Abstract

"'Improving… Our Countrymen': University Science, Mechanics Institutes, and Agricultural Societies in the United States, 1820-1850"

Laura Clerx, Boston College (lauraclerx@gmail.com)

“There is nothing like down East for learned women. Why, even the factory-girls at Lowell edit entirely a magazine…Some of them, having fitted their brothers for college at home, come to Lowell to earn money enough to send them through!! Vivent les femmes.” wrote the botanist Asa Gray to John Torrey in the summer of 1842 (Letters of Asa Gray vol. 1, ed. by Jane Loring Gray, Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1893). The connection between nineteenth-century industry and education in the professor’s boast was more than apparent. Hired as Professor of Botany at Harvard in 1842, Gray became part of a circle of New Englanders who promoted the dissemination of scientific education to the laboring classes. The involvement of the American university in the industrial economy is typically conceived of as a late-nineteenth-century phenomenon beginning with the establishment of the Morrill-Land Grant universities in the 1860s. In this paper, I argue that the scientific establishment in the United States has been bound up with national economic development from the earliest days of the new republic. This paper explores attempts by educators, politicians, and semi-professional scientists to guide U.S. economic progress by bringing a particular type of scientific education to workers and farmers through the establishment of mechanics institutes and agricultural societies. By examining these early to mid-nineteenth-century organizations in more detail, this paper brings to light the class dimensions of scientific knowledge and experimental culture in the period of early labor organization in the United States.