This article examines the statistical work done by Leonard Porter Ayres for the Council of National Defense during the First World War. Director of statistics for the Russell Sage Foundation when war was declared, Ayres immediately volunteered his own and the foundation's statistical expertise. The article focuses on the first year of American intervention in the war and argues that Ayres's important statistical work evolved in three overlapping but distinct stages. The structure of the American state, however, confounded the wider ambitions of Ayres (just as it had those of his rival Edwin Gay) to centralize all government statistical data.

This article explores the first attempt by American physiologists to assist employers with the stubborn problem of tired workers. It examines the work of Frederic Lee and the Committee on Industrial Fatigue, which was set up to increase productivity in the face of the long hours deemed necessary for war readiness. Despite the biomedical investigators' strenuous efforts and their incisive critique of Taylorism, however, corporate management found few practical uses for their findings and remedial proposals. Instead, industrial physiology helped to pave the way for rival consultants from psychology.

Established to mobilize science during the Second World War, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and its director, Vannevar Bush, created new weapons as well as a new relationship between science and government that helped shape Cold War America. Yet much about the partnership that emerged disappointed Bush, especially its uncontrolled expansion and the failure of civilian oversight. The failure, ironically, as this article explains, can be traced to the very approach that allowed Bush to mobilize rapidly during wartime, especially to an “associationalism” and contractual strategy that centralized the management of R&D in Washington while leaving its performance to private contractors. Forged in more conservative decades, the strategy facilitated the rapid exploitation of private-sector resources at the cost of promoting the uncontrolled proliferation of public-private arrangements that undercut Bush's postwar hopes.