THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF CONGRESSIONAL OBSTRUCTION: A QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT FORM OF STATE ACTIVITY

Despite the “superabundance” of scientific labor it produced, the public-private structure of American science was not the organizational design initially desired by federal scientists. The first superintendents of the USCS wanted to construct federal observatories and erect a national university in Washington, while Powell sought to construct federal laboratories for the centralization of the Geological Survey's scientific workforce. The restrictions that Congress placed on the construction of a physical infrastructure for federal science were meant to minimize success and protect against the permanence of early scientific bureaus. This strategy worked to near perfection in the earliest years of the Coast Survey, as the absence of federal scientific facilities slowed the work of the Survey and produced a “general dissatisfaction” that led to the temporary disbandment of the USCS.Footnote ⁶ The unintended consequence of this move against federal science, however, was to create a strong incentive for scientific administrators to find an alternative to their previous strategy of pursuing purely public endeavors.

As I will discuss, in the place of federal laboratories and observatories, scientists in the federal bureaucracy helped construct and operate private observatories throughout the nation, contributed to the growth of research museums at private universities such as Harvard and Yale, and placed federal scientists, as well as entire divisions of federal science bureaus, at state institutions such as the University of Wisconsin. In the place of a national university, federal scientists established the USCS and the USGS as the leading graduate schools of the nation, while also underwriting graduate education at the nation's leading colleges and universities. The federal bureaus also assumed the role of national scientific coordinator, facilitating joint expeditions between themselves and the colleges, universities, and private research institutions of the country. Through all of these actions, none of which were directly legislated by Congress, the federal government established a national organizational structure for American science. It is, in fact, one of the great ironies of American scientific development that the obstructionist strategy pursued by congressional opponents in the nineteenth century unintentionally promoted the public-private structure that helped secure and strengthen federal science.

Despite the recent scholarship that has drawn our attention to the active role of the federal government in the early nineteenth century—a period long held to be “stateless”—the conspicuous and active role assumed by federal government in the development of national scientific capacity remains a puzzling occurrence in American political development.Footnote ⁷ Much of this recent literature has highlighted the peripheral nature of early state activity and has been characterized by a focus on the role of the military or on relatively small or quick bursts of activity. Mark R. Wilson, for example, explores the role of the Quartermaster's Department from 1861–1865, which while large, was brief and subject to demobilization after the national crisis subsided. Likewise, William Adler's study of the Army Corps of Topographers examines an institution that at its peak contained only thirty-eight topographers and was also relatively short-lived, owing its decline largely to its growing visibility.Footnote ⁸ Not only were the USCS and USGS active in the peripheries of the nation as well as its harbors, commercial hubs, and major universities, but their pursuit of public-private partnerships also represents a qualitatively different form of state activity. Partnerships were formed not to disguise or conceal federal policy, but to construct a national network, the reach and capabilities of which would spread well beyond those of a purely public enterprise.Footnote ⁹

Scientific administrators, I argue, constructed this complex network of public-private science by exploiting the minimal supervisory abilities of Congress and the relaxed hiring and spending regulations that characterized the nineteenth-century patronage state. Scientific administrators employed their control over hiring and spending to form partnerships with private institutions and actors, which brought federal science the physical and human capital that Congress had restricted. This innovative strategy for maneuvering around congressional roadblocks turned private scientific institutions into de facto federal facilities and drafted private scientists into government service. Although the primary role of federal science's nongovernment partners was to directly develop and undertake federal scientific initiatives, the strategy of partnering with private actors and institutions did have the secondary effect of creating and strengthening nongovernment scientists as a political constituency for federal science. This political constituency, though not significantly active in the genesis of federal science, did become an important force in federal science's continued development and in ensuring the durability of the public-private organizational structure.Footnote ¹⁰

The article will first examine the societal factors acting upon scientific development in the nineteenth century. It will show that economic growth, national expansion, and international competition cannot alone account for the form and direction of American scientific development. To understand American scientific development from the nineteenth century on, we must consider more carefully how the unique American political context of the nineteenth century shaped this development. In considering the influence of sectional and partisan politics, as well as the role of outside interest groups in the development of American science policy, a case will be made for their explanatory shortcomings and why a focus on bureaucratic policy making is more appropriate. We will examine in greater detail how the patronage politics and distributive policies of the nineteenth century provided scientific administrators in the federal bureaucracy with the tools and opportunities to construct an organizational framework that brought immediate and long-run benefits to American science. The historical narratives detail the development of the USCS and USGS, examine the construction of the public-private network, and describe the political power that American science came to wield in its own defense.

SCIENCE: AN INEVITABLE OUTCOME OF SOCIETAL FORCES?

Accounts of American scientific development are commonly characterized by an overwhelming sense of automaticity. Roger Geiger, for example, has argued that after the Civil War, “science, technology, and a belief in human progress through rational, systematic investigation occupied a permanent niche not only in major universities, but in the national conscious as well.”Footnote ¹¹ There were, however, few signs of such a national conscious during the congressional debates of the nineteenth century. Federal scientists were harangued as mere bug collectors, and their rational investigations were charged with delivering little of value to the hardworking, practical men of the nation.Footnote ¹² Contrary to depictions like Geiger's, scientific development was not the automatic or inevitable outcome of economic development or national need. There were, indeed, exogenous pressures pushing in the direction of national scientific development, but, as we will see, such pressures, when divorced from politics and political institutions, do not provide a sufficient explanation of American scientific development.

Just as it is today, nineteenth-century science was critical to the economic development of the nation and the protection of its citizens. At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, over $300,000,000 in foreign exports passed through American ports each year.Footnote ¹³ An additional $300,000,000 in domestic coastal trading made shipping and commerce the leading sectors of the American economy.Footnote ¹⁴ There was a clear economic interest in the accurate mapping of the coasts and harbors of the United States, as well as in the improvement of navigational techniques and technology. It was the opinion of the Chamber of Commerce of Charleston, South Carolina, for example, that the work of the USCS in the area of the Charleston Harbor was more important than any other project undertaken by the federal government in the region.Footnote ¹⁵ The USGS was similarly championed as a tool for economic expansion. Congressman Abram Hewitt (D-NY), speaking in favor of the creation of the USGS on the floor of the House, declared that “Nations become great and independent as they develop a genius for grasping the forces and materials of nature within their reach and converting them into a steady flowing stream of wealth and comfort.”Footnote ¹⁶ Hewitt couched his support in terms of continuing the work begun by the founding fathers, arguing that nations “may spring into being generated by the force of ideas alone,” but it was the science of the USGS that would help the nation fully mature.Footnote ¹⁷

National expansion and concerns for national defense also pushed favorably in the direction of a larger federal role in scientific research. In authorizing the survey of the coast, President Jefferson declared that a public institution can “alone supply those sciences which though rarely called for … contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation.”Footnote ¹⁸ Concerned that the United States would soon be at war with Great Britain, Jefferson's support of the Survey was in part based on the need to gain a better understanding of the American coasts in order to successfully wage war. Issues of defense only increased as the young nation expanded from a coastline of approximately 30,000 miles in 1807, to one of nearly 83,000 by 1867.Footnote ¹⁹ National need was, however, rarely sufficient for policy enactment; this was, after all, the nineteenth-century patronage state.Footnote ²⁰

From the very beginning, political opposition quickly handcuffed both the USCS and the USGS. Opponents of the USCS, for example, placed language in the superintendent's contract to prohibit the construction or operation of permanent facilities.Footnote ²¹ Western politicians immediately challenged the creation of the Geological Survey by blocking its statutory enactment. Supporters of the USGS, led by Representative Hewitt, instead used a rider to a Civil Appropriations bill to establish the Survey. This tortured path to existence placed the USGS in the precarious position of not having its year-to-year existence guaranteed by statute. Such obstructions to the development of American science belie the notion that scientific development was an automatic or inevitable outcome that was divorced from politics and driven by the exogenous pressures of economic development or international competition.Footnote ²² American science policy was as mired in the political conflicts of the nineteenth century as any other policy realm, and any explanation of its form or growth must be solidly placed in such a context. The origins of American scientific development are found in the politics of nineteenth-century America.

BRINGING POLITICS BACK IN

How, though, did the politics of the nineteenth-century American state work in favor of scientific development? Or, how did scientific administrators exploit the political environment to favor scientific development? There is little evidence to suggest that the process was initially driven by outside interest groups.Footnote ²³ Indeed, the structure of the American state provides numerous points of access to interest groups seeking to influence the direction of policy, but as science policy was first developing in the United States, it is difficult to identify a coherent scientific pressure group. Business and industry, for example, provided no great political push to American science. Their relationship toward science in this period has been described as being indifferent, if not hostile.Footnote ²⁴ The mining and natural resource sectors, for example, which eventually accrued significant benefits from science, were initially skeptical of what eastern, or worse yet, European-trained scientists could contribute to their industries. Far from serving as a source of demand for the early growth of science, American mining outfits, more accustomed to the practical arts of mining, commonly turned away scientific applicants. “The fact of the matter is, Jack, you've been to Freiberg and have learned a lot of damn geological theories and big names for little rocks. That don't go in this country.”Footnote ²⁵

Business and industry had to be won over to the benefits of science. This required the ability of the state to act ahead of societal pressures, which pushes us away from a pluralist explanation of American scientific development like that offered by Robert Gilpin.Footnote ²⁶ Business and industry did become a significant source of support for federal science, but it never became a homogenous bloc. Fearful of the encroachment of federal activity into the often-corrupt business practices of western development, land, cattle, and timber barons, for example, formed a considerable force against federal science.Footnote ²⁷ Even those western politicians who did support federal science were motivated to oppose its expansion in an effort to monopolize the benefits of federal science for their own states or territories.Footnote ²⁸ Federal science did, indeed, benefit in Congress from the lobbying efforts that shipping, commercial, and mining interests eventually offered, but the policies from which such interests benefited were initially developed in the absence of their support, or, in some cases, in direct opposition to their early lobbying efforts.

Scientists, themselves, were also not initially a powerful enough interest to drive early science policy from outside the state. Although nongovernment scientists, as we will see, did become an important source of political influence and power, this was not until after federal science policies had helped strengthen them. Prior to the federal government's entry into scientific activity, the scientific field was not one that was crowded with private actors. The federal government's early policies were, in fact, geared toward coaxing private institutions into being and helping to build up those that were struggling for resources.Footnote ²⁹ The American Philosophical Society, for example, was described in the early nineteenth century as a “small unimportant outpost of science stuck on the very edges of civilized culture.”Footnote ³⁰ Universities and colleges, too, were severely underdeveloped for most of the nineteenth century, and it was federal support in the form of money, equipment, and expertise that played a key role in transforming them from institutions focused almost solely on teaching into full-blown research centers.Footnote ³¹ Private scientific actors and institutions in the nineteenth century could, therefore, be seen as responding to the policies developed by federal administrators more than serving as the driving interest behind them.Footnote ³² Federal scientific administrators, in turn, acted not initially in response to the direct demands of societal forces, but rather in anticipation or defiance of them. This suggests that scientific administrators had a level of autonomy that was not commonly characteristic of nineteenth-century American bureaucrats.

The independent policymaking power of scientific administrators becomes even more stark when we consider the role of partisan and sectional politics in American scientific development. Neither can be seen as clearly driving American science policy in one direction or another. There is little evidence, for example, that American science policy was explicitly part of the Republican developmental policy of the 1860s or a more general product of party competition.Footnote ³³ Congress did charter the National Academy of Science (NAS) and pass the Morrill Act creating Land-Grant Colleges after the South seceded, but both the support and opposition to the USCS in the decades leading up to the Civil War showed no clear partisan or sectional divisions. To determine the presence and significance of partisan and sectional division in the support of nineteenth-century federal science, the best source of evidence does not come from roll call votes, but from examining the key participants in the debates leading up to critical votes. Because Congress's yearly vote on both the USCS and USGS was part of a larger Civil Appropriations bill, isolating the true cause of a congressmen's vote is difficult. The fear of bringing down, or even stalling, an entire appropriations bill would often color a congressmen's support for amendments and final vote.Footnote ³⁴

During the 36^th Congress, which Richard Bensel cites as providing glimpses of the Republican developmental agenda, the Coast Survey was defended by congressmen, including John Cochrane (D-NY), William Miles (D-SC), Benjamin Stanton (R-OH), and Linus Comins (R-MA).Footnote ³⁵ Not only was the support bipartisan, but it also represented the South, North, and interior of the nation. Counted among the loudest antagonists of the Coast Survey, on the other hand, was Cadwallader Colden Washburn (R-WI), who, in the same session of Congress in which he tried to strip more than half the Coast Survey's budget, introduced the steamboat passenger bill that Bensel describes as a major developmental measure.Footnote ³⁶ Republicans from Illinois and Missouri also launched similar attacks during the 36^th Congress, making it difficult to see support for the nation's most prominent scientific institution as being part of a Republican agenda.

The absence of clear partisan or sectional divisions also characterized the battles over the Coast Survey in 1848, in which support came from a southern Whig, Alexander Evans (W-MD), a southern Democrat, Frederick Stanton (D-TN), as well as Whig party members from Massachusetts (Charles Hudson) and Ohio (Samuel Vinton and Robert Schenck).Footnote ³⁷ Even the future president of the Confederacy and Mississippi Democrat Jefferson Davis openly supported the USCS, praising its work in the Gulf of Mexico mapping channels and points of entrance.Footnote ³⁸ The USGS showed similar evidence of bipartisan support, counting among its most ardent supporters prominent members of both parties, including Democrats Abram Hewitt (NY), John D.C. Atkins (TN), and Wilkinson Call (FL), and Republicans William Allison (IA) and Henry Dawes (MA). In what were two of the most important debates surrounding the USGS, the congressional debates of 1879 and 1892 show an almost even split among Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the issue.Footnote ³⁹ The sectional divisions were, however, more stark in the case of the Geological Survey than for the Coast Survey. As discussed, Western congressmen tended to oppose the Geological Survey, but the opposition from the West was not universal. In looking at the debates leading up to the USGS's initial establishment, we can see that Representative Peter Wigginton (D-CA) was one of five outspoken proponents of the USGS, arguing that the Survey would be a source of efficiency and would help end the corruption and graft that plagued western development.Footnote ⁴⁰

The strategies and actions of both the USCS and USGS also show that sectional politics did not drive American scientific development. The USGS's operations were far from isolated to a particular region, and, in fact, bestowed benefits on all parts of the nation. From 1882 to 1902, the USGS formed partnerships with over forty nongovernment institutions across twenty-six states.Footnote ⁴¹ The Coast Survey, too, spread its work as far and as rapidly as possible. Superintendent Bache recognized that political support could be gained from all parts of the country, and it was for this reason that he spread the work of the Survey into additional areas as appropriations votes neared.Footnote ⁴² Being cognizant of the benefits of sectional support is far different from being the object of a single, regional bloc. Powell also understood the similar political dynamics facing his bureau, and acknowledged as much in a letter to Survey Geologist George Becker. “In order to grow from year to year,” Powell wrote to Becker, “it is necessary to interest a larger body of legislators and obtain the friendly cooperation of the public press.”Footnote ⁴³ Moving the Survey's activities into new areas, Powell continued, would “allay certain antagonisms which have arisen.” Rather than an object of sectional or partisan politics, scientific bureaucrats in the federal government used their independent policy-making power to curry favor with political and economic interests from all sections of the country and from across the political spectrum.

THE ARGUMENT: PROCESSES OF STATE DEVELOPMENT AND BUREAUCRATIC AUTONOMY

Employment in the nineteenth-century American bureaucracy was at times compared to a slow painful death and was seen as inhospitable to professionals.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the case of American scientific development, however, we not only see experts operating within the federal bureaucracy, but we also see them endowed with the ability to innovate, implement, and manage policies in the absence of direct congressional authorization. The account of independent bureaucratic policy making offered here departs from the well-established theories of bureaucratic autonomy in the discipline, including Daniel Carpenter's seminal work on the subject.Footnote ⁴⁵ Autonomy prevails, Carpenter argues, when agencies establish “political legitimacy,” defined as a reputation for expertise, efficiency, or moral protection.Footnote ⁴⁶ This reputation is further supported by an agency's diverse set of connections to societal organizations. Under such circumstances, Carpenter continues, politicians are more likely to defer to an agency's policy proposals, and grant bureaucrats “free rein” over policy making. Upon first pass, the case of scientific development, with its reliance on expert mezzo-level bureaucrats and the importance of a private network, seems to mesh well with the argument offered in Carpenter's The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy. There are, however, important differences in regard to both the factors leading to autonomy and the role of the private network.

The reputations of nineteenth-century scientific bureaucrats, as we have glimpsed, were highly contested by those political and economic interests who stood to lose at the hands of federal science policy. Opponents openly challenged the value of federal scientific work and charged federal scientists with attempting to “perpetuate their reign” over American science while furnishing nothing of use to the American people.Footnote ⁴⁷ There is little evidence to suggest the existence of a reputation-induced deference to the officers of the USCS and USGS. The recurring attacks made upon federal science, in fact, show little concern among antiscience politicians of a political cost to challenging an agency's expertise. The direct attempts to retrench federal science suggest that opponents were undeterred by any expert or moral standing these bureaus might possess. The continued independent policy-making power demonstrated by scientists in the federal bureaucracy, therefore, points toward a causal mechanism other than a reputation-induced congressional deference.

An 1884 report to Congress from NAS clearly captures the high level of autonomy federal scientists enjoyed and also points toward critical factors underlying their independent authority. “Each head of a scientific organization is now, practically, absolutely independent, and in his individual judgment of what his organization shall do is controlled only by Congress itself, acting only through an annual appropriation.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The NAS statement points not toward a reputation for expertise as a source of independence, or to an ability to alter the preferences of recalcitrant politicians, but highlights bureau-level control of appropriations and minimal congressional oversight in allowing scientific administrators to implement and manage policies of their own. In 1892, Senator Wolcott further described the institutional environment for federal science as one in which “nobody on earth directs [the appropriations] but the Director of the Geological Survey, accountable to no man and no men, accountable only to the scientific bodies of the United States, who may criticize the wisdom or unwisdom of the work.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Wolcott, like the NAS, identifies the absence of congressional oversight and the complete control over appropriations as a source of bureaucratic power. The one source of congressional control alluded to by both the NAS and Wolcott, the yearly appropriations vote, was, in fact, even weaker than it first appears. During a debate in 1879, Senator Edmunds (D-VT) described how congressmen were reluctant to employ the appropriations vote as a means of control out of a fear of scuttling an entire Civil Appropriations bill, of which science bureaus were but a small part.Footnote ⁵⁰ The statements by both the NAS and Wolcott point to institutional, not reputational, determinants of the independent policy-making power of scientists in the federal government. What, then, explains the ability of scientists to enter the bureaucracy and remain relatively free from congressional control?

The largest determinant of the position and power of scientists within the American bureaucracy was the timing and sequence of democratization, scientific professionalization, and bureaucratization. Mass patronage had many deleterious effects on the American state, but in two important ways it favored the development of scientific capacity in the United States. While rotation-in-office did rob much of the nineteenth-century American state of bureaucratic capacity, it also prevented an entrenched bureaucratic officer corps from controlling the American state. As science began to professionalize in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, rotation-in-office was at its peak, and as a result, there was no entrenched bureaucratic corps capable of preventing a new professional class from entering the American bureaucracy.Footnote ⁵¹ In other nations that were experiencing professionalization at the same time, Great Britain, for example, the emerging science profession was perceived as a threat to the position of long-serving bureaucrats who were trained as generalists, not experts.Footnote ⁵² The presence of an entrenched bureaucracy in Great Britain restricted both the entrance of scientists into the bureaucracy, as well as subsequent chances for promotion. In the United States, the openness of the bureaucracy interacted with an underdeveloped private research infrastructure to make employment in the federal government an ideal position for scientists.Footnote ⁵³ In a letter to the Board of Regents of the University of California, Berkeley, George Becker resigned from his position at that university, stating that the opportunity afforded to him by the Geological Survey is one that “might never again present itself to me.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The absence of an entrenched bureaucracy explains the ability of scientists to get into the bureaucracy but does little to explain the autonomy they came to possess. The most significant source of policy-making autonomy was the combination of bureau level control over hiring and spending with the near absence of congressional oversight or auditing capacity.Footnote ⁵⁵ Again, the benefits of patronage politics for American science are visible in these institutional characteristics. In his exploration of the “party period” and its relation to public policy, Richard McCormick depicts a time in which the only thing weaker than the policies enacted by Congress was their enforcement.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a result of the broad discretion that politicians built into patronage-age legislation, which was meant to facilitate the distribution of targeted benefits, the scientists sitting at the helm of federal bureaus gained significant autonomy. The environment created by patronage politics in the nineteenth century was one that Robert Wiebe described as lacking both the will and apparatus for continuous supervision of governing actions.Footnote ⁵⁷ Scientific bureaus received lump sum appropriations, which in an environment of limited oversight and weak auditing capabilities, gave scientific administrators near carte blanche. Itemized budgets were not required, and as a result, the year-end reports often offered no more specificity for the year's spending than “services.” In one instance, congressional opponents did attempt to gain control of federal science through an amendment to require itemized budgets, but the addition of the phrase, “as far as is practicable,” rendered it meaningless.Footnote ⁵⁸ As such, Congress was only able to control federal science through the restrictions it placed on the construction of bricks and mortar institutions.

The primary importance of federal science's private partners was not, therefore, to serve as a source of autonomy, but to be the object of autonomous policy making. Scientists in the federal government did not enjoy complete administrative freedom, but they were able to exploit the institutional characteristics of the nineteenth-century patronage state to acquire—by alternative means—the physical and human capital that Congress had restricted. The network of private partners through which this was achieved was not initially responsible for the independent policy-making power demonstrated by scientists in the federal government, but the policy strategy of partnering with private actors and institutions did eventually develop into a political asset. New policies can, as Schattschneider famously argued, create new politics, and the case of American scientific development provides an opportunity to see exactly how polices can create positive feedback and reshape politics in their favor.Footnote ⁵⁹ The policy strategy of partnering with private actors and institutions, for example, created an interest group where none previously existed.

In February of 1849, Princeton scientist, Joseph Henry, wrote to Asa Gray, “If the scientific men of the country will only be properly united they can do much for the advance of their pursuits through the assistance of Congress.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Demonstrating the positive policy feedback generated by partnering with private institutions and actors, the provision of federal resources to private institutions and actors in the form of salaries, research grants, specimens, and equipment, as well as money and guidance for the improvement of research facilities, united the scientific community exactly as Henry wished. As the narratives that follow will show, where Henry lamented the absence of an active interest group for science at mid-century, we see a short time later the concerted efforts of a cohesive group of public and private scientists lobbying Congress. The inability of even the most prestigious universities to operate in the absence of federal support created widespread dependence and, therefore, widespread support of not only federal support of science, but also for the particular organizational structure that allowed partnerships with private institutions to flourish.

The material benefits produced by federal science policies proved a strong motivation for private activities on behalf of federal science. Whenever the USCS or USGS came under attack from its opponents, archival evidence including personal correspondence between scientists, and between scientists and congressmen, as well as reports from scientific societies and the language of congressional debates, all show how the private partners to the network were marshaled in support of federal science. The significance of the public-private network in helping to maintain federal appropriations for science, as well as its role in providing political support for this particular pattern of institutional organization itself, is most clearly demonstrated by the efforts of federal science's opponents to terminate the spending and hiring autonomy that undergirded the public-private network's very existence. By their own admission, the opponents of federal science, as we will see, believed that their failed efforts to directly retrench federal science were the result of the political influence exerted by the network of private scientific partners. Because of this, many of the later attempts to retrench federal science were aimed at ending the hiring and spending autonomy of scientific bureaucrats. In attempting to “alter the political environment” in their favor by ending the ability of federal bureaucrats to form partnerships with private actors and institutions, the opponents of federal science confirm the political importance of the network.Footnote ⁶¹ By their own logic, theories of policy feedback and self-reinforcing processes suggest mechanisms for their own reversal, and by tracing the attempts to activate such mechanisms we can determine where a given policy derives its most important source of stability and strength.Footnote ⁶² In the case of nineteenth-century scientific development, as the final section of the narrative shows, the stability and strength came from the bureaucratically constructed public-private network.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AND THE REEVALUATION OF STATE STRENGTH

Scientific administrators used their autonomy to enlarge their offices and transform American science. The United States was the last of the advanced nations to enter the scientific field, but through the efforts of scientists in the federal bureaucracy, the United States was placed on an ascendant path to the top of the scientific world. This account of American scientific development fits into the recent scholarly recalculations of American state power that have attempted to dispel the “myth” of the weak American state. William Novak, for example, has offered a hard count of the dispersed power of American governance, citing the 70,000 municipal, town, and township governments; the 435 congressional districts; the 200 committees and sub-committees of Congress; the 137 federal agencies; and numerous other examples of how governance pervades American life.Footnote ⁶³ This bricks-and-mortar approach to reassessing American state strength is one in which the state pervades society but remains separate from it. Other scholars, though, have begun to identify an entirely different pattern of state building and policy making—one that, like science, has relied on public-private partnerships.

Colin Moore has described public-private partnerships as a commonly occurring, yet under-theorized pattern of American state building.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such hybridized governing arrangements have been explored in the delivery of social services like healthcare and pensions, as well as in the development of the American frontier and the construction of America's overseas empire.Footnote ⁶⁵ It is a pattern of state building and policy making that complicates our understandings of state power. When state strength is defined and measured against or over society, a world is depicted in which societal actors attempt to maintain their sphere of power against the expansionist tendencies of the state; where both state and society cannot be winners.Footnote ⁶⁶ What the case of American scientific development will show, however, is that public-private partnerships can be constructed to deliver complementary, if not synergetic, outcomes that improve both public and private parties. In exploring American scientific development, we will see that although public-private partnerships may have at times been a second choice, they are not necessarily the second-best option of a deficiently Weberian state.

In many respects, public-private governing arrangements are more complex and require a more nuanced understanding of a given policy realm on the part of bureaucrats than a purely public undertaking. Scientific administrators in the federal government were both administratively and scientifically astute and demonstrated the ability to advance American science in an institutionally and culturally adverse environment by balancing the needs and wants of public and private actors. Unfortunately, this aspect of public-private partnerships has been unnoticed or underestimated. Moore, for example, offers an insightful account of the crosscutting professional networks and bureaucratic entrepreneurialism that characterized the collaboration between Wall Street bankers and American bureaucrats in the construction of America's overseas empire, but he employs Elisabeth Clemens's terminology of “borrowing capacity” to describe these interactions.Footnote ⁶⁷ In doing so, Moore groups his complex case of public-private collaboration with the simple fee-for-service relationships explored by Clemens in the delivery of social services in Progressive-era California.Footnote ⁶⁸ If the highly centralized and bureaucratized ideal-typical state is, as William Novak predicts, more a remnant of the past than a harbinger of the future, a more nuanced understanding of public-private partnerships will not only produce a better understanding of American political development to date, but may also aide policy makers as they try to address the challenges of the future.Footnote ⁶⁹ This will be increasingly important as more and more of the nation's activities take place at the intersection of public and private action.Footnote ⁷⁰

This article will begin to differentiate among public-private partnerships by examining and describing in considerable detail the essential characteristics in the successful public-private partnerships in American scientific development. They were built on the transfer of money, equipment, knowledge, and influence, through connections that were direct, reciprocal, and multifaceted. This stands them in stark contrast to relationships built on indirect government subsidies and regulations, which only distantly connected partners through a unidirectional flow of monetary resources. The strong ties between societal actors and public officials that stretched across the public-private divide in American science, the embeddedness of American science, to use Peter Evans's terminology, provided to American science many of the benefits that Evans identifies as flowing from embeddedness. Among them is the rise of mutual trust and respect, a reduction in the risk of poor performance and corruption, and a more easy realization of mutual benefits from cooperation.Footnote ⁷¹ As Powell detailed to the Allison Commission in 1886, the addition of a new agency or institution “in no manner weakens other existing agencies, but in fact strengthens them,” provides evidence of the mutual respect and trust, as well as the mutual benefits of cooperation that characterized American science.Footnote ⁷² Powell continued to explain the complementarity and synergy that resulted, arguing that “if nine equal agencies are at work the establishment of the tenth agency not only increases the amount of work done to that extent but renders such assistance to all the others that all are more prosperous and more successful.”Footnote ⁷³

Federal science bureaus sat at the hub of an overlapping national network of public-private science. Inaugurated by the USCS in 1843, and continued by the USGS, scientists in the federal government constructed a complex network of public-private partnerships through which money, equipment, personnel, information, and influence flowed in all directions. The result was the dramatic improvement of the scientific capacity of the federal government and the nation as a whole. Science, as Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Corwin argued in 1851, is progressive, “and the tendency of work executed by permanent corps, not partaking in the general movement of the day, is to become stationary.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The steady progress of science depended on the continued existence of the public-private network, and the narratives that follow show how it developed as the result of independent, bureaucratic policy making.

THE INAUGURATION OF AN AMERICAN SCIENCE POLICY: THE UNITED STATES COAST SURVEY

To little fanfare, but great effect, Superintendent Bache began to establish partnerships with nongovernment science in his first months in office. In December 1843, Bache penned a letter to New York University professor Elias Loomis, stating that “if there is any extra object above all other which I shall aim at, it is to promote science as far as my position enables me by calling to the aid of the Survey the real talent of the country.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Bache's position as superintendent, according the Survey's congressional reauthorization in 1832, enabled him to hire “such astronomers and other persons as he shall deem proper.”Footnote ⁷⁶ This became the most important phrase in American science. The Coast Survey, as Senator James Pearce (W-MD) stated during debates in 1849, “was not restricted as to the character of the individual [employed], or the nature of their professional pursuits.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Early connections were made to Professors Hackley and Renwick at Columbia College, Professors Benjamin Peirce and William Cranch Bond at Harvard, Professors Otis E. Kendall and Sears Walker Cook at the Central High School in Philadelphia, and Stephen Alexander at Princeton University. These connections enabled the Coast Survey to quickly expand the geographic and scientific scope of its work. The added human capital helped decrease errors and expand productivity, enabling the Survey to conduct work year round.Footnote ⁷⁸ Prior to the adoption by Bache of the strategy of partnering with private scientific actors and institutions, the Survey was active in only five states. Within two years of undertaking the first partnerships, the USCS had expanded scientific operations into all sixteen states of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The “general dissatisfaction” with the progress of the Survey that had previously threatened its continued existence was replaced by concerns of federal overreach.

The Survey was initially constructed in such a way as to limit its capacity and reach. This was done as a means of guaranteeing against its effectiveness and permanence. An institution that can provide few benefits will win few friends and defenders. Bache, who was as politically astute as he was scientifically expert, understood the connections between scientific effectiveness, the provision of tangible benefits, and political support. With Professor Renwick of Columbia College supplementing the Survey's work in the New York Harbor, Long Island Sound, and the Nantucket Shoals, for example, and with Stephen Alexander performing related computations at Princeton, Survey scientists were freed to pursue work on the Southern portions of the Atlantic Coast for the first time. Politically, these developments were invaluable. Not only did the prosecution of work along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts help avoid sectional jealousies, but the Survey also won the active support of a geographically diverse group of interests including the Chambers of Commerce of New York and Charleston and congressmen from Mississippi to Massachusetts.

The increased productivity that the Coast Survey showed in the period immediately following the inauguration the policy of public-private partnerships is incontrovertible. As table 1 shows, the productivity during the first five years of public-private partnerships far outstripped that of the previous twelve. The increase was exponential and included movement into entirely new areas of exploration and research. Although this period did coincide with the addition of Florida, Texas, California, Oregon, and Washington, which presents a possible alternative explanation for the increased productivity, scientific work in these areas did not begin in earnest for several years. The addition of such vast coastlines did, however, provide pressure for increased appropriations, but this too cannot account for all the productivity gains seen in this period. According to a report from the Secretary of the Treasury, for example, while the period between 1844 and 1848 saw a doubling of the Survey's appropriations, the productivity of the Survey increased threefold.Footnote ⁷⁹ As we see in Table 1, it is precisely in those areas where private partners made their largest contributions that the Survey saw its largest productivity increases. This is most notable in the study of currents, tides, and ocean floor zoology.

The work of the Survey in the Nantucket Shoals and Vineyard Sound in the late 1840s provides one of the earliest and clearest pictures of the Survey's public-private partnerships in action. “The history of this most dangerous shoal is startling.”Footnote ⁸⁰ So read a report from William Mitchell, who along with his daughter Maria Mitchell, operated an observatory on behalf of the Coast Survey on Nantucket. Described further as a grave of thousands, it was determined that the presumed position of this mid-ocean shoal, which was at times covered by just a foot of water, was nearly twenty miles in error of latitude. The Nantucket Shoal was, in fact, located precisely in the path of vessels bound for New York and Europe. The collaborative effort between the Survey, the Mitchells, Renwick, Alexander, and Elias Loomis of New York University not only remedied this important “want of information,” but also identified this region as a priority for additional work and the allocation of resources.Footnote ⁸¹ To accomplish this necessary work, Bache further extended the public-private network by drawing Harvard professor and world-renowned zoologist Louis Agassiz into the service of the federal government.

Louis Agassiz joined Survey Assistant Charles H. Davis aboard the USS Bibb in an expedition that would, among other objectives, accurately map a ridge of the Nantucket Shoals where the depth could drop rapidly from twenty-four fathoms to as low as four.Footnote ⁸² In the process, Agassiz and Davis identified and mapped two additional shoals in an area believed to be deep ocean. Further research was performed on the currents of the Vineyard Sound and Nantucket Shoals, and an extensive study of specimens of the seabed was undertaken. Such studies were relevant to both applied and basic research and could not have been completed in the absence of this public partnership.Footnote ⁸³ Studying the species of the ocean floor contributed to the advancement of sounding, a technique by which samples of the seabed were taken to assist in determining a vessel's position. The voyage and research aboard the USS Bibb was also of great value to Agassiz's basic zoological research, which could not be adequately supported by Harvard alone.Footnote ⁸⁴ Scientific administrators employed their policy autonomy to not only expand the applied research of the federal government, but to also fund basic research, for which securing direct congressional support would have been nearly impossible. We see, then, in the partnership between Agassiz and the Coast Survey that Agassiz and Harvard borrowed as much capacity from the federal government as the federal government was borrowing from them.

Harvard's newly established Lawrence Scientific School possessed no dedicated buildings or laboratories. There were also no collections of specimens from which Agassiz or others could work. What resources that Agassiz possessed at Harvard, he supplied himself. Through his partnership with the Coast Survey, Agassiz and Harvard amassed a vast collection of specimens. The barrels of specimens that were sent to Cambridge from Coast Survey expeditions formed an important part of the collections at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and were described as a “rich harvest of discovery.”Footnote ⁸⁵ An agreement was put in place in which Agassiz could keep any specimens that were not of use to the Survey's hydrographic work. The support that Agassiz received from the Coast Survey when studying the Nantucket Shoals or the Florida reefs played an important role in his decision to remain in the United States and pursue his research. “Everything I can wish for,” Agassiz wrote of his partnership with the Survey, “is at my disposal so far as it is possible.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The benefits of Agassiz's partnership with the Coast Survey also benefited Harvard as a whole. In building up the collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Lawrence School, Harvard could better attract students, particularly graduate students, and provide them with a more comprehensive education. The improved research opportunities did not just arise from the specimens acquired from Coast Survey expeditions, but from participation in the expeditions themselves. In addition to the Coast Survey crew, Agassiz was permitted to bring assistants from Harvard on the Coast Survey expeditions. Such contributions to graduate education by the USCS prompted the Franklin Institute to label the Coast Survey a “great national scientific school” in the federal government.Footnote ⁸⁷ So common was the attachment of students to the Survey that young assistants were called “learners,” and a library was amassed for their continuing education.Footnote ⁸⁸ The production of expertise was deeply engrained within the Survey, with Bache writing to J. M. Wampler, “I am willing that any of those who enter the survey should obtain a large expense, at its expense.”Footnote ⁸⁹ An article in the American Journal of Education described the training provided by the Coast Survey in mathematics and the physical sciences as “superior to what is afforded by any other institution.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Indeed, it was Harvard professor Benjamin Peirce, the father of American mathematics, who upon joining the Survey stated, “I shall think it part of my duty to give these [assistants] all the knowledge of theory, which I find them capable of acquiring.”Footnote ⁹¹

The Coast Survey, in assuming a leading role in graduate education, played an integral role in the production of expertise in the United States. This benefited the Survey because those persons who trained within the Survey were both better prepared for service in the government and more likely to continue directly or indirectly to work with the Survey.Footnote ⁹² The Survey's role in education tied the federal government even more closely to institutions of higher education, as universities introduced entirely new fields of study to their curriculum that mirrored the Coast Survey's work.Footnote ⁹³ These intimate connections habituated scientists to a cooperative approach to research, thereby contributing to the stability of the public-private organizational structure.Footnote ⁹⁴ As a report form the American Association for the Advancement of Science described in an 1860, the scientific training provided by the Coast Survey “directly profited the Government in connection with this great public work” and also “carried into other spheres of action a species of attainment the rarest, and in our country at the present day, of most practically valuable kind.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Engrained with the public-private organizational structure and collective approach to science, the men trained within the Survey went on to work in other federal bureaus, academia, and private research institutions. The scientific approach made necessary by the political environment of the nineteenth century was thus transmitted through time and across institutions by the interflow of personnel through the scientific network. The assumption of the responsibility for graduate education by the Coast Survey provided it with a steady stream of skilled labor, while simultaneously expanding and strengthening its network throughout the nation.

The partnerships established between the Coast Survey and nongovernment science were not simply about creating and acquiring additional human capital. The connections made between the Coast Survey and institutions like Harvard and the Central High School of Philadelphia not only brought greater expertise into the service of the federal government, but also acquired for the Survey the physical infrastructure that Congress had expressly barred it from constructing, namely observatories. In constructing public-private partnerships through a multi-directional transfer of money, equipment, personnel, ideas, and influence, the Coast Survey had developed an organizational strategy to neutralize congressional restrictions and expand federal scientific capacity.

After four previous attempts, Harvard finally succeeded in establishing an observatory in 1839. There was, however, no salary for an astronomer and minimal equipment. William Cranch Bond operated the Harvard observatory with money and equipment from the federal government, and in the first years of operation, his salary was paid solely by the federal government.Footnote ⁹⁶ In a report to the Committee of Visitors to the Harvard Observatory, Bond acknowledged the indebtedness of the observatory to the Survey, describing the “great part of the expense” that the Survey assumed for making improvements to the Harvard Observatory.Footnote ⁹⁷ The return on this investment was considerable. The Harvard observatory became a cardinal point to which observations and computations of longitude from other geographical locations could be referred. It was to Harvard, for example, that the primary triangulations from Northeast shipping channels and harbors were sent—this included data gathered by Davis and Agassiz aboard the USS Bibb. The partnership formed between the Coast Survey and institutions such as Harvard increased the pace and precision of the government's scientific work. Bache reported to Congress that with the assistance of Harvard it was possible to “render directly available the accurate determination for the longitude and latitude” for the commercially important areas of Boston Harbor, Vineyard Sound, and Nantucket.Footnote ⁹⁸

The Harvard observatory became the de facto National Observatory. It supplied observations of lunar culminations, occultations, and solar eclipses to astronomers and surveyors around the country, aiding in the complex computations and reductions necessary to advance the science. The astronomical work performed at the Harvard Observatory for the Coast Survey was not only more accurate than what the Survey could achieve in the absence of the partnership, it was also more cost-effective. Senator Jefferson Davis (D-MS) estimated that the work done in partnership with private observatories was done at one-fifth the cost of the temporary field setups to which the Survey was legislatively limited.Footnote ⁹⁹ In addition, the coordination and harmonization that was facilitated between institutions such as Harvard, Georgetown, New York University, and numerous other observatories was an important step in the advancement of astronomy, one that helped move it from an amateur venture to a professional undertaking. Individual scientists or institutions operating in isolation could rarely supply an adequate volume of observations for advanced computations. The Survey became the clearinghouse of astronomical data. No longer were observations and analyses deposited in the archives of isolated observatories, but rather became part of a national, and even international, network of information. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science stated, the communication of scientific results and research that was facilitated by the Coast Survey stimulated American science to higher efforts.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

As alluded to, Harvard was but one piece in a national network. Observatories were constructed and maintained with the support of the Coast Survey from Albany to Charleston, and Philadelphia to Cincinnati. In stationing federal scientists at the Dudley Observatory in Albany, the Coast Survey supplied the expertise needed to both complete construction and operate the new observatory. The Dudley Observatory took its name from the late Senator Charles Dudley (D-NY), whose wife donated an initial $10,000 for its construction.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Despite this early and generous support, it was only with the assistance of Survey astronomers and resources that the Dudley was brought into operation and was able to secure additional donations from a citizenry that was given new confidence by the involvement of the Coast Survey. As a product of this partnership, the Survey scientists stationed at the Dudley secured access to equipment and facilities that Congress had made unobtainable. Benjamin Gould, the Harvard professor and head of the Survey's Longitude Division, who was named the director of the Dudley Observatory, wrote to Bache describing how the trustees of the Dudley had “taken measure to equip [the observatory] with instruments of the highest order, capable of rendering essential service to science and greatly facilitating the Coast Survey's operations, both by furnishing accurate places of latitude stars by the triangulation of the Pleiades.”Footnote ¹⁰² The Coast Survey clearly benefited greatly from the Dudley's infrastructure, but this partnership is not simply an instance of a weak government institution relying on a private entity for the capacity to fulfill its operational responsibilities. The Dudley, for example, was only made operational with the resources and expertise of the Coast Survey; its Scientific Council and scientific workforce was comprised solely of federal scientists. In a letter to Bache from C. H. F. Peters, who directed the Dudley prior to Gould's arrival from Harvard, we see the extent to which the Dudley was, for all intents and purposes, an institution of the Coast Survey. “I have the honor to submit to you the following report respecting some trials undertaken by your order, with the view of ascertaining the practicability and advantage of using lunar spot in transit observation for the determination of longitude” (italics added).Footnote ¹⁰³ Alexander Dallas Bache, as the superintendent of the Coast Survey and member of the Dudley's Scientific Council, was directing the day-to-day operations of a private observatory. A similarly complex and multifaceted relationship existed between the Coast Survey and observatories around the country.

The Cincinnati Observatory, like the Dudley, was also unable to secure adequate private funds to become fully operational.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Private funds were raised to purchase a high-powered telescope, but the additional funds for the acquisition of the equipment needed to make the observatory fully functional were not forthcoming. In the place of private funds, the Survey provided the Cincinnati Observatory with a transit circle and sidereal clock. The $3,000 in equipment that the Survey provided to the Cincinnati Observatory was given in addition to payments to its director, Ormsby M. Mitchel.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It was this financial support that kept the Cincinnati Observatory operational and its director secure enough financially to continue conducting research that benefitted the Coast Survey and the nation. Included among Mitchel's research endeavors was collaborative work with the Harvard and Philadelphia observatories on the development of a method for determining longitude by telegraph—a method that would come to be known as the “American method.”

The research and development of the process by which longitude was determined by telegraph was coordinated by Survey assistant Sears Walker Cook from his base of operations at the Central High School of Philadelphia. It was, in fact, from the Central High School that the Survey's Longitude Division initially operated.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Also working at Central was Ezra O. Kendall, who while not directly employed by the Survey as Cook was, received support over decades of collaboration. The intimacy and importance of the partnership is evidenced by Bache's year-end report in which he mourned the loss of Kendall to the University of Pennsylvania, writing that “the survey has lost the valuable services of Professor E. Otis Kendall, by his attachment to the chair of mathematics in the University of Pennsylvania, which takes him from the High School.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Bache's concerns were perhaps overblown, as the University of Pennsylvania was one of the many institutions to which the Survey had established connections.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Bache's comments do, however, highlight what an important role private partners like the Philadelphia High School played in the work of the Survey.

To add to the important work on longitude by telegraph, which would win the Council Medal of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Survey drafted Lewis Gibbes of the College of Charleston into its service. Gibbes, who Joseph Henry described as among the “best names in science,” operated an observatory on behalf of the Survey in Charleston.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ An observatory was something that was desired by the trustees of the College of Charleston, but again, private resources were not available for its construction, operation, and maintenance.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The Survey, again, took the lead. The Coast Survey instructed Gibbes on its construction and supplied him with a five-foot transit instrument, two chronometers, and a sidereal clock.Footnote ¹¹¹ When the Survey had to pull personnel from Charleston, Gibbes also took over the operation of the Survey's tidal station in that city. It was precisely this type of work on tidal observations that the secretary of the treasury referred to in 1851 when defending the public-private organizational structure of the Survey.Footnote ¹¹² And it was all the work the Survey conducted in the area of Charleston that won the Survey the vocal support of the Charleston Chamber of Commerce.Footnote ¹¹³ Although a centralized structure may have been initially desired, we see in this example that the functionality of the public-private organizational structure provided benefits that helped secure the support it needed to, for example, maintain its appropriation. The USGS, which supplanted the USCS as the leading scientific institution of the country, picked up on and expanded the network initially erected by the USCS.

THE CONTINUED EXPANSION OF AMERICAN SCIENCE: THE UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

Othniel C. Marsh was acknowledged to be among the very best paleontologists of the nineteenth century. His discoveries and contributions to the developing theory of evolution won him praise from the likes of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Marsh represented a great prize for the USGS, but there were not adequate federal facilities for his work. Bringing Marsh to Washington was the preferred path, but political opposition made it unattainable.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Drawing on the considerable spending and hiring autonomy of the director of the Geological Survey, a solution was reached by establishing the Division of Paleontology at Yale.

Marsh officially joined the Geological Survey on 1 July 1882. Powell's control of the Survey's purse allowed him to offer Marsh generous funds for expeditions, publications, and assistants.Footnote ¹¹⁶ All this was in addition to the specimens that would be amassed at Yale's Peabody Museum and Sheffield Scientific School as a result of Marsh's employment with the Survey. The Geological Survey, in return for this beneficence, would acquire not only the human capital of Marsh and his students, but also the physical infrastructure of the Peabody Museum and Sheffield Scientific School. Like the Coast Survey, the USGS was able to maneuver around congressional opposition to the construction of bricks and mortar institutions through atypical employment and spending procedures.

Yale as an institution also gained considerably from this partnership. When Marsh was awarded the prestigious Cuvier prize by the French Academy of Science in 1897, the Peabody Museum was among the accomplishments noted by the prize committee.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The collections that brought Yale and Marsh such honor were procured and maintained with considerable support from the USGS. The collections made by Marsh while working with the USGS were estimated to weigh over 160,000 pounds and were large enough to require five freight cars when they were later moved.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The collections were described by Marsh's successor at Yale, Charles E. Beecher, as affording an “abundant material for original investigations,” which would attract leading scientists and students to Yale for years to come.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The intimacy of the partnership between Yale, Marsh, and the USGS is visible within the contractual language of Marsh's assistants. Samuel Wendell Williston signed a contract on 1 July 1882, the same day that Marsh officially assumed the office of chief of the division of paleontology. The contract stated that Williston was to work as an “assistant in the Yale Museum, or the Geological Survey [as Marsh may decide] for five years from this date.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The seamlessness of these public-private partnerships was specified in this contractual arrangement. There was literally no formal distinction or division between Yale and the USGS. Further showing the closeness and near indivisibility of such partnerships, when Williston's paycheck was late in arriving, he spoke not with Marsh, but with Powell.Footnote ¹²¹

Williston was not just an assistant; he was also a graduate student at the Sheffield Scientific School. The $1,500 annually paid by the Geological Survey was in many ways a federally funded graduate student stipend. The Geological Survey was as heavily involved with graduate education as the Coast Survey. Over the period between 1882 and 1892, Marsh had fifty-four assistants, at a cost of over $100,000, a portion of which went to underwriting graduate education and the production of expertise.Footnote ¹²² The employment of graduate students was a critical aspect of the nation's continued scientific development and a mechanism through which the organizational structure of public-private partnerships was extended. This was clearly acknowledged by Survey staff and their private partners. In an article in Science, Charles D. Walcott, who served as the third director of the Geological Survey, estimated that 50 percent of students who pursued graduate training within the Geological Survey would become permanent members of the Survey and another 38 percent would join or rejoin academic institutions.Footnote ¹²³ The inclusion of graduate students within the ranks of the Survey would, as Walcott wrote to Henry S. Williams at Cornell University, develop “some very good men.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Such men were brought into the ranks of the USGS, connected to federal science, and then sent out to all corners of the country. As the Mining and Scientific Press wrote in 1912

The service of the federal government as a “great graduate school of instruction” was necessary throughout the nineteenth century. As late as the 1890s, top universities like Harvard still lacked adequate private funds for graduate research and education. In an 1893 edition of the Harvard Graduates' Magazine, Harvard professor Nathaniel Shaler, who served as chief of the Atlantic Division, described how the training in geology at Harvard was hindered by a university-wide lack of resources.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the same article, Shaler stated that, “the most important portion of the instruction given in the department of Geology is afforded by this continuous field-work.” Shaler estimated that three months of fieldwork was equivalent to a year's worth of classroom learning. Records of the USGS show that Shaler was able to provide such opportunities by employing his graduate students in the prosecution of the work of the Atlantic Division. At any given time, Shaler was employing as many as six graduate students as assistants.Footnote ¹²⁷ In 1892, for example, the USGS allocated over $2,200 to Charles L. Whittle, a graduate student at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School.Footnote ¹²⁸ The funds covered the costs of his research and paid him a modest monthly salary. Harvard professor and Survey associate, William H. Davis, described how the work of the Survey was “much increased” by the assistance of gradate students like Whittle.Footnote ¹²⁹ For this reason, Survey-sponsored graduate education was not limited to just Harvard and Yale, but spread from Johns Hopkins to Cornell, to the Universities of Wisconsin, Texas, and California, benefitting institutions from all parts of the nation. The Survey, for its part, was able to extend its work across the nation at a lower price and with greater flexibility through the employment of temporary graduate assistants. Just as importantly, heads of academic departments, as well as university and college presidents, became great friends to the Survey as a result of this beneficence. This program had no direct congressional approval and was entirely the work of bureau-level administrators pursuing innovative policies to secure scientific capabilities and political might.

In addition to the Paleontology Division at Yale, divisions of the Geological Survey were placed at Harvard and the University of Wisconsin. Nathaniel Shaler, who had been a student of Louis Agassiz, became the division chief of the USGS's Atlantic Division at Harvard. With the placement of this division at Harvard, the relationship between the federal government and Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) was continued and extended. The Geological Survey sent barrels of specimens to the MCZ from as far away as California.Footnote ¹³⁰ As the MCZ continued to grow, correspondence between scientists in Washington and Cambridge show that Survey scientists in both locations made use of the museum's collections and facilities. In addition, the scientific administrators at the USGS played an integral role in coordinating the scientific efforts of the MCZ with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Alpheus Hyatt, who later took charge of the MCZ, and O. C. Marsh of Yale.Footnote ¹³¹ The connections created by the USGS were therefore not simply bilateral but involved multiple institutions.

The University of Wisconsin became a major hub of federal scientific activity. Both the Glacial Division of the USGS, under the guidance of Thomas C. Chamberlin, and the Lake Superior Division, which was under the leadership of Roland D. Irving, were established at Wisconsin. It was by the “courtesy of the authorities of the University of Wisconsin,” Irving wrote from Madison in 1885, “the office work of my division of the Survey has been carried on in my office in the Science building of that institution.”Footnote ¹³² Again, there was little division or distinction between the work of the University of Wisconsin and the USGS. According to his first year-end report in 1883, Irving's work with his colleague, Charles R. Van Hise, continued from previous years, with the only difference now being the added support of the USGS.Footnote ¹³³ Irving's connection to the Survey also shows the multiplier effect that often accompanied the hiring of a single professor. With Irving's attachment to the Survey came Van Hise, as well as other colleagues from Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, Beloit College, and even as far away as Johns Hopkins University.

The USGS gained not just the expertise and capacity of these men, their colleagues, and graduate students, but also the scientific infrastructure of their universities. The laboratories of the University of Wisconsin, for example, were stocked with equipment and facilities for the practice of assaying, analytical chemistry, and terminative geology.Footnote ¹³⁴ Because of these partnerships, fieldwork could be prosecuted around the country before being brought to facilities like those at Wisconsin or Harvard to be analyzed, digested, and published. Had the USGS depended solely on federal facilities, its work would have slowed considerably. “The rooms which they have placed at our disposal,” Arnold Hague wrote of the facilities of the Museum of Natural History, “have met not only all our requirements, but are unsurpassed for purposes of scientific work.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Universities from around the country, even those that did not house an entire division of the Survey, granted the USGS similar courtesies to those given by Wisconsin, Harvard, and the Museum of Natural History. In the year-end report of the USGS for 1884, the partnership between professor Henry S. Williams of Cornell, his home institution, and the USGS was detailed. “In working up the collections he was materially aided by the liberality of the trustees of Cornell University, who allowed the free use of their library and collections, and permitted him to associate his work with University duties, and also co-operate with him in gathering such literature and other facilities as were needed in promoting the investigation.”Footnote ¹³⁶ In the decade between 1882 and 1892, more than forty institutions from twenty-six states collaborated and partnered with the USGS.Footnote ¹³⁷

The coordination gains to American science from the federally constructed public-private partnerships were immense. In 1892, for example, Survey division chiefs G. K. Gilbert, William McGee, and Lester Ward undertook an expedition with professors from the Universities of California, Berkeley, Alabama, and North Carolina. The purpose of the expedition, as Gilbert wrote in his annual report, was to “enable each observer to understand more fully the phenomenon studied by the others, so that, from a broad and common view of facts, there might, if possible, result a single common interpretation.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Prior to the organizational efforts of scientific administrators in the federal government, American scientists often operated in isolation, functioning as part of an atomized and only loosely formed community. The federal government, in large part, assumed the cost and responsibility for organizing and coordinating American science. Such efforts were, in fact, considered to be as important as the direct prosecution of work by federal scientists. As Powell stated to the Allison Commission

Scientists, as Powell went on to state, spurn authority but seek coordination.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ It was through the policies developed at the bureau level, policies that were pursued in response to political obstructionism, that such a balanced coordination was achieved. Although coordination did not guarantee universal accord amongst scientists, this was not necessarily the goal. The achievement, as Gilbert described it, was “modifications of opinion tending in the direction of harmony.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Such harmony across the public-private divide was far from automatic. Nations such as Great Britain struggled to bridge the two spheres and paid dearly for their failure.

In the reports of the federal science bureaus, “harmony” was a common adjective. It was how McGee described the joint expedition he organized between the USGS, Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Agricultural College, and McGill College. This expedition in 1891 coordinated the work of the various institutions and also bridged the disciplines of stratigraphy, paleontology, and zoology.Footnote ¹⁴² This expedition, McGee wrote, would accustom these institutions and professors to continued collaboration. The initial cost of coordination was borne by the federal government, and its success would help reproduce the complex organizational structure over time as American scientists of all stripes were habituated to the process and introduced to the gains from collaboration and coordination. Division chief Lester Ward and University of Virginia professor Fontaine, for example, were brought together to explore and build upon their conflicting conclusions regarding the Potomac Formation.Footnote ¹⁴³ This initial project between Ward and Fontaine, which would continue for decades, was in fact a continuation of an early undertaking between Fontaine, Marsh, and McGee that was organized and coordinated by Powell.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The purpose of the earlier expedition was, according to a letter from Powell, to bring together three scientists with varying skill sets to produce a “wonderfully rich” study of the structure, fauna, and animal remains of the Potomac formation of Virginia.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The collaboration that was made possible by the public-private partnerships furthered the aims of both government and national science. Organized science was indeed stronger. This was not, however, limited to scientific strength.

CONTINUED GROWTH AND ORGANIZATIONAL DURABILITY: THE POLITICAL POWER OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE SCIENCE

Politically, the public-private scientific network became a significant force in both the continued development of American science and the durability of the organizational structure itself. What began as a strategy to maneuver around the institutional and political obstructions to American scientific development, the establishment of partnerships between government and nongovernment scientists and institutions created a national constituency that acted as a carapace against the political attacks made upon federal science. We cannot know for certain what the exact political effect of the public-private network was, but we can examine the historical record for observable implications that demonstrate the political significance of the public-private network. Taken together, evidence that scientific administrators placed value in the political influence of their private partners, that the private partners influenced the substance and direction of congressional debates, that acknowledgements were offered by federal science's opponents as to the important role played by the public-private network in impeding retrenchment attempts, and that these opponents made efforts to curb the ability of bureaucrats to form public-private partnerships, provide such a demonstration of the political impact of the public-private network.

When attacks against federal science began to gather steam, scientific bureaucrats undertook efforts to marshal their private partners in defense of federal science. Just two weeks prior to the attempts made by Senators Benton and Bradbury in 1849 to strip the Coast Survey's appropriation and transfer the Survey to the Navy, Alexander Dallas Bache requested that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), the American Philosophical Society (APS), and the Franklin Institute produce reports for Congress testifying to the “scientific character” of the Coast Survey.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ All three scientific institutions obliged. In a show of their influence on the congressional debate, the language of these reports, as well as the specific Survey accomplishments to which these societies made reference, were reflected in the speeches of the Coast Survey's supporters in the Senate.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This was particularly true of Senator Pearce (W-MD), who, ten years later, was still identified by opponents of the Survey as the senator most responsible for coming “to the rescue” of the Coast Survey in 1849.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Pierce's floor speech was dotted with explicit and implicit references to the reports of private scientific societies, as well as to the letters of colleges and universities. One of Pearce's greatest weapons in the defense of the Survey in 1849 was an article from the Princeton Review written by Princeton professor and Coast Survey associate, Joseph Henry.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The article was written at Bache's urging and direction, and with the express purpose of being distributed widely among congressmen.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Not only did it directly inform the congressional debates of the late 1840s, including a partial reading by Pearce in 1849, but it was also described by opponents of the Survey as “the most important” piece of written evidence offered during the congressional debates of this time.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Even more telling, Henry's article was highlighted by these opponents in a discussion of the outside influences that were exerted to “put down” efforts to investigate and retrench the Survey.

Just as Bache had pressed upon the scientific societies the need to muster their influence in support of the Coast Survey, Bache, too, urged his university partners to do the same. “I received your letter of the 10^th,” read a letter from the University of Virginia to Bache, “[and] learn with astonishment that a movement has been made against the Survey by Benton.”Footnote ¹⁵² The letter from the Coast Survey to the University of Virginia resulted not only in efforts to lobby Virginia's two senators, but also in a letter from the University to the entire Senate, detailing their “surprise and regret that a resolution has been submitted to the United States Senate proposing to repeal the act authorizing the employment of civilians in the Survey of the Coast of the United States.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Proponents of the Survey directly referenced this letter, as well as those of a similar nature from other universities and colleges, during the critical debates of the 1840s and 1850s.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The value that scientific administrators placed on the influence of their private partners, as well as the subsequent influence of the private partners on congressional debates, is also seen in the case of the Geological Survey in the 1880s and 1890s.

“If one amendment that is spoken of goes through,” Charles D. Walcott wrote to Cornell professor and long-time Geological Survey partner, Henry S. Williams, “you may be sent for to come down here for consultation, so keep me posted as to your whereabouts.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Survey administrators clearly felt that it was important to keep their private partners informed to the changing political environment for federal science and did not hesitate to call on their influence. In 1892, for example, efforts were made to inform university-based partners of the pending cuts to paleontology and the need to restore the appropriation in the Senate.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ During this same debate, O.C. Marsh, the Yale-based Survey bureau chief for paleontology, wrote to Senator Orville Platt (R-CT) to “ask for your assistance in having the matter put right in the Senate, as otherwise great injury will be done to science, the Geological Survey, as well as to Yale College and myself.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Additional letters are found among Marsh's papers in the Yale archives between himself and Connecticut's other senator at the time, Joseph R. Hawley, thanking Hawley for his “good words” in the Congressional Record.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Platt and Hawley were, subsequently, the two most outspoken defenders of the Geological Survey in the 1892 debates. “I know of no reason,” Platt argued, “why the work of paleontologists should be stopped any more than the chemical work or the work of the geographer or topographer … To my mind it is one of the most important branches of work which is carried on in the Geological Survey.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ We can neither know the precise effect of Platt's spirited defense of paleontology on the fate of the Geological Survey, nor the influence that Marsh's letter had upon Platt, but in this episode and those previously discussed, we can look to the words and actions of federal science's opponents to gain a greater understanding of how significant such efforts were in the defense of federal science.

“[W]hen I made the motion to reduce this appropriation, I had no expectation that it would carry. Such is the influence which is combined in this House, that I fear it will be a long time before these abuses will be checked.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ On the floor of the House in 1859, Representative Cadwallader Washburn (R-WI) was forced to acknowledge that his efforts to retrench federal science were thwarted by the Coast Survey's political strength. In identifying the source of the Coast Survey's political supremacy, and the cause for its continued growth and organizational stability, Washburn and his allies repeatedly identified the Coast Survey's network of employees. It was this network, which Washburn described as leaving “scarcely a square mile” of the United States without a partisan of the Survey, that produced the flood of pamphlets that were credited with successfully influencing the outcome of the congressional debate in favor of federal science.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In an article from Hunt's Merchants Magazine that was meant to accompany the retrenchment efforts of 1849, the authors acknowledge the effectiveness of the Survey's use of “patronage” to construct a national network that not only secured the Coast Survey's existence, but also enabled it to “defy all opposition.”Footnote ¹⁶² Ten years later, an article in the New York Times described the ability of the Survey to “entrench and fortify” itself with the patronage that the Survey distributed throughout the country.Footnote ¹⁶³ To opponents of the surveys, the hiring of outside scientists, regardless of their qualifications, was deemed “patronage,” and, in many ways, it returned many of the same political benefits of typical nineteenth-century patronage. The same diagnosis of the Survey's strength appeared again in 1861 after congressmen made multiple failed attempts to restructure the Survey and cut its appropriations. It was to those scientists “connected with” the Survey that Representative Phelps accused of thronging to Washington to “raise a clamor” every time Congress took up the business of the Survey.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ “You would have heard no complaint uttered in this Hall if it had not been for the employees in the Coast Survey.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Phelps' statement is an acknowledgement of the belief that in the absence of the Survey's national network of connections, the congressional debate would have followed a different path, and the Survey would likely have been more easily retrenched.

The influence of this “extensive and all-pervading” network of private partners was not limited to the Coast Survey. The survival of the Geological Survey from what was the most direct and potentially harmful attack since its inception, was, in the opinion of its most ardent critic, Representative Hilary Herbert (D-AL), the result of the Survey's private partners.

The opponents of federal science, from Washburn to Herbert, shared a belief in the political power of science's private partners. It was, however, Senator Stewart in 1892 who succinctly captured the political environment federal science's opponents faced. The Survey, Stewart stated, “can take care of the colleges as long as you give it money to buy influence, and it will have the power here and elsewhere.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In Stewart's speech, as well as those of Washburn, Phelps, Wolcott, and Herbert, the historical record provides statements from key contemporary actors from the 1850s to the 1890s, as to their belief that in the absence of federal science's private partners, it would have been significantly easier to retrench and destabilize federal science policy.

Evidence of the political importance of the public-private network in the continued development of federal science is not, however, found only in the words of federal science's opponents, but also in their actions. Following almost immediately after Stewart's assessment of the source of the USGS's strength, Senator Carey (R-WY) introduced an amendment that would require all scientists associated with the Survey to “devote all their time and all their energies” solely to government work.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The strategy of pursuing structurally changes to prohibit partnerships between government and nongovernment science was seen throughout the course of science's nineteenth-century development. From these attempts at what Paul Pierson has described as “systemic” retrenchment, we can infer a certain level of importance of the public-private structure that such reforms were targeting.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The implication of the work of scholars such as Pierson and James Mahoney is that when attempts to directly retrench a policy fail, opponents will attempt to undermine the source of policy feedback that provides political strength.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In the case of federal science, opponents took clear aim at the mechanisms that allowed federal science bureaus to partner with nongovernment actors and institutions.

In 1849, 1859, 1861, 1886, and 1892, which represent nearly every major attempt to retrench federal science in the nineteenth century, each failed attempt to directly cut the Coast Survey or the Geological Survey's appropriations was followed by an amendment to prohibit the formation of partnerships between government and nongovernment science. “For the survey of the Coast … after the 30^th day of June, 1849, said survey shall be carried on exclusively by the Navy Department, under the direction of the President of the United States.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ This amendment, which was offered by Senators Benton (D-MO) and Bradbury (D-ME) after the failure of a more direct assault on the Survey's appropriation, would bar all civilians from employment with the Coast Survey, effectively ending the policy of partnering with private science. After the introduction of the amendment, Benton questioned from where the Survey derived its power. “Not from the acts of 1807 and 1832; not from any act of Congress; not from the Constitution of the United States—an instrument that never contemplated the establishment of a college for the science in the Treasury Department, or any other department of this government.”Footnote ¹⁷² Science, in Benton's estimation, was “above the law,” and it was the presence of partnerships with observatories around that nation that allowed the Survey to act as such. In order to slow or reverse the growth of federal science, Benton and Bradbury set their aim at eliminating the ability of the Coast Survey to partner with private actors and institutions.

Ten years after Benton and Bradbury's efforts to retrench the Coast Survey, Representative Washburn (R-WI) declared that “there is no department of the Government which has as much power or influence to-day as the same Coast Survey.”Footnote ¹⁷³ An article in the New York Times, which served as a popular accompaniment to Washburn's retrenchment efforts in Congress, observed that the Survey was “beyond the reach of the rearing and plunging of the party which unhorses Presidents and Secretaries; and under whatever administration, [the superintendent] is the same serene and plausible leech upon the Treasury.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ It was the opinion of both the author of the Times article and Washburn—both, in fact, used nearly the exact same language—that the Survey drew its strength from its national network of supports, which left not a square mile of the United States without a “partisan” of the Coast Survey. It follows, then, that after the defeat of the amendment to strike out the Coast Survey's appropriation from the Civil Appropriations bill, Washburn and his ally, Henry W. Blair (R-NH), introduced amendments to transfer the Survey to the Navy and prohibit civilian employment.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Without the ability to employ private scientists—what Washburn called partisans—it stands to reason that the political power that placed the Survey above all other political entities of the day would end. The same series of events occurred again in 1861 when Representatives Horace Maynard (R-TN) and John Phelps (D-MO) attempted to introduce amendments to the Civil Appropriations bill to transfer the Survey to the Navy.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In this instance, Maynard also offered an amendment to place the auditing power of the Survey with the Treasury, so as to take spending power away from the scientists in charge of the bureau. Both of these strategies—the more drastic barring of all partnerships with nongovernment scientists, as well as the use of stricter auditing and budgeting rules—were also employed in efforts to limit the ability of the Geological Survey to form partnerships with private science in the 1880s and 1890s.

Following Herbert's floor speech in 1886, in which he blamed the reversal of an earlier decision to drastically cut the Geological Survey on the political influence of the Survey's national network, Representative William Springer (D-IL) put forward an amendment to eliminate public-private partnerships. Springer's amendment specifically barred any portion of the Survey's appropriation from being paid to persons “engaged in private occupations or pursuits.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ This was an attempt, like those made against the Coast Survey in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, to end the dual employment that was critical to the construction of the public-private network. This effort, like all previous efforts, was defeated only to see it revived again during the next major conflagration. It was in 1892 that Senator Carey (R-WY) introduced the amendment described above. The repeated efforts to restructure both the Coast Survey and the Geological Survey so as to eliminate the ability to form public-private partnerships provide a testament to the scientific and political influence of these partnerships.

Ironically, the opponents of federal science came to favor the very centralized system that they had initially fought so vigorously against. Speaking on the floor of the Senate in 1849, Senator Benton described the pattern of growth that federal science had assumed, while also offering some recognition of the role he and his allies played in encouraging the construction of the public-private network they now meekly confronted. “Congress having forbid the coast survey to establish or to maintain a permanent observatory, then the coast survey will go into connection with all the local observatories of the Union.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Having been denied one observatory, Benton concluded, the Survey came to have them all! The ability to “have them all” is what Benton and every opponent of federal science that followed tried to eliminate. While the support of private science was not necessary for the genesis of federal science policy, it has shown itself to be integral to its continued development and the stability of this most important organizational structure.