The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

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  Needing more space as his payroll ballooned in 1884, Powell convinced Congress of the survey’s need to rent space in the six-story Hooe Iron Building at 13 and F Streets, a twenty-minute walk from his M Street home and just a couple of blocks from the White House. Washington’s largest cast-iron-fronted structure, the Hooe was also the city’s largest privately owned office building. American Express operated out of a storefront on the street level. Powell had chosen a fashionable block indeed, especially given its proximity—just sixty feet away—from the city’s most elegant hotel, the mansard-roofed Ebbitt House, with its immense gas-fired chandeliers, imposing marble-and-walnut lobby, and constant stream of politicians and military figures. Large flamboyant white script spelled out United States Geographical Survey on the transom over the Hooe’s elegant main entrance. The USGS, like Powell, had finally, and completely, arrived.

  Practicality, as might be expected, equally marked Powell’s choice of location. The city’s infamous Newspaper Row lay only a block away, an anarchy of a dozen small houses packed with journalists, all anchored by the Western Union office on the corner of 14th and Pennsylvania. The telegraph office would enable Powell to communicate with his far-flung staff. The taverns jamming nearby Rum Row, where journalists, politicians, and lobbyists gathered, offered the latest information and gossip. He could not have chosen a better place at the center of the Capital’s influence peddling.

  Moving the survey into a roomy building also helped Powell support his perpetually stretched Bureau of Ethnology. With the survey now boasting a budget ten times that of the Bureau, Powell set out to work an economy of scale on behalf of the smaller organization, moving himself, his personal secretary, and several Bureau personnel to the survey payroll. The survey paid James Stevenson’s salary, even though he served as the chief executive officer of both organizations. Artist William Henry Holmes and photographer Jack Hillers reported to both, although they were paid only by the survey. In practice, this meant that Powell and the others had doubled their workload for no additional salary. The interior secretary acceded to Powell’s request to become the sole arbiter of the survey’s budget, becoming the “Special Disbursing Agent of the United States Geological Survey” on August 24, 1882.

  From his second-floor corner office in the Hooe, Powell held court like an unkempt monarch, his door open to any who might wander in. Senators and congressmen dropped by to chat or pick up handsome illustrated copies of survey publications. Scientists visited fresh from the field, while other impromptu gatherings might find the discussion centering on Hopi dance or a recent discovery of toothed bird fossils. Time had played its ravages on the Major, now approaching fifty, who resembled an odd hybrid of mad scientist and rumpled professor, yet his left hand reached out in welcome to deliver a nearly uncomfortable grip. The immobility enforced by his iritis had fattened his frame. His stump continued to deliver near-constant pain, which caused his friend Samuel P. Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian after Baird, to describe him as “a stoic who suffered long years of pain in silence.” Deep lines etched his face. An unruly, graying red-brown beard always seemed dusted by ashes from an ever-present cigar. His hair grew long, combed back without a part. He was fond of formless wool suits, looking as though he had slept in them, and conforming to no recognizable fashion. Yet his deep-set bright gray eyes still twinkled, and never seemed to miss the least detail. He had the gift of making others feel that he registered and carefully weighed every word they uttered. Many felt elevated after a conversation with him, inspired to dig deeper into their work, perhaps with the benefit of some new perspectives. Powell had a gift for opening up new contexts; his intellectual abilities, noted one of his friends, lay in “seeing analogies and making comparisons, of coupling observations and thoughts which to most people seemed not at all related to each other until by him placed in a certain light.”

  Not all survey employees jumped eagerly aboard Powell’s train, particularly such close friends of King’s as the geologists Samuel Emmons and George Becker, who detested the free-form sharing of ideas. They liked to remind Powell that Congress had established the survey primarily as a vehicle to develop mineral resources. Powell listened courteously, but with only half an ear, yet still kept both on staff. Emmons reported a conversation he had with Gilbert, who commented on Powell’s general decision process: “He will think it over for a few days, come to half a dozen minds about it, and then decide suddenly without any reference to what we had said about it.” Powell’s general open-mindedness would eventually bring Emmons around to supporting him.

  Powell’s eclectic hiring practices defied any sort of consistency—a pastiche of political motivation, the desire to engage influential scientists, and warmhearted regard for the self-taught. He gave his scientists wide latitude to focus on their particular interests. As the survey grew, he drew in remarkable numbers of America’s top scientists. Between 1882 and 1892, the USGS collaborated with more than forty institutions in twenty-six of the forty-four states. Powell’s growing influence ensured that every major American university and prominent academic organization would feel his missionary passions. When federal laboratories could not accommodate one aspect or another of cutting-edge science, Powell established new divisions at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Wisconsin. Under Powell’s support and guidance, Lester Frank Ward wrote his influential 1,200-page Dynamic Sociology, a work that created the political philosophy of social liberalism, and served as a foundation of progressivism in the next century. Among others under Powell’s wing would be Charles Walcott, who would serve two decades as a brilliant Smithsonian secretary.

  Powell’s inner circle met regularly at the Hooe, gaily calling themselves the Great Basin Mess—Dutton, McGee, Holmes, James Piling, Walcott, and Gannett telling stories from their days in the field. Initially an indoor picnic, they ate simple meals on wooden plates with cheap silverware and paper napkins. Most of these men lived not far from Powell’s home and supported one another like a band of brothers through many difficult times. One such came early in 1883, when coal-gas poisoning sickened Gilbert’s entire family. The survey staff and their wives pitched in to help nurse them back to health. When tragedy struck again that spring, the Great Basin Mess rallied to help. Emma never left the bedside of Gilbert’s seven-year-old daughter, Bessie, as she lay dying from diphtheria, her parents too sick themselves to be present.

  The men surrounding Powell clearly saw his foibles and idiosyncrasies—yet those very qualities appeared to energize them with zeal for the mission. Like other great salesmen, he did not focus on product details, but rather spun notions of what could be, whether amid a rugged band of adventurers huddled on the banks of the Green, the clumps of young scientists eager to change the world, or in the ranks of senators shaping policy in Washington parlors. He combined skills of a Houdini and confidence man with the contrasting ideas of an idealist committed to salvation. When these qualities meshed with his future-shaping visionary insights into land stewardship and federal science, they created a formidable package.

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  Observers often described antebellum Washington as a sleepy southern town, but the northern war effort had changed that forever, centralizing great power and emboldening it with enormous economic expansion. The reclaimed swamplands along the Potomac saw its population rise from 75,000 in 1860 to more than 130,000 in 1870 and 175,000 by 1880, newcomers often drawn by fast-rising needs for scientific, professional, and technical work. By 1877, three thousand gaslights illuminated city streets, even more new swampland had been reclaimed, and mule teams drew streetcars along the major avenues. The federal government played an ever larger role in public life.

  In the small parlor of his M Street town house, Powell and several others, including Henry Adams, formed the Cosmos Club, with Powell serving as its founding president. The club offered newly forming scientific societies and their members with the social club, assembly hall, and lib
rary they needed. Ethnologist Otis Mason described “the scientific minds of Washington” as parts “of an organized, living existence.” This community crystallized into new societies, “all of them flourishing and useful.” At the Club, “they meet two or three times a week to discuss everything in the heavens above, the earth beneath, the water under the earth, and sociology.”

  At the Cosmos, the Hooe, and new and old universities across the nation, Powell prosecuted his grand ambition “to make the Survey of such magnitude,” as he wrote another scientist in 1884, “that the whole area of the United States can be properly occupied with a corps of topographers and geographers doing efficient work which will be available during the present generation.” By the following year, his goal was close. King’s staff of 40 had blossomed to 283, working among 10 divisions: topographic survey, geologic survey, economic geology, paleontological laboratories, chemical laboratory, lithological laboratory, physical laboratory, illustration, geologic library, and mineral statistics.

  Powell must have known that he would soon run afoul of Congress. Postwar national politicians still espoused laissez-faire attitudes toward federal governance, a general disposition that worked well for the big corporations of the Gilded Era. Politicians gave little thought to science, unless it involved a major inventive breakthrough such as the telephone or railroad, neither of which had resulted from public money. When Congress did wade into these waters, it was moved by singular responses to specific problems. Any endeavor to find an overall role for science in federal government got nary a look or consideration. These attitudes had opened a door through which Powell boldly strode. But that door was fast closing.

  A reckoning would come in the 1884–1885 appropriation request for the USGS. By all accounts it appeared a big winner, the Appropriations Committee furnishing the survey with $386,000—a more than 60 percent increase over the previous year, and more than two and a half times the entire budget of all federal surveys in 1878. Yet when the budget passed in July 1884, two items appeared that would lean hard on the survey, one a directive to the Joint Committee on Public Printing to curtail the mounting costs of publications. The year before, the survey’s publications expenses for its annual report and myriad monographs and bulletins topped $150,000. The second, more ominous, directive, appeared in the form of a Joint Congressional Commission tasked to secure greater efficiency and economy of administration of the Signal Service, Geological Survey, Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the Hydrographic Office of the Navy Department. With a combined annual budget of approximately $3 million, these four separate agencies consumed most federal science appropriations. The USGS had not been singled out, but Powell understood that some congressional apprehension now focused on the very public survey and its director. The Commission offered the microscope through which Congress could finely examine Powell’s fiscal and personnel management.

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  On December 4, 1884, the first day of testimony before the Joint Commission—known as the Allison Commission after its chairman, Republican senator William B. Allison from Iowa—Powell took a chair at 10 a.m. in the Senate Appropriations room before the six commissioners, three from the Senate, three from the House. If he thought this inquiry would end quickly, he was sorely mistaken. They summoned him again the next day, and then five more times over the next fourteen months. His oral testimony and prepared statements would fill 285 pages of the commission’s more than 1,000-page report. Of the six commissioners, Hilary Herbert, an influential congressman from Alabama, would become Powell’s most severe interlocutor, his biting asides and caustic questioning of Powell both acerbic and clever. Two more formidable duelists would be hard to imagine. The son of a slave-owning plantation culture, Herbert moved stiffly, his right arm hanging limp and useless at his side from a grievous war wound sustained at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864. He had also endured a prisoner-of-war camp.

  The war had forged unquenchable fires of nationalism in both men, but their views on reunion were radically different. A “Bourbon Democrat,” the Greenville lawyer had won election to the House in 1866 on a tide of like-minded Southerners who had bitterly resisted federal Reconstruction policies, while Powell had remained closely affiliated with the Republican Party of Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield, union and antislavery running in his veins. A month before Powell faced Herbert, the Northern Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland had narrowly won the presidential election, pledging to reduce federal inefficiencies and waste, and to institute a government-wide pursuit of corruption. The Allison Commission’s inquiry dovetailed well with Cleveland’s agenda, Herbert eagerly taking a cudgel to what he believed was the inflated presence of science in federal government. His target came to focus almost entirely on Powell. On trial would be Powell’s great visions for science in the federal service and his ambitious plan to map the continent. The debate would spill out into the press and soon get nasty.

  The Allison Commission began by asking the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in, much as it had earlier in the matter of survey consolidation. Another bout of iritis cut short Powell’s testimony in front of a newly assembled Academy committee. The Commission would choose to ignore the Academy’s broad-gauge recommendation—to organize all federal science under a cabinet-level Department of Science—but the ideas they presented as to what kind of science the government should conduct marked the beginning of a federal science doctrine that in its main aspects endures today.

  On the first day’s hearings, commissioners questioned Powell on the difference between geological, topographical, and geographic mapping. At one point, the chairman admitted his confusion; Powell kept explaining. They pressed him as to why a geologic map needed an exact topographic map to fit beneath it. “Every error appearing in geographic part or topographic part of a map projects itself into the geology and vitiates the geologic representation to that extent,” explained Powell wearily.

  Why then, inquired Herbert, did one need a topographic map if the land survey plots laying out townships could be used to mark deposits of coal, iron, and other minerals? What necessity would a map serve that located roads and hills accurately? The Major responded that “we do not usually tell a man, ‘You can go and find a mine on such a fraction of a section,’ but make outlines of the geologic formations in which ores are found, and every man exploits his own land.”

  Senator Eugene Hale of Maine detected the elephant sitting in the room. This slight man with a tightly trimmed beard, known for his dapper big city suits and Down East sarcasm, asked whether anyone believed that a line of an appropriation bill delivered the authority for creating a nationwide geological map. “Do you suppose that that carried in Congress, or elsewhere, any expectation of your going on and making triangulation, topographic work, and a complete topographic map of the United States? Do you suppose anybody construed it that way, or expected that?” Powell responded that “the passage of it hinged upon that point; and it was elaborately and fully discussed.” But Hale soon circled back.

  Hale represented that other senators besides himself had no idea that they were approving a national map of such grand proportions. He most definitely remembered the debates—how could he not, serving on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “Certainly it did not occur to the members of the Senate, it did not to carry the idea, that this was to take upon itself the province of a survey in the old States.” He directed his gaze more intently on Powell. “Now, in framing that language, why did not you put it in fairly and in terms?”

  Powell dodged the question, cheekily telling Hale that perhaps the distinguished senator did not recollect the whole history of the matter—then delved into the confusing politics of the appropriations bill. “It was in the amendment made by the Senate committee that went back to the House and was there approved under very peculiar conditions,” argued Powell. “It went out upon a point of order in the House and was restored in the Senate, and when it came back to the House the House did not even refer
it to the conference committee, as I remember it now, but called up that separate amendment and voted upon that question without it being referred to the conference committee.” Not willing to drill deeper on this first day of hearings, Hale pressed no further. The House as well as the Senate had ultimately approved the wording. The fog of this non-answer had covered Powell’s escape.

  Later that day, Herbert asked how long the map would take to complete. Again dodging the question, the Major detailed how he proposed to proceed. Eventually Herbert would extract his answer: Powell thought twenty-four years.

  On December 5, Powell was recalled; Herbert waited for several of the others to question him before he dived in to ask for a single practical purpose or new fact that the survey’s work had uncovered after already spending all this money. Powell answered that the work had not been completed, but that did not deter Herbert from pressing. For the first time in the proceedings, Powell appeared confused, bringing up the importance of mapping to constructing charts for mariners—the province of the Coastal Survey, not any of his departments. The two men stared at each other from opposite sides of a vast abyss, Powell’s unwavering faith in science challenged by an able man. Powell pulled back from specifics to identify why science itself was critical: “Perhaps the most practical value that a great scientific fact or principle may have subsists in its educating power—its power of improving the minds of the people.”