The Socialist Popularization of Science in America, 1901 to the First World War

Abstract

THROUGHOUT MUCH OF THE nineteenth century the ascendent star of science was closely tied to the rise of the middle class.Science reflected their optimism and aided them in understanding a world and society in constant motion.The middle class embraced science in a hearty manner and as a labor of love they sought to popularize it in America.By the turn of the century, the middle class enthusiasm for popularization had abated somewhat, but science was still being pursued and popularized with great ardor by others.Only now the group most enamored of science, and certain that its rise was tied to the prestige and power of science, was the socialist movement, the self-appointed sentinel of the working class.No less than the middle class, the socialist intellectuals sought to ground their discourse in scientific language and to make the fruits of science readily available to a wide audience.The great revolutions in science-the Copernican, Newtonian, and Darwinianbecame the subject matter for socialist popularizers of science.Their tale was simple: Marxism was a science, a scientific revolution in social thought, that would usher in not only a new world-view, but a new society, a new age.Science served as a powerful symbol and "attitude of mind" for nineteenthcentury Americans.As the handmaiden of technology, science was changing the physical landscape of America in the era of the railroad, telegraph, steam, and electricity.For most Americans, science was a symbol easily reconciled with the prevalent assumptions of societal progress.1A scientific knowledge, according to geologist Clarence King in his Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment (1877), would be "a means of clearing away the endless rubbish of false ideas from the human intellect, for the lifting of man out of the dominion of ignorance."2Yet science was more than an object of veneration or a description for new technologies; it was a explanatory and normative concept as well.While science could be blamed for inaugurating an era of bewildering change and chaos, it could at the same time organize apparent chaos into a Mr. Cotkin is a member of the Department of History,

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