Republican Science
Today's GOP seems increasingly anti-science, but it wasn't always so. 80 years ago, the antiscience social conservatives were Democrats.
By Shawn Lawrence Otto | Jul 07, 2011 | Comments (12)
Today's GOP seems increasingly antiscience, which may explain why fifty-five percent of scientists polled in 2009 said they were Democrats, while only six percent said they were Republicans, compared to thirty-five and twenty-three percent of the general public, respectively.
But it doesn't have to be this way, and history suggests some striking insights into how it's gotten so extreme, and what may be in store for Republicans this election.
Early in the twentieth century the party identification of scientists was almost reversed. Republican Abraham Lincoln had created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. Republican William McKinley, who is admired by Karl Rove, won two presidential elections, in 1896 and 1900, over the firey, charismatic, anti-evolution Democrat William Jennings Bryan. McKinley supported the creation of the Bureau of Standards, which would eventually become today's National Institutes of Science and Technology. Bryan’s strident campaigns of anti-evolutionism, culminating in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, helped to drive even more scientists toward the Republican party, just as today's extreme creationist politicians like Michele Bachmann are driving them toward the Democrats.
“We have many people even here who hasten to condemn evolution without having the remotest conception of what it is that they are condemning, nor the slightest interest in an objective study of the evidence in the case which is all that ‘the teaching of evolution’ means,” wrote an exasperated Republican, the Nobel physicist and CalTech president Robert A. Millikan, in the leading journal Science in 1923, “men whose decisions have been formed, as are all decisions in the jungle, by instinct, by impulse, by inherited loves and hates, instead of by reason. Such people may be amiable and lovable, just as is any house dog, but they are a menace to democracy and to civilization because ignorance and the designing men who fatten upon it control their votes and their influence.” He could have been talking of Geroge W. Bush, who believed in governing by his "gut."
Other prominent scientists noted the political divide. The great botanist Albert Spear Hitchcock, who would soon become director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wrote the following spring in the same journal that “it is absurd for a scientist to shiver with fear if he sees a black cat cross his path or if he walks under a ladder. It is equally absurd to believe that all Germans or all democrats, or all Roman Catholics … are undesirables and a menace to society.”
Originally growing out of the anti-federalist party of Thomas Jefferson, by the early 20thCentury the Democratic Party had become dominated on the national level by Southern religious conservatives, and was divided over culture war issues including evolution, the war on alcohol, restrictive immigration laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Catholic faith of Al Smith, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928.
Republicans, by contrast, were the party of Lincoln and Roosevelt, of progressive optimism and tolerance married with environmentalism and finance – the party of rationalism and national parks. And by the 1930s, one of the most famous men in the world was a Republican scientist named Edwin Hubble. Hubble's work established the field of cosmology; he showed there were other galaxies outside the Milky Way, and that the universe was expanding, thus leading to the idea of the Big Bang. His protege, the great astrophysicist Allan Sandage, a Democrat, told me that Hubble took great delight in scheduling Democrats for telescope time on election day to prevent them from voting.
The press was different back then, too. Instead of ignoring much of the major science discoveries, or writing he-said-she-said accounts of mainstream scientists versus etreme outliers, they trumpeted science. Here's an example from Hubble's private papers, which I was lucky enough to examine when researching a film about him some years ago:
My, how times have changed, and yet my, how they stay the same.
Tags: Antiscience, Religion, Politics, Republicans, Democrats, Belief, Evolution, Creationism
Comments (12)
Mike Haubrich:
Jul 08, 2011 at 08:06 PM
With the budget deficit, the modern Republicans have an excuse to cut science programs. I get so discouraged at times, that these people are just plain cutting the legs out from under the table of the research and development that at one time made the U.S. a leader in science and related industries. What do rich people want? They are going to get a country that can do nothing soon for them; workers with no disposable income, disabled people with no way to be gainfully employed (lack of educational opportunities,) poisoned water and air and a hotter and more active climate. They are destroying this country and it frustrates me.
The James Webb Telescope is about to be scuttled, even though it is near completion and they have already spent $3 billion. How wasteful can you get?
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/local/politics/2011/07/hoyer_dont_cut_goddard_telesco.html
I mean other than leaving $18 billion in Iraq with no one guarding it....
Shawn Lawrence Otto:
Jul 10, 2011 at 02:47 PM
The social neoconservatives that are behind much of the science opposition seem not to understand or be concerned with fiscal conservatism or sound financial practices; only with ideology and a sort of team sports, uncritical loyalty to party before country. It is an attitude that is gravely endangering the republic, IMO.
Suresh:
Mar 13, 2012 at 02:48 AM
Nick, there was actually a fair degere of agreement from the scientists for a very long period, when debate was conducted in journals. Nobody took any notice of them until the need for a large-scale political solution became apparent. At this point, two things happened: (a) people who hadn't ever thought about the issue felt that they needed to look into it, and (b) the fact that the political solution was bound to be disruptive became apparent.Now I think a lot of Aussies were quite prepared to give the scientists a go, especially given that a lot of us, from our own observation, think that something IS very, very wrong with the climate. On the other hand, climatology is a comparatively new science, it's very complex, and it deals in statistics. There was no climatology in (eg) NSW high school science in the 1980s, so we have no familiarity with the material and many of us associate statistics with lies. It is unsurprising that some people would be suspicious of the evidence, or of the motives of the scientists.I agree that there isn't much scientific explanation being done for Joe Public, but that's because Joe Public doesn't watch Catalyst or listen to the Science Show. RealClimate and Wattsupwiththat aren't terribly newcomer-friendly either and these are places that are probably trying to educate people to their POV. The Dept of Climate Change website doesn't look too bad.I am not sure that asking Who started it? is going to help you much. I think you'll find that the biffo started as soon as governments (and the large corporations concerned) realised (b). In any case, a theory (or lack of one) isn't responsible for the bad manners of its proponents.
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