Whither ASME?
As the 1939 annual meeting of the Society approached, Clarence Davies found it natural to sum up his judgment of ASME’s situation. The war in Europe was sure to involve the United States somehow. Besides, 1939 marked his twentieth anniversary in the organization and he had just seen it through five years of the depression as its chief administrative officer. He felt some pride in having maintained so many of the Society’s programs and yet kept the budget in balance, although he also saw the harsh effects of long financial drought. Those might have been reasons enough for his candid and confidential memorandum to Council, but on top of them, Davies spent practically all his waking hours concerned with ASME and he thought he knew what it ought to be doing. And just as at the beginning of the depression he had been inspired by Charles A. Beard’s Whither Mankind, at the end of it he entitled his own observations ‘Whither ASME?’