SCIENCE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN AMERICA 



point of view. Americans in 1918 were puzzling over these issues as had 

 the generation of John Quincy Adams a century before or as men now 

 do. 



THE PROGRESSIVE S CREDO— W J McGEE 



CW J McGee shared with Gifford Pinchot a prominent place in 

 the conservation movement during the administration of Theodore 

 Roosevelt. In addition, he was for many years head of the Bureau of 

 American Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institution. In the selection that 

 follows he engages in a favorite end-of-the-century sport: measuring 

 fifty years of scientific progress and incidentally revealing his faith in 

 the all-pervading beneficent influence of science. Remember the distinc- 

 tion between science and technology and see if McGee is able to gain 

 an advantage in his argument by ignoring it. (W J McGee, "Fifty Years 

 of American Science," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXII [1898], 307-20.)] 



Scientific progress, especially in a land of free institutions, is so 

 closely interwoven with industrial and social progress that the advance 

 of one cannot be traced without constant reference to the other. In- 

 deed, the statement of our national progress during the past half-century 

 is little more than a summary of results and practical applications of 

 scientific research. Fifty years ago our population was hardly more than 

 twenty millions, now it is seventy millions; then our wealth was less than 

 seven billion dollars, now it is eighty billions. At the beginning of the 

 year 1848 there were fifty-two hundred and five miles of railway in the 

 United States, now there are two hundred thousand, — far more than any 

 other country has, more than all Europe; nearly as many miles, indeed, 

 as all the rest of the world put together. Some of those who attended 

 the first meeting of the [American] Association [for the Advancement 

 of Science] made their journey, or part of it, by stagecoach or in the 

 saddle. They met many a boy riding to the neighborhood mill with a 

 bag of corn as grist and saddle, and the itinerant doctor or minister on 

 horseback, with his wife on a pillion behind; they passed by fanners 

 swinging the back-breaking cradle or wielding the tedious hoe, while 

 lusty horses grew fat in idleness; they caught glimpses of housewives 

 spinning and dyeing and weaving with infinite pains the fabrics required 

 to clothe their families; they followed trails so rough that the transpor- 

 tation of produce to market multiplied its cost, and carrying back family 

 supplies was a burden: everywhere they saw hard human toil, enlivened 

 only by the cheer of political freedom, and they did not even dream of 

 devices whereby nature should be made to furnish the means for her 

 own subjugation. Most of the mails were carried slowly by coaches and 

 postboys; the telegraph was little more than a tov; the telephone, the 

 trolley-car, and the typewriter had not begun to shorten time and 

 lengthen life; and steel was regularly imported from Sheffield, and iron 

 from Norway. The slow and uncertain commerce of interior navigation 



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