The astronomers could hear cheers of joy bellowing from the streets of downtown Washington, D.C. On April 3, 1865, the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, had fallen. Simon Newcomb left the Naval Observatory on the banks of the Potomac and walked into the city to join the celebration. Stores had closed, the clerks had been given a holiday, and men paraded drunk in the streets, beating drums and proudly waving American flags. Newcomb, too, was filled with rapturous pride. The dark days of war that had shrouded American life for the past half-decade were over. He wrote to his friend Chauncey Wright, then a computer at the Nautical Almanac, that he was “almost ashamed to think that [he] had ever said that any act of the government was not the best possible.”Footnote 1
In the postwar years, Newcomb quickly became one of the federal government’s most prolific promoters and defenders of its scientific corps. His globally recognized work in astronomy and his voracious appetite for public engagement made Newcomb, as his biographer has argued, the most “influential American scientist of the late nineteenth century”Footnote 2 (Figure 1). Simon Newcomb’s public persona grew in part because of his musings on diverse subjects, notably political economy. In most respects, the renowned astronomer was a standard nineteenth-century liberal, an advocate of laissez-faire markets and “let-alone” individualism.Footnote 3 And like the liberals whom historian Leslie Butler argues embraced and promoted a liberal politics of cultivation, Newcomb placed his voice in the print culture of bourgeois intellectualism, balancing scientific advocacy and popularization with lengthy critiques of the greenback system, labor unions, and the national debt in The Nation, Harper’s Weekly, and the North American Review. Footnote 4
Figure 1. Photograph of the 1873 “Great Refractor” of the Naval Observatory, 1870s, with Newcomb sitting in the observing chair. Newcomb worked closely with Alvan Clark and Sons on the construction of the telescope. This photograph also served as the basis for the frontispiece of Newcomb’s Popular Astronomy (1878), which went through numerous editions over the next several decades. https://www.cnmoc.usff.navy.mil/Our-Commands/United-States-Naval-Observatory/Our-Telescopes/The-26-inch-Great-Equatorial-telescope/
Newcomb’s celebratory letter to Wright on April 7, 1865—when he was “almost ashamed to think that [he] had ever said that any act of the government was not the best possible”—sits in stark contrast to the hard-lined laissez-faire liberalism that other scholars have often associated with this famous astronomer. Historians of science as well as Americanists have depicted Newcomb as a relatively stern mugwump, impressive in his scientific achievement, yet at times stunted by a parochial arrogance. In histories of nineteenth-century liberalism, in particular, Newcomb makes cameos as a stand-in for an economically conservative wing, beholden to a strict and scientized laissez-faire, where empiricism and scientific method affirmed the rationality of the free market and demonstrated the misguidance of the historicist thinking of a new generation of economists, perhaps best represented by Richard T. Ely.Footnote 5
Yet Newcomb also saw an essential role for an activist state, especially in the sciences. The sentiment he expressed to Wright in 1865 undoubtedly came as immediate postwar patriotism, but it also ran deeper, a part of Newcomb’s thought that persisted into the Reconstruction years. In his popular articles and professional life, he advocated for a Department of Science in government, a national university, increased federal spending on science, civil service reform, better publication practices, and many other policies that would enlarge the role of the federal government in American science. Newcomb’s Janus-faced politics raises two questions. First, why would an astronomer spend so much time writing about politics and political economy? And second, why would a so-called staunch laissez-faire liberal be so adamant about increased federal spending and institutional growth in the sciences?
To answer these questions, this article analyzes two facets of Newcomb’s postwar thinking that have been consistently left out: race and nation. After the Civil War, Newcomb’s tireless pen meticulously described American scientific progress as a project of nationalism that, at times, wavered between cultural and biological determinism. The issue was clear: American science, unlike French, German, or English science, struggled to find its footing. “Ethnoracial” nationalism, to borrow a term from historian Dorothy Ross, helped to explain this predicament.Footnote 6 Science progressed as an evolutionary, hereditary, and collective enterprise, according to Newcomb. Indeed, there were national styles of science.Footnote 7 The styles of French or English science excelled in different areas of scientific inquiry, be it theory, mathematics, or experimentation. Yet in studying Darwinian evolution or Newtonian mechanics, their differences—French mathematics and English theory, for example—emulsified to produce collective scientific advancement. An American style had yet to find a voice on the international stage. And like the concept of the nation itself, American science emerged not from the idiosyncratic habits of individuals, but from a more fundamental set of unifying social, cultural, and institutional conditions. Newcomb’s prescriptions—a national university, Department of Science, award incentives, and more—served as the national glue just as religion, race or ethnicity, and territory set the conditions for a self-governing nation. While the United States remained developmentally behind in the sciences, its whiteness (thereby excluding the large non-white population of the country), he argued, made it scientifically viable.
Albert Moyer’s biography remains the most in-depth treatment of Newcomb’s thought. Moyer argues that Newcomb’s public writings consistently advocated for the application of scientific method, especially a rhetoric of scientific method—a precision and logic of terms and definitions in argumentation—to a broad swath of society’s problems. In doing so, Newcomb, along with others such as Charles Sanders Peirce (who Newcomb knew well), William James, and John Dewey, helped lay the foundations of nineteenth-century American pragmatism. Moreover, as Moyer points out, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, and Charles Darwin loomed large in Newcomb’s science, politics, and beliefs in the causal forces of the world. Mill, in particular, became Newcomb’s initial roadmap to liberalism and empiricism, especially Mill’s A System of Logic (1843). In 1870, during a trip to Great Britain, Newcomb had the chance to meet John Stuart Mill at his home at Blackheath in London, where the two had a “very pleasant conversation.”Footnote 8 The astronomer excitedly recalled this encounter in his memoir decades later.Footnote 9
Like Mill, whose liberalism and concept of the nation relied upon “civilization” as a cultural category in juxtaposition with societies of “barbarism” or “savagery,” Newcomb believed that a national American science included only those who could potentially attain scientific “genius”—that is, white Americans.Footnote 10 Race was implicit in Mill’s institutional and cultural interpretation of backwardness, but Newcomb injected a more biologically determinist perspective. Uplift was indeed possible, but genius was inherently circumscribed by race.
Newcomb’s national science blended race and nationalism at a time when the greater liberal project of Reconstruction sent shockwaves through Washington, D.C.’s local politics. Congress passed Black male suffrage for the District in 1867. A moderate and conservative backlash to Black suffrage and the financial mismanagement of the 1871–1874 territorial government gradually eroded home rule until disenfranchisement came in 1874 (and was then made permanent in 1878). The glaringly illiberal fact of disenfranchisement opened new questions about the capital city’s purpose. Who was it for, and what did it represent? Newcomb never spelled out what the American style of science would become, but most of his suggested reforms centered in Washington. And many were a far cry away from a strict laissez-faire idealism. With national reunion, it was the state that held the power to set the proper conditions for an American scientific style, especially within a country that for much of the nineteenth century remained completely apathetic toward abstract knowledge. In Reconstruction-era Washington, Newcomb hoped such state-building—and nation-building—would be possible.
Race and nation help to close the loop between Newcomb the laissez-faire liberal and Newcomb the advocate for a robust scientific state. National science required an impressive institutional infrastructure, best provided by the state after the war. Newcomb assumed scientific improvement to be an essential quality of modern nationhood, rather than simply the wants and needs of a special interest group. His thinking echoed the division between perceived special interests and “the great middle,” where “paradoxically,” in Heather Cox Richardson’s words, “American individualists came to depend on government support while denying it to others.”Footnote 11 Mill argued that only civilized nations could have rights as nations. They could indeed act as despots if their intentions included uplifting “savage” and “barbaric” societies, a striking feature of Mill’s thought that excused and even promoted British imperialism. Newcomb gave similar privileges to science. He justified state-sponsored science because he imagined it as a project of white, national progress—not as a contradiction to liberalism but as an extension of it.
The echoes of race and nation that bubble up in Newcomb’s popular writing had roots in the Republican milieu to which he grew close in Washington during and after the Civil War. Drawing upon published articles in the North American Review and the Simon Newcomb Papers at the Library of Congress, this article first explores Newcomb’s intellectual and social world in 1860s and 1870s Washington. Histories of post-Civil War American science use Washington (the city itself, not just Congress) as a stage for scientific growth, but rarely as a dynamic contextual category. As such, our understanding of how local texture—Washington scientists’ personal politics, their local networks, and the city’s local politics—gave shape to postwar federal science is less clear.Footnote 12 Newcomb’s story, I argue, demonstrates the salience of the local, suggesting the need for more localist and urban studies of the rise of state science after the Civil War.Footnote 13
The article then analyzes Newcomb’s portrayal of national styles of science and the need for a legible American science. His Washington vantage point of the war had led him to questions about national health and prosperity. As he befriended congressmen, he proposed reforms for the creation of an American science that largely centered on strengthening science in the capital—an ethos of centralization that mirrored global trends in modern nationalism and state building. It seems natural that the expanding scientific state would centralize in Washington, but it needs to be stated that this centralization was neither obvious nor inevitable. Whether science even properly belonged in government remained an open question well past the Reconstruction years.Footnote 14 Finally, this article shows how Newcomb’s concerns with an apathetic American political spirit show a more reform-minded individual, a liberal who rejected laissez-faire idealism because he believed science and nation to be so intertwined. In his biography, Moyer argues in one direction: that Newcomb used scientific method to position science as a stabilizing force in American life. I see a two-way street: for Newcomb, a secure nation—politically, racially, and fiscally—was necessary to give American science national meaning.
Simon Newcomb Goes to Washington
Simon Newcomb found a position at the Naval Observatory in 1861 after several professors of mathematics defected to the Confederacy, including Superintendent Matthew Maury. The Civil War, then, made his initial entry into government service possible. During the War, Newcomb worked on his catalog of stars, reforming observational practice to correct systematic errors in right ascension, and the determination of solar parallax using observations of Mars made in 1862. But instrumental equipment, such as the astronomical clocks, was meager. And with wartime expenses, it was a bad time to materially improve the Observatory. “That the work of the observatory was kept up,” Newcomb remembered years later, “was due to a feeling of pride on the part of our authorities in continuing it without interruption through the conflict.”Footnote 15
Newcomb settled into a relatively lax work schedule that, as his diary reveals, allowed for a two-track mind as he kept abreast of news and hearsay of the war. On February 7, 1862, he noted that Fort Henry in Tennessee had been “bombarded and captured by the Federal fleet.” Among other Civil War news, he wrote of the “great fears of McClellan’s defeat” in Richmond, and, two days later, of McClellan’s cautious retreats, potentially killing thousands. Between such momentous news, he “recommence[d] operation on [his] theory of Uranus.” On observation nights, Newcomb walked two miles to and from the Naval Observatory in the middle of the night, passing through the capital’s muddy and rat-infested wartime streets. And in his free time, he occasionally made lengthy walks to visit the wounded at Mount Pleasant or Harewood Hospitals.Footnote 16 The realities of war had transformed the city Newcomb now called home.
In 1862, Newcomb had yet to become an American citizen. He was born on March 12, 1835, in Wallace, Nova Scotia, and raised by an itinerant schoolteacher father who controlled much of the young boy’s education. “The spelling book was more familiar than the plow,” Newcomb remembered, and by six and a half, he was able to read the Bible and calculate simple cube roots. At sixteen, he agreed to a five-year apprenticeship with a doctor in Salisbury, New Brunswick, an herbalist whom Newcomb eventually viewed as cold and unscientific. He ran away, trekking the 120 miles to the port of Calais and boarded a boat to Salem, Massachusetts, where his father had recently moved. By 1854, father and son had relocated to Maryland. Living near Washington, Newcomb frequented the library of the Smithsonian Institution whenever he could, and met Joseph Henry, the first Secretary of the Smithsonian, on a fateful day. Newcomb balanced private tutoring with his own work in science and mathematics, refining the Cavendish method of determining the density of the Earth and making astronomical calculations using the tables of an ephemeris.Footnote 17
Henry, who quickly grew fond of Newcomb, encouraged him to contact the U.S. Coast Survey for a technical job. Julius E. Hilgard of the Coast Survey told Newcomb that he had no job openings, but could arrange a computer position at the Nautical Almanac Office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Cambridge, Newcomb embraced the teachings of Scottish Realism and Baconianism, but rejected raw Baconianism for the more novel teachings of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Charles Darwin. Soon, Washington would call him back. But Cambridge left a permanent mark on the young astronomer, as he kept in touch with his Massachusetts colleagues, including Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce, for decades to come. Back in Washington, as an astronomer at the Naval Observatory, he came face to face with wartime stresses and the struggle for the nation. In 1864, he became a naturalized citizen.Footnote 18
For Newcomb, wartime Washington was a social affair. At the Observatory, if the astronomers got tired, they would “vote it cloudy” and go find a plate of oysters at a neighboring restaurant.Footnote 19 On a February evening, he took a couple of ladies to the theater and then “had an oyster party at the Observatory.” On another night, he attended a party at Superintendent James Melville Gillis’s house and did not return home until one-thirty in the morning.Footnote 20 He formed a chess club in 1862 and found excuses to play a game whenever he could. That same year, Newcomb met a young James Garfield at the main dining table of his boardinghouse. After joining the House as a Representative from Ohio in 1863, Garfield paid a visit to the Naval Observatory, saw Simon Newcomb, and recalled their acquaintance.Footnote 21 They became good friends, occasionally discussing “parallax and beef steak” over supper.Footnote 22 To Newcomb’s delight, Charles Sumner also lived just across the street from that boardinghouse. He met Sumner for the first time in March 1865 and considered the senator “more pleasant” than anticipated. Newcomb had become interested in political sentiment in South Carolina before the Civil War and had started writing an article on the causes of the Civil War, which, for whatever reasons, forever remained unpublished. He continued to study politics and political economy in the Congressional Library, and eventually visited Sumner to borrow a book from his private library. The two got along and, for a time, Newcomb became a regular visitor.Footnote 23
Newcomb’s interest in the war and friendships with men such as Garfield and Sumner proved momentous for his career, leading to a lifelong fascination with political history, political sentiment, and the fiscal policies coming out of Washington. His Washington networks and the free time he dedicated to self-study at the Smithsonian or Congressional Library directly led to his 1865 publication, A Critical Examination of Our Financial Policy During the Southern Rebellion, which criticized many of the financial policies of the Union and began his long preoccupation with monetary theory.Footnote 24 At Joseph Henry’s Saturday Club meetings, Newcomb persistently hunted down Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch to advocate for anti-greenback policies.Footnote 25 McCulloch, who believed “gold and silver [were] the only true measure of value,” was happy to chat with the young astronomer.Footnote 26 On July 7, 1866, Newcomb “called on Hon. James A. Garfield, and had quite a talk with him on protection and finance. Was unexpectedly pleased with his views. Left him my draft of a bill for returning to specie payments.”Footnote 27 At the time, Garfield was involved in the House Committee on Banking and Currency. The fate of Newcomb’s bill is unknown, but in 1875, the Specie Resumption Act ordered the Secretary of the Treasury to redeem greenbacks in specie on or after January 1, 1879.Footnote 28
Certainly not a Radical Republican, Newcomb still found his political compatriots in the Republican Party. He avoided overt partisanship, however, and even considered the platform of George McClellan’s Democratic nomination in Chicago for the 1864 election “somewhat uncertain, but not entirely objectionable.”Footnote 29 Yet Newcomb’s advocacy for a return to the gold standard resonated with many other northern Republicans who wanted a stable domestic investment environment, to encourage new capital imports, to produce a scarcity value of money capital, and to place the power over the direction of investments into the hands of New York bankers and financiers.Footnote 30 In Washington, the political and scientific began to overlap in spaces such as Henry’s Saturday Club, the evening literary and scientific salons of Horatio King (Postmaster General of the United States), the Literary Society of Washington, and the Washington Statistical Society, which Newcomb helped to found in 1866.Footnote 31 On December 14, 1866, Newcomb spoke to the Statistical Society “for half an hour on our national wealth and prosperity.”Footnote 32 Newcomb demonstrated that the scientist had a voice in local, largely Republican, political discussion.
Still, thinking of the nation state as a unit of fiscal health was new for Newcomb. His 1865 book made this change in scope clear. He now examined the word “nation” in the “fullest sense of the term,” in Newcomb’s own words. Here was John Stuart Mill’s influence at work.Footnote 33 Newcomb “considered the strength of the nation as the aggregate strength of the citizens composing it” and “measured what individuals could do to promote the public welfare, not what Government might require of them.”Footnote 34 Newcomb’s proposal to his publisher revealed the growing national vision of the young astronomer turned social theorist: “The objects of the following essay are to trace our present financial system to its effects on the power of our government, the permanence of our institutions, the future well being of society, and other great national interests; to show how certain principles of social science are illustrated in its workings; and, incidentally, to inquire in what way it may be improved.”Footnote 35
Concerns of “Permanence” and the “future well being of society” became essential to Newcomb’s thought, connecting his political economy, wariness of partisanship, and commitment to scientific method. He advocated for higher taxation rates to eliminate ballooning national debt, which he called a “great evil” and a potential “source of sectional controversy between East and the West.”Footnote 36 During the war, the debt had increased from $65 million to $2.7 billion, roughly 30 percent of the Union’s 1865 gross national product.Footnote 37 Concerning the southern states, he wrote to Garfield suggesting a collection of data to examine fair treatment under the law: “My idea is to have the general of the army enumerate all cases of Public Wrongs by Whites not known as Loyalists. Our object is not to prove all Blacks and Loyalists angels, but to learn whether they are equally protected (or neglected) by the civil authorities.”Footnote 38 Both Newcomb and Garfield agreed that “statistical science is indispensable to modern statesmanship.”Footnote 39
Washington’s southern heritage and sizable population of Confederate sympathizers spilled over into its own unique and unstable politics in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The passage of Black suffrage in 1867, followed by a territorial government in 1871, and finally the reactionary elimination of home rule in the capital in 1874, showed a mercurial spirit at the heart of the nation. Joseph Henry, Newcomb’s greatest mentor in Washington, remained staunchly pessimistic about democracy before and during the war. “I am convinced,” he wrote to scientist John Torrey in 1860, “that while the negro retains his peculiarities he never can exist in juxtaposition with the white man, but in a state of servitude.”Footnote 40 Aside from Black suffrage, Henry thought it best to bring American democracy back to pre-Jacksonian conditions, where only white men who owned “a certain amount of property” could vote.Footnote 41 Henry’s racism ran deep. He had even barred the possibility of Frederick Douglass speaking at the Smithsonian, writing to Charles Sumner and other members of a local abolitionist group that he “would not permit the lecture of a coloured man to be given in the room of the Institution.”Footnote 42 Newcomb never directly recorded his views on Black suffrage, but he was a far cry from his friend Sumner’s egalitarianism. After the passage of Black suffrage in Washington, and with the 1868 election just months away, Newcomb took an afternoon to read up on equity at the Capitol and then “intended to stop at city hall and get registered, but the string of darkies extended to an immense length.”Footnote 43
By the 1870s, urban democracy, in particular, had become the emblem of bourgeois anxieties over an expansive electorate. Boss Tweed in New York City, the Paris Commune in 1871, and now the territorial government of Washington, which ran up outlandish debts under the supervision of Alexander Shepherd and Governor Henry Cooke, fed the skepticism of liberal reformers who increasingly looked at politics, reform, and cultivation as practices best commanded by a select, educated few.Footnote 44 A conservative white population blamed many of the territorial government’s failures on Black voters.Footnote 45 In March 1871, during a tour of European observatories, Newcomb found his way to Paris from Berlin. He rummaged through the Paris Observatory archives looking for seventeenth-century star charts as the Paris Commune barricaded the streets of the city. Newcomb wrote to a friend named Charlie that he had seen “historic objects which fall not to the lot of every generation,” but that in all fairness, there was “nothing like a mob anywhere.”Footnote 46 He strolled through insurrectionary districts without trouble, stopped in stores, and saw Parisians sipping their wine in cafes as normal. Still, he was in “daily expectation and hope of the capture of the city.”Footnote 47 A couple of weeks later, he wrote that “we are completely besieged,” and moved himself and his wife out of their hotel and into the Paris Observatory itself.Footnote 48
The Panic of 1873, caused in part by resumptionists’ contractionist monetary policy, exacerbated class-based tensions and urban unrest. In Washington, Henry Cooke had invested many of the city’s public funds into his brother Jay Cooke’s now-defunct financial projects, which hit the capital city hard.Footnote 49 Economic panic mixed with the racist backlash to Black suffrage led to the re-imposition of white rule over the city in 1874, signaling a belief among whites and Congress that a population that included so many Black male voters was unfit to govern itself.Footnote 50 In 1877, Henry stated that “it was a matter of justice, to give the slave, his freedom, but, it was more than a blunder, to give him the right to vote.”Footnote 51 During the 1870s, Newcomb began authoring his articles for liberal-minded publications. He had seen the Paris Commune firsthand and had witnessed the elimination of democracy in the nation’s capital. His obsession with permanence and the nation seemed more than justified.
He found excitement in seeing his name in print, but Newcomb also believed he had a unique perspective to share. The drama of postwar American politics sat close to home. Newcomb socialized with powerful Republicans, lobbied for his own policies, and observed a city caught in both financial precarity and Reconstruction retrenchment. Newcomb had called Andrew Johnson’s attempt to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, in violation of the Tenure of Office Act, the “most exciting political juncture since the close of the war.”Footnote 52 He also made sure to ride the Seventh Street car down to the Old Arsenal Penitentiary to attend the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. He described the prisoners as a “miserable looking set.” “They do not, indeed, look as villainous as I had expected,” he wrote to his wife, “but I was surprised that the court did not make them present a more decent appearance in so august a presence.”Footnote 53 But he observed all of this political intrigue as a scientist. By the war’s end, the astronomer, who already thought in grand scales, looked to put his observations of a reconstituting nation into national forums. Newcomb asked his Cambridge friend Chauncey Wright to write a review of his first book in the North American Review, a literary and intellectual magazine founded in Boston in 1815. Newcomb was not asking for a “puff,” just a note that his book was at least worth reading.Footnote 54 Several years later, Newcomb asked Wright for a contact at the North American Review. He thought the journal was “hopelessly committed to [Salmon P.] Chase’s policies,” that is, a greenback system.Footnote 55 But perhaps that is exactly why Newcomb wanted his voice in its pages. And so he started writing “The Let-Alone Principle.”
The Heredity of American Science
The Civil War had stagnated American science, rather than propelling it. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) emerged in 1863, but as Newcomb lamented, it was made up of people who largely did not live in Washington and received zero federal financial support for its activities.Footnote 56 With the war’s end, the organizational work of federal science came not from the NAS, but from those in Washington living and working in the sciences day in and day out. On an April evening in 1870, and by invitation of Joseph Henry, Newcomb joined a meeting, held at the Smithsonian Castle, of the Washington members of the NAS “respecting the formation of a local society, or the greater localization of the Academy.”Footnote 57 Like the postwar capitalists, bankers, and financiers who now saw their fortunes tied to the power and influence of the federal government, these scientists believed that national science could be strengthened and centered in Washington.Footnote 58 This meeting would eventually lead to the 1871 establishment of the Philosophical Society of Washington, the first formal scientific society in the District of Columbia, and one that would become an essential lobbying body for federal scientists in the coming decades. Newcomb agreed to do his part, using the pulpit of the North American Review to give voice to a national science vision: an American science.
The United States was just one hundred years old, but Newcomb spoke of Americanness on the same terms as Englishness, Frenchness, and Germanness. It was nascent, but it was still evolutionarily distinct and definable. The conflicts of the 1850s and especially the Civil War and Reconstruction had dramatically disrupted the somewhat amorphous idea of American nationalism, which on a popular level usually combined republican liberty, millennial identity, and manifest destiny. In the 1820s, “the Union” became a more common moniker for the nation to accommodate the class, ethnic, and sectional conflict that challenged a single notion of nationhood while celebrating dual-sovereignty federalism. When antebellum Americans spoke of the Union, they referred to a mixture of states’ rights and fraternal unity, or a shared language, set of laws and institutions, and, at times, ancestral ties.Footnote 59
Across the globe, the rise of the modern nation state linked its centralization and economic development to the ideology of nationalism. International fairs and exhibitions made this new order clear, serving as tourist attractions and moments of exchange as well as competitions between unified nation states; science and industry were highly visible at these international exhibitions. The Civil War gave the United States a newly centralized and territorially unified sense of the nation. But these more tangible characteristics of nationhood blended with the celebration of a white, Christian civilization, chopping away at the Radical Republican mission of racial egalitarianism.Footnote 60 As historian Dorothy Ross writes, “the national community, even if formed by political principle, implied a social bond that could be figured as an ethnic affiliation. In the nineteenth century, civic principles were often joined to a conception of a distinctive ‘American people,’” what Ross calls “ethnoracial nationalism.”Footnote 61 The radical political years of the Civil War and Reconstruction created a self-consciousness about nationhood and a feeling that the terms of such a cultural concept were up for grabs. As the United States confronted the racial plurality of citizenship during Reconstruction, theorists of the nation struggled to find unity in diversity. As Ross has argued, some thinkers, such as Francis Lieber, Elisha Mulford, and John William Draper, could not reconcile national unity with racial diversity, while others, like Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner, found resolution in the strength of “human rights” and national progress.Footnote 62
Newcomb had similarly developed a postwar interest in what, exactly, bound the nation together. And, naturally, his articles in the North American Review explored his concerns with national health and prosperity through the prism of science and political economy. The articles fused a mugwump fealty to expertise, especially in the civil service, with an economic liberalism that, while acknowledging the deepening inequality in Gilded Age America, affirmed the capitalist status quo.Footnote 63 His articles “The Let-Alone Principle,” “The Labor Question,” “The Standard of Value,” and “Soap-Bubbles of Socialism” maintained that the government should not “rush in and ‘regulate’ the business of the individual,” and criticized the labor movement for causing more harm than good.Footnote 64 His critiques emerged from his politics of permanence: a general distrust of populist or radical political agitation, but a fierce commitment to government’s “protection of minorities, especially those most powerless minorities, individuals.”Footnote 65 During Ulysses S. Grant’s 1869 inauguration, Newcomb’s cousin James P. Newcomb—a Republican and soon to be the Secretary of State of Texas—arrived in Washington with what Newcomb called “a delegation of radicals to see about the reconstitution of the state.”Footnote 66 The term radicals was perhaps not completely pejorative for Newcomb, but it was indeed dismissive.
When Newcomb turned his attention to national science, he insisted that the “American people” carried innate qualities, easily juxtaposed to those of their European counterparts. The “intellect of a nation” displayed its own peculiarities and existed as its own unit of analysis.Footnote 67 Proficiency and mastery over one concept in science could coexist with a complete inadequacy in another. At the outset of “Abstract Science in America,” published in the North American Review in 1876, Newcomb insisted that “we do not here refer to well-known general differences in the intellectual power of different races, the Caucasian and the Mongolian, for instance, but to differences of special faculties or tastes between people whose general powers are on the whole equal.”Footnote 68 Whiteness remained a precondition for scientific excellence, but even within whiteness, there were gradations. The theory of gravity offered an illuminating example of the ethnoracial parameters of science. According to Newcomb, the establishment of universal gravitation was the product of the “British intellect,” not just the mind of Isaac Newton. The French mathematicians, including Alexis Clairaut, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and Pierre-Simon Laplace, lacked the necessary “sagacity” of the British mind: “the superiority of Englishmen in the powers of investigation necessary to establish the theory would seem to be evinced by the readiness with which they perceived its truth and traced its effects, while a generation of Continental mathematicians occupied themselves with puerile objections to it.”Footnote 69 Yet once Newton reduced the theory of gravity to the mathematics of the Principia (1687), the French mathematicians took up the torch of physics and went to work.
For Newcomb, this example demonstrated the “striking difference” between the intellectual abilities of “two peoples,” the English intellect perhaps the more scientific of the two given that it was “more ready in grasping the ideas of nature, in seeing the correlations of natural phenomena, in distinguishing between the relevant and the irrelevant in propositions, and in freeing itself from the trammels of philosophic systems when it turned its attention toward the external world.” Once the English mind had grasped nature’s laws and expressed them in mathematics, it was the French mind that could best carry the work forward. “These [calculations] required powers of minute analysis,” Newcomb wrote, “of close concentration upon minute points, and of patient endurance while carrying through long trains of thought, which the English intellect did not possess, and has never since acquired.”Footnote 70 Scientific progress, then, directly followed pathways forged by national styles.
If attuned to the “intellectual natural history of nations,” Newcomb wrote, Darwinism provided another revealing example of the differences between England, France, Germany, and the United States. “In the land of its origin it is a subject of fierce controversy between the religious world on the one side and the scientific one on the other; in Germany, received with universal applause as one of the great philosophic triumphs of the century; in France, so utterly groundless a piece of speculation as to be unworthy of the attention of a biologist; in America, received by naturalists, but viewed by the public as something on which it is quite incompetent to pass judgement.”Footnote 71 While cultural and infrastructural differences clearly existed—Newcomb pointed to the variations in the quality of available textbooks in each nation—nationalisms also ran deeper for the astronomer, the intellectual natural history of nations more akin to a nationalism that viewed the “American people” as an ethnoracial category, as a mix of whiteness and Americaness. In “Exact Science in America,” Newcomb considered the university structure for science in Germany “by no means a simple difference of organization … but a difference arising out of a fundamental peculiarity of the German mind.”Footnote 72 Promoters of a national university in the United States agreed that the university would be both a federal appropriation and “a creature of the American people,” to use Lester Frank Ward’s words, but Newcomb, in the 1870s, asserted that this institutional side to science had deeper ethnoracial and hereditary forces at work.Footnote 73
“Race and descent,” Newcomb argued, was “largely involved” in the intellectual natural history of the United States. Drawing from Francis Galton, who had published Hereditary Genius in 1869, Newcomb stated that the “descent of the American nation” seemed unfavorable to the production of genius. Philosophers and men of science had not been well represented in the emigrants who made their way to American shores. Galton was Charles Darwin’s cousin and a leading theorist of heredity who popularized the phrase “nature versus nurture” and eventually coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. Galton’s Hereditary Genius drew upon the biographies and familial lineage of prominent men as the data of inheritance. A year before Newcomb’s “Abstract Science in America,” Galton published “A Theory of Heredity” (1875) in the Contemporary Review, which furthered his statistical studies of inheritance and advanced his concept of “stirp,” or the latent material responsible for inheritance from one generation to the next.Footnote 74 Newcomb directly interlaced Galton’s work and the nation state, suggesting that the quality of science was inherently tied to the “descent of the American nation.”Footnote 75 Whether or not Galton was, in the end, correct, Newcomb was unsure. But he argued that the rarer existence of “scientific genius” proved more complicated. It appeared to be something separate from the laws of heredity, however true they may be. Instead, scientific genius, “though confined to a single race, seems to be almost entirely sporadic.”Footnote 76
The United States faced a problem of inheritance, according to Newcomb, but it had one saving grace: the whiteness it shared with England, France, and Germany. The nation’s proper cultivation of a certain class of “scientific genius,” which was always white, could produce its own Newtons, Lavoisiers, and Humboldts. Newcomb called science a “national liberal education, to be maintained for the same reasons that we maintain the liberal education of the individual”—science and nation equated again.Footnote 77 As Albert Moyer has shown, Newcomb believed the scientific method could help citizens understand the first principles of any subject. But science itself was separate from the application of the scientific method. The true practice of science would be reserved for a favored few. Such a belief was common among Reconstruction-era liberal thinkers who looked to establish political science, political economy, and the other emerging social sciences along the principles of positivist scientific method: “science allowed them to speak with the voice of universal rationality,” Dorothy Ross writes, “while bestowing special authority on its elite class of practitioners.”Footnote 78 Yet like other theorists who struggled to comport the racial complexity of the country with a unified nationalism—Lieber, Mulford, Draper—Newcomb ultimately equated “American science” with white science.
When Newcomb wrote “what is required to insure us against disaster is not mere technical research, but the instruction of our intelligent and influential public,” he did not technically abandon the liberal politics of the 1870s—namely, public education—but rather superimposed a hierarchy of race that almost foreshadowed the inequality of the disingenuous “separate but equal.”Footnote 79 He regarded emancipation as a sign of the natural “order of progress,” as the framers of the Constitution understood that slavery’s permanence “would be in conflict with the advancing views of the world.” But “the outlook for the negro in America” remained deeply puzzling, he wrote, with freedpeople suddenly made citizens, “yet savage so far as any education was concerned.” It is easy to see both his mentor, Joseph Henry, and his intellectual idol, John Stuart Mill, in these ideas. Of the freedpeople who came to Washington during and after the Civil War, Newcomb claimed that they “made fair servants if only their pilfering propensities could be restrained.”Footnote 80 In 1879, Newcomb compared astronomer C. H. F. Peters’s “sledge hammer” destruction of hypothetical Vulcans orbiting the Sun to a rhyme popularized in minstrel shows: “I have been greatly struck with the [similarity] between the history of these 4 little Vulcans, and that of the 10 little niggers [sic], whose number was diminished by one with every accident.”Footnote 81 Newcomb then wrote out the rhyme for Peters. That same year, Newcomb wrote to the editor of Nineteenth Century Magazine that he wanted to write on the “hopeless” condition of the “negro problem” and the “decay of Republican sentiment in the country.”Footnote 82 Unfortunately for historians, he never wrote the article. His parameters were also clearly gendered. When in January 1878 Sarah R. Smith, in charge of the Miner Normal School in Washington along with her sister Mary, wrote to the Philosophical Society of Washington requesting to attend its meetings, Newcomb stepped forward with a resolution that “it has not been the custom of the society to receive lady visitors, and that it is not regarded as expedient at present to accept such.”Footnote 83
In the pages of the North American Review, Newcomb argued that science was essentially like the nation itself: a civilizing force that would lift others out of savagery and barbarism, one that ought to be commanded by a white male demographic. But so far, he claimed, Americans cared little for science that could not be immediately monetized and put to use. The structures of American science had faltered through a lack of incentives, poor publishing practices, and a general “incredulity respecting the possibility of native talent which seems to be inherent in the American mind.”Footnote 84 American scientific societies exhibited “a total lack of cohesive power, vitality, and that undefinable something which may be called weight and importance.”Footnote 85 A “rigorous system of intellectual natural selection” would place an American style of science on par with England, France, and Germany.Footnote 86 In the early years of the Republic, “nothing worthy of the name of national science” existed.Footnote 87 With the end of the Civil War, the conditions had changed. Reconstructing the American state included sufficiently manning scientific agencies and bureaus (including the use of civilian scientists rather than military men), rewarding and incentivizing scientific research, and adequately publishing and distributing science. “Scientific research,” Newcomb wrote, “and the presence of those ideas on which civilization is founded, are so closely connected, and each is so productive of the other, that they cannot be separated.”Footnote 88 In other words, science and nation were made of the same liberal stuff. Thus, if Americans wanted to improve science, they would need to address something fundamental: the very spirit of the nation.
The Undying Spirit of Apathy
“I have never been able to confine my attention to astronomy,” Simon Newcomb confessed in his autobiography, “with that exclusiveness which is commonly considered necessary to the highest success in any profession.”Footnote 89 While scattered in his interests, Newcomb consistently committed himself to uniformity, stabilization, and refinement. Wartime violence, political instability, financial panic and inflation, and the disruption of scientific research during the Civil War and its aftermath all generated in Newcomb a desire to assist the United States in finding more solid ground—economically, politically, and scientifically.Footnote 90
His faith in scientific method, for example, embodied this obsession with stabilization and standardization. That is, progress of all stripes advanced with a “definite set of procedural rules, primary of which was the rule to employ only those concepts that can be defined in terms of concrete experiences.”Footnote 91 Late in Newcomb’s life, the Director of the Paris Observatory described the American astronomer’s work as a “superhuman task … to build up the theory of our whole planetary world on an absolutely homogeneous basis of constants.”Footnote 92 His work on the transits of Mercury and Venus, the velocity of light, the constant of nutation, lunar motion, star catalogues, and many other subjects all fit within his project of refining studies of gravity and the solar system by placing celestial mechanics upon a uniform systemFootnote 93 (Figure 2). Economics, he professed, was no different, a study of natural laws much like physics or astronomy: “A law of nature can only be expressed in the form of a conditional proposition. Its general form is: if a certain state of things be true, then a certain result will follow. Examples of such propositions are as follows: If you touch gunpowder with fire, then it will explode; if you leave a heavy body unsupported, then it will fall to the ground; if you bring a large extra supply of goods to market, then the prices will fall.”Footnote 94 Newcomb’s procedural approach was early American pragmatism at work, an “idea about ideas,” in scholar Louis Menand’s words, where ideas are “tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.”Footnote 95 Indeed, Newcomb was friendly with two icons of the emergent philosophy: Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Peirce. They all looked to make a world more concrete. In the words of political economist and former Union Army officer Francis Amasa Walker, “the world [had] lost its taste for a priori politics.”Footnote 96
Figure 2. Simon Newcomb (sitting on stool) with the 1874 transit of Venus team at the Naval Observatory. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
At face value, Newcomb’s politics of uniformity and stabilization appear quite conservative. Indeed, fellow well-known names in federal science, sociologist Lester Frank Ward and geologist and anthropologist John Wesley Powell—two Midwestern men with agricultural backgrounds—differed from Newcomb by carrying more sympathy for populist labor politics.Footnote 97 Ward’s brother, Cyrenus Osborne Ward, had become a labor radical in the 1870s who advocated for industrial cooperation and communism as the historical inevitabilities of democratic and republican progress.Footnote 98 Powell feared the complacency and apathy of the mugwump types in the wake of such a violent American conflict. “When wrongs arise in any class of society,” he wrote, “those wrongs must ultimately be righted, and so long as they remain, the conflict also must remain, and when the solution comes not by methods of peace, it comes by war.”Footnote 99 But using Newcomb as conservative juxtaposition would again misunderstand him. Like Powell, he saw danger in apathy. They shared a deep concern with the connection between American indifference and the stability of the postwar government.
By 1880, the North American Review enjoyed Newcomb’s growing celebrity: “your name has become a power in the land,” Secretary of the Review John S. Barron wrote to him.Footnote 100 So that year he wrote an article for the North American Review called “Our Political Dangers,” which argued that the biggest threat to American politics was a future contested presidential election, essentially a repeat of what had happened in 1876. The Electoral Commission that had placed Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House had prevented a conflict that, “as human nature goes, might have been expected to culminate in anarchy or civil war.”Footnote 101 Sectional conflict, as he feared between East and West years earlier, remained a serious concern for the astronomer. And fifteen years on, Newcomb continued to situate his arguments in relation to the Civil War and its aftermath:
Ever since the war, good men have been expecting to see the present parties disintegrate and new ones formed to meet each other on the new issues of the day. Especially has the moribund condition of the Democracy been the subject of moralizing on the part of Republicans, who seemed about ready to put on mourning for their old antagonist; and yet both organizations are to-day more compact than ever, and, could the Democratic party only keep its wayward and unruly members in subjection, it could hardly fail to elect the next president.Footnote 102
Elections no longer centered on questions of public policy, in Newcomb’s mind, but on scrambles for power between party machines. The notion of a republic, where the questions of governance are decided by the opinions of individual citizens, had almost completely vanished.
In less than a year, Newcomb’s good friend James Garfield had been inaugurated as the twentieth president of the United States and then tragically assassinated. When Charles Guiteau shot Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, many Americans turned their ire to the spoils system, the corrupted practice of political appointments that, many believed, had made the president into Guiteau’s target.Footnote 103 Civil service reform became popular in the 1870s among liberals who viewed the spoils system as the major roadblock to expert-driven administration, the kind of governance Newcomb promoted as a federal scientist.Footnote 104 When Garfield died after months of agony and medical malpractice from his head physician, Newcomb wrote to his friend, astronomer Otto Wilhelm von Struve, in St. Petersburg, Russia, expressing his sorrow. “The loss of our President,” Newcomb wrote, “is more severely felt by scientific men generally, and by myself in particular, than by most other classes.”Footnote 105 Garfield had secured funds for the Transit of Venus Expedition in 1874 after Newcomb had joined his family for dinner to discuss the science and promise of the expedition. Then, when the Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872 came back to haunt Garfield during his presidential campaign, Newcomb anonymously penned an article for a New York newspaper in his defense. And in 1880, gearing up for the presidential election, Newcomb wrote to the editor of The Nation, E. L. Godkin, to “express the hope that you will speak kindly of the nomination of Garfield.”Footnote 106 Newcomb admired his friend’s generosity and wanted to return the favor.Footnote 107
Newcomb took to his pen once again. “American Political Practices,” an article written in 1882 or 1883 yet left unpublished, brought up the dangers of a future contested political election, as he did in 1880, but this time Newcomb wanted to reduce American politics to first principles: a natural history of the nation, but this time from the side of politics. It was, among other things, a fierce critique of the spoils system. As with a national scientific spirit, the American political mind had several tendencies that could be isolated by “long and patient study and observation,” rather than via abstractions and grand theories. In contrast to the “violent democratic and revolutionary feeling” at the turn of the last century, Newcomb noted, the “apathy of the present” was a curious development.Footnote 108 Teachers taught the Constitution to the nation’s youth, but as a matter of fact, not as a flexible document embedded with fierce sentiment. Even with decades of fraught elections and the “tenor of a crisis,” Americans had not moved past their aversion to changes in the Constitution to fix a broken electoral process. The Reconstruction Amendments did not fundamentally change the electoral process, but only expanded it. And Washington’s expansion and then elimination of democracy appeared more as a retraction than progress. Newcomb, who became a naturalized citizen in 1864, could no longer vote after the establishment of a commission government in the capital in 1874.
Much of Reconstruction appeared to Newcomb as a short-lived project, a widening of current American political practices but not a wholesale change; the agency and demands of freedpeople never came to mind. John C. Calhoun, he believed, had pushed the Civil War upon the nation, even if Calhoun never lived to see it. Newcomb recognized the radicalness of Reconstruction, how reunion required departure from the “contemporaries of [George] Washington,” and how some anticipated twenty years ago that “the legislation of Congress would no longer be guided by the constitution.”Footnote 109 Yet sentiments died quickly. “Old habits of thought and action reasserted themselves,” he wrote. A club appeared in Washington after the Civil War to agitate for empire, but “it died from inability to even excite public attention.”Footnote 110 The push and pull of Reconstruction demonstrated the three major characteristics of the American political spirit: a natural conservatism arising from fear of change, indifference to theories of politics, and a general spirit of toleration toward those in power.Footnote 111 As with American science, apathy had stunted progress.
What emerged from the war was a hardening of party lines. The “machines” and “bosses” of party politics grew stronger as democracy grew weaker, even with the promises of an expanded electorate; civic virtue and cultivation buckled under the weight of party loyalty. To Newcomb, a distinctly illiberal regime emerged during Reconstruction, not through military occupation of the South, as some would have it, but as a product of party hegemony and the spoils system, a trend he dated back to Andrew Jackson. As Leslie Butler has argued, civil service reform, as the “totem” of late nineteenth-century liberal politics, had strong moral dimensions that decried the tyranny of partisanship that obstructed progressive policy through cultivated public education and discussion.Footnote 112 Indeed, what worried Newcomb was how ineffectual the government would be if Americans sat back and accepted politics as usual.Footnote 113
Scientific progress had a two-pronged relationship with this political conundrum: it served as an epistemic foundation for positive, liberal government, and it could not find solid ground without a protected civil service. As far as Newcomb could tell, the American apathy for structural change and ultimate fealty to party machines had largely left scientific appointments untouched, given the specialized skill of such positions. But if Americans continued to leave the system unchanged, those scientific positions so central to proper statecraft could easily succumb to the beast of spoils. Even if Newcomb’s economic thought gave credence to the capitalist, “arrogant, smug, and self-satisfied,” his devotion to a national science made the astronomer a passionate reformer.Footnote 114 Newcomb feared the “consequences when a Democratic Administration shall again come into power.” Seeking revenge, “it will find itself with nearly all the offices in its home field,” ready to be replaced. National science required centralization—after all, Benjamin Franklin and astronomer Nathaniel Bowditch had worked tirelessly in isolation, without a London or Paris to support them. Philadelphia circa 1800 showed promise, but it offered nothing like the space and resources of the Royal Society in London or the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Washington could now be this scientific center, a capital city like Paris or London, one now at the beck and call of elites, newly free from popular democracy. Scientific progress largely emerged from “men working together in close associations,” with national styles coalescing on the global stage. “The mutual attrition of ideas, the competition of rival workers, the zest gained by intercourse with kindred spirits, though of a lower order of genius, are all most important factors in such advance.”Footnote 115 Newcomb’s theory of scientific progress was distinctly social. When in 1875 Harvard president Charles William Eliot approached Newcomb about the possibility of succeeding Joseph Winlock as Director of the Harvard College Observatory, Newcomb declined, bound by family to the national capital and hopeful that the relationship between “scientific and literary classes” and politicians would soon improve.Footnote 116 Like his friend Charles Sumner, Newcomb believed Washington would be an example for all the land.
Along with civil service reform and general increases in federal patronage for science and scientific publishing, Newcomb consistently argued for two major reforms: science at the department level in the executive branch, such as a “Department of Science” or a “Department of Agriculture and Science,” as well as the establishment of a national university. The national university idea had gained new life after the Civil War when a western educator and political activist named John Hoyt decided to dedicate his life to its creation, hoping one day to make good on George Washington’s promise for an intellectual capital city. At a meeting of the National Education Association in 1869, Hoyt ginned up support for a university in Washington dedicated to postgraduate work that made use of the scientific departments of government.Footnote 117 The idea also gained traction locally. In 1873, “leading citizens of the capital” held a meeting at Wormley’s Hotel for the endowment of a national university, with Columbian College (now George Washington University) as the nucleus.Footnote 118 Joseph Henry, Spencer Baird, Alexander Shepherd, President Ulysses S. Grant, governor of the city and financier Henry D. Cooke, and Simon Newcomb were all present, among others. Speakers toasted the blessings a national university would bestow upon the nation and the world, and “spoke with pride of the present condition of our city, and of its future possibilities, and in some facetious and very happy remarks referred to the past in our history as a national capital.”Footnote 119
Centralizing and strengthening science in Washington would, of course, bolster Newcomb’s own power as a federal scientist. In the early 1880s, Newcomb wrote to Henry Adams, a fellow powerful voice among Gilded Age liberals and resident on Lafayette Square next to the White House, asking why a new education bill did not allow for a national university. The following year, he wrote to Samuel P. Langley that “I have sometime thought it might be well to take advantage of the proposed re-organization and elevation of the Agricultural Department to make it a Department of Agriculture and Science.”Footnote 120 In 1884, Newcomb joined Powell in testifying before Congress on the need for a Department of Science during the Allison Commission’s investigation into the organization and spending of federal science. Years later, in 1895, singing the same tune in the North American Review, Newcomb wrote, “Why We Need a National University.” A “national university at Washington,” he called “one of the most pressing of our public needs.” The number of scientists now centered in Washington exceeded all other capitals, he noted. The center of politics offered opportunities, rather than distractions, for harmony between science and politics.Footnote 121
All of this was easier said than done. In the early 1880s, Newcomb struggled to free the Naval Observatory from military appointments, frustrated that non-scientists had control over a scientific institution.Footnote 122 Indeed, astronomer and meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, whom Newcomb originally brought to Washington in the 1860s, and his Weather Bureau at the Department of Agriculture, would find themselves under attack during the second term of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat elected president after the Civil War.Footnote 123 Reunion was only as stable as the ability to keep the opposition party at bay. Stagnation in American politics would beget stagnation in the sciences. Science faltered as long as the spoils went to the victor.
Conclusion
In his 1903 autobiography, Newcomb wrote, “I do not think the history of any modern municipality can show an episode more extraordinary or, taken in connection with its results, more instructive than what is known as the ‘Shepherd régime’ in Washington.”Footnote 124 The city’s territorial government of the early 1870s, he insisted, revealed the contradictions of public memory. Thirty years had gone by, and Washingtonians now looked back fondly at Shepherd for creating the beautiful city they enjoyed each day. The maligned governor whom Congress ousted was, in their eyes, the founder of the new Washington. They equated “modern” with beauty and a white control that made the illiberal government appear enlightened rather than despotic. The American political spirit had smoothed the edges once again. The malpractice of Shepherd was now necessary, even celebrated. “What will be the moral effect on our children,” he asked, “of holding up for their imitation such methods as I have described?”Footnote 125 Shepherd’s callous and reckless methods had assured his place in the history books. Indifference reigned supreme.
This anecdote brings together several important themes: Newcomb’s focus on reform, the importance of the city’s politics and history in his imagination, and an American political spirit that, as Newcomb saw it, capitulated to those in power and perpetuated an anti-reformist agenda. Newcomb focused on stability and permanence—his supreme faith in the silver bullet of scientific method became an essential example of this focus—but as goals to be attained rather than conditions to be maintained. Indeed, he was far more the reformist than most other scholars have suggested. Rather than the staunch laissez-faire liberal who looked stuck in the middle of the nineteenth century, Newcomb was, in fact, much more in line with the currents of modern liberalism. This side of Newcomb was never clearer than when he spoke about science and the future of the nation. Science, that “national liberal education,” was inseparable from the modern state. American science, and thus the American state, needed reform.
If the value at the bottom of pragmatism is tolerance, as Menand states, then Newcomb had a tricky relationship with the postwar intellectual project. He envisioned a future for American science through a nationalist lens that had a distinct racial cast to it. American science, like the American people, emerged from a set of conditions: social, cultural, political, evolutionary, and hereditary. Even within the parameters of whiteness, different nations excelled in different areas of scientific inquiry, and certain classes of scientific genius rose above others in a natural history of nations that set the conditions for intellectual natural selection. The utter lack of a national science, for Newcomb, was a fatal crack in the edifice of American culture. During the Civil War and Reconstruction years, he mingled with local Republicans, dug into economic and political subjects, and began to think of the nation as its own unit of analysis. In doing so, he embraced a liberalism that meant two things: a let-alone laissez-faire economic policy and more activist state support of science writ large. As his friend Irving Fisher noted after Newcomb’s death, the economist-astronomer was not so hard-headed about the role of government as many thought: “he was an advocate in general of the ‘let alone’ policy, though he distinguished it sharply from what he called the ‘keep out’ policy. In other words, he believed in the free economic activity of individuals, but did not advocate the exclusion of government from economic activity.”Footnote 126 Newcomb was a student of John Stuart Mill, and like Mill, his liberalism looked different at the intersection of race and nation. A robust scientific state fit soundly within Newcomb’s liberal project because it furthered the progress of white civilization in the world.
Science and nation became a two-way street, so Newcomb looked both ways. He critiqued a nationalism of apathy in both American science and American political practices. With all its many changes, Reconstruction had not amended a vital political danger: the capitulation to party machines. The spoils system was a double whammy for Newcomb. It did not hire the most expert people, and it threatened future instability and violence through its vengeance politics. In 1883, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which provided the technical foundations for the meritocracy many liberal white Republicans had been advocating since 1870. But the law was far from a robust solution. The Pendleton Act initially only covered about 10 percent of the government, the power of Congress and political parties remained in appropriations and administrative appointments, and McKinley added about 20,000 appointment opportunities a decade later.Footnote 127 Even so, a standard practice for the postwar Republican Party included Black patronage in the federal government, but with civil service reform, the patronage that continued was “all based on a fragile arrangement,” historian Eric S. Yellin writes, “that relied on the inclusiveness of white bureaucrats, the ‘respectability’ of black leaders, and, perhaps most important, the power of the Republican Party in Washington, D.C.”Footnote 128 A systematized civil service allowed for a racial hierarchy that looked less like the egalitarianism of Radical Republicans and more like the so-called intellectual natural selection of Newcomb. The move toward an ostensible meritocracy had white oversight baked in.
Newcomb’s story shows that we need better integration between the history of science and American political history, and we need political histories of science that take localist approaches more seriously. So much more work can be done on the intersections of science, nationalism, liberalism, and democracy, especially in pre-World War II America. Newcomb’s one-sided treatment in the historiography has resulted from this lack of attention, and especially a lack of attention to Washington, D.C., as a distinct political context for post-Civil War American science. With Newcomb as a conversation starter, we can begin to ask broader questions. What did reunion mean to American scientists, especially those in government? How did those who experienced the Civil War and then moved into government science bring their experiences into the next chapters of their lives?Footnote 129 And how did American scientists, as a special interest group (or groups), interact with the political currents of the age: Reconstruction, nationalism, democracy, and more? In Newcomb’s case, and not to downplay the essential importance of the global and textual dialogues of both science and politics, I argue for the importance of place.Footnote 130 Newcomb’s life in Washington brought him into contact with a congealing scientific community that often overlapped with political Washington. He found his own voice within this environment and pushed it into the national journals of nineteenth-century liberalism. And he was not alone. Much of the same can be said for Ward, Powell, and others. The history of state science needs to be told from the streets of Washington just as much as it does from the halls of scientific agencies, the fields out West, and the thoroughfares of global knowledge exchange.
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