Budgeting for the Human Race

...By the time Hoover left the White House, the farm production psychology which it had been his business to accelerate in 1918 appeared to many people to be an evil genius presiding over the ruin of American agriculture...

...Crookes was an Englishman who lived on an island that fed itself by trade...

...It was primarily a gesture of compassion toward the individual woman...

...With it came a renewed sense of the Malthusian dilemma as another occasion for budgeting material resources to meet human needs...

...the international diplomacy of the big powers has been dominated by the same issue for many months...

...Yet the resurgence of the movement in this country in the Twentieth Century, under the leadership of Margaret Sanger, does not owe much to anxiety over the pressure of population upon resources...

...There can be no doubt that the final impetus actually required to put it over came from the war and the necessity for conserving grain supplies which it imposed...

...Progressive America, a continental republic, was insular in a way that no island could hope to be...

...On the face of it, the basic impulse of the postwar world was to say goodbye to all the rationing, the privation, the diet planning that had been generated by the war...

...Budgeting for the Human Race by DONALD FLEMING In the last Presidential election campaign, for the first time in American history, a candidate concentrated upon a scientific question as a major issue of his campaign...

...Yet the budgeting impulse itself survived and quickened to the new end of depressing production to the level of economic demand...

...The power of this theme—the budgeting of physical resources in terms of human needs and wants—to bind together seemingly disparate scientific achievements, covering a wide range of human problems, can best be appreciated by summarily listing some of the major developments in science at the beginning of the Twentieth Century...

...The practical application of nuclear physics bore upon the budgeting enterprise from another direction by introducing a new term into calculations of available energy...

...One powerful note of this theme may be detected running through the whole period...

...The Malthusian note was lacking...

...The conservation movement focused on the first two categories with such effectiveness that the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy over coal reserves played a major role in politically bankrupting the Taft Administration...

...The enterprise of toting up the resources of mankind was resumed, with an effort to bring potential consumers into balance with potential supplies...

...Only when this had ceased to be true in the course of the next two generations could the new natural right to health emerge...

...World War II brought the wheel around again to maximum production for insatiable demands and freshened up the now familiar theme of budgeting for nutrition...

...sources of energy for food, fuel, and power...

...This was a contributory factor to the downhill slide of American agriculture in the 1920's which acted out the depression of the 1930's in advance...

...Unavoidable "background" radiation, therapeutic and diagnostic use of X-rays and radioactive isotopes, and exposure to fall-out make up together the sum of a new arithmetic that will have to be kept to a minimum from this time forward...

...In a sense, the war was a hunger contest between the Central Powers and Britain...

...Madame Curie became a well-publicized martyr to the radioactivity that she investigated...

...Deeper involvement in that enterprise is precisely the practical expression of scientific progress, the most sensitive index to its impact upon mankind...

...In knowledge of nutrition, however, the British were out in front...

...The 1920's and 1930's had seen the vitamin concept firmly established in science and in the popular mind...

...On the other it led to widespread instruction of housewives on both sides of the Atlantic in nutritional precepts, so that in a rough sort of way the science of applied nutrition wa& brought down to the level of the ordinary woman's shopping list, from which it could never again be entirely extricated...

...but men will take the same biological equipment with them, the same vulnerability to radiation where radiation will be more powerful than on earth, the same need for oxygen where oxygen will have to be meted out artificially, the same need for shelter where shelter against intolerable circumstances can never be dispensed with...

...The devastating war and depression experience of the Twentieth Century and the growth of the budgeting enterprise drew together all these and many other developments into a single universe of discourse...

...and like every other form of effective intelligence is always leading on to new expenditures of itself...

...Many historians and sociologists have regarded the emergence of bookkeeping as a central element in the Protestant and capitalist creeds —keeping track of income and outgo is seen as symptomatic of a will directed toward the rationalization of economic life and, by extension, of human endeavor at large...

...Presumably the new age of nuclear power will also be the age of space travel...

...Crookes was concerned with drawing up balance sheets of supply and demand in food supplies...

...The agricultural program of the New Deal was like a gigantic inversion of the wartime imperatives...

...Calculations of this sort as applied to the known—and exhaustible—resources of the United States were a staple of the conservation movement which was in full swing in America when The Progressive was founded, and of which a president of the University of Wisconsin in the elder LaFollette's prime, Charles R. Van Hise, was the intellectual leader...

...So maybe the whole impulse can be left behind with earth itself...

...Behind this endeavor lay the researches of Sir John (later Lord) Boyd Orr in the mid-1930's on the diet of the different classes of the British population...

...The British, by contrast, were pioneering in a newer nutrition which had begun to discover the need for what were then called "subtle essential principles"— and are now called vitamins...

...His books include "John William Draper and the Religion of Science" and "Will,am H. Welch and the Rise of Modern Medicine...

...Perhaps it was because of the emphasis on the moral rather than on the scientific aspects of conservation that the conservation movement did not have as part of its controlling animus any sense of despair about the mounting pressure of people upon resources that were properly husbanded...

...Another consequence of World War I which has had a marked influence on the present and the future was the bringing into cultivation of several million acres of marginal land in the United States which was basically unfitted for the purpose...

...Now began a series of articles and books, most notably William Vogt's Road to Survival, which questioned the value of this once unequivocally sought-after goal...

...The birth control movement both in England and America goes back to the early part of the Nineteenth Century and, inevitably, has had some Malthusian connotations...

...Over-exposure to X-rays with severe radiation burns was a commonplace in the early days of radiology...

...Budgeting has always been for life on earth...

...This conviction was midwife to an extremely rare historical phenomenon, the birth of a new natural right —the right to health...

...The last thing that science in the Space Age is likely to give is remission from the budgeting enterprise...

...The historic discovery by Herman J. Muller in 1927 that X-rays will induce mutation in genes took on new relevance...

...It became clear for the first time that survival of a nation under fire might turn precisely on superior budgeting for nutrition...

...The real vigor of neo-Mal-thusianism, defined by orientation toward the well-being of society, may be said to date from the close of World War II...

...Those natural resources which are susceptible of conservation may be divided into inert materials...

...In physics, X-rays had been discovered by Roentgen, the electron by J. J. Thomson, and radioactivity by Becquerel and the Curies...

...It is a curious circumstance that both in England and America the presumptively unpopular job of food controller in wartime proved to be, for men capable of grasping the nettle firmly, a claim to immense public esteem...

...It was a rebuke to the plutocrats, a means of bringing irresponsible businessmen to heel, a contest over the locus of power...

...This concept was true as far as it went but it did not go far enough...

...The common element was the feeling that if science discloses some new possibility for giving people equal opportunities in life, nothing will excuse the failure to act upon it...

...Apart from the conjunction of conservation with Malthusianism, one now had what was lacking in the progressive conservation movement at the beginning of the century—a widening of horizons to include the whole human race...

...In biology, the work of Mendel was about to be exhumed and a science of genetics founded...

...The Germans were stuck fast in the conception, dating back to Baron von Liebig, a profoundly influential chemist of the Nineteenth Century, that the needs of the body are carbohydrates and fats for energy, proteins for repair of tissues, and a few, very few, minerals which serve unknown purposes...

...and here for once the budgeting psychology appears to falter in its forward march through history...

...It must be acknowledged that the conservation movement in its early days was more than an effort to preserve natural resources...

...The two dangers of genetic injury to the race and the direct somatic injury to the individual, chiefly from Strontium 90 with resulting leukemia, have enforced still another kind of budgeting, a factor to be measured not in tons or calories but roentgens...

...Science multiplies occasions for budgeting...

...For one thing it fostered the greatest political reputation to come out of the war and set Herbert Hoover on the high road to the Presidency...

...It is the great rising note of modern history: the growth of budgeting for the human race...

...The same lesson—that everybody was in it together—was also imposed by the postwar awakening to the dangers of radioactivity...

...The result was that with the coming of the war, nutritionists were able to put at the disposal of receptive governments prescriptions of an unprecedented refinement for keeping up the health of military and civilian populations...

...He had shown that though all classes were fairly equal in consumption of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, many millions of the less prosperous were seriously deficient in "protective foods"—those rich in vitamins...

...New resources may conceivably be tapped somewhere in the universe...

...The basic impulse to keep records and to make the results significant may have been gathering force for centuries, but the distinctive note of recent times has been the pouring forth by science of DONALD FLEMING, professor of history at Yale, now visiting professor at Harvard, is a specialist In the history of science...

...but his own anxieties were closely akin to those of men, like his fellow countryman economist William Jevons, who were calculating how long it would take to use up the then known coal supplies of the world...

...It would be unprofitable to discuss whether Prohibition was or was not going to prevail anyhow...

...The politically explosive presumption that perpetuation of a stunted race was rendering class distinctions permanent aroused much indignation on the Left and opened wide the prospect of turning the war to internal social and political advantage...

...Within little more than a decade of Hiroshima, fission power was being generated on an economic scale in Britain and the United States...

...The decks were cleared for systematic application in peacetime of the means for annihilating disease, including penicillin, sulfa drugs, and antibiotics, which had first become available in the 1930's and more particularly during the war itself...

...Sir William Osier, the great Canadian physician, in his renowned textbook of medicine which led to the founding of the Rockefeller Institute and more broadly to the whole range of Rockefeller medical benefactions, was still proclaiming at the close of the Nineteenth Century, and correctly, that almost nothing was yet known about the specific cure of specific diseases...

...It was no accident that the German chemist Fritz Haber now solved the problem that Crookes had posed, that of fixing atmospheric nitrogen for fertilizers— and explosives...

...For all the benefits that this might bring, it would not solve the problem of an exploding world population unless fusion power could be applied to production of metabolic energy in, for example, factories for the cultivation of algae...

...More significantly still, England seized the opportunity to make of this crisis a means of eliminating dietary class distinctions and emerged from the war with a stronger breed of men and women than ever before...

...and the concept of vitamins was just over the horizon...

...new opportunities for putting this impulse to work...

...Budgeting of people against food supplies will have to continue unabated in the age of nuclear power...

...But as vital and pervasive political issues as these are today, they are merely climactic signs of the accelerating pre-eminence of science in public life which has characterized the first half of the Twentieth Century...

...and people...

...The answer is no...

...The scientific grounding of a philosophy of "equal shares" found still further expression at the close of the war with the institution of socialized medicine...

...But only when nuclear physicists had leaped forward in half a century from J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron in 1897 to the dropping of atomic bombs in 1945 and the testing of hydrogen bombs in 1954 did the menace of radioactivity hit human consciousness...

...Gifford Pinchot insisted it was a moral issue, a matter of right or wrong...

...Fusion power appears to be no more than 10 or 15 years in the future...

...and with it, something more—the worldwide perspectives that were so evident in Crookes' phophesy...

...the scientific and technological achievement marked by Russia's Sputniks threw the first serious cloud over the personal popularity of President Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...No such right could have been conceived or vindicated before the Twentieth Century...

...Yet the budgeting enterprise of the war period left a decisive mark upon the history of the 1920's in America...

...He is now working on a large-scale history of science in America...

...Controlled release of fusion energy, in contrast to uncontrolled hydrogen bombs, would make ordinary water the ultimate fuel...

...On one side this determined the rock-bottom imports of food that England could not do without...

...Hoover, in his role of czar of food, contributed to the emergence of one of the great political issues of the 1920's, the Prohibition experiment...

...Then came World War I. The natural resources movement was succeeded by a new kind of budget, the dietary budget for the individual family and the national community...

...As if to sound the pitch for the age to come, the great English physicist and chemist Sir William Crookes prophesied at the close of the Nineteenth Century that starving times were ahead unless chemists found the means of fixing atmospheric nitrogen to make artificial fertilizers...