoped. Billings and Silas Wier Mitchell (a Philadelphia physician, physiologist, and author) prepared a rebuttal to his report, opposing the research associates scheme and arguing for the minor grants to exceptional men.³⁰ The stage was set for a confrontation with the full board at their meeting in December 1906.

In his presentation to the board, Woodward dwelt on the inefficiency of the minor grants: they were not as productive of research as the departments and were an unproductive use of his own time. Fruitless interviews and correspondence with hopeful or disappointed applicants kept him from attending to the productive business of the CIW’s departments. The only way to ensure that the CIW got a good return from its investment in individual grants, Wooodward contended, was to clearly separate research from education. Research associates had to be selected by the same standards as regular department staff: not for youthful enthusiasm and promise but for a track record of productive research on important problems. Associates would be forbidden to delegate research to student assistants, and they had to be employed in universities where research had already become an accepted requirement of academic careers.³¹

The fatal flaw in Woodward’s case was that it entailed giving up the search for the exceptional man. For believers in the exceptional man, Woodward’s language of productivity and efficiency was simply a reminder that the minor grants were designed not to produce research but to widen participation in the process of research by assisting disadvantaged young scientists. Woodward knew that he might have to fight hard for his research associates plan. He was not prepared, however, to have it summarily dismissed.

Billings was not present at the critical meeting, owing to a recent operation, and it was Mitchell who presented the case against the research associates scheme. Mitchell minced no words: he sympathized with the inconveniences of administering a large number of gants, but his own experience suggested that Woodward exaggerated the hardships. Besides, that was what he was paid to do. Carnegie had established the CIW to discover exceptional men, and Woodward’s job was to carry out the wishes of the founder and his trustees. He and Billings disliked the idea of supporting only men of middle age and assured competence by success in many investigations, observing that he himself would not have qualified for support at a time when he could have best used it. Mitchell hoped there would be no serious warfare between the President and Executive Committee, and on that note the board moved on to other matters.³² The president was put in his place as the servant of the board, not its master. Woodward neither forgot nor forgave it.

PRESIDENT VERSUS BOARD

The confrontation in December 1906 was just one in a series of skirmishes between Woodward and the executive committee, in which both sides tried to assert their authority. In selecting Woodward to succeed Gilman, Billings and Walcott may have been trying to make sure they kept control. Woodward was their hand-picked candidate, and they lobbied vigorously on his behalf against trustees who argued that Woodward’s record as administrator failed to show any executive capacity whatsoever. The Boston faction, businessman Henry L. Higgenson and Harvard zoologist Alexander Agassiz, favored either Ira Remsen or Columbia’s Henry Pritchett, both of whom were less accomplished scientists than Woodward but more experienced administrators.³³ In fact, Pritchett was offered the presidency of the CIW, but he declined it, apparently because it became clear to him that he would be expected to do the