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Scientific Advances and Thinking
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According to historian Casey Blake, "By the late nineteenth century, science and scientific thought, broadly conceived, had had a tremendous impact upon American intellectual life and American culture. The achievements of science were widely admired and the scientific method was accepted as a means of achieving new knowledge."
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Using documents provided and your knowledge of the period, explain and assess how Americans during the period of 1875–1915 responded to new scientific developments and ways of thinking.
Primary source: Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 1881.
Background information: Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most famous Congregational preachers of his day, involved himself in controversy when he accepted Charles Darwin's theories of evolution.
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To the fearful and the timid let me say that while Evolution is certain to oblige theology to reconstruct its system, it will take nothing away from the grounds of true religion. It will strip off Saul's unmanageable armor from David, to give him greater power over the giant. Simple religion is the unfolding of the best nature of man towards God, and man has been hindered and embittered by the outrageous complexity of unbearable systems of theology that have existed. If you can change theology, you will emancipate religion; yet men are continually confounding the two terms, religion and theology. . .
Old men may be charitably permitted to die in peace, but young men and men in their prime are by God's providence laid under the most solemn obligations to thus discern the signs of the times, and to make themselves acquainted with the knowledge which science is laying before them. . .
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Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion (1881) in The American Spirit: United States History as Seen by Contemporaries, ed. Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1994): 103–4.
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Primary source: Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1896.
Background information: Andrew D. White was an American educator who wrote about the controversial reactions to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in his book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, published in 1896.
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Darwin's Origin of Species had come into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused. Reviews, sermons, books light and heavy, came flying at the new thinker from all sides. . .
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Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896; reprint, New York: George Braziller, 1955), 70.
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Primary source: "The Kodak Christmas," magazine advertisement, 1900.
Background information: This advertisement for Kodak cameras appeared in a 1900 issue of the magazine Youth's Companion.
"The Kodak Christmas," magazine advertisement in the Ellis Collection of Kodakiana at Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850–1920.
Courtesy of John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University.
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Primary source: Remington Typewriter Company advertisement, 1905.
Background information: In a 1905 advertisement, the Remington Typewriter Company used two letters by Mark Twain to illustrate how his attitude toward the typewriter had changed over a period of thirty years.
Courtesy of the Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.
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Primary source: Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan, "Out in the Automobile," song, 1906.
Background information: The comedian Arthur Collins and the tenor Byron Harlan wrote lyrics for many humorous songs. "Out in the Automobile" pokes fun at early-twentieth-century cars.
Isn't it nice when the motor breaks down,
Out in an automobile.
Leaving you stranded ten miles out of town,
Out in an automobile.
You crawl underneath to repair it of course,
The auto explodes with a great deal of force,
You land in the road full of mud and remorse,
Out in an automobile.
[. . . ]
Out in an automobile,
Out in that green country lane.
There is a smash and you're stuck with a crash,
And find you've run into a cave.
Off with the constable then,
He will not hear your appeal.
They'll hold your machine,
And you'll pay your own green,
You'll be out an automobile.
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Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan, "Out in the Automobile," 1906. Lyrics transcribed by Esther Mandelheim, Merran Elizabeth Swartwood, and Scott Zillitto for Columbia University DKV, © 2002.
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Primary source: John Marin, Brooklyn Bridge, watercolor, c. 1912.
Background information: An important American modernist painter, John Marin (1870–1953) established his reputation with his work in watercolors. Although known for his landscape paintings, Marin expresses his interest in urban life in Brooklyn Bridge, which associates the excitement of New York with the famous bridge. The bridge connects Manhattan to Brooklyn and had been completed about thirty years earlier, in 1883.
John Marin (American, 1870–1953) Brooklyn Bridge, watercolor on paper, 18-1/2 x 15 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949. (49.70.105), Photograph © 1989 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Primary source: Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911.
Background information: Frederick W. Taylor was a mechanical engineer who wrote extensively about scientific management, a method of managing groups of people based on scientific principles, as part of progressive notions of efficiency. His ideas influenced business management theory in America and around the world. The Principles of Scientific Management is a collection of his essays published in 1911.
This paper has been written:
First. To point out, through a series of simple illustrations, the great loss which the whole country is suffering through inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts.
Second. To try to convince the reader that the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man.
Third. To prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations, which call for the most elaborate cooperation. And, briefly, through a series of illustrations, to convince the reader that whenever these principles are correctly applied, results must follow which are truly astounding.
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Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911), 7.
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Primary source: Proceedings of the Fourth Conservation Congress, 1912.
Background information: Mrs. Marion Crocker of the General Federation of Women's Clubs wholeheartedly endorsed the conservation movement, and the scientific basis on which it stood, in this 1912 speech to the Fourth Annual Conservation Congress.
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If we do not follow the most scientific approved methods, the most modern discoveries of how to conserve and propagate and renew wherever possible those resources which Nature in her providence has given to man for his use but not abuse, the time will come when the world will not be able to support life, and then we shall have no need of conservation of health, strength or vital force, because we must have the things to support life or else everything else is useless. . . .
There is great work to be done with the children, in making the school the garden . . . to teach the children to know what the soil is made of and how it should be treated, to make them love the growing flower and to make them respect the property of others. There we are laying the foundation of things for the next generation . . . .
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Proceedings of the Fourth Conservation Congress (Indianapolis: National Conservation Congress, 1912), 258–62; reprint, Major Problems in American Environmental History, ed. Carolyn Merchant (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath, 1993), 353–55.
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Primary source: "Mechanized Home Laundry," illustration, 1913.
Background information: This drawing dramatically illustrates the increasing mechanization of domestic life during the second decade of the twentieth century.
"Mechanized Home Laundry," drawing, Good Housekeeping (1913); reprinted in Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 21.
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