The Society for Useful Knowledge (3 page)

With Franklin's manifesto as its guiding spirit, the movement for useful knowledge left a profound mark on American society and culture, on the very idea of America itself, and, through it, on the world as a whole. Its echoes can be detected in the Declaration of Independence and other acts of the Founding Fathers; in the humming and hissing of the early steam engines on a London bridge that managed to captivate Thomas Jefferson, that dyed-in-the-wool pastoral idealist; in the emergence of grassroots democratic institutions; in the Great Awakening that challenged clerical tradition in the name of do-it-yourself faith; and in the rise of the nation's industrial and technological might, dwarfing anything that Alexander Hamilton and his partisans could have ever imagined. By the end of the nineteenth century, America led the world in both productivity and patented inventions, and the general outlines of its future technological and military supremacy were already clearly visible.

Beginning in Elizabethan times, Europeans habitually invoked the very name America to connote any kind of virgin territory or new field of endeavor. With the coming of the Enlightenment, from the mid-seventeenth century, the New World began to take on a new cast, one that went beyond mere novelty. The critical examination of social, political, and intellectual life during this Age of Reason introduced the search for universal laws that governed both man and the world around him. Among these newfound principles was the notion of a
pristine natural order that lay buried under the rotten surface of European life.

The settlement of the New World seemed to offer the promise that man could at last strip away the artificial social and political structures imposed on Europe over the centuries and reveal the true State of Nature. The pursuit of this elusive natural order and the perfected social arrangements that would accompany it—whether the lost biblical Zion sought by the early Puritan colonists of New England or the “self-evident” truths grounded in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” of the Declaration of Independence 150 years later—represents one of the central themes of the American experience.
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By breaking with the last remnants of the medieval notion of the universe as an immutable hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being reaching from God at the top, through the angels and man, to minerals and rocks at the bottom, republican theoreticians arrived at an American exceptionalism, one that operated outside outmoded European ideas of history. The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke had declared as early as 1690 that America was not so much new or novel, as it was
original
. Now, the American Revolution had liberated the colonies from Old Europe's ways, and set the stage for the realization of the natural order inherent to the New World. America could fully align itself with the latest scientific precepts of harmony, precision, and progress that paralleled Isaac Newton's revolutionary laws of celestial motion. In doing so, it would surely leave Old Europe behind.

“The learned say it [America] is a new creation and I believe them, not for their reasons, but because it is made on an improved plan,” wrote Jefferson, one hundred years after Locke—one of the American's intellectual idols. “Europe is a first idea, a crude production, before the Maker knew his trade, or had made up his mind as to what he wanted.”
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The great seal of the independent United States—a project Franklin and Jefferson pursued together before handing it over to others—carries on its reverse the slogan Novus ordo seclorum, literally “a new order of the ages” and meant, said its author Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress, to herald the dawn of the American epoch. Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln's most famous speech reminded his fellow citizens that America alone had been “conceived in Liberty.”
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The roots of such republican certainty predate the long, grueling contest with the armies of the British Crown. First, Americans had to free themselves from a rigid European economy of knowledge that circumscribed their
imaginations as surely as England's colonial rule restricted their economic autonomy and limited their political freedoms. America's intellectual grievances, it turns out, were virtually identical to its political and economic ones.

The botanist John Bartram for years felt the repeated sting of Europe's disdain for his efforts at original contributions to the field. Another early American naturalist complained bitterly more than a decade before the Revolution of the “dictatorial powers” exercised by Europe's philosophers and scientists.
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Others saw their own work expropriated or otherwise plagiarized from across the Atlantic. Even Franklin's groundbreaking electrical experiments at first provoked only laughter and disbelief among the European men of science.

Seen in this way, the American Revolution represents less a turning point than a significant milestone in a journey that began not at Lexington or Concord in the spring of 1775 but in the study circles, public libraries, and the useful knowledge societies that first took shape in colonial cities and towns almost fifty years earlier. It was no accident, then, that the struggle to create
American
science and the struggle to create a free and independent America often went hand in hand.

It was widely accepted at the time that Europe's far-flung colonies would act merely as suppliers of raw materials—seeds of newly discovered plants, narrative accounts of strange diseases, the bones of unknown animals, and so on—for study, classification, and explanation by the natural philosophers back in the mother country. In the eyes of Enlightenment science, the colonists themselves were by their very essence unsuited to the intellectual rigors of natural philosophy. Any true scientific achievement on colonial soil would have to be the work of visiting Europeans, rather than at the hands of native-born Americans. One of the first accounts of North American plants, dating to 1635, was the work of a French botanist relying solely on specimens sent back to Paris.
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This set the pattern for more than one hundred years.

One leading French naturalist, the Comte de Buffon, famously proposed that climate and other conditions in the New World had led to the inevitable degeneration of its fauna and flora. Buffon's more enthusiastic readers extrapolated from this argument to call into question the virility and intelligence of both America's European settlers and its native inhabitants, the Indians. That sparked a rousing defense of American virtue and vigor from Jefferson, spelled out in his only published book,
Notes on the State of Virginia
.
²⁰

Then an American diplomat at the French court, the future U.S. president defended colonial achievement in a range of endeavors, from the electrical breakthroughs of Franklin, to the mechanical wonders of David Rittenhouse and the military prowess of General Washington. “As in philosophy and war, so in government, in oratory, in painting, in the plastic arts, we might show that America, though but a child of yesterday, has already given hopeful proofs of genius.”
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He also arranged for the delivery to Buffon's residence of the hides and antlers from robust specimens of New England moose, elk, and deer to underscore his rebuttal. One imposing carcass stood seven feet tall.

Notwithstanding these protestations, however, there was a pervasive sense that the colonists could never aspire to anything more than a subsidiary role in a global economy of knowledge that mirrored Europe's imperialist system. Plants, animals, and other natural phenomena of the New World periphery, as well as their integration into taxonomies, studies, and disciplines—created and enforced in the European capitals and then reexported as scientific knowledge—followed the same pathways as the trade in basic commodities and their subsequent transformation into high-value finished goods for sale back to the colonies.

As early as 1629, the Dutch settlements in New York and New Jersey were formally barred from producing finished textiles or any other woven goods, forcing them to rely on imports from home. Under the British, initial aspirations for American industrial production, such as glassworks in Virginia or iron foundries in Puritan New England, were steadily eroded throughout the eighteenth century by an expanding body of English laws specifically designed to impede colonial manufactures and protect British ones. These trade restrictions paralleled barriers to colonial science erected and then maintained by the Europeans' intellectual prejudice.

Like many things “American,” the notion of useful knowledge enjoys a strong European—particularly English—pedigree. Franklin's “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge” was inspired by the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, which he saw as both model and future partner. And his appeal to the colonies' “Virtuosi” was no accident, for members of the Royal Society used just that term to describe themselves and their fellow practitioners of scientific and philosophical inquiry.

Almost one hundred years old at the time of Franklin's 1743 manifesto, the Royal Society was then the world's premier scientific association. It had a well-established language, a particular intellectual outlook, and a specific notion of science, all of which Franklin adopted for himself and then consciously emulated in his “Proposal.” As early as 1664, the first editor of the Royal Society's journal enthused over those “profitable discoveries” grounded in “solid and useful knowledge”—just the thing needed in the young American colonies, Franklin reckoned, as they sought to secure their place in a new and uncertain universe.

Yet ideas and trends long percolating in English society underwent profound transformation in the hands of the American colonists, for the physical, intellectual, and psychological landscape of the New World was unlike anything back home in Europe. America, it turned out to the surprise of many of the newcomers, was neither the Garden of Eden of the promoters' handbills nor anything like a microcosm of the world they had left behind. Enlightenment ideas of science and notions of useful knowledge, which accompanied many of the early, well-educated settlers, took on an increasingly American hue.

After completing a two-month voyage on the
Mayflower
, a dispirited William Bradford gazed at the American shore only to find himself confronted with a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Bradford lamented that the exhausted Puritans had “no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.”
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Another early settler, at Virginia's Jamestown, challenged his fellows to reconcile both the “felicities” as well as the “miseries” of this strange new land.

The unexpected hardships of famine, water shortages, fraught relations with the native peoples, the difficult and unfamiliar climate, and associated other miseries steadily took their toll on the Puritans' institutions, beliefs, and practices.
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The first tight-knit religious communities began to disintegrate in the face of economic imperatives and competing responses to the struggle for daily existence. Where they had expected a new Zion graced with “sweet air, fair rivers, and plenty of springs, and the water better than in England,” they found only dangerous wilderness, the subjugation of which they soon made a matter of religious duty.
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For many of these educated religious dissidents among the new arrivals such a state of affairs demanded a willful, disciplined, and intellectually rigorous approach that could tame the wilderness and secure man's mastery over such
unruly lands. In this way, the Puritans tapped into the utilitarian sentiment that pervaded much of seventeenth-century Protestantism.
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That which was useful in this effort was to be cherished, nurtured, and promoted, while that which simply recalled the Old World sensibilities or were maintained out of habit was best discarded.

Such attitudes steadily took hold across the colonies and were given concrete expression in the laws, institutions, and practices that sprang up in the New World. The development of natural philosophy, what we today call science, faced considerable resistance from the European establishment, with its deep attachment to classical studies and the humanities in general. This was not so in the New World, where the intellectual influence of the Puritans and other religious dissidents was generally unimpeded.
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In the towns and cities of North America, artisans, petty merchants, and workers, unfettered by the traditional guild system, eagerly sought to learn new skills through private instruction. Evening classes, created to allow students to attend after their day's work was over, offered training in such practical arts as surveying, bookkeeping, shorthand, and even foreign languages. Public lectures on scientific topics proliferated. Newspapers and specialty journals alike brought word of practical discoveries in science and the latest technology to an increasingly literate America.

One early South Carolina law, typical of the times, mandated instruction “in useful and necessary learning” in the local parish schools. Guidelines for the new province of Pennsylvania, written in 1682, established basic public education and called for bounties or premiums to be paid to “authors of useful sciences and laudable inventions.”
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William Penn, the province's Quaker proprietor, laid out clear views on colonial education: “I recommend the useful parts of mathematics, as building houses, or ships, measuring, surveying, dialing, navigation.”
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The Reverend Hugh Jones of Virginia, meanwhile, urged an end to reading Greek and Latin works among his students at the College of William and Mary, to be supplanted by concentration on English, Christianity, mathematics, surveying, and navigation. “These are the most Useful Branches of Learning for them,” writes Jones, “and such as they willingly and readily master, if taught in a plain and short Method, truly applicable to their
Genius
.”
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Newer institutions of higher learning, now beginning to open across the colonies, adopted a similar orientation toward useful knowledge.