The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, page 21
The Flash of the Bug
March 1843 brought a welcome announcement. The Dollar Newspaper was offering a hundred-dollar prize for a short story contest—“Very Liberal Offers and No Humbug.” Poe had already sold his latest tale to Graham—an unprecedented concoction of cryptological drama, entomological misdirection, minstrel show, and pirate legend. Poe bought it back and submitted it to the contest.
On June 14, the Dollar announced, “First prize of ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS to ‘THE GOLD BUG,’” declaring it “a capital story.” Dollars, gold, and capital were on people’s minds: the runner-up was “The Banker’s Daughter,” and third prize went to “Marrying for Money.”
The protagonist of “The Gold-Bug,” Legrand, a ruined aristocrat, lives in self-imposed exile off the South Carolina coast on Sullivan’s Island (known to Poe from his time in the army). He finds a strange insect on the beach, a scarab with a golden, metallic-appearing carapace marked with the image of a death’s-head. He wraps it in a nearby scrap of parchment. When he casts the paper into the fire, writing appears: invisible ink revealed by the flames. Rescuing and reading the document, Legrand finds a coded message. He methodically deciphers it and is led, along with his caricature of a servant, the formerly enslaved Jupiter, to a fabulous buried pirate’s treasure—gold and gems worth millions.
“The Gold-Bug” marked a significant turn in Poe’s fiction toward American settings. It was a wish-fulfilling story about using one’s wits to exchange worthless paper with seemingly meaningless writing on it—like the devalued paper currency of the state banks, or the scribbles “of no value to anyone” in Poe’s bankruptcy declaration—into gold. Robert Louis Stevenson would closely follow its trail in Treasure Island.
Clarke alerted Saturday Museum readers to this “unique work of a singularly constituted, but indubitably great intellect.” There was a rush on copies at The Dollar Newspaper’s offices, with the original and a reprint selling out. It was quickly turned into a play. In the Philadelphia Daily Forum, a young journalist denounced the piece and the prize as “A Decided Humbug,” baselessly accusing Poe of plagiarism. Poe prepared to sue for libel, but the issue was settled with a handshake and a retraction.
This fresh burst of celebrity brought Poe a new series of printed tales and a further venture: a lecture tour. The subject: “American Poetry.”
Publicity was provided by George Lippard—a long-haired, muckraking novelist (his Quaker City depicted the vile appetites of Philadelphia’s elites and their machinations against ordinary working people). He recognized Poe’s heroic literary efforts and, like many, loathed Griswold. Lippard pronounced him a born poet with a mind “stamped with the impress of genius,” likely “the most original writer that ever existed in America. Delighting in the wild and visionary, his mind penetrates the inmost recesses of the human soul, creating vast and magnificent dreams, eloquent fancies and terrible mysteries.”
Poe delivered his speech in Philadelphia to a crowded hall, with hundreds “unable to gain admission.” A “highly intelligent audience” was riveted by his “great analytical power” and “command of language.” He took the show on the road: to Wilmington, Delaware’s Temperance Hall, the Mechanics’ Hall in Reading, the Odd Fellows Hall in Baltimore, the Franklin Lyceum, and the Philadelphia Museum—the city’s most distinguished stage for popular science and entertainment, where George Combe had given his lectures on phrenology and where magic lantern “dissolving views” debuted. Poe’s lectures were a stepping-stone to “a sound Magazine, devoted to all the higher objects of American Literature, edited, owned and controlled by Mr. Poe.”
Poe sought a lecture at the Boston Lyceum, but its secretary predicted a low “probability of your success.” Poe’s attacks on Bostonians—on Emerson, Griswold, and Longfellow—weren’t doing him any favors in Philadelphia either. Graham commissioned a review of Longfellow’s Spanish Student; Poe’s article was so harsh, Graham told Longfellow, that the editor had to pay him not to publish it. He mentioned an IOU from Poe: “I do not suppose it will ever be redeemed, and I doubt if the writer of it will be”—a literally damning judgment.
Thomas C. Clarke, despite dropping out of the Stylus plan, still treated Poe kindly in the Saturday Museum. But in January 1844, Clarke retired from publishing. Lippard tried to set the record straight about Poe’s contributions to the city’s cultural scene: “It was Mr. Poe that made Graham’s Magazine what it was a year ago; it was his intellect that gave this now weak and flimsy periodical a tone of refinement and mental vigor.”
But the round of recognition sparked by “The Gold-Bug” came too late. One by one, the doors of Philadelphia were closing.
11
The March of Science and Quacks
Science on Parade
Poe’s dream of leading a national literary journal, to be guided by impersonal, universal standards, was now buried, if not dead. Meanwhile, other people’s schemes for lifting the level of the nation’s intellectual life were moving forward—projects to promote, diffuse, and organize research at the national level. Some strode forth to loud fanfare, while others, behind the scenes, would have the far greater effect.
In Washington on April 1, 1844, scientists and government officials were lining up on Pennsylvania Avenue. The National Institute for the Promotion of Science was starting its first public convention with a parade.
President Tyler and members of his cabinet marched from the Treasury Building to the Presbyterian church. As they filled the pews, the Marine Corps’s marching band played “a solemn air.” An “appropriate prayer” was offered by the Reverend Clement Moore Butler of Georgetown, after which “a newly invented instrument, combining the organ and piano,” sent forth strains of “dulcet harmony.”
The president welcomed the crowd. He was followed by John W. Draper, who reported on the action of the sun’s rays as revealed by the daguerreotype. The astronomer Elias Loomis next presented his analysis of the comet of 1843.
Interspersed between musical performances, a disorienting range of lectures were delivered: Lieutenant Matthew Maury on the Gulf Stream, Virginia’s George Tucker on “the Future Progress of the United States,” lectures on entomology, a petrified forest, the nebular hypothesis, the historical schools of France and Germany, the theory of “One Electric Fluid” (presented by the president’s son John Tyler Jr.), meteorological observations by the “Storm King” James Espy, and, from the Reverend Eliphalet Nott, the president of Union College who had designed a coal-burning stove and several other less notable inventions, a discourse titled “On the Origin, Duration, and End of the World.”
The event stretched across ten days. In attendance were “members of Congress, strangers, and citizens” with a “large number of Ladies” in the upper gallery. The government officials who organized the convention had promoted it as an “intellectual banquet” of the “broadest popular character.”
For this very reason—its broad and popular character—many of America’s most accomplished men of science chose to stay home. More than forty leading scientists—including Joseph Henry, Benjamin Peirce, and the Yale professor and editor of The American Journal of Science and Arts, Benjamin Silliman—declined the National Institute’s invitation.
On reading the program, Henry sarcastically wrote to the chemist John Torrey, “What do you think of my preparing a paper for the Washington Institute on bubbles to be presented at the great meeting? Would the title be considered objectional in connection with that of the magniloquent communication to be made by Dr Nott on the origin and destruction of the world?”
The institute was a bold step toward national support for science. But for Henry, Bache, and other like-minded scientists, it was a bubble, a fad, and a step in the wrong direction.
A Cool Half Million
The institute arose as the solution to an enviable problem: What to do with eleven crates of gold? Upon his death in 1829, James Smithson, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland and an amateur geologist, left half a million dollars to the U.S. government to “found in Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” In 1838, Richard Rush sailed to Britain to recuperate Smithson’s booty.
No one could agree on what to do with the gold. One possibility was an unkept promise from John Quincy Adams’s inauguration speech: a national observatory, a lighthouse of the sky. Another was a national school of science—a plan supported in Congress and backed by the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1840, Poe echoed this call, arguing in Burton’s that Smithson’s “whole life is a plain commentary” upon his intention to found not a general university or museum but “a College for the advancement of Science.”
The success of the British Association for the Advancement of Science inspired American researchers to consider another possibility: a national scientific organization. Tocqueville saw “the spirit of associations,” the voluntary organization of groups around shared interests, as a defining characteristic of American democracy in the 1830s. In 1838, an attempt to start an association of America’s men of science was blocked by members of Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, satisfied with their position as the country’s oldest (if languishing) scientific society. At the New York Lyceum, John Torrey agreed “with the Philadelphians” that the time was not right: “There is indeed too much Charlatanism in the country—enough to overpower us modest men.”
Despite such reservations, a plan for a national scientific body to be funded by the Smithson bequest took shape within Van Buren’s cabinet. Its leader was the secretary of war, Joel Poinsett, a world traveler and plantation owner from South Carolina. An ardent promoter of the interests of his fellow slaveholders, he envisioned the extension of U.S.-owned plantations into Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America—a plan later pursued by the oceanographer Matthew Maury.
Poinsett was the leading government supporter of the U.S. South Seas Exploring Expedition, the project initiated by J. N. Reynolds and promoted by Poe at the Southern Literary Messenger. Its seven boats had set sail in August 1838 under the command of Charles Wilkes and accompanied, at Poinsett’s insistence, by a scientific corps—including the botanist James Dana, the painter Titian Peale, and the zoologist and ethnologist Charles Pickering (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s application to document the ship’s voyage was declined).
In 1840, as early shipments of specimens from the expedition began arriving in D.C., Poinsett suggested that Smithson’s gift be directed to fund a national museum. Such a “national cabinet” could store and display the expedition’s specimens along with rocks, plants, and animals from state surveys and local collectors. It would be placed under the control of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science.
A number of government officers, including the secretaries of state and the Treasury, drew up the proposed National Institute’s constitution. Poinsett was its director, along with James Kirke Paulding—one of Poe’s early supporters, now Van Buren’s secretary of the navy. The president and the vice president were also given official roles.
With this board of political appointees, the approaching presidential election of 1840 highlighted the fragility of the institute’s conception. Would these politicians—many with strong southern and Jacksonian sympathies—reward or refuse researchers on the basis of political loyalties? Would a new administration support it?
Such worries over the institute’s enmeshment with politics proved justified: with Van Buren’s defeat to the Whig Harrison in 1840, Poinsett retired to his acres in South Carolina. When the Exploring Expedition’s boats returned to New York’s harbor in 1842, the institute’s secretary, Francis Markoe, a clerk in the State Department, took charge. He began haphazardly arranging the expedition’s colorful birds, plants, stones, and ethnographic objects in the Great Hall of Washington’s Patent Office (now the National Portrait Gallery). Markoe also began to plan a national convention for the institute, hoping to strengthen its case to receive Smithson’s gold.
The institute’s organizers abandoned any hope of competing with “the extent and depth” of similar organizations in Europe, such as the BAAS; instead, they aimed merely to “collect” and “diffuse” the “intelligence, science, and practical observations of our countrymen in the different parts of the United States.” Membership was wide open—to anyone with “a disposition” to “contribute or derive useful information.” Despite this popular vocation, Markoe saw that the institute’s success would depend on support from accomplished researchers with established reputations. He invited dozens to attend the convention. He made a particular appeal to members of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists (AAGN). Recently formed by veterans of state geological surveys, this group held its first meeting at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1840.
Markoe knew that the AAGN planned to meet again in Washington in May 1844. He hoped to persuade them to abandon their meeting or combine it with the institute’s in April. Yet he clearly had in mind “something more popular” than the AAGN’s usual business. James Dana, botanist for the Exploring Expedition, felt the AAGN should meet and share their findings “without the aid of a band of music, and with more real science.” Some researchers worried that the institute was more concerned with publicizing science than with doing it; according to Bache, Americans “have half a hundred persons engaged in diffusing science for one who is occupied by research.”
Joseph Henry thought the institute was unfit to “decide questions of a strictly scientific character,” because it was “under the control principally of amateurs and politicians.” According to Dana, the modesty of the upcoming AAGN meeting would upstage the institute’s extravagance: “If we can have a general attendance, the quiet business-like style of the meetings and the real value of the subjects discussed, and original matter brought out will put them in the background, bass-drum and all.”
Henry peevishly wondered what would become of “the mass of diluvium which the Institute has drawn down on itself in an avalanche of pseudo-science.” The institute’s grab bag of presentations, its ceremonial pomp, and its direction by politicians all smacked of crowd-pleasing charlatanism—anathema to his vision of well-planned, self-directed, sober, and rigorous research.
A Humbug Epidemic
Though Bache agreed, he was too shrewd a politician to snub an organization that might win Smithson’s gift. Instead, he used his slot at the convention to deliver a programmatic address titled “The Wants of Science in the United States”—in which he protested, and not subtly, against the institute’s direction. He cautioned against “precipitously moving forward” with a scientific association without clearly reckoning with America’s need for “workers” rather than “talkers.” Efforts to impress and entertain the public would be counterproductive: “We need more activity, but not to be stirred up every year by exciting means.” He insisted that the country needed not just any scientific union but “such a union as would repress charlatanism, not the form of association which would deliver us up bound hand and foot as its prey.”
Henry and Bache were wary of any popular scientific entertainment, fearing that rigor would be sacrificed for spectacle. They were also insistent that any American version of the British Association must not be a democratic free-for-all. The BAAS meetings were popular and open events, bringing in members from across Britain. Wide participation was good for its coffers, but when “every person has the liberty of making a communication,” Henry pointed out, amateurs, dilettantes, and “the profound savant are on the same level.” The self-selecting leaders of the BAAS, however, were able to keep a grip on its overall direction; “the great body of the members have no voice in the management of the Institution, and in this respect the society is quite as aristocratical as the government of the nation.”
Though a firm believer in America’s republican ideals—and that the tendency of science was “republican in the proper sense of the term”—Henry thought that any U.S. scientific organization would also need “aristocratical,” top-down oversight. The risk of a takeover by charlatans and quacks was far greater in America. He was annoyed at Benjamin Silliman’s American Journal of Science and Arts for printing far-fetched electrical and physiological theories. When Samuel Morse contacted him with questions about the telegraph, Henry warned that “in the minds of many, the electro-magnetic telegraph is associated with the many chimerical projects constantly brought before the Public.” Henry thought an American association would have to restrict its membership to those who “have served, as it were, an apprenticeship to the business of experimenting,” echoing his own hard-served apprenticeship as a metalworker; otherwise, “the third and fourth rate men would soon control the affair and render the whole abortive and ridiculous.”
Henry and Bache saw quackery lurking not just in the lyceums and popular press but among their own colleagues. Their friend at the Franklin Institute James Espy had recently earned himself the title of “Storm King” by his popular lectures on meteorology and his book, The Philosophy of Storms. Espy argued that storms were caused by heat near the earth, forcing water to rise and form clouds; it then cooled, condensed, and fell as rain—a theory he demonstrated with his “nephelescope,” a device that produced a tempest in a teakettle. He proposed a solution to the droughts that tormented western settlements: setting a rash of fires beyond the Appalachians would, he believed, draw down rain. This was one of the first plans of artificial climate modification; fortunately, it was never tried out.
Bache expressed reservations about the “strange course” Espy was taking, and Henry worried about his “want of prudence.” Benjamin Peirce bemoaned Espy’s “air of self-satisfaction” and judged that “even storm kings are intolerable in a republic.” The former president John Quincy Adams diagnosed Espy as “methodically monomaniac”; phrenologically speaking, “the dimensions of his organ of self-esteem have been swollen to the size of a goiter.” (Poe would instead question the meteorologist’s originality: “The chief portion of Professor Espy’s theory has been anticipated by Roger Bacon,” he wrote in 1846.) In America’s clamorous public sphere, profitable and “ostentatious presentations” on controversial topics could spark thoughtless admiration, dangerous enthusiasm, and envy. The discomfort of Espy’s friends showed that even a background in solid science and membership in the exclusive scientific clique around Bache, Henry, and Peirce offered no brakes on the slope to demagoguery.
