Alexander Dallas Bache: Building the American Nation through Science and Education in the Nineteenth Century by Axel Jansen (review)

Alexander Dallas Bache is well known to historians of science for his leadership roles in the Franklin Institute, the U.S. Coast Survey, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. While Axel Jansen's main title might suggest that he has written a biography, it is the subtitle that is most illustrative of the contents of the book. Jansen does examine biographical and even genealogical details of Bache's life, but only to the extent that they support the larger argument. Through Bache, Jansen maps out a network of engineers and scientists who, Jansen argues, worked to use the authority of science and rational discourse as a means of consolidating an American nation and building an American nation state.

The idea of a modern state using the authority of science to strengthen its authority is well recognized by historians of science and technology. In antebellum America, however, engineers and scientists were still struggling to professionalize and are generally seen as not having had much authority to lend. The more common story is that they tried to use the authority of the state and its interests to strengthen their own authority. But Jansen convincingly tells a different story that is worth consideration by historians of engineering and technology.

Jansen starts with Bache's family background and then takes us through each major step of his career. He employs a very close textual analysis of the writings and correspondence of Bache to discover his motives as they developed throughout his career. He provides the reader with an abundance of data so that we may analyze it for ourselves and he makes it clear when he is speculating. His analysis is transparent and convincing.

Bache went to West Point at the age of fourteen and studied engineering. As Jansen points out, there Bache would have seen a model for how an institution could employ science and rational discourse to serve the state. Jansen does make a few mistakes in this section. He states that West Point was the "sole [American] conveyor of engineering knowledge until about 1840" (p. 53). There were other schools offering limited engineering training before that, but, more importantly, most engineers learned their profession on the job. By focusing on formal schooling, Jansen limits his understanding of professionalization.

After serving in the Army Corps of Engineers, Bache returned home to Philadelphia in 1828. He became a member of the Franklin Institute, where he conducted experiments to improve water wheels for industry and studied steam boiler explosions. He saw this work and the work of the Institute as a public service, not to the Philadelphia region, but to the nation. While there, he began to argue for the necessity of Americans and the federal government to participate in, according to Jansen, a "rational discourse that transcended national borders" (p. 89), but it was the United States as a nation state that needed to do this to promote national, rather than local, wealth and progress.

From 1843 until his death in 1867, Bache served as the superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey. While the organization conducted the expected surveys of America's coasts, under Bache's leadership it also conducted work such as experiments on the accuracy of standards of weights and measurements in order to promote national standards. Bache, however, did not see the Survey as capable of living up to his vision of a scientific institution able to advise Congress on matters of science and industry. For this, he turned to the idea of a National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The legislation authorizing the institution passed in 1863 in the absence of southern congressmen who would have objected. But Jansen argues that it was the national crisis of the Civil War that prompted the founding. Bache saw the institution as a means of bringing together a nation in crisis...