One should not try too hard to fit all these scientists and their theories into one mould. It is, however, noticeable that one characteristic does link most of these figures: with the possible exception of Russell, each was fairly solitary. Einstein, Rutherford, Ehrlich, and Baekeland, early in their careers, ploughed their own furrow – not for them the Café Griensteidl or the Moulin de la Galette. Getting their work across to people, whether at conferences or in professional journals, was what counted. This was – and would remain – a significant difference between scientific ‘culture’ and the arts, and may well have contributed to the animosity toward science felt by many people as the decades went by. The self-sufficiency of science, the self-absorption of scientists, the sheer difficulty of so much science, made it inaccessible in a way that the arts weren’t. In the arts, the concept of the avant-garde, though controversial, became familiar and stabilised: what the avant-garde liked one year, the bourgeoisie would buy the next. But new ideas in science were different; very few of the bourgeoisie would ever fully comprehend the minutiae of science. Hard science and, later, weird science, were hard and/or weird in a way that the arts were not.
For non-specialists, the inaccessibility of science didn’t matter, or it didn’t matter very much, for the technology that was the product of difficult science worked, conferring a continuing authority on physics, medicine, and even mathematics. As will be seen, the main effect of the developments in hard science were to reinforce two distinct streams in the intellectual life of the century. Scientists ploughed on, in search of more and more fundamental answers to the empirical problems around them. The arts and the humanities responded to these fundamental discoveries where they could, but the raw and awkward truth is that the traffic was almost entirely one-way. Science informed art, not the other way round. By the end of the first decade, this was already clear. In later decades, the issue of whether science constitutes a special kind of knowledge, more firmly based than other kinds, would become a major preoccupation of philosophy.
7
LADDERS OF BLOOD
On the morning of Monday, 31 May 1909, in the lecture theatre of the Charity Organization Society building, not far from Astor Place in New York City, three pickled brains were displayed on a wooden bench. One of the brains belonged to an ape, another was the brain of a white person, and the third was a Negro brain. The brains were the subject of a lecture given by Dr Burt Wilder, a neurologist from Cornell University. Professor Wilder, after presenting a variety of charts and photographs and reporting on measurements said to be relevant to the ‘alleged prefrontal deficiency in the Negro brain,’ reassured the multiracial audience that the latest science had found no difference between white and black brains.1
The occasion of this talk – which seems so dated and yet so modern – was in some ways historic. It was the opening morning of a three-day ‘National Negro Conference,’ the very first move in an attempt to create a permanent organisation to work for civil rights for American blacks. The conference was the brainchild of Mary Ovington, a white social worker, and had been nearly two years in the making. It had been conceived after she had read an account by William Walling of a race riot that had devastated Springfield, Illinois, in the summer of 1908. The trouble that flared in Springfield on the night of 14 August signalled that America’s race problem was no longer confined to the South, no longer, as Walling wrote, ‘a raw and bloody drama played out behind a magnolia curtain.’ The spark that ignited the riot was the alleged rape of a white woman, the wife of a railway worker, by a well-spoken black man. (The railroads were a sensitive area at the time. Some southern states had ‘Jim Crow’ carriages: as the trains crossed the state line, arriving from the North, blacks were forced to move from interracial carriages to the blacks-only variety.) As news of the alleged rape spread that night, there were two lynchings, six fatal shootings, eighty injuries, more than $200,000 worth of damage. Two thousand African Americans fled the city before the National Guard restored order.2
William Walling’s article on the riot, ‘Race War in the North,’ did not appear in the Independent for another three weeks. But when it did, it was much more than a dispassionate report. Although he reconstructed the riot and its immediate cause in exhaustive detail, it was the passion of Walling’s rhetoric that moved Mary Ovington. He showed how little had changed in attitudes towards blacks since the Civil War; he exposed the bigotry of certain governors in southern states, and tried to explain why racial troubles were now spreading north. Reading Walling’s polemic, Mary Ovington was appalled. She contacted him and suggested they start some sort of organisation. Together they rounded up other white sympathisers, meeting first in Walling’s apartment and then, when the group got too big, at the Liberal Club on East Nineteenth Street. When they mounted the first National Negro Conference, on that warm May day, in 1909, just over one thousand attended. Blacks were a distinct minority.
After the morning session of science, both races headed for lunch at the Union Square Hotel close by, ‘so as to get to know each other.’ Even though nearly half a century had elapsed since the Civil War, integrated meals were unusual even in large northern towns, and participants ran the risk of being jeered at, or worse. On that occasion, however, lunch went smoothly, and duly fortified, the lunchers walked back over to the conference centre. That afternoon, the main speaker was one of the black minority, a small, bearded, aloof academic from Fisk and Harvard Universities, called William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.
W. E. B. Du Bois was often described, especially by his critics, as arrogant, cold and supercilious.3 That afternoon he was all of these, but it didn’t matter. This was the first time many white people came face to face with a far more relevant characteristic of Du Bois: his intellect. He did not say so explicitly, but in his talk he conveyed the impression that the subject of that morning’s lectures – whether whites were more intelligent than blacks – was a matter of secondary importance. Using the rather precise prose of the academic, he said he appreciated that white people were concerned about the deplorable housing, employment, health, and morals of blacks, but that they ‘mistook effects for causes.’ More important, he said, was the fact that black people had sacrificed their own self-respect because they had failed to gain the vote, without which the ‘new slavery’ could never be abolished. He had one simple but all-important message: economic power – and therefore self-fulfilment – would only come for the Negro once political power had been achieved.4
By 1909 Du Bois was a formidable public speaker; he had a mastery of detail and a controlled passion. But by the time of the conference he was undergoing a profound change, in the process of turning from an academic into a politician – and an activist. The reason for Du Bois’s change of heart is instructive. Following the American Civil War, the Reconstruction movement had taken hold in the South, intent on turning back the clock, rebuilding the former Confederate states with de facto, if not de jure, segregation. Even as late as the turn of the century, several states were still trying to disenfranchise blacks, and even in the North many whites treated blacks as an inferior people. Far from advancing since the Civil War, the fortunes of blacks had actually regressed. The situation was not helped by the theories and practices of the first prominent black leader, a former slave from Alabama, Booker T. Washington. He took the view that the best form of race relations was accommodation with the whites, accepting that change would come eventually, and that any other approach risked a white backlash. Washington therefore spread the notion that blacks ‘should be a labour force, not a political force,’ and it was on this basis that his Tuskegee Institute was founded, in Alabama, near Montgomery, its aim being to train blacks in the industrial skills mainly needed on southern farms. Whites found this such a reassuring philosophy that they poured money into the Tuskegee Institute, and Washington’s reputation and influence grew to the point where, by the early years of the twentieth century, few federal black appointments were made without Theodore Roosevelt, in the White House, canvassing his advice.5