This was an important period in the elevation of the status of science. Science and the military became closely intertwined.
According to historian David Noble, during the Great Depression in the 1930s, many Americans began to question their faith in the "beneficent myths of scientific salvation." Technological utopianism gave way to a new fear of technological unemployment as machines performed work while much of the nation struggled to find employment to feed their families.
World War II changed all of this. While the war pulled the nation from the depths of the depression, it also transformed the scientific and engineering professions. The war provided employment, a chance to demonstrate abilities on a national stage, and an opportunity to once again gain public confidence. Noble wrote that through "continuous self-promotion and advertising" as well as real accomplishments in radar, rocketry, and atomic weapons, scientists and engineers emerged from the war "with a larger-than-life image (and self-image) as genuine national heroes."
As new heroes, many saw the nation's scientists and engineers as having a central political role in society. After the defining role that the atomic bomb appeared to play in the war, technical and scientific experts came to be viewed as essential for continued U.S. superiority. G. Pascal Zachary in his biography of Vannevar Bush (often cast as the great enabler of the Manhattan Project) argued, "the lesson of World War II...[was that] the outcome of war was now decided, as much as anything, by a nation's scientific and engineering wizards."
According to Daniel J. Kevles, the physics community seemed to "'wear the tunic of Superman'...and stood in the spotlight of a thousand suns."
What are your thoughts on this argument? Do scientists still "wear the tunic of Superman"?