Increase and diffusion of knowledge: Ethos of science and education in the Smithsonian's inception

Marlana Portolano

doi:10.1080/07350199909359256

Rhetoric Review Sep 1999

Increase and diffusion of knowledge: Ethos of science and education in the Smithsonian's inception

Marlana Portolano United States Naval Academy

Abstract

In 1835 the United States inherited the large estate of James Smithson, the natural son of a British nobleman. Smithson had written in his will, I bequeath the whole of my property . . . to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian institution, an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men (Rhees i). The single, enigmatic statement in Smithson's will was the only instruction that Congress had; as a result, competing Congressmen were able to interpret Smithson's words according to their own political and civil agendas. The eight-year debate that ensued over the use of the money was a groundbreaking ideological struggle in the nation's pursuit of knowledge. During these early years of the nineteenth century, universities were only beginning to develop in the United States, and the German thrust for research had not yet made its mark on these new institutions. The rhetoric in the Smithsonian debate represents a uniquely American version of the longstanding struggle between ethos as a value system passed on through education and ethos as a value system embodied in the new science of discovery.1 The debate forced Congressmen and citizens to address directly the question of where intellectual authority should reside in the developing nation. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran argue that early nineteenth-century America was an oratorical culture: one in which a tradition of citizenship and public argument relied on tacit agreement about the commonality of knowledge. This oratorical culture, according to Clark and Halloran, underwent an individualistic transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified by Andrew Jackson's defeat of John Quincy Adams in the presidential election of 1828. While the debate over the formation of the Smithsonian does not entirely support the theory of a rhetorical paradigm shift or transformation, it does dramatize a creative struggle between multiple ideological approaches. While the ethos of public education competed with the ethos of scientific discovery, a larger cultural context of traditional consensus vied with the new ideology of liberal individualism. Individual speakers often

Journal: Rhetoric Review
Published: 1999-09-01
DOI: 10.1080/07350199909359256
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Topics: rhetorical criticism argument public rhetoric
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Increase and diffusion of knowledge: Ethos of science and education in the Smithsonian's inception

Abstract

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References (27) · 2 in this index

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