Between American history and history of science

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 115-129, 1996 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain 0039-3681/96 $15.00 + 0.00

ESSAYREVIEW

Between American History and History of Science Nathan Reingold* Hugh Richard Slotten, Patronage,

Practice, and the Culture of American

Science:

Alexander Dallas Bathe and the U.S. Coast Survey (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xi + 228 pp., ISBN O-521-43395-9, Cloth $44.95. Slotten’s book is important

both for the story conveyed

and as an example of what

is happening to what was once a minority deviant tradition-the effort by historians of the United States to fashion a history of science firmly related to national history and primarily based on non-cognitive aspects of the scientific life. The effort is now well-established but hardly a decisive factor in the history of science community in the United States. In 1986 the first volume of the new series of Osiris could be devoted to Historical Writings on American Science: Perspectives and Prospects.’ Earlier, in 1982, Marc Rothenberg had issued the first volume of his critical and selective

bibliography,

followed

by a second

volume

in 1993.’ Much of this

development occurred outside of history of science programs; key works and trends antedated the writings of T. S. Kuhn which are often credited with producing the development

of a more socially attuned history of science.3 The two best known

Americanist works, even to this day, A. Hunter Dupree’s Science in the Federal Government4 and Daniel J. Kevles’ The Physicists: The History of a Scientijic *Historian Emeritus, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20560, U.S.A. ‘Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter (eds), Historical Writing an American Science: Perspectives and Prospects (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Reprint edn of Osin’s (2nd ser. 1, 1985). *Marc Rothenberg (camp.), The Histor?, of Science and Technology in the United States: A Critical and Selective Bibliography, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1982 and 1993). 3N. Reingold, ‘Through Paradigm-land to a Normal History of Science’, Science, American Style (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), pp. 387409. 4A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

0039-3681(95)00030-5 115

116

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Community in Modem America’,

historiographic

were markedly different in their origins and in their emphases from the norms of the field in both the United States and

Western Europe. Slotten’s book is well worth reading because Alexander Dallas Bathe and the Coast Survey, the federal agency he headed from 1843 to his death in 1867, were key elements in the founding of the modem American scientific community. Many present features of the American research scene have roots in the events of the middle decades of the last century before the upsurge of the graduate school after the founding of the Johns Hopkins University in 1876. In its heyday the Coast Survey (later renamed the Coast and Geodetic Survey) was the largest employer of physical scientists and mathematicians in the United States.6 Slotten has written both a biography and an institutional history, both a benefit and a hazard to readers. But the effort greatly enriches the text even at those points where I disagree with his interpretations. One specific hazard is the lack of narrative closure. Readers do not get an adequate explanation of why this most able leader ultimately failed nor why his agency persisted in its excellence long after its primacy evaporated. After all, from 1861 to 1891, the Survey employed the greatest American thinker of the day (perhaps ever?), Charles Sanders Peirce, whose father, Bathe’s friend the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce, succeeded to the Survey’s Superintendency in 1867.7 For those of us concerned with the historiography of the sciences in the U.S., Slotten’s book also brings up important, contentious issues. Dupree was a student of the Harvard historian A. M. Schlesinger, Sr., a very influential figure in his day in the study of U.S. history. Kevles did his dissertation on physics in the U.S. at Princeton under the American historian Eric Frederick Goldman.* I regard myself as a student of Richard Harrison Shryock, best known for his work in the social history of medicine

but also a strong advocate of including

science, medicine, and technology in the mainstream of U.S. history. Shryock is a ghostly presence in much of the book. And there were others. It is not accidental that Slotten was a student of Ronald Numbers of the University

of Wisconsin

(Madison),

who did his graduate work under A. Hunter Dupree. If many of the historians of the U.S., c. 1950-1965, were receptive to the development, no doubt because of the events of World War II, the small emerging community of historians of science had other ideas. To them the really important history of science had occurred earlier in Western Europe. It was universalistic and

‘Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientijc Community in Modem America (New York: Knopf, 1978). 6Hugh Richard Slotten, ‘The Dilemmas of Science in the United States: Alexander Dallas Bathe and the U.S. Coast Survey’, Isis 84 (1993). 2649. ‘Joseph Brent, Charles Sunders Peirce, A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Peirce’s years at the Survey were the most stable, productive years of his life, followed by the harrowing, grim period so well given by Brent. ‘Goldman’s best known work is Rendezvous with Destiny: A History ofAmerican Reform (New York: Knopf, 1952).

117

Between American History and History of Science

skewed ideally

to abstract conceptions.

A national

attention to social factors and to applications

focus which also paid warm

merely seemed to confirm the limitations

of the American national scene. That the Americanists

avidly studied institutions

like

the government and social processes such as professionalization and popularization only confirmed the provinciality and relative insignificance of the history of science within the United States to orthodox historians of science.g Much has changed since those simple days. Tolerated but not encouraged,

the Americanists

spread their influence

as their

output of scholarship increased. Tolerance was accorded this growing field as an exotic specialty. In 1981 Arnold Thackray could write of the increasing study of national culture, specifically citing ‘American science or Chinese science’.” By 1984 Corsi and Weindling would mark the ‘rapid expansion of science in the United States and...aspects of medicine’ by a chapter on the history of American science and medicine in part IV of chapters on Islam, India indicated by Thackray’s would become ‘a flood

their guide to information sources. Part IV also included and China. ” Where the wind was blowing is perhaps better expressed fear in Isis in 1982 that the growth of this specialty that may completely wash away certain more esoteric and

traditional specialties’.” Nothing of the sort happened; history of science was changing in various ways, even simulating some of the practices of the Americanists who certainly never dominated the field in the U.S. Individual historians like myself and others I will not name bridled at the implication that our mind-sets derived from Kuhn.13 Our concerns antedated his writings and had other roots. Kuhn was knowledge-centered; only those non-cognitive factors fashioning and validating conceptual developments entered his world view. We were interested in the behavior of individuals and groups, scientists and non-scientists, who functioned within a particular national culture. Behaviors studied were not limited to knowledge formation and validation. Many of us were avidly interested in differences and similarities with European analogs.14 Unlike Kuhn we were often much concerned

with applied

fields like medicine,

technology

and

agriculture. To be more specific, Dupree, for a while a colleague of Kuhn’s at Berkeley, resisted the latter’s pressures to change his historiographic

stance. Obviously

influenced

by

World War II, Dupree attempted to place the sciences within the political structure ‘Based on my personal experiences and many similar stories told me. toArnold Thackray, ‘History of Science in the 198Os’, Journal ofInterdisciplinary History 12 (1981). 299-314. The quote is from p. 309. “Pietro Corsi and Paul Weindling (eds), Information Sources in the History of Science and Medicine (London: Butterworth, 1983). The placement was meant well, I suppose. But it indicated how exotic the subject seemed then both as non-European and socially oriented histories centering on national culture. It annoyed me greatly since 1 knew I was part of Western Civilization. “Arnold Thackray, ‘On American Science’, Zsis 73 (1982), 9. 13N. Reingold, op. cit., note 3. t4Discussed in N. Reingold, ‘The Peculiarities of the Americans or are there National Styles in the Sciences?’ Science in Context 4 (1991) 347-366.

118

Studies in History and Philosophy

and process of the nation. I keep on reminding

historians and sociologists

qf Science of science

that Paul Forman (who did take course work with Kuhn) did his Weimar thesis under Dupree.” Slotten signals his intellectual genealogy by opening with a poem by John Quincy Adams, whose presidency is a key moment for Dupree’s vision of the history of science in the U.S. There is also the tell-tale reference to the ‘central scientific organization’, a focus of Dupree’s analysis of the national research structure.‘6 And, in my opinion, a dubious influence on Slotten’s interpretive stance. Kevles had a different but related orientation. His influential book on the American physics community postulates a process of elite scientists and elite institutions attempting to increase the output of top quality research while establishing a degree of autonomy within the national society derived from a recognition of the moral and cognitive authority of the great investigators. Unlike my work on professionalization, Kevles sees the process as aiming for the increase of basic research, not primarily the supply of trained individuals for the many tasks required by a complex modem society.” The word ‘elite’ occurs too frequently in this text for my taste. The spread of the sciences had broad implications for the nation beyond the growth of theoretical science. To these more obvious influences must be added three others: the so-called American Whig culture of Daniel Walker Howe;‘” the concept of Humboldtian science (from Cannon) or geographic science (as given by myself); scientific and technical work as cultural forces (cited here as given by sundry social scientists and even myself). The chronicler of gentlemanly truth, Steven Shapin, thinks history needs disciplining by social theory.” From this book and others it is clear that many histories are flush with concepts from history itself, the social sciences, philosophy, law, and what have you. History as an intellectual venture has traditionally had no scruples about using any analytic methods and conceptual

tools it found useful. This

was true even in the days when historians confidently unfolded grand narratives (let us say of linear progress) based upon a limited range of factors. Over the last century or so, grand narratives have fallen out of fashion, being replaced by two related trends. The most obvious is the tendency to a total history in which everything

theoretically

has a place and a role. Since we cannot,

even

“See the strange discussion bearing on this point in Tian Yu Cao, ‘The Kuhnian Revolution and the Postmodernist Turn in the History of Science’, Pfrysis 30 (1993). 477-504. esp. pp. 477478. ‘%lotten, fatronnge, Pracrice ., pp. vii and 12-13; A. Hunter Dupree, ‘Science Policy in the United States: The Legacy of John Quincy Adams’, Minerva 28 (1990), 259-271. “For Kevles’ most recent statement on professionalization of science, see his ‘American Science’, in Nathan 0. Hatch (ed.), The Professions in American History (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1988), pp. 107-127. The Physicists, op. cit., note 5, has extensive treatments of his concepts of best-science and political elitism. Slotten’s uses of Kevles are many; see Slotten, Patronage andfractice.. , pp. 7677, for one example. ‘*Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture ofthe American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). “Stephen Shapin, ‘Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen Through the Extemalism-Intemalism Debate’, History of Science30 (1992), 333-369, at p. 3.55.

Between American

with clever literary ploys, put everything narrowly

119

History and History of Science

specialized

from any past into our pages, we produce

works. But even these can have an underlying

grand narrative

or ambitious intention. Under the influence of Richard Shryock and the consciousness of a line I came across in Crane Brinton (‘To try to find the relations between the ideas. . . what a few men write or say and many men actually do’),2o I tried for a history conscious of both ideas and everyday life. Reading Slotten provokes in me an almost autobiographical stream of consciousness. And also a desire to figure out what makes him and related historians tick. Since a total history is literally impossible, what are the alternatives, besides the specialized monograph? The history of ideas as such, sometimes known as intellectual history? Within this domain is the more rarefied technical study of the concepts of philosophy and the social sciences. Or we can study the creators and bearers of the ideas, within particular societies or as disembodied sprites thinking in a vacuum. Or we can analyze the behavior of scientists or others among themselves in reference to the ideas. Or we can conceive

of the contents

of intellectual

fields and the

individuals involved as in an almost continuous state of interaction with aspects of the national culture. Which aspects are a key issue here ? ‘High’ culture? Institutional domains? Religion? Politics? Economics? Popular perceptions? Social structures and processes? There is no end to the possibilities. What is often evident is the widespread interest in getting history of science close to or even part of general history (e.g., ‘the history of science must be studied as part of general history’ referring to a Swedish concern for context (e.g., re. project). 2’ This is a part of the now well-established biography of scientists: ‘the historian should use biographical material as a ‘convenient

indicator

of the possibilities

for action

society’. . . ‘).22 The last source has specific comments philosophy

and of sociology

What is occurring characterized

on the pernicious

among us in this deviant Americanist

anthropology

by a particular effects of

on history.

by the young Russian

program of anthropologization of the strong

offered

historian

tradition

Daniel Alexandrov

was recently

as a ‘moderate

of history’ in contrast to the ‘estrangement’ program

(e.g. Bruno

Latour).23 Historians

strategy in the

Americanist tradition ‘simply study the day-to-day relationships that determine the dynamics of science’. Or as Alexandrov also puts it, the studies in question try to show the routine environment of a group, or the ‘way of life, the totality of customs, habits, morals, etc.’ A more precise description

of this historical anthropology

is given by

“Crane Brinton, Ideas and Men (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950). 2“Studying Science in Sweden, 187&1970’, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 44 (1994). pp. 123-124. “T. SGderqvist, ‘The Architecture of a Biographical Pathway’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 25, Part 1 (1994), 165-175. The quotation is from p. 173. 23Daniel Alexandrov, ‘Historical Anthropology of Science in Russia’ (‘Istoricheskaiia antropologiia nauki v Rossii’), Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia tekhniki 4 (1994), 3-22. I am very appreciative of Alexandrov’s courtesy in making his text available.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

120

Peter Burke:24 (1) it is qualitative

and deals with specific cases; (2) ‘microscopic

focused on small communities’; description’ symbolism

(3) interpretations

arising

from Geertz’s

are in terms of a society’s own norms and categories; for ‘apparently

trivial routines

and ‘thick

(4) sought is the

and rituals which serve to enforce and

maintain a certain world view’. Burke, an anthropologist,

names great precursors and

current exemplars from his field. Allowing for differences in terminology, what he describes is much of the received wisdom and usage of my tribe of historians. This moderate historical anthropology is in a very different world from the great paradigm-obsessed scientific groups of Kuhn, or the universalizing pretensions of the social studies of scientific knowledge. I agree with Burke’s view that some sociology of science presents a problem for historians because of the ‘willful lack of concern with change, local context and individual intentions’. When editing documents, I always sought daily routines, even of great scientists, and cherished the textures of routine thoughts and actions.” Who or what is great is best known from deviations from the ordinary. And the ordinary is not always self-evident. Slotten immediately makes clear his ambitions and his general stance.26 After rejecting doing social construction ‘in a naive way’, he declares ‘I pursue a broader analysis, also taking into account techniques, instrumentation, social arrangements, public interaction, pattern of patronage, and the values and ideals supporting professional development’. Because Bathe and the Survey helped establish future patterns for U.S. science, Slotten’s overview is necessarily sweeping: ‘neither Bathe nor the Coast Survey were divorced from the social, religious, economic, and intellectual concerns of the period’. That is an awfully big morsel to digest in a slender book. Most important, he declares that his scope is not limited to the disciplinary. The American Whig political culture Slotten finds in Howe is used to expound a set of beliefs supposedly

animating

Bathe and, by implication,

still relevant to the

present American scene. Stressing innovation and order, the Whig political culture called for government action to enhance economic growth while also reinforcing social and moral authority

(of the right thinking

people, of course).

These are

exemplified by Bathe’s family, especially the Dallas clan. (Slotten pays no attention to whether Benjamin Franklin, the great grandfather of his subject, would fit in among these descendants.) The Whigs are contrasted with the Jacksonian Democrats described as less open to industrial development and more tolerant of cultural diversity. 27 American historians will immediately recognize this and related points in the text as great oversimplifications of a complex, ambiguous situation.

24Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modem Italy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987). especially pp. 3-5. =For a brief discussion of this historiographic dilemma, see N. Reingold and I. Reingold (eds), Science in America, a Documentary History, 190&1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). pp. viii-ix. Wotten, Patronage, Politics. , p. 2f. 271bid., pp. 17, 40, 88, 123 and passim.

Between American History and Histoly of Science

Slotten’s manuscript

analysis

based on a detailed

examination

of many

sources from which is given a rich picture of Bathe and his relatives as

a Whig (or republican) absolute

is, interestingly,

121

patrician

moral standards

family. Slotten pays much attention to the role of

and how science fits in here: ‘scientific

activity

is not

purposeless . . . science was always defined in terms of an underlying moral and religious end...[a] means of personal sanctification.‘28 The way Slotten presents Bathe’s culture, one hardly gets any sense of his passion for knowledge nor of any personal

zest for the mechanics

of administration,

two attributes

Bathe copiously

possessed. More serious is the awkwardness faced by Slotten in using the Whig thesis, given the facts he so fulsomely presents. He has to write about the American Whig culture knowing full well that even his own data show that it did not coincide with the Whig political party, a precursor of the Republican party. Many of Bathe’s relatives were prominent Democrats. 29 In the Senate the Coast Survey had stronger support from southerners and Democrats, in the House from northerners and Whigs.30 This is the well-known disjunction between parties and ideology in U.S. politics. Another serious problem for the Whig argument relating to science arises from Dupree’s writings on President John Quincy Adams’ unsuccessful attempt to establish a national observatory. Both Dupree and Slotten know that later under the Democrats astronomy expanded greatly. Slotten unconvincingly ascribes the growth as largely due to the patronage of the Coast Survey, neglecting the motivations of educators and local boosterism, and the intellectual attractiveness of the field. Much is made of class authority as a motive arising from the patrician republican values of Bathe’s family. The emphasis of family influences may partially derive from Kevles who wrote in The Physicists. .3’ ‘Science is shaped in the endlessly unpredictable

environments

work upon

temperament and imagination and the way that professional the ordinary drives for money, status, and power.’

way that social

and family

circumstances

individual meld with

But Slotten’s Bathe is high-minded despite abundant evidence of astute manipulations to get his way.‘* Being of a cultural elite and an elite theorist apparently excuses anything, even a ‘family’ head of the Survey advising his subordinates to remain unmarried

while he and others were accompanied

in the field by their wives.33

At points Slotten comes pretty close to saying that the high minded can do the ignoble because their hearts are pure.34

**Ibid.,p. 23. 291bid.,

ch. 1.

Mlbid., p. 32. 3’Kevles, The Physicists, 41. 32Robert Post, ‘Science, Public Policy, and Popular Precepts; Alexander Dallas Bathe and Alfred Beach as Symbolic Adversaries’, in N. Reingold (ed.), The Sciences in the American Context: New Perspectives (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1979). pp. 77-98. 33Slotten, Patronage, Politics . . . . p. 165f. 341bid.,pp. 71, 89.

122

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

The linkage of ‘theoretical elites’ to a system of elitism in socio-economic is anachronistic. theoretician;

Bathe

was a very bright, well-trained

scientist.

terms

He was not a

nor were many in his day at the Survey making theoretical contributions.

The Survey was executing Europe. In Bathe’s

a program based on existing knowledge

time there were advances in instrumentation

from Western

and in techniques

of observation. Bathe was a managerial innovator. Later in the century a few individuals at the Survey (like C. S. Peirce and the geodesist John F. Hayford) are properly classifiable as theoreticians. Slotten is too anxious to link Bathe’s Survey to the much later rise of ‘research universities’, which he loosely writes as appearing after the Civil War, even to claiming that Bathe’s on the job training in the Survey was a precursor of graduate education. By 1900 there were only a few institutions in the United States we can perhaps characterize as ‘research universities’. What is interesting in retrospect is how many others were struggling before 1940, some successfully, to get to that state.” Relying on Robert Bruce’s use of entries in the Dictionary of American Biography for the period, Slotten asserts that the scientists were an ‘elite of wealth and family interest’.3h Only Joseph Henry’s father was an unskilled worker. But, to mention one case, Asa Gray’s father was a tanner and the young Gray hardly grew up in an atmosphere of wealth and gentrifying culture. If one looks at the conventional biographical sources for the small number of scientists in ante-bellum America, the socio-economic status of families is not always clear. Nor do past occupations have the same cachet as they do today. Physicians then were not necessarily in a highly regarded, well-paid occupation. Clark Elliott, who has studied a much larger sample than Bruce, concluded that ‘the ante-bellum American man of science came most frequently from an intellectualizing family in an urbanized region’.” He suggests that the upper and middle class of families of professionals and from commerce were major sources but that ‘there was also a way for the children of the poor and lower middle class families to make a mark on the growth of scientific knowledge in America’. Over the long haul, the growth of the national scientific community was not fueled by the scions of upper class gentry, established professionals, or the wealthy. It was a middle class phenomenon sometime accelerated by overseas talent. One notices the presence of Germans

among the Survey’s staff early on, of whom

C. A. Schott was the most significant scientifically. The Jacksonian period in U.S. history (roughly from 1824 to 1860) despite a great Panic in 1837, was a great era of economic expansion. It was the era when the ‘5For this topic. which has a vast literature, see Roger Geiger, To Advance Knowledge, the Growth of Research Lfniversitirs, 1900-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Robert Kohler, ‘The Ph.D. Machine: Building on the Collegiate Base’, Isis 81 (1990), 638-662; N. Reingold, ‘Graduate School and Doctoral Degree: European Models and American Realities’, in N. Reingold, Science, American Style, pp. 171-189. %otten, Patronqe. Practice.. _,p. 28; Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876 (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 90. “Clark A. Elliott, ‘The American Scientist in Antebellum Society; A Quantitative View‘, Social Studies

American

of Science

5 (1975),

9%108.

123

Between American History and History of Science

standard of living in the U.S. surpassed Great Britain. Wealth was being accumulated in great quantities

by the standards of the day. Contrary to the supposed American

Whig patrician-republican ground

at the expense

ethos, new wealth was often flaunted. Excesses gained of old-time

ways. One interpretation

of the Jacksonian

period by the younger Schlesinger proclaimed it as the time of a social democratic movement. Later historians saw the era as one where new money and power pushed aside old elites.38 From this standpoint we might characterize Bathe and his allies in the Whig culture as Canutes trying to hold back the rising tide of the new cultural order. Bathe’s smooth manipulations for the Survey then become interesting but ultimately futile gyrations to get a significant part of the rising Gross National Product for research. To reinforce the significance of the cultural values of Bathe’s family, Slotten surprisingly unveils the contrast between Quaker Philadelphia and Puritan Boston, leaning heavily on the work of the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell.39 Like the work of Howe, Baltzell relies on abstract idealizations based on a few presumably exemplary instances to make his point. In the early nineteenth century Boston was not Puritan nor was Philadelphia Quaker. But Baltzell purports to show how the idealized attributes of each sect contributed to Boston’s presumed excellence and Philadelphia’s supposed penchant for mediocrity. (Baltzell is also the discoverer of the ‘fact’ that Philadelphia was the last bastion in the United States of the institution of the kept mistress. I have long had a secret unrequited desire to link that to the history of science in the city.) Slotten so approves of Puritan Boston and its moral earnestness that he thinks the Dallas clan were spiritually Bostonians and has to explain A. D. Bathe’s ‘genial’ liking for German wines. Bathe, for whatever it is worth, was very sociable and during his lifetime belonged to a number of private dining groups. His great grandfather

would have approved.

Slotten (via Baltzell) is, of course, giving a version of the old New England interpretation of U.S. history or at least the aspects that it favors such as literature. There was (or is) another regional interpretation, like Jefferson interpretation

and Madison

a Southern one, in which Virginians

loom large. There has never been a Mid-Atlantic40

although Richard H. Shryock and others playfully suggested one. Those

states by the mid-nineteenth

century were leaders in commerce,

manufacturing

and

finance. Their populations were ethnically diverse in a manner that later became the norm in most of the country. And for better or worse, the patterns of their politics

38A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age ofJackson (New York: Little, Brown, 1945); Edward Pessen, Riches, Class and Power Before the Civil War (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1973). 39E. Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authoriry andLeadership (New York: Free Press, 1979). For a perceptive commentary on this book, see Daniel T. Rodgers, ‘Democracy, Mediocrity, and the Spirit of Max Weber’, Reviews in American History 8 (1980). 465470. %sually taken to include New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, of Columbia.

Delaware, Maryland,

and the District

124

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

and high and popular cultures largely dominated the United States in the last century. And are still influential. As to high culture, in an editorial on Van Wyck Brooks’ The Flowering England

(1940),

Shryock concluded

of New

that 4’ ‘One may sum up the whole matter by

observing that Boston once excelled in cultural achievement by the simple device of defining culture in terms of those things in which Boston excelled’. That is, in literature and in the writing of history. I would add two observations, one a matter of taste, the other relating to the sciences. The two New Yorkers, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, are worth more than a busload of pallid New England scribblers. In the ante-bellum years, the Mid-Atlantic region was clearly the leading region for the production of scientists.42 Henry Adams, the descendent of two New England presidents, in his autobiography, The Education of Henly Adams, knew the national drift better than Slotten when he advised, if results are wanted, call upon the service of a Pennsylvanian.43 Patronage, Practice, and the Culture ofAmerican Science is so rich in content that the unwary might not notice where treatments are rather light or nearly absent. Bathe was a graduate of West Point, but Slotten does not call attention to the French precedents for using Army engineers for national works and the resulting avidity for planning. Bathe was for governmental interventions at a time when these were rather limited. The exceptions involving the uses of the armed forces are important in light of later developments. Slotten uses the older, hackneyed language about Baconianism now largely extirpated by recognition that the best natural historians were not random collectors but often carrying out specific research agendas.44 Much done by the Survey was engineering, and its work owed much to the example of engineering projects. Some of the Survey’s theoreticians such as Schott and Hayford were trained engineers like Bathe. I would not have objected if Slotten had described the Coast Survey as in part an engineering application of classical physics. The biggest void in the book is the lack of any discussion about why Bathe failed to become truly the leader of the American scientific community, as Slotten correctly describes his aim. Here the author must be faulted for the scanty treatment of Joseph Henry who shared many of Bathe’s views, was initially a key ally, and then reluctantly treating

moved away from his old friend. The book is seriously deficient in not

fully key incidents

in which Bathe

was frustrated

and defeated-the

4’Richard H. Shryock, ‘Philadelphia and the Flowering of New England: An Editorial’, Pennsylvania Mu azine ofHistory and Biography 64 ( 1940), 305-3 13. The quotation is the closing words of the editorial. 4’Daniel Goldstein, ‘ “Yours for Science”: The Smithsonian Institution’s Correspondents and the Shape of the Scientific Community in Nineteenth-Century America’, Isis 85 (1994) 573-599; see Table 1 on p. 578. 43Henry Adams, The Education of HenryAdams(Boston: Houghton, Mifflen, 1961), pp. 333-334. This classic work first appeared in 1907. The particular reference is to Congress, but the implication is far broader. 44Goldstein, ‘ “Yours for Science” ‘, displays a complexity that defies summation as Baconian. Joseph Henry spumed any association with Baconianism: see Papers of Joseph Henry, vol. 3, pp. 475477.

Between American History and History of Science

attempt to use the American instrument

Association

for his group of like-minded

125

for the Advancement

of Science

friends, the Lazzaroni.

as an

The same group,

minus Joseph Henry, founded the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 with Bathe as its first President. Henry was carefully omitted from the planning;

he only learned

of the movement shortly before the passage of the legislation. After Bathe’s death Henry became its President, keeping the Academy alive in memory of his old friend.45 Founding the Academy was a defeat for the visions of Bathe, Benjamin Peirce, and Louis Agassiz. Two factors lightly touched upon by Slotten explain these setbacks, and why Bathe did not succeed in his ambitions. The first is the predominance of natural history; the second is the rising role of higher education. Roughly sixty per cent of the ante-bellum scientific community were in natural history, with the geologists being a particularly strong, self-conscious group. Despite some minor magnify, the Coast Survey was heavily geophysical

involvements Slotten tries to and much of its work was an

application of mathematics and physical theory. During this period there was a notable rise in the role of science in the college world. 46 Until the passage of the land grant college act, higher education was largely non-federal. Joseph Henry retained his ties to Princeton, serving as a Trustee after coming to the Smithsonian. He played a role in the subsequent launching of graduate education there. Contrary to the neat world Slotten pictures of a few elite theorists directing a large number of routine practitioners of science, what was developing in the United States even as Bathe made his moves was a messy, largely uncoordinated research community in which hierarchical lines were blurred. In part this was the result of the persistence of the amateur tradition; in part it arose from the spread of a scientific culture not only in urban areas but in small towns and rural locales. In part it reflected the spread of education

in the society. It is significant

pre-Civil

had college training.

War scientists

that a high percentage

The large correspondence

of

network

maintained

by Joseph Henry and his assistant, Spencer F. Baird, was unlike the active

publishing

scientists used by Bruce and Elliott in their statistics in being largely from

outside of urban areas.47 The two defeats reflected the minority self-congratulating elites.

status of Bathe’s

Bathe’s Coast Survey did perform some natural history on the ocean areas near the coastline; it did routine topographic surveys on the land areas adjacent to the coast. But the bulk of the country, the area where Humboldtian

science might have been and

practiced, was out of bounds. There private scientists and the Army Engineers the Topographical

Engineers

prevailed.

Humboldtian

instincts

were there. Henry’s

45Forthe AAAS story, see Robert Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, ch. 19; for the Academy, see N. Reingold, Science in Nineteenth-Century America, a Documentary History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 200-225. ‘%. M. Guralnick, Science and rhe Ante-Bellum American College (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1975), vol. 109 of the Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society. 47Goldstein, ‘ “Yours for Science” ‘, table 2 on p. 579.

126

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Smithsonian aspirations.

meteorological

service

had Humboldtian

After the Civil War Benjamin

geodetic arcs with a great transcontinental a mathematical

approximation

aspects

in its national

Peirce linked the Survey’s great coastal arc. But the Survey was seeking the geoid,

of the true figure of the Earth, not the flora, fauna and

rocks of the continent. Humboldtian aspirations Bathe’s Survey did have, but also a great yearning for an abstract mathematical theory of the planet. When maritime commerce dropped in relative importance after the Civil War, the geoid arc across the continent could not mobilize popular support. It was too abstract, too far removed from every day concerns. Given the coming of agencies like the U.S. Geological Survey and the rise of experimental physics and chemistry, the Coast and Geodetic Survey did not decline in the quality of its work but in its relative stature nationally by the start of this century. Slotten’s study is evidence that the Americanist tradition is alive and well. The book reflects a trend, the return of attention to the nineteenth century story.48 Like so many others of Slotten’s generation, there is also evidence of the impact of ideas from the social sciences, especially the sociology of scientific knowledge. Nor is this surprising. That influence shows up among all kinds of historians of science, sometimes quite influentially, sometimes as polite obeisance to current fashion. Besides the increase in studies aimed at the sciences in national or regional cultures, references to this and other formerly exotic fields now show up in disciplinary and intellectual histories. Here and there we are favored with the explicitly comparative, a trend we should all cheer.49 Kevles was one of the early pioneers here with his fine study of eugenics in Britain and the United States.” In his later work, as in The Physicists, Kevles is notably different from Slotten in the use of social science concepts. His principal concepts, best science elitism and political elitism, largely arise from the earlier historical literature, for example on the role of professional experts in the Progressive era before World War I. The specific thrust of The Physicists reflects the political and social culture of the sixties, when Kevles was working on his dissertation

and then converting

it into a publishable

volume. The call for the physicists to be more politically responsible in a democratic order represents a moderate liberal position of the day, not a New Left denunciation of science and all its works and adherents. Kevles still cares and wants to believe in the possible good intentions of basic scientists. Howe and (I would speculate) Slotten are from a later cultural generation calling for the return to older conventional values, including a liberal religiosity. It is a call for order and continued progress referred to disparagingly by some in the New Left as corporate liberalism. It is a call for the ?n addition to this book, see E. Keeney, The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and the articles by R. Kohler, ‘The Ph.D. Machine’, and David H. Gustin, ‘Congressmen and Scientists in the Making of Science Policy: The Allison Commission, 1884-l 886’, Minervu 32 (1994), 25-52. There are other works, of course. 49Jonathan Harwood, Sfyles of Scient& Thought: The German Genetics Community, 1900-1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). %aniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985).

Between American History and History of Science

127

proper types to lead the nation down a proper traditional national American

culture.

It is a call for avoiding

the clamorous

path to a sound, secure uncertainties

endemic

to

life. But Kevles has a much lighter touch than Slotten: never does he let

his message get in the way of the exuberant

gusto of his narrative.

Slotten is not so

deft. Slotten uses Kevles’ analytic tools the way he uses later sociological constructs such as boundary work, black boxing, and the ideas from Shapin and Schaffer. They dominate much of his text. From Kevles he takes as a general tool the ‘dialectic interplay

of opposing values’, never stopping to consider whether another meaning

exists in the language of that day and culture. For example, on facing pages (96,97) he writes of Bathe’s view of the relationship of pure and applied science, it ‘was left usefully obscure’ and then of Bathe’s and his supporters deliberately ‘drawing a sharp boundary between basic and applied science’. To Kevles’ binary tensions Slotten adds the boundary work of Thomas Gieryn. 51To understand Bathe’s views on theory and practice, Slotten should have used some of the primary and secondary literature on that point.52 By concentrating

on Bathe, the elite theoretician

leader, Slotten limits his treatment

of the work culture of the Coast Survey staff. What he gives is quite fine but more could have been done here especially to avoid uncritical reliance on social science ‘truths’. For example, from Shapin and Schaffer, Slotten sees the field survey work as appropriately public for democratic America, in contrast to the private nature of laboratory experimentation. But the Survey only worked in the field during part of the year when the weather was suitable. When the surveying season ended, the staff returned to Washington where the data were reduced in the office to produce charts, maps and numerical tables. The office reductions and computations were hardly an example of democratic Just as the sometimes injunction

witnessing.53 uncritical

in historical anthropology

reliance on social science constructs violates the to use terms and values contemporary

with the

subject, the reliance on the agency of ‘elites’ obscures historical changes arising unexpectedly from elsewhere in the culture. Historical contingency is real, not simply an excuse used to cover our lack of ideas and primary sources. Dupree’s focus on ‘central scientific organizations’ is a reflection of the American scene of the 1950s. He, like Kevles, Howe, Slotten and the entire crew of the now old hat sociologists of scientific knowledge were trying to impose a rational order on the evidences from the past, a unity supporting a view of hegemony and of continuity. It is important for Dupree that John Quincy Adams stands for right thinking about science in the federal government. It is very meaningful for Kevles “Most of the concepts involved are from analyses of the current scene. Like the uses of Shapin and Schaffer, there is no attempt to consider alternatives fitting other historical eras. “For example, Charles Davies, The Logic and Utility ofMathematics (New York Barnes, 1857). Davies, a West Pointer like Bathe and others (w. H. C. Bartlett) espoused views like the French scientist-engineers studied by Grattan-Guiness. Joseph Henry shared much of that position. 53Slotten, Patronage, Politics.. , p. 172 and passim.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

128

that basic science advances by elite scientists in elite institutions

somehow work for

a democratic good. Note that he and Dupree are imposing a post-World War II vision on both the past and the future. It is important to Howe and Slotten that the morally best people impose order and progress on the entire population.

As to the sociologists

of scientific knowledge, what can one say? That freed from Durkheim’s restraints on dealing with scientific knowledge sociologically, they now claim their rightful place in the intellectual firmament? Historians of science within the United States, like those in other specialties, are no longer content with unities either arising from some past or imposed magisterially on past, present, and future from supposedly rational analysis. We should view these attempts, sometimes impressive and well-intentioned, as the non-mathematical equivalents of the formal sciences.54 They may or may not prove valid in some universalizing

sense. We should do our own thing, opportunistically

middle range generalizations. History is filled with false analogies drawn from developments

hoping

for

in the sciences. But

I am very impressed with the message, explicit and subliminal, from two publications coming out of recent developments in solid state physics.55 These show the breakdown of a long prevailing intellectual and social pattern based on assumptions of a unified science following a reductive pattern. The assumptions so comfortably animating Kevles and others may be giving way to a world filled with what may seem to us as unconnected improbabilities and absurdities. Even now doing good history requires a certain playfulness, a certain amount of a talent for sniffing out whimsy plus a sense of humor. Slotten is too serious and high minded to see the black humor in Bathe’s story. My reaction to Slotten’s book is also influenced thought undermining

by a growing strand of historical

his confident assertions. Perhaps we can characterize the strand

as the historians’ equivalent of the naive or common sense realism or empiricismtake your pick of pejorative terms-some social theorists and philosophers see as rampant

among

scientists.

(We historians

must be doing

example of this stance is this recent statement

something

by an environmental

right.) An

historian?

the chastening fact [is] that we can never know nature at first hand. Instead we encounter it only through the many lenses of our beliefs, cultural institutions, structures of knowledge, all of which can only hope to approximate natural reality in a mimetic or metaphoric fashion, never actually replicate it.

54J. Franklin, ‘The Formal Sciences Discover the Philosophers’ Stone’, Srudies in History and Philosophy of Science 25 (1994), 5 13-533. “P. W. Anderson, ‘More is Different’, Science 177 (1972), 393-396, and S. Weart, ‘The Solid Community’, ch. 9 of L. Hoddeson, E. Braun, J. Teichmann and S. Weart (eds), Outof the Crystal Maze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For a comment on this development, S. S. Schweber, ‘Physics, Community, and the Crisis in Physical Theory’, Physics Today 46 (1993), 34-40. See also John Dupre, The Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 5hWilliam Cronon, ‘The Uses of Environmental History’, Environmental History Review 17 (1993), l-22, from p. 15.

Between American History and History of Science

Rather than interpret this argument

129

as a defense of human arrogance-asserting

that we can do whatever we like because nature is whatever we want-1 the constructedness

of human knowledge

I find in this story, in other words, points self-criticism.

prefer to see

as proof of our own fallibility. us toward

humanity,

The moral

tolerance

and