CHAPTER 43

Powell, Clubs, Organizations and Associations

In Washington, D.C., on the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution, stands a stunning Victorian Mansion, the home of the prestigious Cosmos Club, a scientific think tank and social club founded by John Wesley Powell. In its halls and libraries are stories of its early beginnings: “The story of progress told in the rooms of the Cosmos Club did not originate with Powell. Civilization's rise was a story that came out of the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and, most importantly, the Enlightenment. Powell, when he stepped out of the Methodist chapel, stepped into that well-established narrative. At its core lay a dream of human liberation through reason. Science would replace superstition, virtue would flower, and ‘happiness’ would spread across the earth.”³⁵⁶

Powell, the man that was referred to as the high priest of science in the 1800s, “was an active member of the Philosophical Society of Washington which included practically every notable scientist in the capital. He had been once, briefly, a kind of national hero, and he had established a solid reputation as a geologist and ethnologist. On November 16, 1878, busy as usual in a dozen directions, energetically persuading Congressmen, directing research, pursuing his own studies, providing opinion for Western editors on his land policies, and circumventing Hayden’s lobby, he had taken another step calculated to enhance and insure all his other activities and at the same time consolidate his gains. On that evening he invited over to his home on “M” Street a group of friends and colleagues that included Henry Adams, Dutton, Captain Garrick Mallery, Fred Endlich, James Kidder, and some others, and before they broke up they had organized the Cosmos Club—ever since that night the closest thing to a social headquarters for Washington’s intellectual elite—and elected Powell its temporary president.”³⁵⁷

G.K Gilbert, a co-founder of the Cosmos Club, stated “a prime function of the Cosmos Club was to bind the scientific men of Washington by a social tie and thus promote that solidarity, which is important to their proper work and influence.”³⁵⁸

At the time of the club's founding the atmosphere among the capital's scientists was poisoned by suspicion, jealousy, and dissension. Dutton, Gilbert, Powell and company wanted to uplift their colleagues. Science, as they conceived it, required men to refrain from selfish competition otherwise, science would fail in its effort to win greater support from government and to lead public policy.

If Powell aimed to usurp Joseph Henry's position as leading scientist in Washington by setting up a rival institution to the Philosophical Society, he modestly restrained himself. As candidate for first president of the Cosmos Club, he put forward Henry's successor at the Smithsonian, Spencer Baird. But in 1881, after a decent interval, he came out of the wings to serve as club president, with Mallery as vice president. By then he hardly needed any such office to achieve recognition. No one else in the city could match his reputation for organizing the evening hours of the intelligentsia.

Besides the Cosmos Club, Powell was a founder of the Anthropological Society, incorporated in late 1879. He was elected its first president and served nine terms in all, missing only one year, 1883, due to illness. Here the reading of long papers under flickering gas lights was once more endured. Nearly five hundred persons had joined by century's end, though most meetings drew smaller numbers of the devoted.³⁵⁹

On still another winter evening still another link in the institutional chain was forged. Thirty-three men gathered at the Cosmos Club in January 1888 to establish a National Geographic Society. Powell was, of course, prominent in that group too…And there was more. Powell sent in dues, not only to all of the above, but to the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the U.S., the University Club, the American Meteorological Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Society of the Army of the Tennessee, the Choral Society, the Society of Naturalists of the Eastern United States and the American Historical Association. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. For over a quarter-century he paid dues to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and was its president. He was on the editorial board of Science and of Johnson's Cyclopedia. His annual subscription list included the Washington Post, the Daily National Republican, the Journal of Philology, the American Naturalist, and the Geological Record (U.K.). Secular institutions of every sort were his bread and butter, his instruments of change, his source of recreation.³⁶⁰

The establishment and use of clubs and organizations to assist in the advancement of social and scientific agendas was becoming very much a part of the Washington scientific community. Because of the shear number of organizations that they could draw on for support of a piece of legislation, it became increasingly easier to find general support by the law makers. And, as such, the science community has become a very respectable and influential force on Capital Hill.

However, even with so much respect given to the sciences and these imposing organizations, which have been very worthily credited for inspiring many great and good innovations, it is still important that one keeps perspective in sight by looking at a cow and remembering that the greatest scientists of our day even with the many credits given, have never yet discovered how to convert grass into milk.

“In the latter decades of the nineteenth century Washington became one of the country’s most important intellectual centers, perhaps the most important of all. What it lacked in distinguished universities or publishing houses, it made up in the richness of its scientific and other scholarly agencies and institutions. The Smithsonian stood at the core, but radiating from avenues …were many lesser organs, clubs, and offices for serious minds. Together, they sought to create in the capital a more highbrow atmosphere that would improve public legislation, administration, and welfare. Powell was among the most dedicated architects of that city of science, the emergent capital of American hope.”³⁶¹

Smithsonian

_______________________

³⁵⁶ Ibid. 458.

³⁵⁷ Stegner, 242.

³⁵⁸ Gilbert, in Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Cosmos Club, 40

³⁵⁹ Worster, 439. ref. Lamb, Story of the Anthropological Society of Washington

³⁶⁰ Ibid. 440: Powell mss. NAA, file 4453.

³⁶¹ Ibid, 440.