Discerning the Relation between American Science and American Democracy: A. Hunter Dupree’s Science in the Federal Government

John Cloud

Gamblers the world over consider seven a lucky number. This Gregorian year of 2007 features a profusion of science-and-technology-related anniversaries strutting into view like sequined dancers on a Las Vegas runway. It is the three hundredth anniversary of the births of Carolus Linnaeus and Leonard Euler, the foundational systematist and mathematician, respectively. It is the two hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Survey of the Coast, which became the first scientific agency in the United States government, now known as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. It is now fifty years since SHOT was founded, and fifty years since the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, a Soviet contribution to the International Geophysical Year, which also began in 1957, more or less. And it is fifty years since the publication of A. Hunter Dupree’s Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities.{1} Here elements and implications of all of the above converge in a volume addressed to an ambitious goal: a “rounded synthesis” of the development of science policies and activities of the U.S. government from the establishment of the federal constitution to the onset of American engagement in World War II.{2} Half a century later the book remains a landmark, notwithstanding that no one would attempt such a project today, nor would anyone fund it.

Dupree never really stipulates what he means by “science,” although he appears to favor a very broad-stroke definition: “Science, thus unspecialized in intent as well as in fields of knowledge, was at the same time useful and ornamental, specific and universal.”{3} He is rather more precise about the elites who would be the major participants in it: “As in Europe, the new United States found a knowledge of the natural world residing in an organized form largely within its upper classes. As in Europe, ideas stemming from science, in particular the ideas of Isaac Newton, were tremendously influential in shaping the mental outlook of cultivated men” (p. 6). So much for “knowledge of the natural world” by anyone else, like the Indians, and the slaves, and the servant classes, and, of course, all the women altogether. Since much of the project of history in the last half century has been to put these excluded people back into the story, and rather central to it in fact, what can still be gained from Dupree’s contribution to the vast parade of histories of Dead White Males?

Dupree’s saving grace is a formidable intelligence coupled to a deep sympathy for ordinary people in history. Arising from that is a commitment to discerning the relation between the history of American science and American democracy, both considered in messy and contradictory practice. The voluminous source materials that Dupree and his staff assimilated for the project were dominated by the records of the leaderships of scientific societies and government bureaus and the Congress, and the volume reflects that concentration. Because of these men, and despite them too, the slaves were freed, Indians were not annihilated entirely, women’s participation in society and science changed utterly, and a great literate and scientifically knowledgeable middle class developed in a large and prosperous country. Dupree is particularly acute to the creative mobilizations set off by war and other political crises and the ways these transformed government scientific agencies, which in turn affected the people, often in counterintuitive ways.

But much recent history has emphasized the counterintuitive. Why read Science in the Federal Government now? I can think of two reasons. First, it has never been surpassed as a one-volume summary of the early history of all the major American government scientific bureaus and their contentious relations to other scientific enterprises, presidents, and the Congress. Second, Dupree is one of the best writers in the history of the field, magisterial yet democratic. The book’s chapters proceed chronologically, picking up new scientific problems and government bureaus and areas of the world as they are enfolded in U.S. history. A major part of the scientific democratization that Dupree discerns comes from a momentous double movement: as scientists and scientifically trained government personnel rose in stature and influence during the nineteenth century, the determination of national science policy descended from the highest political strata and came to concentrate at the level of professional bureau heads—paradigmatically Alexander Dallas Bache of the Coast Survey, Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, and Charles Henry Davis of the scientific branch of the United States Navy.

The Civil War was a particularly transformative period—though all American wars are transformative to Dupree—and here Dupree sets the relationships of science and technology in a frame that will resonate with readers of this journal:

It was the war and the peculiarly public and centralized nature of military problems that ineluctably forced the government into the business of using experimental science to evaluate technology. In these research efforts, spasmodic and on the fringes of the war, a consistent relation between science and technology appears for the first time. This new union, of course, far exceeds the bounds of the war effort, because it was one of the most significant changes of the nineteenth century—the one which in the popular mind eventually linked science with the production of material wealth and with the enormous addictions to the power of man over his environment” (pp. 121–22).

The postwar landscape was populated with government bureaus specializing in new disciplines, meteorology, fisheries, agriculture, and the like, based on the same model of power exercised from the same seats. The postwar era saw as well the rise of two new players: well-endowed private research institutes, such as the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and modern, German-influenced but state-centered universities, which Dupree formalized as “estates of science,” whose relations to the government bureaus would change profoundly in the twentieth century under the influence of that century’s great wars and their aftermaths. Throughout there is the constant competition for funds and responsibilities, which brings in the U.S. Congress as a complex and problematic player, shiftingly involved with every other.

Dupree can forge words as in an arsenal and dispatch them like Grant commanding the Army of the Potomac. His summary assessments of complex matters convey a confident ring of truth. The final paragraphs of each chapter in the book are essays in miniature and springboards for fresh ideas in other arenas, as lucid writing may be. Dupree also had an eminent advisory committee, which insured both breadth and depth in treatment of all government science agencies.{4} The book’s chronology and bibliographic note remain particularly excellent resources, even half a century after their initial publication.

Ostensibly the book ends at 1940, with the reasonable argument that science in the government changed so much in World War II and its aftermath as to become another story. But Dupree was in fact summoning prewar arguments to skirmishes he and his companions were fighting in the 1950s.

Dupree’s tome has had no successor in part because the American government allowed no one to succeed him. When the legislative compromise establishing the National Science Foundation (NSF) finally passed in 1951, certain specific scientific disciplines to be funded were named in the act, but the entire lot of the social sciences and history were excluded unless they could be slipped in under the catchall phrase “and other sciences.” They paid a heavy price to belong. What became Science in the Federal Government was one of several historical research initiatives advanced by Alan T. Waterman, the first NSF director, and Charles G. Gant, head of the Program Analysis Office, to demonstrate by example the contributions that historical analysis might make to contemporary scientific projects. The shift toward the past was a way to deflect the present. Waterman had resisted the attempts by the Executive Office of the President for the nascent NSF to take an active role in shaping science policy for the entire federal government. He knew the inevitable fate of a small new fish in a pond full of very old pike. But by the time the research for Science in the Federal Government was finished the original NSF officers were gone, and no initiatives of similar scope ever occurred again. Dupree’s achievement is both a first and a last. The National Science Foundation decided to fund history of science as an enterprise severed from the rest of the discipline of history but coupled to philosophy of science. Scholarship has followed funding; first the History of Science Society and then the Society for the History of Technology have booked rooms in the lesser tier of conference hotels ever since.

But even Foucault’s pendulum may swing many times in half a century. Major social and intellectual upheavals in the 1960s (and, of course, another war, this time in Vietnam) wrought their changes. Challenges arose to the postwar arrangement of “a plural system of scientific disciplines in a plural system of research universities, supported by a plural system of government granting agencies, [which] seemed at the heart of the most successful science policy structure of all times” (p. xii). The political consensus necessary to such an accord frayed under the strains of the cold war and shifts in funding sources and funding mechanisms.

By 1986, Dupree, apparently ever the optimist, saw signs that the marginalization of the history of science from science as such was decreasing in response to societal changes and new congressional mandates. In a new preface to the Johns Hopkins edition of Science in the Federal Government, he noted: “But somewhere, perhaps in the hesitant beginnings of the technology assessment movement, under that or another name, a set of practices will be accepted by which every research project, no matter how narrowly focused on physical hardware, will have an environmental and a social science evaluation built into it” (p. xvii). Alas, little of this has transpired, and we live with the consequences. Environmental evaluations of government programs and government-funded research have evolved to a system largely dependent on actual or threatened litigation from without to trigger effective review. Social science evaluations of research projects are virtually nonexistent or, worse yet, are window-dressings for decisions already made. Most government scientific agencies have rudimentary history programs at best; the exception is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and NASA history is scarcely distinguishable from NASA public relations.

Meanwhile we are at war against an abstract noun and mired in extremely tangible conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the convergence of tax cuts for the rich and the post–9/11 mobilizations, the only increasing source of discretionary spending in the U.S. government has been funding for Homeland Security, and it has been quite striking to see how research institutes and academic departments have realigned themselves and their research topics accordingly. The Homeland is where you find it—or fund it.

So was Dupree hopelessly unrealistic in ending his magnum opus with the conclusion that “during a century and a half, science has not only contributed to the power of the government but to the ability of the people to maintain their freedom” (p. 381)? Well, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Anyone who has read his book through will have noted the myriad of government programs, good and bad, that originated as riders attached to a bill in the middle of the night. Half a century after its publication, Science in the Federal Government still speaks to the present.

{1} The original edition, sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences under a grant from the National Science Foundation and published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, is out of print, as is the first paperback edition, published in 1964 as a Harper Torchbook. With a new preface by Dupree, the book was republished as a paperback in 1986 by the John Hopkins University Press.

{2} Dupree, 1957 edition, v.

{3} Dupree, 1986 edition, 8. All further references are to this edition and are cited in the text parenthetically.

{4} I. Bernard Cohen (chair), Edward C. Kirkland, William F. Ogburn, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., and Richard H. Shryock.

At the time of writing John Cloud was working under contract to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to research and write the modern part of the history of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. He is now willing to research and write for food.