By Ronald G. Waters.
Hominid skulls. Smithsonian.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE and social reform is a tangled one and relatively recent in origin. Indeed, the notion of reform as an ongoing and positive process, and of reformer as a career, clearly emerged in America only in the first half of the nineteenth century [1]. Modern science as we know it is still more recent.
Even so, as early as the 1830s, some reformers evoked “science” as a justification for particular causes and a guide for social change. Such rhetoric, however, appeared most commonly in movements to create new and better kinds of institutions—schools, asylums, and prisons, for instance—as well as among a small number of utopians and in health and other reforms aimed at improving humankind through understanding physiological “laws.” In a few instances, “science” actually served as a weapon against reformers’ goals. Beginning in the late 1830s, scientists of the so-called American School of Anthropology undermined antislavery and calls for women’s rights by citing measurements of human skulls to “prove” that the races had been created separately and that men were superior in intelligence to women. George Fitzhugh similarly marshaled statistics and evoked the “science” of sociology to defend slavery against abolitionist attacks. Prior to the Civil War, however, science usually took third place to religious and political rhetoric—notably, the languages of evangelical Protestantism, republicanism, individualism, and artisan radicalism—in debates over what America ought to be.
That changed after the Civil War. A small but significant sign of the transformation occurred within the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an organization with intellectual and organizational roots in antebellum traditions of religious and women’s activism. Among its more successful endeavors in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was a campaign to promote scientific temperance instruction in public schools. Although the science was debatable, the results, by 1901, were considerable, and the effort to cloak what had been primarily a moral crusade with the mantle of science was telling [2]. The WCTU, however, was far from alone in using science to further what it saw as reform. The last decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth—the Progressive period—produced a striking burst of confidence in the ability of science, including social science, to describe, prescribe, manage, and improve the state of life. That the faith persists to the present day in many quarters should not obscure the fact that it is a historical creation, not much more that a century old in American culture.
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THE SPECIFIC CONNECTIONS BETWEEN science and reform in the twentieth century, however, have been shifting, complex, and ambiguous. Science, for example, provides predictions and a vocabulary for talking about the future, ranging from utopian visions to calls to action to avoid environmental disaster, energy depletion, and overpopulation. Proponents sometimes claim science to be the ideal court of last appeal; in practice, it frequently is an arena of contention, with scientific experts either speaking on different sides of policy issues or declining to take a stand. It provides data for policy makers to interpret and to translate into action, occasionally in extraordinary significant ways, as when the Supreme Court used testimony from social scientists to arrive at its historic 1954 desegregation decision in Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka. The authority of science legitimates particular positions and certain groups’ powers, and it provides languages and metaphors that shape and limit debate. Further complicating matters, science is often available to impede as well as to foster reform; in the late twentieth century, science and reform agendas sometimes compete for resources in federal, state, university, and corporate budgets.
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AT THE TURN OF the century, the notion of entrusting social problems to disinterested experts, scientists among them, had great appeal to middle-class Americans dismayed at the corruption and turmoil of democratic politics in which the “best men” no longer ruled. The undemocratic nature of deferring to scientific authority was part of its attractiveness and remains so today. Evoking scientific impartiality as a counter to mere politics worked within government as well as with the public. President Jimmy Carter’s science adviser claimed to have “found it advantageous to be viewed primarily as a professional rather than a political appointee, particularly in my dealings with Congress, industry, universities, and professional societies.” He further noted that “the credibility of my advice [to the cabinet] was enhanced by the apolitical and impartial image” of his office [3].
Once established, the cultural authority of science moved from individual scientists and their achievements to subtle forms of power….[T]his power was mainly the ability to define certain kinds of knowledge as legitimate, the ability to exclude others kinds of knowledge from legitimacy, and the ability to affect language, imagery, and metaphor. Testimony to the rhetorical strength of science is the persuasiveness of terms derived from it even when they are not especially appropriate: how much, for example, is a “social experiment” (to use a common reform figure of speech) really like a scientific one? [4] Also revealing is the manner in which Americans have incorporated the image of science, with its promise of future progress, with images of the past, notably the frontier. When Vannevar Bush titled his famous 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier, he was far from unique. Even the erudite and thoughtful physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer could not resist the frontier metaphor as he tried to explain to undergraduates the “strange destiny” American leadership in science imposed upon the nation. Nor did another physicist, Frederick Seitz, see anything incongruous in calling his 1994 autobiography On the Frontier: My Life in Physics. [5] When an analogy has such power among scientists, it is little wonder that politicians, corporations, and advertising agencies find it similarly appealing. Whatever its ironies and limitations, however, the cultural power of science, as embedded in language and metaphor, helps structure how Americans think and talk about their society. Through its appropriation by advertisers and the media, moreover, science’s prestige links notions of progress to the development of a consumer economy in which producing and purchasing material goods is the essence of pioneering.
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FINALLY, TO ATTACK PRESENT-DAY critics of science as misguided and cranky radicals does more than violate the historical record: it obscures problems within science itself and the degree to which it invites hard scrutiny, particularly when applied to social issues. On that score, the sources of frustration among intellectuals and the public alike are several. The historical record contains reminders that what seem to be progressive uses of science from one perspective look reactionary in hindsight. Between 1907 and 1928 scientific warnings about a “feebleminded menace” to the United States resulted in a spate of mandatory sterilization laws and the sterilization of more than eight thousand allegedly unfit Americans, a practice that was as dubious scientifically and socially as it was constitutionally. In another notorious instance, a 1972 examination of a forty-year Public Health Service study of men with tertiary syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama, revealed an ugly story of callousness and racism in the name of science [6]. While those episodes might seem safely in the past by the 1990s, their ghosts still haunt American science and social science in recurring debates about alleged linkages between intelligence, criminality, and race.
From the 1960s onward, scientists themselves did little to enhance their image as spokespersons on crucial issues. Intense specialization, dependence on federal and corporate funding, and commitment to the ethos of disinterestedness, led many to avoid speaking out on public issues or, when they did, to speak with so much caution and nuance that their words carried little impact. Such reticence left the field open for popularizers and scientists with marginal credentials, who were anything but disinterested[7]. That—combined with attacks on the indirect cost recovery universities collect for scientific research, disagreements among scientists on global warming and other environmental and health issues, and well-publicized allegations of scientific fraud—played to cynical suspicions that scientists were either out of touch with reality or, like lawyers, bought by the highest bidder. After decades of strong fiscal support for research, the end of the twentieth century produced ample evidence that many Americans felt that science, as represented by such things as a high-energy supercollider or the space program, was simply too expensive. Given the realities of taxpayer discontent and of social problems that science did not appear to be addressing, science faced increasing scrutiny from the government, corporations, and universities.
Ronald G. Walters is Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. This excerpt is from Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America
NOTES:
1 I discuss these points in Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860
2 This episode is recounted in Jonathan Lurie Zimmerman, “‘The Queen of the Lobby’: Mary H. Hunt, Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of Democratic Education in America” (Ph.D. diss. Johns Hopkins University, 1993).
3 David Dickson, The New Politics of Science
4 For a recent use of the term, see Amy Erdman Farrell, “A Social Experiment in Publishing: Ms. Magazine, 1972-1989,” Human Relations 47 (1994): 707-30.
5 Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier
6 These episodes are recounted in Daniel J. Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
7 John C. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States
