7. Science, Technology, and the Rise of the Military-Industrial Complex

In 1961 President Dwight D. Eisenhower noted in his farewell address to the American people that he had observed a new power, a military-industrial complex, emerge in American society during the Cold War. The massive growth of the peacetime defense budget after World War II had brought into being entire industries that depended on government purchases to keep them in business, and a military bureaucracy accustomed to the availability and continued development of sophisticated weaponry. Eisenhower saw that these changes in national defense and industry were connected to universities because both sectors relied upon universities to conduct research for them.^[1]

Eisenhower’s observation was accurate, but historically the intertwining of industry and higher education, including in Cleveland, began much earlier than the Cold War era.^[2] The Case School faculty, for example, conducted much of its research on behalf of outside institutions from its earliest years. Professor Charles F. Mabery, who came to Case in 1883 from Harvard, published widely on the chemistry of petroleum (Cleveland was the center of American petroleum refining in the 1880s), and pioneered in using infrared spectroscopy for the analysis of distillates. He was also a consultant on the development of a pioneering electro-chemical furnace. Mabery trained Albert H. Smith, who took an instructor’s appointment at Case even before he graduated in 1887. Smith then went to Zurich for his doctorate and returned to become the chairman of the mechanical engineering and chemical engineering departments, where he conducted research for both industry and government.^[3]

One of Mabery’s students was Herbert H. Dow, who became interested in extracting bromine from the brine (saltwater) found underground in certain areas of the Midwest. Attempting to develop a commercially-viable process, Dow worked closely with Smith (who was an instructor when Dow was a student) and eventually drew him into a consulting arrangement. After a series of business and technical failures, the Dow Chemical Company was founded in 1897, with its center of operations at Midland, Michigan. Smith subsequently played critical roles in developing industrial methods for making chloroform (with Professor William O. Quayle) and carbon tetrachloride, and he directed many capable students to employment with Dow.^[4]

Among the students was Smith’s son, Kent H. Smith who after graduate school at Case worked for Dow from 1919 to 1921 on aluminum-magnesium alloys for automotive uses. Engaging in several business ventures in the 1920s, he eventually became a founder, with his brothers Kelvin and Vincent, of the Graphite Oil Products Company. Searching for a better lubricant for modern high-speed automobile engines, the company hired Professor Carl Prutton of Case to find an effective additive.

Prutton tended to work on the basis of informed hunches rather than systematic experimentation. He was known to take a large kettle, mix ingredients which he thought useful, and test them in practical applications, such as automobile engines. If he thought the results were good, he would ask a graduate student to analyze the product chemically. Only Prutton knew what the original ingredients were. Prutton’s first successful engine oil additives were aromatic halogen compounds, and the resulting lubricant was named Lubrizol. It sold so well that the company soon took on the name of the product. Lubrizol became a leading Cleveland corporation.^[5]

In some instances, these early research relationships had direct benefits for Case. Herbert Dow gave the school money to furnish an electro-metallurgical laboratory. The Harshaw Chemical Company of Cleveland established an industrial fellowship in 1910 to fund a year of post-baccalaureate studies by a graduating student. Harshaw could pick the topic, but the student could apply the research to his master’s degree.^[6]

The most continuous early Case connection to industry was that with the research department of the National Lamp Works of General Electric. Begun in 1901 as the research arm of the National Electric Lamp Association (NELA), a group of independent light bulb manufacturers, the laboratory moved to a campus of new buildings (called NELA Park) at East Cleveland in 1912, at the same time that General Electric acquired all of NELA’s stock. NELA Park became second only to GE’s laboratory at headquarters in Schenectady as a center of the corporation’s innovation and development program, particularly for lighting.

Within a few years Case graduates held several top administrative positions at NELA Park. That apparently made it easy for the school to recruit teachers for a course first offered in the 1916-17 academic year, titled “Science and the Art of Illumination,” required for senior electrical engineers. Several of the NELA staff were listed as instructors, including Percy Wells Cobb, a researcher in the physiology of light who was a Case graduate and had gone on to receive an M.D. from Western Reserve. Variants of that course remained in Case School’s catalogue for thirty years.^[7]

Western Reserve University’s interactions with industrial research seem to have been more at arm’s length through the 1930s than were Case’s, probably because its professors were more theoretically inclined. Reserve’s most regular connection to industry was through extension courses and in Cleveland College, Western Reserve’s the evening division founded in 1925. As early as 1896 Professor Morley had taught a summer school in chemistry for non-degree students, although under the auspices of Case. In 1923 the Reserve chemistry department instituted evening classes directed “to chemists; teachers of chemistry, physics and general science; to engineers; to graduate physicians, dentists and pharmacists; to both graduate and student nurses; and to those students who have been temporarily forced to discontinue their academic studies toward one of the professions mentioned.”^[8]

Reserve’s chemistry department continued to serve as a kind of continuing education program for professional chemists in the region through the 1930s and 1940s. Central to this outreach was Professor Harold S. Booth, a graduate of Reserve who had his doctorate from Cornell. He was a consultant to several companies, including Harshaw Chemical and Ohio Chemical in Cleveland, and was an authority on fluoride gases. In the 1940s Booth also developed a technical sales program at Cleveland College, combining science and business curricula.^[9]

Meanwhile, Western Reserve University had developed a close association with the Standard Oil Company of Ohio (Sohio). In 1929 two chemistry professors, R.E. Burk and Herman P. Lankelma set up a research laboratory for Sohio in one room of the second floor of Pierce Hall. Within a few years the staff and projects of the laboratory required a move to larger quarters in the University’s powerhouse. By 1940 the laboratory had a staff of twenty and employed several graduate students and undergraduates part-time, and Burk had become a leading researcher in the field of polymerization. Sohio paid rent to the University and to some degree allowed university faculty and students to use its facilities. There was some confusion as to Burk’s role, because he served as both a professor at the university and as research director for Sohio. In documents of the period he appears more an advocate for Sohio’s interests than the university’s.^[10]

Booth and Burk were involved in Reserve’s efforts in the 1940s to develop further relationships with industry. In 1941 they met with President Leutner and representatives of Sohio, and four other Cleveland area companies: Harshaw, Goodrich, Arthur G. McKee and Sherwin-Williams. Reserve asked that corporate leaders suggest what directions its scientific programs should take in the future, and offered a plot of land along the railroad from Cornell to Mayfield roads for industrial laboratories. In return, Reserve wanted to arrange joint purchases of the analytical instruments which were rapidly becoming central to scientific research, such as infrared spectrographs, electron microscopes, and diffraction equipment. For some years Reserve’s chemistry department had recognized that it was seriously deficient in the tools of modern research.^[11]

Sohio responded positively to this overture and in the next year built a laboratory on Cornell Road which remained in use until the 1960s. On that site were developed a boron additive for gasoline and micro balloons which floated on stored crude oil to reduce evaporation losses. In 1957 Sohio moved most operations to a new laboratory in Warrensville (OH), since there was no room for expansion on the University’s site.^[12]

In 1942 the research laboratory for Sherwin-Williams Paint moved into the powerhouse facility vacated by Standard Oil. Professor Oliver Grummitt of the Reserve chemistry department, who was already a consultant to Sherwin-Williams, became the laboratory’s director. When the decision was made in 1966 to close the laboratory, the termination date was delayed more than a year to allow Grummitt’s graduate students to finish their studies.^[13]

The experiences of Case and Reserve with industry prepared them to some degree for the infusion of research monies which came with World War II. At Case the total research budget in the last prewar academic year was $26,510; in the final year of the war, only four years later, it was $392,860, almost fifteen times larger. Both industry and government contributed to the rise, but government contracts for the development of wartime technologies accounted for the lion’s share. Reserve reportedly had government contracts for 1942-45 totaling $1,000,000, and received an equal sum for providing training and educational programs to various military units.^[14]

For both institutions this infusion of government money was intoxicating. They had struggled with finances throughout the 1930s, and suddenly their budgets balanced. What was unexpected was that this government largesse continued after the war’s end, because traditionally the United States had demilitarized rapidly with the return of peace. But this peace was the first based on the atomic bomb and superpower confrontations. Research at American universities turned quickly to development of nuclear weapons, the airplanes, submarines and rockets with which to deliver them, and a host of related subjects. Avowedly nonmilitary research also received an impetus when the National Science Foundation, an independent government agency, was created in 1950.^[15]

Some people in academia became very worried about the growing dependence of universities on government funds. Two years after the end of World War II astronomer Howard Shapley at Harvard argued that “those who were worried about the domination of freedom in American science by the great industries, can now worry about domination by the military.”^[16] Case’s Research Director, Charles W. Williams, who coordinated all of the grants to faculty from government and industry, wrote in his annual report of 1949 that “the fact that our sponsored research is heavily weighted in the direction of Government support seems to the writer to be bad.” He was concerned in part because the federal government added only 50% to grant budgets to cover the institute’s overhead expenses, while industrial contracts generally provided 100% overhead.^[17] When John S. Millis was installed as president of Western Reserve University in 1950 he called for voluntary support of the university by Clevelanders, whom he understood to have a great tradition of philanthropy. Without voluntary support, he said, there would be a “shifting, by default, of our personal responsibilities to the agencies of government.”^[18] While these words may have resonated with the tradition of personal philanthropy in University Circle, they did not reflect the changing nature of support for science.

Others were enthusiastic about the new possibilities opening for science, and it seemed impossible to resist the tidal wave of money. In the academic year 1956-57 Case received $1.8 million for research, and six years later it had more than doubled that amount (excluding classified research). The federal portion hovered around 75%.^[19] John Gardner, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (a non-profit foundation), remarked in 1957 that “federal funds are flowing to the universities in exceedingly impressive amounts, and no one involved — federal agencies, college presidents, trustees, or faculty members — shows any concerted inclination to stop the flow.”^[20] A contemporary study of the impact of increased federal funding for the sciences in the United States (made by an advisory committee which included Case President T. Keith Glennan) concluded that this source of funding offered no harm to the social sciences and the humanities. Glennan was in fact proud that Case students devoted 25 percent of their class time to these areas.^[21]

Certainly both Reserve and Case fielded a wide variety of programs in this era, and financial support could be had for many of them, some of which brought other departments into contact with science and technology. Reserve, for example, was a post-war leader in the use of television for education, and in teaching how to use the television as a medium of communication. The Cleveland Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation provided some funding for staffing and equipment. Reserve began with a graduate curriculum in television in the fall of 1946, focusing on scripting and producing public interest programs. Since the television courses were part of the university’s drama department, live theatric performances were an early part of the programming. The Plain Dealer’s theater critic, William McDermott, saw the first performance in the spring of 1948 and remarked that “it was interesting and impressive, not so much for what it was as drama, but for the enormous possibilities it suggested. You had the feeling of being at the birth of something revolutionary and important.”

In the fall 1951 semester WEWS (the first television station in Cleveland) broadcast two full courses which any tuition-paying viewer could take for credit through Cleveland College. The New York Times reported that this was the first instance in the United States in which credit was offered for a television course. The initial response to the courses was “overwhelming.” Courses-by-television remained on the Cleveland College roster for many years, and graduate courses in television programming remained in the university curriculum until the mid-1960s.^[22]

The opening a college curriculum to all television viewers was virtually antithetical to the  substantially seccret aspect of the academic community’s involvement in post-war technological innovation. The incredible potential of modern weapons and delivery systems could be developed rapidly by the military only through the cooperation of leading academic research centers. But accepting classified-status contracts for classified defense research meant the restriction of knowledge, rather than the diffusion represented by television.

Both Case and Reserve had many classified defense contracts from the 1940s into the 1960s, but Case had by far the largest contract, for project Doan Brook. This highly secret Air Force systems analysis research dealt with the aerial seeding of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines and accounted for about half of the federal funding received by Case from 1951 to the project’s end in 1958. Researching both questions of technology, such as the design and development of explosive fuses, and broader questions of target vulnerability, Doan Brook brought together an interdisciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and a few social scientists and humanists. It had a staff of over 80 at its height, and in its lifetime provided support for about 40 graduate students.^[23] Intellectually, Doan Brook was an important campus focal point for the development of the field of systems analysis, a field in which Case exercised considerable leadership in the 1950s.^[24]

Doan Brook was the equivalent of an academic department on campus, with its own facilities, budget, research program, and graduate students (most of whom were officially in electrical or mechanical engineering). Yet the differences from regular departments were glaring: only a few of its staff held professorial rank, and virtually all written results were classified and unpublished. They therefore were not subject to the peer review expected of academic research and publication. Graduate students on the staff of Doan Brook could publish only the peripheral, non-military applications of their research, not the most significant results.

In the late 1950s some professors at Case began to object strongly to classified research, but other faculty believed that academic institutions should have some role on the leading edges of national defense. Committees wrestled with the problem without immediate result. With the support of the administration, Case slowly disentangled itself from classified research commitments, and in 1962 the institute’s Faculty Committee on Research stated unequivocally that only scholarly publication was the measure of academically-acceptable research.^[25]

One reason it was possible to turn away from classified research was that by 1960 the balance of federal research monies had begun to shift from defense toward other topics. The American reaction to the successful Russian launching of their satellite, Sputnik, brought new non-defense research money into play beginning in 1958, and President John Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to put an American on the moon within the decade accelerated the trend. Health research also began to become more important.

But in the late 1960s federal funding of research in all areas dropped, and through the decade of the 1970s austerity was the byword. Case Western Reserve suffered considerably. Symbolic of its problems was its inability to lease fully the University Circle Research Center which was composed of two large buildings adjacent to the University Circle rapid station along Cedar Avenue. Planned in 1966 to be a research park similar to those adjacent to campuses in California and Massachusetts, the buildings were completed in time to experience economic stringencies at the height of the Vietnam War, followed by an economic recession, and inflation. The buildings were only partially occupied, and it was reported early in 1972 that the university was losing $20,000 per month on the center.^[26]

Difficulties with research funding to some degree promoted a reassessment of the interrelationship between research and teaching. Dean Donald E. Schuele of Case Institute argued in 1976 that “because of our reduction in student population and problems of budget, the emphasis has shifted too far in the direction of research. I believe it is now time to turn our attention to the quality and delivery of our classroom instruction.”^[27] Three years later a committee of the trustees reiterated Schuele’s concern, but stated firmly that “this is a research-oriented university, widely recognized and respected for the range and quality of its research and generously supported in these efforts by granting agencies. These are features in which we should take pride and which we must preserve and enhance.”^[28] Clearly, no matter the substantial problems which it brought, the trustees were wedded to research, including research for the industrial corporations that many trustees represented.

The most characteristic aspect of scientific and technical research in the 1980s was the university’s establishment of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional units. The Center for Adhesives, Coatings, and Sealants, for example, sought to provide research opportunities to firms that for reasons of expense chose not to have in-house laboratories.^[29]

The most notable of these units were three centers which, with CWRU’s participation, were established by the state of Ohio to arrest the decline of its industrial base. The Edison Polymer Innovation Center (co-sponsored by the University of Akron) focused on the development of plastics and other materials for construction, for electronics, and for other uses. Professor John Blackwell’s world-renowned research on high-strength fibers in both organic and inorganic materials was one source of CWRU’s leadership in polymers. CWRU contributed its work in automation and intelligent systems to the Cleveland Advanced Manufacturing Program (co-sponsored by Cleveland State University and Cuyahoga Community College). Ohio State University and CWRU collaborated in creating the Animal Embryology Research Center to study the means of genetically altering the fertilized embryos of animals. The state of Ohio contributed over $10 million to start these centers in l984-85.^[30]

By 1985 the Circle had large investment in scientific research, largely on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. It had continuing traditions of accomplishment in areas such as polymers, metallurgy and materials, systems design, and biomedical engineering. It had close links with industry and government, including the military, links which some regarded as too close, and others as not close enough. It was generally agreed, however, that in the world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries centers of scientific and technological research such as the Circle possessed were the keys to regional and national economic growth and productivity.