News notice: The nomination deadline for the American Physical Society’s Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics is June 1. Please note, nominations require between two and four seconding letters, so be sure to move quickly!

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For four decades, the American Institute of Physics has supported a program that offers three-year postdoctoral research opportunities for historians of science. At the end of this coming summer, we will continue the tradition as we welcome Vincent Femia to our team.

Vince received his PhD in history last year from Princeton University, and he is currently working as a research associate at the Smithsonian Library and Archives. His work focuses on the confluence of the history of science and urban history, with a particular focus on science in Washington, DC. This year, he organized a just-concluded Smithsonian event series called “City of knowledge: Science, place, power,” exploring the subject.

Today, we look at Vince’s new article, “The natural history of nations: Simon Newcomb and the forging of a postwar American science,” published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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Simon Newcomb was one of the most prominent astronomers in the 19th-century United States. He was born in 1835 in Nova Scotia, Canada, and learned mathematics largely on his own before taking an apprenticeship to a physician, which he soon abandoned. He then made his way to the United States, where he reunited with his father and moved to Maryland on the opposite side of Chesapeake Bay from the city of Washington. Taking a job as a tutor closer to the city, he began spending time in the Smithsonian Institution’s library and soon met the institution’s founding leader, Joseph Henry.

Henry directed Newcomb to a job with the US Coast Survey, which in turn led him in 1856 to another position with the US Navy’s Nautical Almanac office, then located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He also began studying under Benjamin Peirce at nearby Harvard and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1858. The Civil War brought Newcomb back to Washington in 1861, when a number of staff members at the Naval Observatory, including its superintendent, departed for the Confederacy, and he joined on as an assistant, which also gave him a professorship with the US Navy. He became a US citizen in 1864.

A scientific life in the nation’s capital

Femia paints a vivid picture of life at the wartime observatory, with resources lacking but also a relaxed schedule and pride that the work was continuing at all:

“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. 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. 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. They became good friends, occasionally discussing ‘parallax and beef steak’ over supper.”

One should not take away from this the impression that Newcomb was less than deeply devoted to astronomy. Through his work at the Naval Observatory, he established a reputation that was strong enough to earn him an offer to direct the Harvard College Observatory in 1875. However, he declined, believing he would be best positioned to pursue his goals by remaining in Washington. And indeed, in 1877 he eagerly accepted the superintendency of the Nautical Almanac, which had moved to the city. It was in that role that he could finally set an agenda for work in mathematical astronomy, his preferred corner of the field. This brought him still greater prominence, and among other markers of his significance, he served from 1899 to 1905 as the first president of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America (soon renamed the American Astronomical Society).

Femia aptly shows that, throughout this time, Washington was for Newcomb more than just the location of the Smithsonian, the Naval Observatory, and the Nautical Almanac office—it was a lively urban environment that continually fed and shaped his interests. He participated in groups such as Joseph Henry’s Saturday Club, scientific and literary salons convened by former postmaster general Horatio King, the Washington Statistical Society, which was founded in 1866, and the Philosophical Society of Washington, established in 1871. And he was on friendly terms with important players in national politics such as Garfield and the Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner.

Traveling within these circles, Newcomb fostered an abiding interest in political economy and national affairs. For instance, with the Confederate defeat in 1865, he published a lengthy critique of the Union’s financial policy , and he remained an avid commentator on currency policy, criticizing the use of greenbacks and strongly advocating a return to money backed by gold or silver. Moreover, he took full advantage of his proximity to power. Fermia documents him personally hunting down Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch to advocate for anti-greenback policies and handing Garfield draft legislation on currency reform.

Science, culture, and politics in Newcomb’s thought

Femia argues that, while scholars have recognized Newcomb’s political interests, they have generally portrayed them simplistically, as characterized by a commitment to laissez-faire economic doctrines and a “let-alone principle” of individual liberty. Per Femia, Newcomb’s ideas represented a more complicated response to the tangled social, cultural, economic, and political problems that the US faced in the wake of the war. Understanding his place—both geographically and socially—in American scientific and political life can help to make sense of these ideas.

The only full-length scholarly study of Newcomb is Albert Moyer’s 1992 book, A Scientist’s Voice in American Culture: Simon Newcomb and the Rhetoric of Scientific Method. Femia credits Moyer with placing Newcomb within traditions emphasizing the application of scientific methodology across the natural and social world, which informed, for instance, his 1885 book Principles of Political Economy. In such pursuits, Newcomb was influenced by figures such as Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, and especially John Stuart Mill, and he can be considered part of a cohort of American thinkers that also included Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.

However, Femia also stresses the centrality of Washington’s local political and intellectual environment in shaping Newcomb’s thinking about political affairs and science’s relationship to them. Femia places Newcomb’s politics within the non-radical wing of the Republican party: approving of the abolition of slavery, defensive of established social and economic orders, critical of labor unions, suspicious of popular agitation, and committed to the stability of the nation. Amid these concerns, Newcomb advocated for the federal government to support science and scientific education as cultural mechanisms for holding together a fragile American polity.

Newcomb reflected on these matters across a number of his writings, including a pair of essays published in the North American Review: “Exact science in America” in 1874 and “Abstract science in America” in 1876.

In Newcomb’s view, American science was in an unfavorable position compared to England, France, and Germany, where science contributed to those nations’ high civilizational status and their leadership in lifting other nations out of “savagery”—an argument echoing Mill’s defense of colonialism. Exploring why America fell short, Newcomb explicitly put aside the question of racial differences in intelligence, as he accepted the racist and sexist presumption that science was the preserve of white men. He was moreover skeptical of Francis Galton’s then-recent argument that scientific genius is inherited within families, supposing there was no biological reason why white Americans could not measure up.

Instead, Newcomb argued that different nations cultivate different styles of science and that American science was hampered by its failure to promote vital institutions and scientific discourse. He attributed such failures to the apathy of American society toward any science that departed from practical affairs as well as apathy toward sound government, as reflected in the fitful reforms of the Reconstruction era. Newcomb feared the rise of “machine” politics and the potential resurgence of the spoils system in federal employment. Femia points out that some blamed corruption of the civil service for inspiring Charles Guiteau to assassinate James Garfield, still Newcomb’s friend, months after he became the US president in 1881.

Despite such headwinds, Newcomb placed his faith in political reform to lift up American science, expecting that Washington could be made into an important scientific center. He looked forward to increased federal patronage of scientific research and publishing, and also to a more merit-based civil service. Even more ambitiously, he advocated for the creation of an executive branch department dedicated to science, as well as for the foundation of a “national university” located in the city.

By the time Newcomb died in 1909, his hopes for such reforms had been dashed. Backed largely by private philanthropy, American science had advanced, but the federal government’s more transformative role would only grow later on, in response to the two world wars and the Cold War. Although US policy would always avoid concentrating authority over science in a single department or concentrating scientific work in a single geographic location, by virtue of its proximity to research-supporting agencies, Washington, DC would in fact become an important locus for science in America.

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William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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