Magnificent Distances: The Rise and Fall of the Capital City of Science, 1862-1920

Abstract

Magnificent Distances tells the story of the rise and fall of “capital science,” a period (1862-1920) in which scientists and intellectuals in Washington, D.C. consistently turned to the problems and opportunities of a modernizing capital city to make claims on the authority of science, authority within their disciplines, and, in many cases, the authority of the state. By bringing the scale of state science down to the streets and the everyday lives, concerns, and relationships of people in the city, this dissertation shows how scientists became active political actors within the capital city: architect-engineers controlled municipal improvements, astronomers became lobbyists, naturalists negotiated land development, social scientists pursued uplift through neighborhood reform and institution building, and chemists guarded the District’s public health in their efforts to achieve national regulation. The communities who built the postbellum scientific state in Washington and the scientific culture of the city saw these processes as simultaneously ones of city building, both culturally and physically. The story of capital science bridges the history of science, urban history, and the history of a “long” or “greater” Reconstruction. Magnificent Distances reexamines bureau scientists in this period as modernists whose notions of labor, progress, and civilization remained bound to the racial, gender, and class politics of the city. The liberal exchange and civic politics of many in capital science simultaneously assumed and perpetuated white control over the city, acquiescing to Washington’s disenfranchisement, the most glaringly illiberal fact about the capital city. Yet by situating this story in the city, rather than the halls of government agencies, capital science includes many who were perceived as outside science’s orbit, most notably D.C.’s burgeoning Black intellectual community. It is a story of place, where the cultural meanings—the federal, national, and model city—and relatively compact intellectual geography of the city produced engagement across intellectual communities and competing claims of authority over the capital’s design, political, and cultural futures. Capital science saw an intimate bond among science, capital, and nation. In forging a city in its own image, it would leave an indelible mark.