Monday Quote Frenzy – Mugwumps

In the late 1770s, Benjamin Franklin suffered several controversies over his ideas about electricity.

The first started in 1775, when Alessandro Volta carried out a series of experiments with an “electrophore”. The device was a refinement of an invention by Johannes Wilcke, and consisted of a fixed metal plate, a plate of what we would now recognize as non-conducting material, and topped with a rotating, foil-covered wooden shield. Volta showed that both the non-conducting plate and the metal plate became charged, and retained their charges when separated. In Franklin’s original theory, the charge on the metal plate should have decayed away. Franklin was too preoccupied with political events to deal with the problem. Fortunately, a colleague, Jan Ingenhousz, took up the problem, and published an explanation of the effect in the 1779 Philosophical Transactions, showing that Franklin’s electrical fluid theory could explain it if two different fluids (one positive and one negative) were produced in the two plates.

The second controversy centered on lightning rods, then called conductors. Franklin had demonstrated with a series of careful experiments that the charge of conducting rods could be drawn off more easily the more pointed their ends were. He thus recommended that lightning rods would be more efficient with pointed ends. In 1772, when the Board of Ordinance was considering using lightning rods to protect powder storehouses, Franklin made the case for pointed conductors, while Benjamin Wilson (a fellow Fellow of the Royal Society) argued for blunt-ended rods. Franklin won, but Wilson continued to pursue the point. In 1777, the Purfleet gunpowder magazine – equipped with Franklin’s pointed conductors – was struck by lightning. This gave Wilson the opportunity to press his argument, which he did in the same 1779 issue of Philosophical Transactions as Ingenhousz’s article.

Although the Royal Society overwhelmingly took Franklin’s side in the conductor debate, the effect of the two controversies was to make the public skeptical about all of this electrical theorizing. Thus, in a 1779 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine, we find:

[W]hen philosophers thus differ, many will think themselves safest with no conductors at all.

And thus, more than a century before the term was devised, we get mugwumps, in the popular sense of fence-sitters. Flash forward to the present and consider the public stance toward scientific issues of great significance. Global warming? There’s controversy, so it’s safest to ignore it. Teaching evolution? There’s controversy, so it’s safest to teach nothing. We dignify these people by calling them skeptics. But they’re mugwumps the lot of ‘em.

Horace Porter, once an aide to General Grant, later his personal secretary, and even later an executive with the Pullman company and a diplomat, said

A mugwump is a person educated beyond his intellect.

People who have the intellectual engagement to be aware of pseudo-controversies, but lack the intellect to recognize that the evidence for one side has far more weight than the other – those would be your mugwumps.

My appreciation to Joyce Chaplin’s biography of Benjamin Franklin, The First Scientific American, for information about the controversies of the 1770s. My apologies to the authors of the Wikipedia article on mugwumps, who make a strong case that the original Mugwumps were a political movement of substance.

Monday Quote Frenzy – Daniel Webster on the War of 1812

In the category of déjà vu all over again, we draw attention to the remarks of Daniel Webster, delivered in Congress in 1813, as the war began to turn sour.

Utterly astonished at the declaration of war, I have been surprised at nothing since. … Unless all history deceives me, I saw how it would be prosecuted when I saw how it was begun. There is in the nature of things and unchangeable relation between rash counsels and feeble execution.

(Annals of Congress, 13th Congress, 2nd session, pp. 943-944; as cited by Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, p. 159)

Webster’s dissatisfaction arose in part from the realization that one of the major presumptions of the initial war effort – that the invasion of Canada would be assisted by a substantial number of anti-British Canadians, who would flock to support the American forces, greeting them as liberators – was mostly wishful thinking.

A Historical Note

Several states (e.g., California and New York) have recently begun initiatives to regulate carbon emissions, thereby taking the initiative against global warming that has not been taken up by the industry-beholden Congress. Those of us who grew up during the battles for civil rights do not normally associate state legislatures with progressive vision. Yet, in the early days of the republic...

In 1792, James Madison (“A Candid State of Parties”, National Gazette, Sept. 26, 1792) was worried about the fledgling Republican party. Why, if the Republicans truly represented the interests of the majority - "the mass of people in every part of the union, in every state, and of every occupation" - why didn’t they win every election? Indeed, why couldn't they get their voters to the polls to turn out the rascally Federalists? Turnout in national elections was only 1 in 4 eligible voters, significantly lower than in state or local elections.

John Taylor (A Definition of Parties; or, The Effects of the Paper System Considered, Philadelphia, 1794) blamed the special interests. With the setting up of Hamilton's Bank of the United States, government securities were available not only for commercial activity, but also for speculation. Those who benefited from paper-based schemes were, according to Taylor, exercising undue influence over the Congress, and (by propaganda and patronage) over the electorate.

It's no wonder they're so good at it; they've had 220 years of practice!

Taylor's manuscript was well circulated in Virginia, and impressed such worthies as Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. They paid particular heed to his recommended solution, which was to encourage the state legislatures to take a more active role in running the country. Of course, that was in a time when state legislatures could exert more control, through the election of senators and the selection of presidential electors.

Nowadays, the linkage is different, but the approach remains sensible. Control of the state legislature means control of redistricting, strong local organization means strong turnout, and so on. Not all politics is local, but the kind we can really have a say in is.

A sidenote: This rumination is rooted in further reading in Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy. I really like this book.

Another sidenote: This is a cross-posting from 16th Street Forum.