scholarly journals Undoing the Double-Cross: Promoting Public Accountability in American Science Agencies

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (03) ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Buckley ◽  
Kristen Ramsey
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American People ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
Public Accountability ◽  
World War ◽  
Advisory Boards ◽  
American Science ◽  
Vannevar Bush ◽  
Democratic Principles ◽  
Double Cross

The leadership and advisory boards of American science agencies are largely organized according to the ideas set forth by an influential scientist, Dr. Vannevar Bush, after World War II. Although American science agencies are publicly funded, only experts control what research is funded and how each agency operates. Wielding his unique position of power after the war, Dr. Vannevar Bush suppressed the ideas of his adversary, Senator Harley Kilgore, resulting in the absence of public accountability and citizen input that defines American science agencies today. We argue that citizens must have a seat at the table in the leadership of science agencies to promote trust in science, reduce inequity, increase efficiency, embrace democratic principles, and address the needs of the American people. By providing a mechanism for non-expert citizens to influence the direction of American science agencies, Congress can now finally rectify the double-cross of Senator Harley Kilgore by Dr. Vannevar Bush.

The Myth of the Innocent Nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 198-238
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
American People ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
American Myths ◽  
To Come

While the myth of the Innocent Nation weaves a tale that is objectively false with no redemptive qualities, it is one of the strongest of the American myths in terms of its hold over the American people. That myth, like the nation itself, hangs suspended between the golden age of an innocent past (Nature’s Nation) and a golden age of innocence yet to come (Millennial Nation). Suspended in that vacuous state, Americans imagine that history is irrelevant. How could it be otherwise? Nothing destroys a sense of innocence like the terrors of history taken seriously. Anchored by the pillars that stand at the beginning and end of time, the myth of the Innocent Nation flourished during every modern conflict beginning with World War I, but especially when the nation faced enemies like Nazi Germany in World War II or Isis during the War on Terror. The irony was obvious, for even as the nation proclaimed its innocence, black soldiers, for example, returned from World War II only to face brutality and segregation in their own nation. Countless blacks from Muhammed Ali to Toni Morrison to James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates have protested that irony in the American myth of Innocence.

Who Can Say They Are Apathetic and Listless Now?

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-67
Author(s):  
Douglas K. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
World War ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
And Migration ◽  
War Production ◽  
Migration Experiences

Roughly 65,000 Native American people enlisted for overseas service or contributed domestically to war production industries during World War II. Expansive off-reservation work and migration experiences created a historical precedent and network for subsequent waves of Native peoples who moved to cities for new opportunities and better standards of living after making significant contributions to the United States’ victory in World War II. Meanwhile, paying attention to Native American patriotism and urban labor, the federal government began envisioning an urban relocation program.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and US Foreign Relations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Cross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
American People ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

Franklin D. Roosevelt was US president in extraordinarily challenging times. The impact of both the Great Depression and World War II make discussion of his approach to foreign relations by historians highly contested and controversial. He was one of the most experienced people to hold office, having served in the Wilson administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, completed two terms as Governor of New York, and held a raft of political offices. At heart, he was an internationalist who believed in an engaged and active role for the United States in world. During his first two terms as president, Roosevelt had to temper his international engagement in response to public opinion and politicians wanting to focus on domestic problems and wary of the risks of involvement in conflict. As the world crisis deepened in the 1930s, his engagement revived. He adopted a gradualist approach to educating the American people in the dangers facing their country and led them to eventual participation in war and a greater role in world affairs. There were clearly mistakes in his diplomacy along the way and his leadership often appeared flawed, with an ambiguous legacy founded on political expediency, expanded executive power, vague idealism, and a chronic lack of clarity to prepare Americans for postwar challenges. Nevertheless, his policies to prepare the United States for the coming war saw his country emerge from years of depression to become an economic superpower. Likewise, his mobilization of his country’s enormous resources, support of key allies, and the holding together of a “Grand Alliance” in World War II not only brought victory but saw the United States become a dominant force in the world. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s idealistic vision, tempered with a sound appreciation of national power, would transform the global position of the United States and inaugurate what Henry Luce described as “the American Century.”

Fact and Fiction in Southeast Asia

Worldview ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-12
Author(s):  
Harold W. Thatcher
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
American People ◽  
World War ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Atomic Age ◽  
Secretary Of State

Once again we are practicing brinkmanship in a manner that even the late Secretary of State Dulles would have envied. How we have done so and why the American people in the Atomic Age have permitted their government repeatedly to get itself into perilous situations which could escalate into a general nuclear war cannot really be understood without reference to the background of our thinking since World War II. We must separate fact from fiction, which means that we must re-examine critically and objectively the premises and conclusions from which our actions have sprung.

American Science Policy since World War II

1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 191
Author(s):  
Susan E. Cozzens ◽  
Bruce L. R. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
World War ◽  
American Science

The Arc of National Confidence and the Birth of Film Noir, 1929–1941

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-414
Author(s):  
PHILIP HANSON
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Film Noir ◽  
American People ◽  
World War ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Film Genres

Early in the Great Depression, Gerald W. Johnson remarked on the “fathomless pessimism” that had overtaken the American People: “The energy of the country has suffered a strange paralysis … We are in the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes.” Film developments of the decade were entwined with the ongoing economic crisis. This article offers an analysis of the extreme shifts in confidence in this period and argues for their relationship with the evolution of film noir, which had its roots in two film genres prominent in the period, the gangster and fallen-woman films, but which breaks with these genres, not after the onset of World War II, which has long been believed, but in the closing years of the 1930s.

Physics, Emotion, and the Scientific Self: Merle Tuve’s Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 341-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Wang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
World War ◽  
American Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Carnegie Institution Of Washington ◽  
Emotional Dimensions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Scientific Identity

This essay brings together and builds upon histories of cold war American science and studies of objectivity, scientific personae, and the self by exploring the physicist Merle A. Tuve‘s career in the late 1940s and 1950s as a history of selfhood and the emotional dimensions of scientific identity. As director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington after World War II, Tuve followed a convoluted path through the institutions, politics, identities, and sensibilities of science in the cold war, and he struggled to preserve a sense of meaning and identity centered on the humanistic and aesthetic possibilities of scientific inquiry in an era of rapidly growing instrumentalism. His predicament highlights not just the political and institutional shifts within postwar science, but also the intricate entanglements between feeling, selfhood, and the cold war order.

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