The Essential Writings of Vannevar Bush edited by G. Pascal Zachary

Abstract

G. Pascal Zachary has selected, organized, and presented a masterful collection of Vannevar Bush’s thinking about information systems, organizational dynamics, weapons of war, the future of computing, potential benefits of the Great Depression, the space race, solar energy, and the elimination of drudgery, as well as his high regard for the duck and his wonder at the mysteries of the silkworm. Zachary’s notes before each of the fifty-six selections provide context and insight. They could stand alone as a superb essay on Bush’s life and career. Several themes suggest themselves in these readings. One is that Bush’s perspective was that of a successful meritocrat, with the contributions and limits of that historically important culture. In the introduction, Zachary notes that Bush’s pronouns are invariably masculine. The habit jumps out to a modern reader, but the anachronism is more than a generational quarrel over antecedents. In considering the leadership of the organizations that engaged him, Bush thought only about men, and men of a certain type. He brings to mind the Framers when they fashioned the Senate, the Electoral College, and the federal judiciary. The authors of the Federalist Papers believed that leadership required men who had established themselves, who were older, wealthier, wiser, successful in their careers, who could be trusted to promote the national interest, and who needed to be shielded from the passions of the masses. Bush would have concurred. We have since learned that a meritocracy that limits its candidates to a small slice of the demographically fortunate is a meritocracy too restricted to warrant much confidence that we have found our most capable. Bush’s focus on elites was evident in his observation in 1937 about the utility of science for society, concluding that “the mentally defective benefit along with everyone else, breed rapidly, and may inherit the earth” (p. 36). This judgment may well have been influenced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision a decade earlier upholding forced eugenic sterilizations in the nefarious case of Buck v. Bell. Eugenics was one of the great tragedies in U.S. history, all the more so for being fashionable among the well-off. A second theme that emerges from these readings is Bush the classicist. Again and again, he urged balance, a middle path between hazards, the ideal of Aristotle’s Golden Mean. He thought that people from various professions should be able to