Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of American Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey by Hugh R. Slotten

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 183 help from the state. Still, the notion that France was backward be­ cause it did not measure up to England remains a theme of historical writing even today. Geiger’s study makes no claim to a powerful new methodology or startling new insight into the technology ofcanals, but the book makes a large contribution. It reminds us that the canal fever of the 1820s was an international phenomenon, explaining how culture influenced planning in the nation that pioneered scientific construction. In offer­ ing this useful perspective the book gives us a detailed look at a quasi-capitalistic state enterprise and one of the most ambitious canal programs of all times. Todd Shallat Dr. Shallat, a history professor at Boise State University, is the author of Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Patronage, Practice, and the Culture ofAmerican Science: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey. By Hugh R. Slotten. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 228; illustrations, notes, index. $44.95. No one in mid-19th-century America better meshed scientific au­ thority, political strategies, and professional commitment than Alex­ ander Dallas Bache. Nathan Reingold and other scholars who studied the formative years of the American scientific community suggested the exceptional influence of Bache, but this is the first account to demonstrate the dimensions of his patronage in detail and to link them to his cultural setting. Hugh Slotten’s thematic and meticulously researched biography emphasizes the pragmatic and intellectual as­ pects of the scientific entrepreneur whose leadership shaped the U.S. Coast Survey into a powerful federal patron, with the largest annual budget for science of any agency in the antebellum period. But the texture of Bache’s personality and personal life remain shaded be­ hind his careful public demeanor. Slotten is deliberate in his efforts to link his account to recent work on the history of American politics and culture and to social studies of science. Among the early influences on Bache in Philadelphia were extensive family connections, social and political, readily traced back to Benjamin Franklin. The eldest son of eight children, Dallas (as he was familiarly known) graduated first in his class at West Point and, deciding against a military career, returned to Philadelphia to take up significant responsibilities in such innovative educational enter­ prises as the Franklin Institute and Girard College. Well connected to economic and political elites, Bache soon demonstrated the patri­ cian-republican values associated with the Whig Party. Whig politi­ cians were optimistic about economic and industrial growth, but also 184 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE concerned about the social order; fundamentally, they stressed edu­ cation and disciplined reason as the basis for decision making. Bache himself inevitably spoke with a voice of aristocratic authority. As an articulate spokesperson for scientific and technological ideol­ ogy, he helped formulate and implement several of the remarkable institutional and scientific achievements of mid-19th-century Ameri­ can science. From his early research on boiler explosions on steam­ boats at the Franklin Institute to his coordination of geophysical re­ search at the Coast Survey, Bache demonstrated consummate political skills as promoter and organizer. His training at West Point proved useful as he turned the survey into a research organization whose generous annual budget provided instruments and staff for scientific observations, thus generating the data essential for analyzing and graphing larger phenomena. This contribution to Humboldtian sci­ ence—with its intention of determining the natural history and physi­ cal principles of the entire earth—required highly accurate data from carefully calibrated locations. Slotten clarifies the day-to-day opera­ tion of an enterprise that gathered continuous observations on the earth’s magnetic fields, the depth and temperature of channels and bays along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and the changing currents of the Gulf Stream. Like his friend Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, Bache shared results around the world through reports published at government expense. Many of the scientific observers were part-time or short-term staff hired for particular projects, while consultants in astronomy, geology, and other sciences...