The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, page 22
Henry held a special loathing for the man who would become, by far, America’s most successful scientific lecturer in the 1840s, Dionysius Lardner—the very rogue who had challenged Henry at the Liverpool BAAS meeting in 1837. Born in Dublin, Lardner took Anglican orders but devoted himself to evangelizing on mechanics and physical science instead. In London he created a successful scientific publishing concern. He became a fixture on the lecture circuit, ingratiating himself with Charles Babbage through a paean to the calculating engine; backed by Lord Brougham, he was installed as professor at University College London.
A seductive lecturer and a prolific seducer, Lardner had an illegitimate son with a married woman. The husband of another of his paramours, Mary Heaviside, was a captain of dragoons who gave him a thrashing in Paris. Lardner and Heaviside relocated to the United States. Rebuffed in Philadelphia, they moved to New York. In 1841, Lardner began public lectures at Clinton Hall and Niblo’s Garden on astronomy, electromagnetism, steam engines, and extraterrestrial life.
Lardner accompanied his lectures with “extensive and splendid illustrations,” magic lanterns, the artificial illumination of the oxyhydrogen microscope, and dioramas—a vividly colored, backlit display invented by Daguerre that produced illusions of depth, movement, and change. When the cause of his exile got out, New England papers were scandalized. Lardner had “destroyed the peace of a happy family,” but “the villain, instead of being scoured from all decent society, is invited to deliver a series of lectures.” Henry wrote to Torrey, “I see by the papers that the Gay Lothario Dr Dionysius Lardner is flourishing in New York. I think it is time for you to leave. The Philadelphians have some reason to crow—they gave him no countenance.”
Dionysius Lardner giving a lesson, surrounded by equipment from his lectures
Despite the disapproval of leading American scientists, Lardner’s easily digested, multisensory spectacles were immensely popular: from Clinton Hall he went on to lecture in lyceums from Boston to New Orleans, St. Louis to Cincinnati; in Philadelphia he entertained audiences of more than one thousand. Lardner, who flaunted the title LLD (doctor of laws), appeared in one of Poe’s humorous tales, “Three Sundays in a Week,” as “no less a personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics,” whose opinions were gospel to a foolish character. To Joseph Henry’s view of science, Lardner was a double threat—both a moral reprobate and a simplifying charlatan.
Yet Lardner’s lavish spectacles proved how hungry American audiences were for science. Showmen would rush in to meet that appetite if working scientists did not.
In a spirit close to that of Bache and Henry, the dyspeptic New York physician David Meredith Reese diagnosed charlatanism as a political and moral crisis in his 1838 book Humbugs of New-York. New Yorkers, he moaned, “have taken the pills of foreign and domestic quacks by the thousand, with Lobelia, Cayenne pepper, and vapour baths … and are now equally busy in bolting down Phrenology and Animal Magnetism.” Charlatans make “a pedantic show of learning”; they need only to “decry all existing systems” and “denounce all the learning of the schools” to find “a great multitude of disciples.” Though New York was ground zero, the disease was nationwide. Because new scientific schemes were frequently allied with radical programs for political and moral reform, Reese’s polemic targeted political and religious movements alongside “pseudo-scientific” systems. “Both Popery and anti-Popery are impostures on the public,” he proclaimed, while “Ultra-Temperance” became a public nuisance once it sought to ban all booze.
The full intent of Reese’s polemic became clear only in a late chapter taking up one-quarter of the book, titled “Ultra-Abolitionism.” The antislavery movement, the doctor declared, went beyond the vague hope for a gradual end to slavery espoused by “Jefferson, Franklin, Rush, and John Jay, of the old school.” According to Reese, abolitionists who condemned slavery as a sin “in all circumstances” and adopted strong actions—such as brandishing a musket against a pro-slavery mob, as had Elijah Lovejoy of Missouri, which got him killed—were violating Scripture (which offered examples of acceptable slavery) and citizens’ rights (to their human “property”). Reese declared the Anti-Slavery Society “the most gigantic imposture which ever afflicted either the church or the state.” For Reese the age’s greatest humbug, and the greatest danger to the common weal, was not phrenology, the water-cure, patent medicines, or even Catholicism—but abolition.
Faced with the volatility of American politics, Bache and Henry were convinced that science depended for its survival on keeping controversial issues such as slavery at a distance wherever possible. The hostility they expressed toward charlatanism was in part a hostility toward any “popular” issues that might inflame passions. Beyond their endorsement of a common background of Protestant natural theology, they largely kept explicit religious claims—and controversies—out of their science. In the 1840s, their moderate, modest stance also meant trying to stand clear of projects of reform for workers’ and women’s rights, as well as the increasingly divisive issue of slavery and the race science being marshaled to support it. Out of fear of stirring up the public and of creating fissures among the fragile community of researchers, Bache and Henry largely avoided the topic.
This discretion was by no means due to their opposition to slavery. Henry was baffled by the thought that Blacks and whites might one day marry or exercise the same political rights. Their close ally the Harvard mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce was a convinced and public supporter of slavery. Whatever opinions Bache had on the question, they did not interfere with his decades-long friendship with the future Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, or with Louis Agassiz, who would become a diehard proponent of race science.
The “modesty” and “rigor” that Bache and Henry promoted as a scientific and moral ideal led them to avoid topics that might stoke regional antagonisms and interfere with their goal of uniting the nation’s “real men of science.” For Bache, Henry, and most of their allies, the ideals of scientific disinterest and “objectivity” operated in tandem with a tacit acceptance of the status quo, including white supremacy and slavery—a “polite” silence toward the era’s most urgent moral and political issue. Strikingly, Poe’s “scientific” approach to literary criticism—which set aside moral and political considerations to evaluate literature as a pure “art-object”—revealed his alignment not only with Bache and Henry’s projects of American intellectual reform but also with their complicity in the antebellum era’s “average racism.”
Bache’s “Great Scientific Work”
Bache believed that another way to protect science from political interference was, paradoxically, to entrench it so firmly within the state that it could withstand the vagaries of party conflict and public whim. After his setbacks in Philadelphia—forced to step down from both Girard College and Central High School by Jacksonian politicians—he was on the lookout for a solid, unobtrusive institutional base from which he could quietly build up the nation’s scientific infrastructure.
His chance came in 1843, when Ferdinand Hassler died. Hassler was the superannuated superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey (USCS). Started in 1807 to produce maps of coastlines for fortifications and commerce, in recent years the USCS had lacked staff, equipment, and direction. After Hassler’s death, the neglected federal bureau appeared to Bache as an open route. As Henry put it, the Coast Survey was “intimately connected with the scientific character of the country: a great scientific work which should be intrusted to some one with an established scientific reputation.” Bache perfectly fit the bill.
Bache tapped his family and influential friends to lobby for the appointment. Benjamin Peirce declared, “I shall allow myself no rest till I have accomplished my object,” and drummed up support for Bache among Boston’s elite, obtaining references from John Quincy Adams, Whig Senator Rufus Choate, the historian George Bancroft (who, as customs director of Boston, had placed Orestes Brownson and Nathaniel Hawthorne in customhouse positions), and prominent merchants. Joseph Henry also mobilized his connections in New York and New Jersey, though it meant abandoning the natural philosophy textbook he and Bache planned to write together.
The campaign succeeded. President Tyler appointed Bache superintendent of the Coast Survey in 1843; according to Henry, Bache “had the support of all the most prominent scientific men in the country and the Cabinet could not do otherwise.” He relocated to Washington, D.C., with his wife, Nancy. There he set about transforming a sleepy government agency into a national research powerhouse.
Under his sole authority, away from public lecture halls, journalists, and college administrators, Bache plotted highly focused expeditions to map the nation’s coastlines and harbors. For half the year, he worked in the field. He and his survey teams extended grids of carefully measured triangles over the terrain; they also conducted hydrographic surveys, throwing lead lines over a boat’s side to measure the depth and contours of the land beneath coastal waters.
For assistance he called “to the aid of the survey the real talent of the country.” Staff were recruited from the army and navy—many from West Point—and included students recommended by his friends. Benjamin Peirce provided a steady supply of tractable Harvard graduates (and his headstrong son Charles, the future philosopher). The “chief” patiently instructed these young men and a very few young women—the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who in 1847 would discover a comet, was a distant relative of Bache’s and spent a summer with the survey—in the ways of science. The survey offered rigorous advanced scientific training and experience of a kind unavailable elsewhere in the United States. It created a generation of researchers loyal to Bache and his friends, trained to their exacting standards.
Alexander Dallas Bache while superintendent of the Coast Survey
Bache spent the other half of the year in Washington in offices near the Capitol, computing results, overseeing the production of maps, and composing his annual report. Assisting him was the wizard instrumentalist Joseph Saxton, brought from the Philadelphia Mint to become superintendent of the nation’s Office of Weights and Measures, who repaired the survey’s apparatus, improving the precision of Humboldtian measurements of all kinds (air pressure, magnetic inclination, distance, and time). Though Bache faced outright hostility from many in Congress who saw federal funding for science as an elitist extravagance, his family connections and political savvy helped him cultivate allies and placate foes. At first he foresaw ten or twelve years of work to cover the entire U.S. coastline, but he managed to expand its mission and annual appropriations. By 1848 the U.S. Coast Survey was one of the best-funded branches of the U.S. government, with a mammoth annual budget of four hundred thousand dollars and no sign of stopping.
Bache transformed the U.S. Coast Survey into a “national scientific project.” Under his direction, it was steadily becoming “the general scientific agency of the government,” a solid base for research and training, and a model for federally supported but politically independent expertise; it owed its existence to no single group or party.
Yet other “wants of science in the United States” remained unmet. The crowd-pleasing National Institute was, for Bache and Henry, an entirely inappropriate forum for exchanging information and coordinating among localities or allowing the “real working men” of American science to speak with a unified voice. And Smithson’s five hundred thousand dollars had yet to find a home.
Just Rewards
Poe’s lecture tour of late 1843—through Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland—retraced the path of other itinerant lecturers and performers. He was tilting at his replacement at Graham’s, Rufus Griswold, by giving his lecture the name “American Poetry”—the title of Griswold’s collection, which Poe deemed a “humbug.” But he had other rivals on the lyceum circuit.
Most aggravatingly, Dionysius Lardner—Poe’s “Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics”—returned to Philadelphia in December for a series of Christmas engagements. The “Gay Lothario” was quieting the rumors of his immoral conduct by ladling religious sentiment (and music) over his performances.
Lardner had also expanded his special effects. He added the “Planetarium,” a room-sized mechanical model of the solar system designed by an artisan from Ohio, and accompanied its display with an organ performance of Handel’s Messiah. His “telescopic panorama of the firmament,” an enormous oxyhydrogen-illuminated magic lantern display with moving slides of the solar system and the comet of 1843, was backed by Haydn’s cosmogonic symphony, The Creation, while a “moving panorama,” a massive scroll of images, slowly unfurled to show St. Peter’s and Jerusalem to the sound of Mozart’s Masses.
These contrivances adorned what Lardner called his “Bridgewater Lectures”: a “view of natural theology” presented with “no sectarian doctrines.” He proposed “to demonstrate that the modern discoveries in Astronomical and Physical Science, prove the EXISTENCE and manifest the ATTRIBUTES of the DIVINE AUTHOR OF THE UNIVERSE.” Lardner had no license to use the Bridgewater name. He was piggybacking on the reputation of those venerable works of natural theology—much as his former patron in London, Charles Babbage, had done with his controversial Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. Lardner’s well-oiled productions were calculated to appeal to families, to dazzle and leave them with a satisfied, pious sense of having understood the universe—without having to work too hard or to entertain any dangerous ideas.
Playbill for Dionysius Lardner’s “Bridgewater Lecture” at Philadelphia Museum, December 1843
Between 1841 and 1845, Lardner’s lectures and publications earned him an astronomical two hundred thousand dollars, nearly six million dollars today. The penniless Poe couldn’t help but envy such a haul, though he disdained the performances’ bad taste and “quack” aspects. Music and mechanical effects could cover a multitude of intellectual sins. The effectiveness of such gimmicks, like the “namby-pamby” embellishments that Poe thought debased Graham’s magazine, only proved how easily the masses could be captured with noise, excitement, bright lights, and sentimental reassurance. As Poe wrote, “The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”
Pleasing the crowd, though difficult enough, was too simple a game for Poe. For years he had been writing for two audiences at once. A single tale could entertain a popular audience with suspense, humor, and shocks, while he hoped that its philosophical resonances and literary craft would eventually be recognized by the inquisitive few. His critical writings provided maps and keys for future explorations of his work; in his tales he quietly buried cryptic allusions, dense subtexts, and self-referential in-jokes for later readers to find and decode. As he put it, “Where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling?”
Lone Explorer
That autumn, Poe reviewed a special issue of Silliman’s American Journal of Science and Arts featuring an account of the Exploring Expedition—the national project he had championed at the Southern Literary Messenger and took as inspiration for Pym. In addition to its botanical, zoological, geological, and ethnographic specimens, the expedition had brought back, unwillingly, a Fijian chief named Veidovi. Captain Wilkes kidnapped him in a brutal show of force in which two American sailors and dozens of Fijians were killed. Falling ill on the last leg of the journey, the captive chief died in New York Harbor. The onboard naturalist Charles Pickering packaged and shipped Veidovi’s skull to Philadelphia, where Samuel Morton added it to his “American Golgotha.”
Over the four years of the voyage, Wilkes had earned the animosity of most of his crew—not least “the scientifics,” whose research he frequently blocked. Wilkes was court-martialed on his return, facing accusations of misrule and excessive force. Cleared of the charges, he went to work in Washington, to help bring order to the makeshift gallery of specimens at the Patent Office.
In July 1843, Wilkes, as was his wont, put himself in charge. He added explanatory signs, rearranged the displays, enhanced the lighting, banned tobacco spitting, and painted above the entrance in gold letters “Collection of the Exploring Expedition.” The refurbishment was a hit. Visitors lined up to gawk at the brightly colored tropical birds and flowers, “gems and gold and iron ores from Brazil; copper and silver ores from Peru and Chili; vast collections of shells and corals”; and ethnological objects, including clothing, weapons, and skulls from Pacific Islanders.
U.S. Patent Office Museum, displaying collections of the U.S. Exploring Expedition
This spectacular display of cargo seized by American naval forces seemed to justify the expedition’s enormous expense and complications. It flattered the nation’s sense of its own technical progress and superiority by inviting a ranking of the cultures it had collected: “By a walk through the National Gallery, we travel with more than railroad speed over the Pacific, and examine into their various productions and the relative intelligence of the savages. The degradation of the New Hollander stands out in bold relief in contrast with the more advanced, though no less barbarous Feejee.” More than one hundred thousand people would visit the exhibit each year over the next decade. It served as a warrant for future outlays by the government for scientific and colonial expansion.
