Discerning the Relation between American Science and American Democracy

Gamblers the world over consider seven a lucky number. This Gregorian year of 2007 features a profusion of science-and-technology–related anniversaries strutting into view like sequined dancers on a Las Vegas runway. It is the three hundredth anniversary of the births of Carolus Linnaeus and Leonard Euler, the foundational systematist and mathematician, respectively. It is the two hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Survey of the Coast, which became the first scientific agency in the United States government, now known as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. It is now fifty years since SHOT was founded, and fifty years since the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, a Soviet contribution to the International Geophysical Year, which also began in 1957, more or less. And it is fifty years since the publication of A. Hunter Dupree's Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities.¹ Here elements and implications of all of the above converge in a volume addressed to an ambitious goal: a "rounded synthesis" of the development of science policies and activities of the U.S. government from the establishment of the federal Constitution to the onset of American engagement in World War II.² Half a century later the book remains a landmark, notwithstanding that no one would attempt such a project today, nor would anyone fund it.

Dupree never really stipulates what he means by "science," although he appears to favor a very broad-stroke definition: "Science, thus unspecialized in intent as well as in fields of knowledge, was at the same time useful and ornamental, specific and universal."³ He is rather more precise about the elites who would be the major participants in it: "As in Europe, the new United States found a knowledge of the natural world residing in an organized form largely within its upper classes. As in Europe, ideas stemming from science, in particular the ideas of Isaac Newton, were tremendously influential in shaping the mental outlook of cultivated men" (p. 6). So much for "knowledge of the natural world" by anyone else, like the Indians, and the slaves, and the servant classes, and, of course, all the women altogether. Since much of the project of history in the last half century has been to put these excluded people back into the story, and rather central to it in fact, what can still be gained from Dupree's contribution to the vast parade of histories of Dead White Males?

Dupree's saving grace is a formidable intelligence coupled to a deep sympathy for ordinary people in history. Arising from that is a commitment to discerning the relation between the history of American science and American democracy, both considered in messy and contradictory practice. The voluminous source materials that Dupree and his staff assimilated for the project were dominated by the records of the leaderships of scientific societies and government bureaus and the Congress, and the volume reflects that concentration. Because of these men, and despite them too, the slaves were freed, Indians were not annihilated entirely, women's participation in society and science changed utterly, and a great literate and scientifically knowledgeable middle class developed in a large and prosperous country. Dupree is particularly acute to the creative mobilizations set off by war and other political crises and the ways these transformed government scientific agencies, which in turn affected the people, often in counterintuitive ways.

But much recent history has emphasized the counterintuitive. Why read Science in the Federal Government now? I can think of two reasons. First, it has never been surpassed as a one-volume summary of the early history of all the major American government scientific bureaus and their contentious relations to other scientific enterprises, presidents, and the Congress. Second, Dupree is one of the best writers in the history of the field, magisterial yet democratic. The book's chapters proceed chronologically, picking up new scientific problems and government bureaus and areas of the world as they are enfolded in U.S. history. A major part...