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<A HREF="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/prometh2.htm">American
Prometheus -- The American System</A>
--[2]--
The American Promethus, Part II:

Philadelphia and Germany



by Anton Chaitkin

Printed in The American Almanac, 1989. First printed in New Solidarity
 Newspaper, August 22, 1986.


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End of PageThe American SystemSite MapOverview Page
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part I of this series [New Solidarity, Aug. 1, 1986] described the
post-Civil War industrial construction of the victorious Lincoln
Republicans, who moved the U.S.A. towards great power status. Their
political and commercial base was Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia, home
of economist Henry Carey and the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad.
They were opposed by financiers of the British and European oligarchy,
who engineered financial collapse and scandals to crush America's
state-assisted development. In the 1870's the weakened nationalists
launched new technological projects -- the American steel and electrical
industries -- and attempted simultaneously to spread American
development throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Their opponents eventually seized control of the nationalists' new
industries, stopped their further advancement, and broke off the
republican, technology-spreading relationship of the United States to
the less-developed nations. In recent years the U.S.A. has slid
backwards from industrialism towards a New Age utopia of nature-worship.
Meanwhile the same international financial faction which aborted U.S.
development has imposed misery on the Third World countries, with
usurious debts ruling out science and factories.

Knowing precisely how America pulled itself up into great national power
in the first place, should assist other nations who wish to do the same
or better for themselves today. It will be instructive as well for
Americans who are determined to reverse decades of physical and moral
decline.

Before proceeding with the story of this industrial explosion of the
1860's to the 1880's, we must "peel the onion" -- go still another step
beyond what the anti-republican academics have retailed as American
history. We have already described a nationalist commercial faction,
operating with the sponsorship of a nationalist government, which
deliberately created U.S. industry; no Free Market per se ever built
anything. But looking behind our industrialists, the Philadelphia
Interests so-called, we find a single organization, at once political,
military, commercial-industrial and scientific, waging war for national
survival. The pattern we discern here may perhaps be looked for in the
history of any nation's development.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
A strikingly handsome portrait of science pioneer Alexander von Humboldt
is on display in the library of the American Philosophical Society in
Philadelphia. Humboldt paid a famous visit to that very place in 1804,
cementing his ties to the new American republic to which he was so
passionately attached.
Benjamin Franklin had visited the University of the Royal Society of
Science at G�ttingen in 1766, three years before Humboldt's birth.
Franklin, already celebrated globally for his scientific leadership in
the rude American colonies, had just bested the British crown in a
Parliamentary hearing on the Stamp Tax (both a license and a tax on all
American transactions). Under interrogation, the American representative
denounced British looting policies and made it clear his country would
develop with or without the British:

Q: "What used to be the pride of the Americans?"

A: "To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain."

Q: "What is now their pride?"

A: "To wear their old clothes over again, till they can make new ones.
[fn1]"

Threatened with violent colonial protests, the British government
repealed the Stamp Act in February-March of 1766. That summer Franklin
was telling the Germans all about it, and discussing with his fellow
republican scientists the future destiny of America. From G�ttingen and
Hanover the story of the colonies' fight for liberty spread immediately
through German books and newspapers.

The American Revolution which began a decade later was championed by
republican artists such as Mozart and Beethoven. In his play Cabal und
Liebe, Friedrich Schiller showed resentment for the princes' sale of
Germans as mercenaries to the British against Washington. Schiller's
Weimar circle, including his close friends, the brothers Wilhelm and
Alexander von Humboldt, echoed Franklin's nationalist example. They
would nurture science to new heights in the first half of the 19th
century, while they fought against the oligarchs for an elusive German
republic.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transatlantic Political Science

In 1804, 14 years after Franklin's death, Alexander von Humboldt repaid
Franklin's memorable G�ttingen visit by arriving in the United States at
Philadelphia, and proceeding to Dr. Franklin's American Philosophical
Society. The gathering discussed Humboldt's just-completed five year
expedition to South America and Mexico, and aspects of the new sciences
which he was in the process of creating: meteorology; oceanography;
botany and geology as "books" in which to read the history of the earth;
the mapping of the earth's magnetic field, and his discovery of the
decrease of the field's intensity from the poles to the equator.
In Mexico the previous year Humboldt had reviewed and applauded the work
of geologist Andr�s Manuel Del Rio (1764-1849), a Spaniard who had
become his friend in Germany. Sponsored by the humanist court of Spain's
Carlos III, Del Rio had studied in the Freiburg Mining Academy,
Humboldt's school, and with chemist Antoine Lavoisier in Paris; he fled
the French Terror in disguise after Lavoisier's arrest and murder by
Marat and the mob. Del Rio had gone to colonial Mexico in 1794 and
organized the teaching of science and engineering in the new School of
Mining, creating the basis for a modern mining industry in Mexico. After
Mexican independence, Del Rio was to follow Humboldt's path to the
American Philosophical Society. He would remain in Philadelphia five
years (1829-1834), serving as president of the new Geological Society of
Pennsylvania, then return to Mexico to fight for scientific development.


In 1804, Philosophical Society member Charles W. Peale accompanied
Humboldt from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., for his visit with
Society member, President Thomas Jefferson. Humboldt soon afterward
returned to Germany. That same year, 18-year-old Nicholas Biddle, son of
a Philadelphia banker, went to Paris as an unpaid secretary to the
American legation.

Though his father was a Federalist, and a friend of Aaron Burr, Biddle
was becoming an ardent republican, a nationalist. The warring British
and French were seizing defenseless American ships at sea; the British
kidnapped and impressed into their navy thousands of American merchant
seamen. Nicholas Biddle's brother James had been imprisoned by Libyan
terrorists (the "Barbary pirates") when his ship the U.S.S. Philadelphia
had gone aground off Tripoli.

On a wartime intelligence collecting tour through northern France and
Switzerland during the summer of 1805, Biddle was accompanied by George
Gibbs (1776-1833) of Newport, Rhode Island. Gibbs also collected rocks;
he later sold his a collection of 12,000 specimens to Yale, and Gibbs
and his family were to be important intelligence contacts in Connecticut
for the Philadelphians.

The young American agents went on through Italy separately, and Biddle
then made an extraordinarily bold trip alone to Greece. En route on a
Greek ship, Biddle encountered a strange Greek priest who had been
smuggled aboard in Naples. He told Biddle that he had lighted a set of
lamps in Constantinople by shooting fire from out of his beard. He also
possessed a piece of Christ's original cross, and the relic was,
fortunately, completely fireproof. When Biddle doubted his story, Biddle
and his baggage were thrown off the boat in Sicily. [fn3]

Finally arriving in Greece, with no modern maps or guides, he relied on
his previous rich studies in ancient Greek history and literature to
find his way among the islands and the towns which had survived the
ages. He reported home his fears of Russian penetration into Europe, his
disgust with the British for stealing Greek national art, and his lament
for the fall of Greek civilization into barbarity.

Nicholas Biddle met with the Marquis de Lafayette in the summer of 1806,
and finished his assignment at America's Paris legation in January,
1807. He was asked by James Monroe, then U.S. minister to Great Britain,
to serve as his temporary secretary. During the ambassador's tense
negotiations for an end to Britain's war on American shipping, young
Biddle was virtually adopted into Monroe's family in London. A famous
episode, treasured by Monroe, occurred when the 20-year-old Biddle
attended a party with some Oxford dons; the "colonial" explained to the
outclassed, speechless academics the essential differences between
ancient and modern Greek language. On his homeward trip Biddle carried
letters from Monroe to President Jefferson and Secretary of State James
Madison. Biddle thereafter retained the closest ties, as of family, with
Monroe.

The U.S. finally declared war against Great Britain in 1812. But the
American war effort was hampered by a British fifth column among New
England merchants, draining the country of gold, stopping credit,
selling British war bonds and preaching Northern secession. Meanwhile
the charter of Alexander Hamilton's Bank of the United States had
expired in 1811, leaving the economy at the mercy of anti-American
financial interests.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Moneyed Aristocrats"

Having been elected to the Pennsylvania state senate in 1810, Nicholas
Biddle had joined Philadelphian Mathew Carey's vigorous campaign for a
second Bank to be chartered, to protect American financial independence.

Biddle's call for national banking had been sharply republican, and
prophetic:

"Without credit or money, while your commerce is stopped and your
manufactures languish....[in] the total want of money, the demand for
specie will place the poorer classes at the mercy of the rich, and the
great money lenders will issue abroad to prey upon their fellow
citizens. In the general submersion of small traders, the only beings
who will be seen floating on the wreck are those very 'monied
aristocrats' whom the [anti-Bank] resolutions denounce with such
indignation." [fn2]
Britain's 1814 invasion and burning of Washington led to a political
uprising by the partisans of all-out war. James Monroe became Secretary
of War and virtual commander in chief in September, 1814. A firm
advocate of a new Bank, Philadelphian Alexander J. Dallas, was installed
as Secretary of the Treasury the following month. Encouraged by Mathew
Carey's 1814 Olive Branch, honest Federalists deserted their corrupt
party and came out openly for the war effort.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Philadelphia and Connecticut

Biddle's old fellow U.S. intelligence agent and geologist, Col. Geo.
Gibbs, had married Laura Wolcott, whose father Oliver Wolcott
(1760-1833) had been Federalist Alexander Hamilton's chief assistant
Secretary of the Treasury. Wolcott's family tradition was rather
raucously patriotic: his father Oliver Wolcott, Sr. (1726-1797) signed
the Declaration of Independence, and had dragged a lead statue of King
George III from New York back to Connecticut for the ladies to melt into
bullets. In the treasury, the younger Wolcott implemented much of the
nationalist, dirigist policy designed by Hamilton. He had been a
"Hamiltonian" Treasury Secretary for both Washington and John Adams
following Hamilton's 1795 resignation. He stayed loyal to Hamilton when
Hamilton campaigned against President Adams's renomination by the
Federalists in 1800. Hamilton thus gave the election to Jefferson; the
Federalists, whom Hamilton knew to be fatally corrupt with British
influence, never recovered.
The Gibbs-Wolcott household was one of the centers for the resistance by
American patriots to New England treason during the War of 1812. Oliver
Wolcott formed a personal alliance with Mathew Carey to break what
Wolcott called the "perverted" Federalist Party in New England, and
distributed Carey's book, the Olive Branch.

Wolcott prepared the Connecticut militia to deal with the anti-war
Hartford Convention, opening Dec. 15, 1814, in case it should attempt an
insurrection.

The Hartford Convention was undercut midway through by the ending of the
war. The treasonable but harmless anti-Union resolutions which they
issued were answered by a Pennsylvania state legislature declaration
composed by Nicholas Biddle.

In 1817 Oliver Wolcott was elected governor of Connecticut. He
instituted a thorough reform of the state, sweeping out the pro-British
aristocrats and presiding over a convention which wrote a new state
constitution. Wolcott was elected ten times to one-year terms as
governor.

At the commencement of the Wolcott regime, in 1817, his son-in-law Col.
George Gibbs proposed to Yale University Professor Benjamin Silliman the
establishment of an American nationalist-oriented scientific
publication. Gibbs had previously provided the massive mineral
collection which formed the material basis for Silliman's successful
Yale lectures. Silliman, the son of a Revolutionary War general, had
been sent in 1802 to the University of Pennsylvania to pre-train, in
chemistry, physics and medical fields, for his Yale teaching duties. He
was made a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1805. Like
Biddle, Silliman made a European tour in 1805-06, visiting Great Britain
and Holland, but was deterred by the war from entering Germany. He first
met Gibbs in Newport in 1807. At Gibbs' urging, Silliman founded The
American Journal of Science and Arts in 1818.

A Second Bank of the United States was established in 1816, during the
Treasury administration of Alexander Dallas. Nicholas Biddle was
appointed president of the Bank in 1823 by James Monroe, who was then
finishing his second term as U.S. President.

The Presidency of John Quincy Adams (1825-1829) and Biddle's Bank, as it
then came to be known, combined to give the country a period of free
flowing credit and great prosperity. Aside from New York State's Erie
Canal, completed in 1825, the greatest energy for national development
was in Philadelphia itself.

Nicholas Biddle and Mathew Carey formed the Pennsylvania Society for the
Promotion of Internal Improvements in 1824. They immediately sent the
gifted architect of the Bank, William Strickland, to England to
investigate public works there. Strickland reported that railroads must
soon replace canals as the predominant form of transportation. Biddle's
Bank then financed the beginning of rail construction in America. Mathew
Carey's Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of National Industry
meanwhile inundated the entire country with Carey's own pamphlets
calling for high tariffs. A national protectionist congress met in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1827, and in 1828 the Congress passed just
what Carey had been demanding. The new law was called the Tariff of
Abominations by its enemies -- it caused a surge of American factory
construction, turning even New England toward manufacturing.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Birth of the Lazzaroni

As was noted in Part I, William J. Duane, briefly Treasury Secretary in
1833, refused to cooperate with Andr�w Jackson's attack on the Bank of
the U.S. But Roger Taney was nominated to the Treasury post by Jackson
simply to pull the government's deposits out of the Bank, and they
brought down the financial system of the Founding Fathers altogether.
Chaos reigned in 1837, economic and political demoralization. The tariff
system was gone with the Bank, and the British merrily dumped goods into
the still predominantly agrarian U.S.A.

William J. Duane, lawyer for the immensely wealthy Stephen Girard, won a
court battle, after Girard's death in 1831, to control his estate for
the benefit of the public. A trust fund for a Girard College was
established, with Nicholas Biddle as Chairman of the Board. In 1837,
Biddle, using this fund, sent Alexander Dallas Bache to Europe for two
years, to study European education, and to orient himself for leadership
of the coming generation, for what was to be a long fight.

Alexander Dallas Bache, age 25, and his cousin Franklin Bache were the
leading descendants of Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, with enormous
attendant prestige (see Franklin-Bache Family Tree). Alexander had
graduated with highest honors from the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point at the age of 19.

He had served in the Army Corps of Engineers for three years, teaching
at West Point and helping construct Fort Adams in Newport, Rhode Island;
he married Nancy Fowler of Newport. From 1828, Bache was professor of
natural philosophy and chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania,
until in 1836 Nicholas Biddle made him President of the projected Girard
College and sent him to Europe.

While teaching in 1830, Bache had made experiments in the observation of
the earth's magnetism, based in a small building attached to his home.
This work was carried out as faithfully as possible on the model of two
German scientists then working at G�ttingen University,
mathematician-astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and physicist
Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804-1891).

On his European trip (1837-38) Bache worked with Gauss, recognized as
the founder of modern mathematics, to prepare instruments which Bache
would use for further experiments in the United States. Bache also met
and lived for some little time with Alexander von Humboldt. In this
household he became an expert in the consumption of German wine, from
then on exporting it. And he gained from Humboldt, Gauss and Weber a
programmatic outlook for scientific work which would have profound
consequences for America and the world.

Upon his return Alexander Bache wrote a 666 page report on Education in
Europe, published in 1839 and widely celeberated, describing the German,
French and British schools of the day. The opening of Girard College
being delayed, Bache was hired as Philadelphia's superintendant of
public schools. He organized the city system along Prussian lines, and
himself became the first principal of the new Central High School, whose
format was quickly copied in other American cities. Under Bache's
leadership Central High developed a unique national reputation for
excellence and involvement in science which carried into the 20th
century.

In 1840 Bache established a magnetic observatory station at the new
Girard College, which functioned for the next five years, one of about
thirty similar institutions throughout the world. From 1840 to 1843, in
the summers, Bache did a magnetic survey in the Pennsylvania region. His
program was designed by Gauss and Weber through their Magnetischeverein
(Magnetic Union), established in 1836.

Under the Germans' guidance, Bache was meanwhile assembling a tiny
leadership body of American scientists, jovially called the Lazzaroni --
Italian for beggars. Bache was the "chief" of this science and
intelligence grouping, which functioned together, for the single purpose
of national development, with the rest of the Philadelphia top command:
political economist Henry Carey, and the industrial leaders grouped
around the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In 1843, Bache was appointed Superintendant of the United States Coast
Survey. Over the next quarter century, with increasing appropriations
and political backing, he used the Survey as a cadre training unit and
Washington power base. By the time of the Civil War, the Lazzaroni group
dominated Harvard and Yale Universities, the U.S. Navy, and all American
science. With the fall of the Philadelphians in the 1870's, the
universities, the Navy, and American science were to fall with them.

The central figures in Bache's organization were [4] :
�mathematician Benjamin Peirce (1809-1880);
�chemist Oliver Wolcott Gibbs (1822-1908);
�naval officer Charles Henry Davis (1807-1877);
�astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould (1824-1896);
�and Bache's personal aide John Fries Frazer (1812-1872).


The other Lazzaroni members were:
�naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), whose career was carefully
managed by the central figures in the group;
�Greek scholar Cornelius C. Felton (1807-1862), who died too soon; and
�physicist Joseph Henry (1797-1878), most important as part of Bache's
Washington power base.
�Chemists Frederick Augustus Genth (1820-1892) and Benjamin Silliman,
Jr. (1816-1885), were important close allies.





------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harvard, and the U.S. Navy


Benjamin Peirce was the son of Harvard University's librarian and
historian. At the time of Peirce's birth, John Quincy Adams was
Harvard's most distinguished teacher. Adams was U.S. minister to Prussia
from 1797 to 1800; he negotiated a treaty of friendship and commerce
with Prussia in 1799. While there Adams avidly studied German culture
and mingled with its leaders in the Weimar circle, including the
Humboldt brothers.

Back home, John Quincy Adams advised President Thomas Jefferson about
the anti-U.S. intrigues of members of Adams' own Federalist Party in New
England, the Boston merchants self-proclaimed "Brahmins." This clash
with the British agent grouping occured while Adams was United State
Senator from Massachusetts (1802-1808), and Boylston Professor of
Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard (1806-1809). As a means of countering
the dominant British cultural outlook -- atheism, utilitarianism --
Adams taught his students the sharp contrast between Socratic reason and
sophistry, and introduced at Harvard the classical German culture for
which he was America's foremost spokesman.

Benjamin Peirce graduated from Harvard in 1829, one year after a
republican revolt in Boston forced the resignation of Harvard's cynical
Brahmin-backed president, John T. Kirkland. Peirce tutored mathematics
from in 1831-32, then was Harvard's professor of astronomy and
mathematics from 1833 to 1880, universally recognized as America's best
mathematician. From 1829 to 1839 Peirce revised the translation and
commentaries on the Celestial Mechanics of P.S. Laplace. In 1842 he was
made a member of the Franklin-Bache family's American Philosophical
Society. Peirce was in touch with the Germans at G�ttingen, whom he,
like Dallas Bache, clearly understood to be his scientific mentors.

Peirce's thinking was diametrically opposite to the trancendentalist
romantics who dominated Harvard in the 1830's and 1840's. He spoke to a
national science meeting [fn5] about the Fibonacci series (the golden
section) one could see in the placement of successive leaves on a stem,
their angles being in the ratios 1/3, 1/4, 2/7, 3/11, 5/18, 8/29, etc.;
and in the ratios of the orbital periods of the planets. Peirce
explained that the closely similar, purposive arrangement in botany and
astronomy demonstrated that one Mind created the universe, and that our
minds should strive to see that purpose.

Charles Henry Davis, had left Harvard in 1823 to join the navy.
Returning to Harvard between cruises, he married Benjamin Peirce's
sister-in-law in 1841, and was appointed to the Coast Survey in 1842.
The following year Dallas Bache became his boss at the Survey, while
Benjamin Peirce and his associates founded the Harvard Observatory.

In 1844 Peirce's star pupil, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, graduated from
Harvard. His grandfather had fought in the Revolution, at Lexington and
Bunker Hill, had seen the British surrender at Saratoga, and was captain
of the guard at West Point when British spymaster Major Andr� was
captured. His father was a classical scholar and principal of the Boston
Public Latin School. Following Gould's graduation from Harvard, he
studied for one year in Berlin, and for a year in G�ttingen with Gauss
and others. Upon his return to America with his doctorate he was, by all
accounts, "fired up" with determination to emulate the German
scientists.

In 1846 Professor Peirce drew up a faculty reolution calling upon
Harvard's new President, Edward Everett, to open a separate school of
science. Later that year, Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz arrived in
Boston. Agassiz had been a renowned researcher on geology and glaciers
and publisher on embryology, paleontology and anatomy, who had been
patronized by Alexander von Humboldt since they had met in Paris in the
1820's. His prestige would count heavily at Harvard.

Also in 1846, on the recommendation of Alexander Dallas Bache, Princeton
geophysics teacher Joseph Henry was installed as the first director of
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The Lazzaroni had to
compromise with Smithsonian founder Robert Dale Owen, the cultish
British socialist. Owen was allowed to spend potential research money on
a garish building of Owen's design, but Bache's man was allowed to run
the Institution.

In 1847, during a period of enormously popular public lectures by
Agassiz, Alexander Dallas Bache ordered Lieutenant Charles Davis to take
Agassiz out on the U.S.S. Bibb to cruise off Cape Cod for research
purposes. In 1848, with pressure from Peirce and Bache, Harvard hired
Agassiz as professor of zoology. Lt. Davis moved in down the street from
Agassiz, and became so much his protector and practical manager, that
Mrs. Agassiz called Davis the professor's "prime minister" [fn6].

Peirce, Bache and Agassiz were now pulling together important talent at
Harvard. The Lawrence Scientific School, begun in 1847 on the urging of
Peirce and Agassiz, hired Eban Horsford, a former student in Germany of
Justus Liebig, as the first head of its analytical chemical laboratory.
In 1849, the U.S. Congress appropriated funds to establish the American
Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac at Harvard. This important naval
publication was directed by Charles Henry Davis, with Benjamin Peirce as
its mathematical consultant, and Benjamin Apthorp Gould, back from
Germany, as its consulting astronomer. Both Peirce and Gould worked on
longitudinal determinations in the Coast Survey at Harvard from 1852
onward.

The combination of the Harvard Observatory, the Almanac and the Survey
work made Harvard a base for growing scientific influence in the navy,
in direct competition with the recently established Naval Observatory
and its unwholesome director Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806-1873). Maury
was a main enemy to the Lazzaroni, a leader of the oligarchical faction
corrupting the antebellum U.S. armed forces. Throughout the 1850's Maury
sponsored filibusters -- mercenary attacks on Mexico and other Ibero
American republics. In 1861, Maury was to join the Southern rebellion as
 its top naval "scientist" and a weapons negotiator with Great Britain.
After the Civil War, Maury would join the hated Emperor Maximilian in
Mexico as commissioner of immigration!

It is noteworthy that while Bache and his circle despised Maury, the
Bache family were personally close friends with Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson
Davis, in the prewar years when Davis was a leading Southerner but not a
Rebel.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Escalating Conflict

Benjamin Peirce wrote to Bache in 1851, "Gould has had the official
offer of Professorship at G�ttingen, with a promise of Gauss's influence
to obtain the...directorship of the observatory." [fn7] But Gould
declined the offer, wanting above all to develop science on this side of
the Atlantic. In 1855 Peirce, Bache and Gould founded the Dudley
Observatory, which was intended to be part of a new national university
in Albany, New York. The Lazzaroni partners were made a scientific
advisory council, while local capitalists backed the effort as trustees.
Under Benjamin Gould's direction, the observatory was projected as a
major center of "pure research" in astrophysics, nothing immediately
"practical." Naturally, a showdown very quickly developed.
Led by Albany and New York City banker Thomas Olcott, the trustees
denounced Gould's direction of the observatory as undemocratic: its
telescope was not to be used for public entertainment, and its results
could not be understood by the average man. As Olcott complained to
Bache, "we cannot here erect a throne above the majesty of the people."
[fn8] Curiously, this same Olcott two decades before had been the main
organizer of a national propaganda attack on the Bank of the United
States. The cry in 1831 had been that Biddle's Bank was "undemocratic,"
that it did not allow "private enterprise" and "the little man" room to
participate in finance. Olcott was backed by the Brown Brothers and
Prime, Ward and King (agents for Britain's Barings). They would force
the U.S. Bank to close -- or to be moved to New York to be under their
factional control (the latter alternative was accomplished in 1913 with
the creation of the Federal Reserve). In 1835 Olcott reportedly lost
thousands of dollars selling short on U.S. Bank stock, when Biddle's
side outmaneuvered him. [fn9]

The Lazzaroni fought for their project, and in 1859 were reduced to
barricading themselves in the observatory building. But the trustees got
a court order, battered down the door, and threw Dr. Gould out in the
snow. Under new management, the observatory fell to mediocrity and
obscurity.

But Benjamin Apthorp Gould's great life work was still far in the
future. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) known as the
Schoolteacher President of Argentina, was a friend of the United States
and preferred to think of himself as an Abraham Lincoln. President
Sarmiento invited Gould to Argentina in 1870, along with other foreign
science personnel. Beginning immediately, Gould built the national
observatory at Cordoba, a great interior city to which Sarmiento had
completed a railroad only in 1869. Gould, and the staff he trained,
mapped, for the first time ever, the skies of the Southern Hemisphere,
charting over 70,000 stars during fifteen years of labor.

As the Civil War approached in 1860, the Lazzaroni were able to place
one of their own members, Cornelius C. Felton, as President of Harvard
itself. Felton, a translator of Grotius, Homer and Aeschylus, and a
popularizer of Greek history, backed Peirce and Agassiz to the hilt and
opened the way for real scientific achievement by Harvard teachers. The
Boston Anglophile faction was, for the moment, completely displaced at
the school. Unfortunately, Felton suffered a presumed heart attack on
the way to Washington in February, 1862. He died in the Philadelphia
home of his brother, whose central role with the Philadelphia
industrialists will be discussed below.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some Wartime Science

A new Bureau of Navigation was organized in 1862 and Charles Henry Davis
was made its head. In this position Davis was director of the Naval
Observatory and its hydrographic functions, consolidating in loyal hands
all that Maury and his faction had controlled before the war. On
February 11, 1863, Rear Admiral Davis, Alexander Dallas Bache and Joseph
Henry were appointed sole members of a Permanent Commission of the Navy
Department, enjoined to advise the navy on "questions of science and
art." On March 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill
incorporating the National Academy of Sciences, to "investigate,
examine, experiment, and to report upon any subject of science or art."
Alexander Dallas Bache was the National Academy's first president, and
50 incorporating founders were chosen by Bache, Peirce and Davis. The
National Academy was a Lazzaroni project.
Beyond advising the president and his administration, the Lazzaroni
contributed significantly to victory through the use of their research,
and the deeds of their students.

Charles Henry Davis's place as commander of the Mississippi Squadron was
taken by David Dixon Porter. The new commander and his step-brother
David Farragut were to be the leading architects of naval success for
the Union.

The father of David Dixon Porter (and stepfather of Farragut),
Boston-born David Porter, had been captured and imprisoned in Libya
along with Nicholas Biddle's brother in the grounding of the
Philadelphia. He was released with Biddle, and settled and married in
Philadelphia. He became a prime mover there in the inter-American
republican group including Manuel Torres and William Duane. He smashed
up Britain's Pacific whaling fleet during the War of 1812, and was
captured in desperate battle with the British navy off the coast of
Chile. In 1826 he moved to Mexico and became Commander in Chief of the
Mexican Navy. He developed and disciplined the Mexican forces for battle
with Spain, and escaped several assassination attempts. David Porter was
later U.S. minister to Turkey for many years, fighting the British
head-to-head for the predominance of republican institutions in the
Middle East.

The son David Dixon Porter was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1813.
He passed three years with his father in Mexico, then as a Mexican naval
officer (age 15) he fought gallantly and was captured by the Spanish in
a battle off Cuba, finally returning home in 1829. Over the next three
decades Porter worked alternatively with the Coast Survey, both with
Bache and his predecessor, and on other naval duties. With the work of
Peirce, Gould and others in the 1850's, the hydrography of the Survey
became a potent weapon. This was, after all, the heart of Bache's
tradition. The Pacific current which flows off the west coast of South
America bears the name of Alexander von Humboldt, who first measured its
temperature. But Bache's great grandfather, Benjamin Franklin, had years
before then precisely mapped the Atlantic's Gulf Stream. The American
Revolutionaries, sailing across the ocean with knowledge of this strong
current, were thus enabled to outrun the uninformed British by a matter
of weeks.

Bache's Coast Survey, by mapping the entire national shoreline, and by
teaching higher mathematics to naval personnel, gave the Navy the
ability to amaze, surprise and depress the enemy. David Dixon Porter,
for example, learned to do calculus in his head. He could thus know
where a sand bar ought to have been deposited by river and ocean
currents, by looking at even an outdated Coast Survey chart. (One of his
more famous, outrageous stunts, was the sailing of an entire fleet of
river warboats many dozens of miles through a forest -- which had been
flooded with rain.)

The confident scientific outlook of Admirals David Dixon Porter and
Charles Henry Davis led them to give crucial backing to inventor John
Ericsson's armored turret ship, the Monitor. Porter and his friends
noted with particular emphasis that with the deployment of this new ship
in 1862, the wooden British navy, in particular, had become obsolete.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gibbs and Yale

Thomas Hill, a friend of Peirce and Agassiz, succeeded Cornelius Felton
as President of Harvard in 1862 and continued Felton's ambitious science
policy. In 1863 Lazzaroni member Oliver Wolcott Gibbs took charge of the
chemistry work at the Lawrence Scientific School. He was the son of
Nicholas Biddle's friend Col. George Gibbs; and the grandson and
namesake of Oliver Wolcott, the aide to Alexander Hamilton who had
broken the oligarchy in Connecticut.
Benjamin Peirce wondered whether Gibbs's appointment was
"worthwhile...when we see that the whole thing must [eventually] fall
into the hands of imbeciles" -- as Harvard did, in the end. But during
his tenure, Oliver Wolcott Gibbs was perhaps the most effective and
beloved science teacher in American history. His portrait in bas-relief
is wrought upon the doors of the west entrance to the Capitol in
Washington.

After graduating from Columbia College in New York, Gibbs had worked
briefly at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1841 or
1842, and returned to New York for a medical degree. From 1845 to 1848
he studied chemistry in Berlin, Giessen and Paris. He became an exponent
of the research and instructional methods of his teacher at Giessen,
Justus Liebig, who had also taught Gibbs's predecessor boss at the
Lawrence School, Eban Horsford. Liebig himself had been sponsored and
placed at Giessen by Alexander von Humboldt, who shifted the young
chemist out of Paris in the 1820's when the �cole Polytechnique was no
longer viable as the center of republican science. At Giessen, Liebig
founded agricultural chemistry and the science of artificial
fertilizers. What Gibbs brought to Harvard was the Liebig system of
hands-on research for students, in resposible, sophisticated original
research by the side of master chemists.

>From 1849 to 1863, Wolcott Gibbs taught at the new City College of New
York. Throughout the 1850's, Gibbs was associate editor and foreign
correspondent for the American Journal of Science and Arts, founded in
1818 at the suggestion of Gibbs's father. Through this medium
communication was maintained with European science. Gibbs and his fellow
editor Benjamin Silliman, Jr., helped bring German-trained teachers into
Yale in the heyday of the Lazzaroni, the 1850's and 1860's. When
Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School opened in 1847, Lazzaroni pressure
began operating for a similar school at Yale. What became the Sheffield
Scientific school was thus born in the 1850's.

The first dean of the Sheffield School was Justus Liebig's student John
A. Porter, who developed the courses in agriculture and nutrition.
During the Civil War, under Lincoln's Land Grant College Act, both the
Harvard and Yale institutions got federal government funding as state
colleges. Another pupil of Liebig's, William H. Brewer, was the
professor of agriculture at Sheffield from 1864 to 1903. His colleague
S.W. Johnson returned in 1856 from his studies with Liebig, began
teaching at Sheffield and translating the latest European works on
chemical analysis for American scientists. Johnson later led in the
development of the U.S. government's experimental research stations.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pennsylvania's Industrial Juggernaut

Benjamin Silliman, Jr., published in 1855 a "Report on the Oil Rock, or
Petroleum, from Venango County, Pennsylvania". It explained the
composition and means of refining of oil from underground, for the
owners of some land near Pittsburgh. Four years later, encouraged by
this report, Edwin L. Drake started the world's petroleum industry on
this land. The Philadelphia Interests would then fight a losing battle
with British-backed John D. Rockefeller, for control of the new resource
whose development they had begun.
Coal had preceded oil as the fuel for Pennsylvania's growth. During the
last year of the Civil War, 1865, total U.S. coal production was 23.8
million tons. By 1880, this figure had tripled to 71.5 million.
Pennsylvania produced 47.1 million tons, or about two thirds of the
national total in 1880.

That America's coal industry, and its iron and steel industry, were born
and grew up in Pennsylvania, was no accident of geography or "free
enterprise." It was rather a result of precise, scientific calculation
and government policy.

The Philadelphia-based scientists, in Ben Franklin's tradition, had not
neglected to develop highly skilled technical manpower for the use of
their home region. The University of Pennsylvania (founded by Franklin),
the Franklin Institute, the American Philosophical Society (primarily as
an intelligence gathering agency, since its membership per se had become
largely honorary by the mid 19th century), and the Bache-organized
Philadelphia school system were all put to the task of industrial
mobilization. Pro-growth lobbying organizations, particularly the Iron
and Steel Association under the control of Henry Carey, completely
overlapped and interlocked with the educational process. The industrial
owners, in turn, paid for and were themselves a product of the educ
ational system.

The scientists, the industrialists and the literati of the city, taken
together as an informal command group, most often met in the dinners of
the "Wistar Party." The head of this group, during the entire period of
our concern, was Isaac Lea (1792-1886!). He had become the publishing
partner of his father-in-law, Mathew Carey, back in 1821. He had two
sons named Mathew Carey Lea and Henry Carey Lea. Isaac Lea, whose
interests ranged from conchology, to the defeat of British free trade
subversion, went to Europe in 1851 and held a several day strategy
discussion with the scientific elite of Germany.

The Lazzaroni themselves met mostly in the home of John Fries Frazer,
the practical manager of the group. His grandfather, ironmaster Persifor
Frazer, served on Philadelphia's Committee of Safety at the outbreak of
the Revolution. As a Lieutenant Colonel of Pennsylvania's troops,
grandfather Frazer was on Long Island in 1776 arresting New York Tories
and suppressing their activities -- something his descendants may have
often wished they could do. He fought the British in Canada, he was
captured in the Battle of Brandywine, but he escaped to fight at the
battle of Monmouth.

Grandson John Fries Frazer graduated from the University of Pennsylvania
in 1830. He was Prof. Alexander Dallas Bache's lab assistant in 1833,
assistant to the state geological survey in 1836, and taught in the
Philadelphia school system from 1837 until 1844. When Bache went to
Washington, Frazer succeeded him as Professor of Chemistry and Natural
Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania; he held this position
until 1872. He edited the Journal of the Franklin Insitute from 1850 to
1866.

Frazer's son Persifor (1844-1909) was in Bache's Coast Survey during the
Civil War, 1862-1863. He came home to join the Philadelphia city cavalry
for the Gettysburg campaign in 1863, and then finished the war as an
ensign in the Mississippi Squadron of David Dixon Porter. After the War
young Frazer studied for three years at the mining school in Freiburg,
Germany.

With this training Frazer returned in 1869, to serve as mineralogist and
metallurgist in the United States Geological Survey under Ferdinand V.
Hayden. Frazer wrote "Mines and Minerals of Colorado," published in the
1869 Annual Report of the Survey. This was the scientific encouragement
needed by the Philadelphia Interests to back William J. Palmer, several
years later, when Palmer began settling Colorado and developing its
mining industry. Hayden, a University of Pennsylvania professor of
geology from 1865 to 1872, won worldwide acclaim for his exploration and
mapping of the mountain west. But his work was opposed by the British
faction in Washington, led by Henry Adams. The West was said to be one
vast uninhabitable desert, and they sponsored their own surveys under
John Wesley Powell to prove it.

At his father's death in 1872, the younger Frazer replaced him for one
year as chemistry professor in the University of Pennsylvania. He then
spent the rest of the 1870's as assistant to J. Peter Lesley, director
of the Pennsylvania's Second Geological Survey. Persifor Frazer was
replaced at the University of Pennsylvania by Professor George F.
Barker, whose very important career, closely associated with that of
Thomas Edison, will be considered below.

Frederick Augustus Genth was another chemistry teacher on the University
staff beginning in 1872. Born near Hanau in Hesse-Cassel, Germany, he
studied under Justus Liebig and others, and emigrated to Philadelphia in
1848. He operated an analytical chemistry laboratory for nearly half a
century. Genth was the official chemist for the Pennsylvania Board of
Agriculture, specializing in fertilizer analysis and development, and he
wrote more than 70 papers on mineral researches, in American and German
journals, from 1842 to 1893. The work recognized as Genth's greatest
contribution to science was done jointly with Oliver Wolcott Gibbs in
the 1850's, a study of ammonia-cobalt bases.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Science" Meets "Politics"

J. Peter Lesley (1819-1903) demonstrates in his own career the complete
interconnection between the various strategic concerns of the
Philadelphia Interests, and thus, of the American republicans.
Graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1838, Lesley worked
for three years in the state government's geological survey. In 1845-46
he studied theology in Halle, Germany, and travelled. After other jobs
in geological surveying for public and private interests, Lesley served
from 1856 to 1864 as the secretary of the Henry Carey/Joseph Wharton
organization, the American Iron and Steel Association. He was also
professor of mining at the University of Pennsylvania from 1859 to 1883,
and dean of the science department after 1872. At the same time, from
1859 to 1885, J. Peter Lesley was both Librarian and Secretary of the
American Philosophical Society.

Benjamin Smith Lyman became Leslie's assistant in the geological survey
of Pensyvlania in 1856, a year after his graduation from Harvard. In
1857 Lyman did research throughout the country for the Iron and Steel
Association. J. Peter Lesley sent him to Europe in 1859. Lyman studied
two years at the �cole des Mines in Paris, and one year at the Freiburg
school of mining. After his return he worked in Pennsylvania, in many
other states, in Canada, and in India. Lyman was hired in 1872 by the
Meiji government of Japan. He worked for eight years in geological and
topological surveys of the Japanese islands, mapping deposits of iron,
coal, silver, copper, gold and oil, and the projected routes of
railways.

We may now once again take up the Philadelphia industrialists, being
better situated to understand the context of their achievements.

In 1852 the management of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with a charter from
the legislature to serve the state, was not moving its construction
forward sufficiently rapidly to suit the Whig members of its trustees.
The management was replaced by the team of J. Edgar Thomson, formerly
chief engineer, and Herman Haupt, formerly general superintendant, who
now became respectively president and chief engineer.

Thomson's national leadership, as president of the Pennsylvania Railroad
until his death in 1874, was presented in Part I of this series. His
early factional supporter and co-executive, Herman Haupt, completed the
construction of the railroad through the mountains west to Pittsburgh.
Haupt's "General Theory of Bridge Construction" (1852) was widely
adopted in American engineering and technical schools.

In 1862 and 1863 Herman Haupt was chief of construction and operation of
the military railroads. President Lincoln described a bridge that Haupt
built with unskilled soldiers in 1862:
"I have witnessed the most remarkable structure that human eyes ever
rested upon. That man, Haupt, has built a bridge across Potomac creek in
nine days with common soldiers, and, upon my soul, gentlemen, there is
nothing in it but bean poles and corn stalks." [fn10]

The engineering corps organized by Haupt marched through Georgia with
General Sherman, allowing the supply of Sherman's forces despite his
destruction of every bridge and rail line he came to. They built a
celebrated bridge across the Chattahoochee River, 750 feet long and 90
feet high, in four and a half days, using forest timber.

Herman Haupt was hired in 1881 by the new owners of the Northern Pacific
Railroad franchise. As general manager, Haupt completed to the Pacific
coast the line that had been stopped since Drexel and Morgan bankrupted
Jay Cooke in 1873.

Centered around the Pennsylvania Railroad, the "Philadelphia Interests"
were, chiefly, corporate owners J. Edgar Thomson, Thomas A. Scott,
Andr�w Carnegie, William J. Palmer, all of whom were encountered in Part
I, and Matthew Baird, William Sellers and Samuel M. Felton. Aside from
the PRR, the enterprises they controlled jointly included coal mines,
iron foundries and land companies. The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad
(managed by Palmer), the National Land Company, the Pennsylvania Steel
Company, the Kansas Pacific Railway, the Mexican National Railways (in
the years of construction), the Automatic Telegraph Company (later sold
off to Jay Gould), and the Westmoreland and the Alleghany Coal
companies, can all be fairly considered as simply a single enterprise,
with different names for different divisions, or "entitities."

Matthew Baird, a large investor and director in this industrial
combination, was a partner, and from 1866 the sole owner, of the Baldwin
locomotive works. His firm got the contract for the locomotives for
Palmer's lines in Colorado and Mexico, after furiously building engines
for the Union forces in the Civil War.

William Sellers, born in 1824, was owner of Sellers and Co. Machine
Tools. Since the founding of the American Philosophical Society by
Franklin, there had always been a member of the Society in the Sellers
family; his great-great-grandfather had observed the transit of Venus
for the Society in 1769. In 1864 William Sellers became president of the
Franklin Institute, and presented there, his formula for screw and nut
threads which was adopted as the standard by the United States
government. In 1868 Sellers set up the Edge Moor Iron Company, which
made the iron structures for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in
1876, and for the Brooklyn Bridge. He was a trustee of the University of
Pennsylvania. His relative and junior partner Colman Sellers, who was
president of the Franklin Institute from 1870 to 1875, was chief
engineer and dynamo designer in the construction of the Niagara Falls
power station in the 1890's.

Samuel Felton, brother of Harvard president and Lazzaroni Cornelius C.
Felton, had moved to Philadelphia in 1851 from Boston. He was president
of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. When PRR vice
president Thomas A. Scott advised president-elect Lincoln not to go to
Washington by the advertised route, to avoid assassination, Felton put
Lincoln aboard his line and got him into the capital for his
inauguration. A Baltimore mob sacked the train they had thought Lincoln
was aboard. Felton devoted his lines during the war years entirely to
troop and supply transport.

After the Civil War, Samuel Felton became president of the Pennsylvania
Steel Company, an "entity" of the joint Philadelphia Interests. In 1868
he hired, as chief chemist and then manager, the extraordinary John B.S.
Pearse. Born in 1842, Pearse headed the chemical division of the U.S.
Army laboratory in Philadelphia the last two years of the war, producing
medicines. He studied at the Freiburg school in Germany for a year, and
in Styria in Austria, and observed European steelmaking.

The Pennsylvania Steel Company employed Alexander L. Holley in 1867 to
construct the Harrisburg plant which was then operated by Pearse.
Holley, who had designed naval ordinance during the war, had negotiated
with Bessemer in England for his patent rights, and had combined them
with the patents of American William Kelley -- whose steelmaking process
actually predated Bessemer's. The Harrisburg plant began turning out the
first steel rails made in America. Manager John Pearse translated from
German the standard work by Peter Tunner, "A Treatise on Roll Turning
for the Manufacture of Iron" (1869), and "A Conscise History of the Iron
Manufacture of the American Colonies up to the Revolution and of
Pennsylvania until the Present Time" (1876). Pearse also became an
expert in the playing, construction, woods, varnishes and acoustics of
the violin, translating hundreds of documents from French, German,
Dutch, Danish, Latin, Italian, Spanish and Russian.

Alexander Holley was hired by Andr�w Carnegie for the construction, in
the midst of the Panic of 1873, of the world's greatest and most modern
plant, the J. Edgar Thomson steel works. The brains, the capital and the
experience of the Philadelphia Interests, and the protective tariff
which Carey and associates had enacted during the Lincoln presidency,
allowed Carnegie to overcome the bear raid on the nation's credit by the
European financiers. This was the heart of the great American steel
industry, built up by Carnegie over the next decade or so, to the point
where the United States emerged as the undisputed leader of world
industry.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Professor and the Inventor

George F. Barker graduated from Yale in 1858 after only two years'
study, and taught in Harvard and other colleges until 1865. He then
returned to Yale and taught until 1873 in the medical college under the
leadership of Benjamin Silliman, Jr.
Barker was hired as professor of chemistry and physics by the University
of Pennsylvania in 1873. He was immediately made editor of the Journal
 of the Franklin Institute, and from 1877 until 1897, Secretary of the
American Philosophical Society, mostly under J. Peter Lesley. He was a
close companion and dear friend of Professor Frederick Genth until
Genth's death in 1893. He was a dinner companion of Joseph Wharton and
his "social science" friends (i.e. Henry Carey), according to Barker's
correspondence in the University of Pennsylvania archives.

The following letter, copied from the archives, was addressed to Prof.
Barker at the Hall of Exhibition, dated October 5, 1874:

"I am informed that you have invited Mr. Thomas A. Edison to appear
before your convention with his electro motograph -- I am acting for Mr.
Edison & on his behalf thank you cordially for the invitation & if I may
have 2 minutes audience with you, will arrange to have Edison meet you
at your option as to time & place.

"A reply left at the Telegraph Stand will quickly reach me.

With respect, I am yours,

E.H. Johnson Gen'l Manager Automatic Telegraph Co."

Edward H. Johnson was the assistant to General William J. Palmer who was
sent, on behalf of the Philadelphia Interests, to manage the Automatic
Telegraph Company. When Johnson hired Edison, the contracted employee
quickly outshone the particular company. The Philadelphians then backed
Edison's evolution into a fulltime inventor, established in his
"invention factory" in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Professor Barker became Edison's overall science advisor and angel in
academic circles. After Edison completed Bell's telephone by inventing
the microphone, Barker encouraged Edison in the development of the
phonograph. When that was completed early in 1878, Barker arranged for
Edison to be invited to the April 18 meeting of the National Academy of
Sciences in Washington, and Barker and his friends made sure the hall
was packed by a warmed-up audience. The first words of the device to the
public were, "The Speaking Phonograph has the honor of presenting itself
to the Academy of Sciences."

That night a demonstration was held for the press in the Washington
bureau of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The next day a demonstration was
held for congressmen in the home of James Blaine's neice. The publicity
generated within this 24 hour period, all of it organized and managed by
the Philadelphians and their republican political allies, made Edison
world-famous.

That July (1878), Prof. Barker invited Edison to relax with him on a
trip to Wyoming to view a solar eclipse. Edison was to try out against
the sun's corona a tasimeter he had invented, a device for measuring
minute changes in temperature. During the two months train ride,
relaxing and hunting, Barker described to Edison the progress to date on
the production of artificial light from electricity. Barker had himself
demonstrated for lecture audiences in Philadelphia, on and off campus,
the latest lighting devices, batteries and crude dynamos. He was
probably uniquely familiar with the problem as it had been dealt with so
far by man's technology, and he proposed that Edison tackle and solve
the problem.

Back east, Barker took Edison up to Ansonia, Connecticut to visit the
factory of William Wallace on September 8. Wallace had invented a
powerful dynamo, had coupled it to a water-powered turbine, and had led
the generated electric current a quarter mile to the factory's arc
lights. Edison inspected the setup and forsaw the great potential power
in a proper organization of steam-generated electricity and a closed,
incandescent light. When he left with Barker, Edison was determined to
light up the world.

The announcements were soon made to the press, that Edison would produce
light and power for the cities. To some, this was a very dangerous
situation:

"[J.P.] Morgan himself was interested in acquiring British and
continental European rights. Since Edison continued to claim to be too
busy to go into the city, Morgan caught the train out from New York, and
his partner, Anthony Drexel, came from Philadelphia. Early in December,
in a clapboard building rising from a muddy field, the elegant, reserved
Drexel and the balding, moustachioed, bulbous-nosed Morgan negotiated an
agreement for the lighting of Europe.

"In the meantime, Baron S.M. Rothschild of Vienna wrote his New York
representative, August Belmont, 'It would greatly interest me to learn
whether really there is something serious and practical in the new idea
of Mr. Edison, whose last inventions, the microphone, phonograph, etc.,
however interesting, have finally proven to be only trifles.' [Morgan
lawyer Grosvenor] Lowry brought Belmont to Menlo Park the first Saturday
in December -- a whistle-stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad had turned
into a center of international finance." [fn11]

But the European feudalist financiers, whether Europeans of the New York
or the Vienna address, did not actually wish to develop the Edison light
and electric companies, of which they were board members. They bought
into his enterprises for the power to close them down or contain them.
Though Edison, over the next couple of years, invented the myriad of
devices needed to generate and distribute electricity from central
station to homes and businesses, and set up the first such station at
Pearl Street in New York. But the financiers and the lawyers absolutely
blocked Edison's power company from expanding across the country. Their
money, though, was available by the limitless milllions, for the
purchase and combination of existing property such as railroads.

In the autumn of 1884, Edison and his friends staged a "stockholders'
revolt" against the Morgan forces. Ed Johnson was put in actual charge
of the Edison Company as executive vice president. Production of dynamos
and their installation grew rapidly. Large city central power stations
rose to 12, in 1884, and to 58 in 1886. They were being installed in
Europe, South America and Japan.

Ed Johnson had earlier promoted the light and power system in Europe. At
the International Electrical Exhibition in Paris in 1881, Professor
Barker, who had been widely demonstrating Edison's work in America, was
on hand as a commissioner. A working model of the Pearl Street Station
was shown. The budding German industrialist, Emil Rathenau, purchased
the Edison patents and set up the Edison General Electric Company of
Germany, by which the cities were lit and powered.

In later years, Morgan and his allies came to own the entire electrical
industry, and bought up all the new steel industry, preventing any
further fundamental progress in those areas. But Edison encouraged an
ambitious employee of Detroit Edison Company, Henry Ford, to complete
the gasoline-powered automobile Ford was working on. With Edison as a
kind of stepfather, Ford made great advances in the organization of
labor through his factory innovations. A few years after the development
of the American mass-produced automobile, gas engines allowed the Wright
brothers to succeed in bringing about manned flight.

But most of the world never received the new technology developed in the
United states and Europe. The faction and the philosophy which prevented
further basic advances in most lines of work during this century, also
stopped would-be prometheans at the borders of the Third World
countries.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes

1.Quoted in Spannaus and White, eds., The Political Economy of the
American Revolution, Campaigner Publications, New York, 1977, p. 270.
2.Speech to the Pennsylvania Senate, Jan. 8, 1811, Quoted in Govan,
Thomas Payne, Nicholas Biddle: Nationalist and Public Banker, 1786-1844,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1959, p. 31-32.

3.Govan, Biddle, p. 16.

4.Membership roster taken from Miller, Lillian B., et al, The Lazzaroni:
Science and Scientists in Mid-Nineteenth Century America, National
Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 1972. I
have dropped James Dwight Dana, who may have been a plant by their
opponents -- he "encouraged" a revolt by Harvard students against
Professor Agassiz.

5.Speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS), 1849, described in Daniels, George H., American Science in the
Age of Jackson, Columbia University Press, New York, 1968. From 1848 to
1855 each of the presidents of the AAAS were Lazzaroni.

6.Miller, Lazzaroni, p. 44.

7.Peirce to Bache, Sept. 21, 1851, Peirce papers, Harvard, quoted in
Reingold, Nathan, ed., Science in Nineteenth Century America, A
Documentary History, Hill and Wang, New York, 1964, p. 161

8.Quoted in Miller, Lazzaroni, p. 51.

9.Govan, Biddle, p. 151, 152, 155, 156, 175, 282.

10.Quoted in the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, James T.
White and Co., New York, 1921, Vol X.

11.Conot, Robert, A Streak of Luck, Seaview Books, New York, 1979, p.
129.




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The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in
The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of
The New Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this
article must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The American
Almanac.
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Omnia Bona Bonis,
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Amen.
Roads End
Kris

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