On the Origins of the Education-Complex State

Boris Vallejo, paying the rent

This is not a complicated story. It at least seems clear that when you increase the market supply of a scarce commodity, you lower its price. Therefore, increasing the number of college graduates ought to push down the value of a college degree through the bargaining leverage of the "reserve army of the unemployed." Here are six footnotes aggregated over 20 minutes by Googling "X school scam." (1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6.) I was inspired to do this by Katie Zavadski, who decided last week that   "Pharmacy School Scam" would be a good lede for a New Republic article.  Otherwise I might have written about humanities graduate school, and that would not have been good for anyone.

Of my quickly assembled footnotes, only the last is really important, even if you might enjoy trolling through the same old answers, endlessly repeated. (There is no pharmacist surplus because so many pharmacists are working part time nowadays!) That last link is to "The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage." Here I think I have some insight, as a historian of science and technology, and as a product of the STEM mill. (Not as an inadequate student, but as an anthropological observer. Like Bruno Latour.) Someone even tried to recruit me into what I now recognise in retrospect as a "quants" laundry off my department's matriculation list, way back in 1989. This is, in short, going to be a contribution to the origins of the "educational complex state," and not of the modern school scam, which is, in my opinion, part and parcel of how the educational complex state works today. So, sorry about that.

This is not to be construed as an admission that I could not say a great deal more, very specifically, about how it works today. I've somewhat whimsically linked to a private college that spams my Facebook feed above, but this is not a criticism of the idea of charging tuition to teach people to be electricians. I may think that this is the wrong way to go about it, but the social harm that I experience is indirect. The student loans that fund this kind of training may or may not pay off in the students future. Right now, they act as subsidies for entry level employers, who can get away with paying below-maintenance wages because the student, or, more often, their partner, is living off their student loans. But enough about how you can have a generalised labour shortage without wage inflation.* I've probably already said more than I can say out of work.

 What is open to be said here goes to my interests as a historian of science and technology. You will recognise the idea of the "Educational -Complex Statement" as a riff on President Eisenhower's "Farewell Address" to the nation, a speech whose actual contents seem to me questionable. 

The old Republican Marshal ("General of the Army," whatever) is worried about the federalisation of research and development and the rise of "a scientific-technological elite" who will dominate public policy with their scientific know-how. I am at a loss to understand how "know-how" is bad for public policy, even though I have seen the argument many, many times. Eisenhower just stands out in fearing "scientific-technical" elites. In previous eras, it might have been Confucian gentlemen, learned caids and ulamas and canon lawyers. For the purposes of this post, it is worth dwelling on the legendary "mandarin," who goes from Eton to Oxbridge to the Civil Service exams and then tries to manage the "white heat" of the modern industrial-technological state with his (of course) grasp of Greek and Latin tags. How absurd! And how absurd that President Eisenhower wanted to reject their technocratic replacements. The rhetoric is familiar, its content malleable, the blatant underlying theme is "Court versus Country," or "Ins" versus "Outs," stripped of the chummy English Settocentism. The insiders claim expertise, so you question the value of their expertise. But you have not been in the old Marshal's shoes, dealing with Curtis LeMay's nuclear planes and pre-emptive strikes that will leave the Earth uninhabitable but who cares because we'll all be living in the asteroid belt anyway. Eisenhower is backward looking and not mistaken. LeMay is borderline insane, but not entirely wrong, either. They are trying to make sense of the educational-complex state in its own terms, sensing that something is wrong without seeing where the intellectual bankruptcy actually lies. 

So we want to float in time, from, when bureaucrats were trained out of the fiqh, or the Five Classics, or Greek and Latin literature, or even out of Woolwich vice Camberly, and to, not the era of the technocratic elite, because that has never really come, but rather to that of the endemic "STEM shortage," and figure out what is actually going on.

Cranfield University. Source

To Bishop Higbald and the whole community of the church of Lindisfarne, good sons in Christ of a most blessed father, the holy Bishop Cuthbert, Alcuin, a deacon, sends greeting and blessing in Christ:

When I was with you your loving friendship gave me great joy. Now that I am away your tragic sufferings daily bring me sorrow, since the pagans have desecrated God's sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street. I can only cry from my heart before Christ's altar: "O Lord, spare thy people and do not give the Gentiles thine inheritance, lest the heathen say, 'Where is the God of the Christians?'"
What assurance can the churches of Britain have, if Saint Cuthbert and so great a company of saints do not defend their own? Is this the beginning of the great suffering, or the outcome of the sins of those who live there? It has not happened by chance, but is the sign of some great guilt.
You who survive, stand like men, fight bravely and defend the camp of God. Remember how Judas Maccabaeus cleansed the Temple and freed the people from a foreign yoke. If anything needs correction in your way of gentleness, correct it quickly. Recall your patrons who left you for a season. It was not that they lacked influence with God, but they were silent, we know not why.
Do not glory in the vanity of dress; that is cause for shame, not boasting, in priests and servants of God. Do not blur the words of your prayers by drunkenness. Do not go out after the indulgences of the flesh and the greed of the world, but stand firm in the service of God and the discipline of the monastic life, that the holy fathers whose sons you are may not cease to protect you. May you remain safe through their prayers, as you walk in their footsteps. Do not be degenerate sons, having such fathers. They will not cease protecting you, if they see you following their example.
Do not be dismayed by this disaster. God chastises every son whom he accepts, so perhaps he has chastised you more because he loves you more. Jerusalem, a city loved by God was destroyed, with the Temple of God, in Babylonian flames. Rome, surrounded by its company of holy apostles and countless martyrs, was devastated by the heathen, but quickly recovered through the goodness of God. Almost the whole of Europe has been denuded with fire and sword by Goths and Huns, but now by God's mercy is as bright with churches as the sky with stars and in them the offices of the Christian religion grow and flourish. Encourage each other, saying, "Let us return to the Lord our God, for he is very forgiving and never deserts those who hope in him."
And you, holy father, leader of God's people, shepherd of a holy flock, physician of souls, light set on a candle-stick, be a model of all goodness to all who can see you, a herald of salvation to all who hear you. May your community be of exemplary character, to bring others to life, not to damnation. Let your dinners be sober, not drunken. Let your clothes befit your station. Do not copy the men of the world in vanity, for vain dress and useless adornment are a reproach to you before men and a sin before God. It is better to dress your immortal soul in good ways than to deck with fine clothes the body that soon rots in dust. Clothe and feed Christ in the poor, that so doing you may reign with Christ. Redemption is a man's true riches. If we loved gold we should send it to heaven to be kept there for us. We have what we love: let us love the eternal which will not perish. Let us love the true, not the transitory, riches. Let us win praise with God, not man. Let us do as the! saints whom we praise. Let us follow in their footsteps on earth, to be worthy to share their glory in heaven. May divine goodness keep you from all adversity and bring you, dear brothers, to the glory of the heavenly kingdom with your fathers. When our lord King Charles returns from defeating his enemies, by God's mercy, I plan to go to him, and if I can then do anything for you about the boys who have been carried off by the pagans as prisoners or about any other of your needs, I shall make every effort to see that it is done.
Fare well, beloved in Christ, and be ever strengthened in well-doing.

Shorter:

Comparing Ealhwine of York to a mob boss never gets old! the relevance here is that Alcuin's residual interest in his see of origins is usually refracted through the York Cathedral School, and the "pagans" who attacked Lindisfarne abducted boys, whom Alcuin gently offers to retrieve --a pretty clear message about his influence over the raiders. Is this supply management being done here? If the pagans had come for Cooley School of Law in 2004, many American law students would have cause to praise Alcuin's influence over them.

If the outlines of the educational complex state have only become visible in the rear-view mirror, then it makes some sense to start at the end, approximately. In 1981, Martin Wiener published English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980, which presented the scarcely novel thesis that Britain's old Nineteenth century industrial leadership self-made men had committed class suicide by sending their children to institutions such as St. Peter's School to learn Greek and Latin tags so that they could pass the Civil Service Exam and/or put on a good show in the Commons. The Wikipedia article already linked cites Eric Hobsbawm, taking some kind of Marxist-puritan "cult of the engineer" position, I suppose, and  Correlli Barnett to show that the cult is a broad church Turning to Barnett, I find Audit of War pointing back to Roy Fedden but also from Hugh Clausen via Stephen Roskill through Jon Sumida back to Arthur Pollen, the Fisher Reforms, and the  water-tube boiler controversy. I reach through that last complicated chain before turning to Fedden, self-proclaimed founder of Cranfield University, because I want to get to 1900. One way of looking at this is that I have shrunk the span between the triumph of the British Industrial Revolution and the reaction to the humanistic-learning-reaction to a very, very interval indeed. The Industrial Revolution happened, well, some time back in the 1800s or so; the sons of the founding industrialists all went to Eton; and by the 1890s the technocratic reaction was well in train. The cynic, or David Edgerton, would suggest that the "turn" identified by Marin Wiener never happened at all. The other is to suggest that something is going on in 1900.

Consider the "General Staff" debate, which, was approximately, an argument that the British army was amateurish and not Prussian at all, because it lacked a "Great General Quartermaster's Staff" to work as the "brain of the army." And also navy, another matter entirely. In the predominant narrative, the great reforms of the turn of the century turned an army dominated by amateur cavalrymen into a modern  technocracy: but look at this. 

Commanders-in-chief	School	Branch of Service	Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff	School	Branch of Service
Jeffrey Amherst, 1793--95	?	Guards	Neville Lyttelton, 1904--08	Eton	Rifle Brigade
David Dundas, 1809--11	Woolwich	Artillery	William Nicholson , 1908-12	Woolwich	Engineers
Frederick, Duke of York, 1795—1809, 1811--22	Private	Cavalry	John French, 1912--14	Sandhurst	Cavalry
Rowland Hill, 1828--42	King’s School, Chester	Infantry	Charles Douglas, 1914	Educated privately	Infantry
Duke of Wellington, 1842--52	Eton	Infantry	James Murray, 1914/15	Woolwich	Artillery
Henry Hardinge, 1852--56	Durham School	Infantry	Archibald Murray	Sandhurst	Infantry
George, Prince of Cambridge, 1856--91	Privately educated	Cavalry	William Robertson	Local church school	Infantry
Garnet Wolseley, 1895--1901	Engineer apprenticeship	Infantry/Engineers	Henry Wilson, 1918--22	None noted (could not pass Sandhurst/Woolwich entrance exams)	Rifle Brigade
Frederick Roberts, 1901--04	Sandhurst	Artillery	Frederick Lambert, 10th Earl of Cavan, 1922--26	Sandhurst	Guards

This is a bit of an appetiser. I would suggest that the effect of the foundation of the general staff was to make the British army less technocratic and more cavalry-oriented, but I would be the first to admit that the table is not going to prove my point statistically. It really just illustrates the prejudices of Brigadier-General James Edmonds, the official historian of the British Army in the First World War, who thought that the effects of the General Staff reforms was to dumb down the army. He's not wrong, though. The new (if it is new) predominance of infantry and cavalry officers in the highest ranks of the army reflects the fact that a quota system limited the number of engineers and artillerists in the Staff College. The British army then trained officers at either  a three-year engineering school (Woolwich) or a one-year leadership-and-fitness academy (Sandhurst), and, given that, it would be surprising if very many Sandhurst graduates were able to beat Woolwich graduates in the staff college exams without quotas. At the same time, in the senior service, the Selborne/Fisher reforms were throwing technical education into a very different but unrelated turmoil, which The Engineer, but not Engineering, thought was a reaction against technocracy. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, it looks like people perceive a serious problem in the way that the Service schools are being run. Given the number of future senior officers who could not make their way into either Woolwich or even Sandhurst, it is hard to see that perception as inaccurate. The reputations of Wilson, Trenchard and Haig have tended to fall over the years, but it is hard to believe that they were less qualified to be at Sandhurst then some of the men who got in! 

1900 is not 1946, of course. I just wanted to move from Wiener's temporally deanchored velleities to the specific problem of the service schools before moving on to 1946 and the founding of Cranfield University. Albert Hubert Roy Fedden (1885--1973) was the son of a prominent and wealthy Bristol family who became the head of the engine design team at Bristol Aeroplane Company after a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions. His tenure ended there 1942 under questionable circumstances ( Bill Gunston's authorised biography for the bizarre details.) As was not uncommon for men of means forced out of professional employment in Britain, Fedden headed off to America to study, as the Wikipedia article puts it, "production line techniques." The Wikipedia article suggests that this just happened. Fedden claims that he was on a mission from the Minister of Aircraft Production. Either way, it was a very short visit that led to a very confusing and little studied burst of literary activity. Gunston (and Barnett) describe a long and extensive "Fedden Report" that was a bombshell to British industry, and which led to another report on the German industry after the war, culminating in a final report advocating for the founding of Cranfield University. The first two at least exist in print. Fedden's mission to America came out as a book, published by MAP in December of 1943, says Worldcat. The  "Fedden Mission" report on the German aviation industry is available on Amazon at a fairly prohibitive price point, since you have to buy each of the three volumes separately, and Gunston makes sense of the diverging accounts of the "Fedden Report" pressing for the foundation of Cranfield by suggesting that there were two or more of them. At the end of the day, the key issue is the much larger employment in American aviation industry "engineering departments" than in British aviation firm "drawing offices." The editor of Aircraft Engineering thinks that this shows that the American firms are doing something wrong, but it is much more likely that it reflects the fact that the American firms have more responsibility for subcontractors than their British counterparts. Whatever the source of the error, the actual numbers from articles in Aviation and Aero Digest give us a better sense of these "college-trained engineers." (That is, most of them had received accelerated engineering training at local colleges in the previous two years.) 

Be that as it may, Fedden returned to a Britain in which the American example served as a spur to a new obsession with the state of scientific and technical education. It does not matter how many "college-trained" engineers, accountants, or even managers (for God's sake, Correlli!) America had. What mattered was how many Britain would have. State-directed technological progress wasall the rage, and soon to materialise as the Brabazon and Saro Princess, And while these colossal white elephants seem a little laughable, they had little concrete impact on the progress of British civil aviation into the 1950s, and the era of the Britannia, Viscount and Comet. 

The future beyond 1955 belonged to the graduates of Cranfield University. Since that is when British civil aviation began to go wrong, it seems easy enough to blame the school, and the educational-complex state. Cranfield, founded in 1946 as the Royal College of Aeronautics on the site of RAF Cranfield, and later absorbing the National College of Agricultural Engineering [1959] (I wish I could make this kind of stuff up!)  is the place where it went wrong.   

Why? I suspect that I've done this dump before, but let's look at the army in 1939:

Total Manpower Burden

In the 1939 Estimates (1939 Sessional Papers, vol. 17 [no separate pagination]),

Vote A: 185,700 on the British establishment, including 5,300 Indian and colonial troops; and 56,800 on the Indian and Burman establishments. Reserve: 139,633. Supplementary Reserve: 32,259. Territorial Army: 206,302. OTC: 916

Educational Burden

School or military college/academy	Officers	Men +Boys	School	Officers	Men
RMA Woolwich	255		S Elec. Lighting	12	315
RMC Sandhurst	540		AA Defence S	60	125
Imp. Defence C	5		S Signals	60	170
Staff C	135+85		Small Arms S	114	194
Senior Officer’s S	57		Army Gas S	60	94
S. Equitation	22		Mot. Mechanics S		200
S. Artillery	135		RASC Tr Cen	66	25
S. Coast Artillery	63		RAOC Tr Cen	20	650
M. C. of Science	160	600+400	PT S	60	270
S. Mil Eng.	125	(450)	Conservatory	c. 180
Railway Tr Cen	?		Instructor’s C	12	130

In addition, the army was preparing to open three  additional Army Technical Schools (Boys) with a total enrollment of 2250. Training for service was also only part of it. Parliamentary policy was to offer one year of vocational training (thus not exactly a high level of proficiency, as the SofS admitted) for soldiers not otherwise trained in a skill prior to separation in order to prevent their being a burden on, and embarrassment to, the country. 

II Royal Air Force

Manpower Burden

The 1939 RAF Vote A is 118,000. The Indian establishment and total reserves are obscure, especially because of the establishment of the Civil Air Guard, but the RAF Reserve, RAFVR, and AAF remained fairly small.

Training figures are apparently deliberately obscure: no figures are cited for 1939. I don’t even have RAF Staff College and IDC figures within the Air Estimates (although the latter figure [5] was no secret.

However, in 1938, Cranwell enrolled 143 cadets, and

No. 1 Electrical and Wireless School, Cranwell, and Equipment Training School, Cranwell had a total enrollment of 1127.

Halton School of Technical Training had an enrollment of 3,830 in 1938; and the new STT (Boys) at Osford enrolled 1427 in 1938. For 1939–40, 6 additional STT would be in operation. Oddly, I also have no figures for the STT (Men), Manston. Although those figures are not particularly enlightening anyway.

In total, in 1938, the RAF trained 143 cadets at Cranwell (University Squadrons?) and 6,384 boys. The cadets were enrolled in 2 year, and boys in 3 year programmes, so that's a lot of training going on.

III Royal Navy

Manpower Burden

Vote A: 133,000 But this total reached 146,500 under the 1938 supplementary estimates, and it is not clear that the persons then placed on Vote A were ever discharged

RN Educational Burden

Royal Naval College Greenwich	191
RN Staff College, Greenwich	43
RN War College, Greenwich	20
RNC of Engineering Keyham	155
RNC Dartmouth	500
IDC	5?
Dockyard Schools	2760
Portland ASW School	150
Shearness Seamen’s Training Establishment	550
Shotley Boy’s Training Establishment	2100
Rosyth BTE	1600
Chatham Mechanical Training Establishment	1100
Gunnery School	450
Portsmouth BTE	800
Torpedo School	650
Gunnery School (HMS Excellent)	800
Naval School	60
Portsmouth MTE	300
Portsmouth Signal School	400
Devonport Gunnery School	550
Devonport Torpedo School	500
Devonport MTE	400
Devonport BTE	200

For some reason I have only the outlay on RN separation vocational training –£11,190 in 1938, 10,640 in 1939.

Eisenhower, looking to the emerging reality of 1950s-era America, is disturbed by the close connection between the military-industrial complex and scientific-technological elites. These numbers suggest that this is only novel for the United States, and that the only available solutions are to either cut back on the size of the armed forces or to stop training military technicians. An armed forces that recruits a significant proportion of the population is going to be a very significant factor in the national educational infrastructure, and the greater part of that training is going to be technical.

So before the "educational complex state," the armed forces train the men they need. The only way to have a large armed forces but not a "military industrial complex" staffed by a "scientific-technical elite" is to find a different way of training STEM specialists.

How does one do this? It might be supposed that the German tradition of the research university and technical high school is a pre-eminent example of state-sponsored technical training. Well, (potentially obsolete research alert!), not necessarily! Wolfgang König, using obituaries from the Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift, establishes that for engineers educated between 1882 and 1914, 11% in private and 8% in public sector were self-educated, 7% in private sector were at technische Mittelschulen, 66.7% private and 40% public at tHs, and 13% private and 51% public at universities.  But for the pre-1880 cohort, fully 40% were self-educated.  University contribution fell over the same period.  In the same period, practical coursework steadily displaced theoretical, which fell from 35% of the curriculum to 19.2% by 1914 (82-7), and lab work and drafting instruction consumed 2/3s of instructional time.  Even theory-oriented lab work fell, from 8.8% of instructional hours to 7.4%. German universities did increasingly displace industry training, but only by becoming more like the industrial training schools they displaced. Certainly the "college-trained" German engineering sector praised by Barnett does not, in fact, exist.(1)

Recalling the "100,000" men (and women) (5) in the engineering departments of American aviation firms, it is interesting to check some actual enrollment data, in this case, chemical engineering departments. (You may recall that many of the college-trained engineers at Northrop did not have aeronautical engineering training. According to a survey undertaken by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers shows the following enrollments in American Chemical Engineering programmes

Degree	1941	1942	1943
B. Ap.  Sci.	2104	2454	2590
M. ASc.	337	325	349
PhD..	57	74	88

An “extreme shortage” is expected in the next few years, of course.(2)

another way of parsing it is by using Alfred H. White, “Research as a Field For Engineers,” Ibid., 199-201.  (200) There are 14,980 engineers current working in research in the US, “over ten percent of our graduates” (201). Another way of parsing this: Roy Fedden is full of shit.

But what about the company schools that produce so many of the actual "college-trained" engineers at the aviation firms? Boeing School consist of? Principal T. Lee, Jr. fills some pages of Aero Digest, June 1941: 70–3. 202, with his “Principles of Vocational Training.” In the midst of traditional principal blather, he notes that his school finds that he can give his students a complete theoretical understanding of internal combustion engines with 60h of instruction, and that 680 hours of workshop work qualify them in engine overhaul and services.

The engineers who beat the Sputnik crisis? A great many of them were trained as piston-engine mechanics. It sounds as though the age of the practical man was not quite over in 1955.

J. D. Akerman, “Report of the Aeronautical Conference.” Ibid., 257-8.  Aeronautical engineering grads have no trouble finding work.  Does the fact that many prominent engineering schools (i.e. Yale, Princeton) lack aero-engineering programmes a factor?  Probably not, as these institutions lack the associated research facilities, and thus cannot profitably offer such programmes.

Speaking of, how is training going in Britain? Comparatively well.

 A short article gives the number of National Certificates in engineering

Level	Degree	1938	1939	1940	1941
Ordinary	Mechanical	1449	1833	1556	1505
	Electrical	917	1133	843	664
Higher	Mechanical	502	632	602	514
	Electrical	379	421	370	278

(3).

 The Imperial College industrial placement programme:

1934	31	1937	116	1940	114
1935	60	1938	167	1941	181
1936	89	1939	228	1942	340

 (4).

As you can see, the number of actually-working engineers seeking accreditation by sitting the Institution examinations swamps the number of Imperial College, London, "co-op" student engineer placements. The venues in which the exam-sitters have received their training varies, but my impression (yes, I could compile better data from the Proceedings  and Journal obituaries, and, no, I do not have time for that) is that the red-brick universities and their college precursors/contemporaries predominate, mainly because these individuals sought technical training as a doorway to accreditation after finding employment in drawing offices. Which is pretty much how those massive engineering departments in American mid-war aviation firms were staffed, too.

At this point, as much to not further delay posting this as for any other reason, I am going to call it a day and argue that this is "demand-based" technical education.

Move ahead then, again, first forward, then back. Sputnik is our defining crisis, a "devastating blow" to the emergent American scientific-technical elite. But what happened? One answer is educational. Not conceding the unlikely proposition that Russian schools had beaten American, the answer came to turn on "abducted" German scientists, incidentally justifying the moral stain that was the employment of Wernher von Braun and his peers.  This was nothing more than myth. The truth is that the  Truman Administration had been a little slow off the mark before the crucial 1950 appointment of Kaufman Keller, and that“Vanguard” had been too ambitious. Neither answer satisfied major stakeholders in the rhetorical battleground, a Democratic Congress, and the, yes, technocratic advisers to a Republican President. (6) The consensus conclusion: we need more scientists!

It was never the intent (I think, I could stand corrected by, say, an actual biography of Cripps) of Cranfield University to turn a demand-side STEM educational infrastructure into  a demand-side one that would metastatise into a modern slave economy --harsh talk, but still!-- His intent --well, I seem to have buried the lede, and I need to get back to St. Paul's School. Educational signalling, I suggest.

*And they say we live in a "free market economy."

1. Wolfgang König, “Science-Based Industry or Industry-Based Science?  Electrical Engineering in Germany Before WWI,” Technology and Culture 37 (1990): 70-89.
2. Stephen L. Tyler, “The Chemical Engineer in National Defence.” Journal of Engineering Education 32 (Sept.  1941-June, 1942): 154-8.
3. Engineering, Jan 2/42
4. Aircraft Engineering (January, 19435. What was the composition of the “notoriously larger American drawing offices?” 5.“How Many Planes, When?” Fortune, March, 1941, 41, 81–3, 183–90, notes that current US total labour in aviation was 500,000 this is cited as 400,000 in labour, 100,000 in “engineering and overhead.” A high estimate of American engineering labour may then be taken as 20% of total manpower, but American business clearly understands this figure to represent all nonproductive labour in the industry, and not just engineers.
6.Rip Bulkeley, The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography of Space.  London: Macmillan, 1991.   Bulkeley’s argument as developed in Chapter I (“A Devastating Blow” (3-18) is that early reaction to the launch of Sputnik in America was uninterested in certain likely explanations for the American lag behind Russian space development, i.e. the Truman Administration’s slow start to major rocket development programmes before the crucial 1950 appointment of Kaufman Keller, and second, a commitment to the overly technologyically amibitious “Vanguard” programme.  The former was uninteresting to a Democratic Congress, while the scientists and engineers managing the post-1957 programme were implicated in Vanguard and had no interest in going over this ground with their contemporary critics.  Nominal Republican allies of the President, conversely, were too excited about the “missile gap” to support the Administration.  Thus, alternative explanations were put forward, most notably (for my context) that “Russia acquired almost all of Hitler’s best rocket brains [according to the widely read journalistic account of the period by Cox and Stoiko, 1958], “which few later historians would ever support.”  (14).  Thus, the myth of the Russian grab here serves contemporary political purposes.