ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contra Kilgore: Scientist Autonomy in the 1940s American Political Sphere

• In Event: Whose Values Count? Political Commitments, Marginal Voices, and the Construction of Scientific Legitimacy

English Abstract

For much of the 20th century, applied research was thought to be distinct from basic research (or pure science). The basic-applied distinction in scientific research traces its roots to the 19th century, but acquired a newfound political importance in the middle 20th century in the shadow of the dawning Cold War. For many Anglo-American scientists, maintaining the distinction between basic and applied science, along with resisting external direction of scientific research and rejecting claims of social responsibility for scientists, was of political, even civilizational, importance. This already-ascendent strict bifurcation of scientific research was cemented into dogma by fear of the specter of Soviet totalitarianism. Marxist and Deweyian conceptions of the social responsibility and social context of science and scientists were edged out in the 1940s, a process illuminated by the spirited debate among scientists around the 1942 Kilgore Bill, which sought to create a central agency to coordinate scientific research funded by the US federal government during the Second World War. Scientists’ concerns about totalitarianism, of government overreach and direction in science, mobilized a successful effort to defeat the Bill. The public-facing campaign to defeat the Kilgore Bill, I argue, represented an important moment in the consolidation of Anglo-American scientists behind the strict division of scientific research along the basic-applied axis, animated by Cold War anxieties and a concern for the maintenance of scientist autonomy.

Author

• Erik Lynch, Michigan State University