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Spencer's American Disciples: Fiske, Youmans, and the Appropriation Of

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Spencer's American Disciples: Fiske, Youmans, and the Appropriation Of Fiske, Youmans, and the Appropriation of the System 123 Chapter 6 Spencer’s American Disciples: Fiske, Youmans, and the Appropriation of the System Bernard Lightman In 1863 an article titled “Evolution of Language” appeared in the October issue of the North American Review. The anonymous author argued that Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theory could help to revolutionize the science of philol- ogy. Impressed by the article, Edward Youmans (1821–1887), science lecturer and advisor to the Appleton publishing house, was curious about the author’s identity. Youmans was at the center of a Spencerian circle in New York and was constantly on the outlook for others who were like-minded. During the same month that the article on language was published, Youmans happened to be in Boston to raise money to underwrite a reprint of Spencer’s Essays in America. He was shocked to discover that the North American Review article had been written by a young Harvard College student of twenty-one by the name of John Fiske (1842–1901). Anxious to meet him, Youmans tracked Fiske down at Cambridge.1 Fiske later recalled that meeting Youmans that day changed his life. He declared, “I have always dated a new era in my life from the Sunday afternoon when Youmans … came to my room in Cambridge.”2 When he met Youmans, Fiske knew only four people who had any concep- tion of the significance of Spencer’s work.3 Their enthusiastic admiration for Spencer was ridiculed. According to Fiske, when they insisted that Spencer’s work as “as great as Newton’s, and that his theory of evolution was going to remodel human thinking upon all subjects whatever, people used to stare at us and take us for idiots.”4 But through Youmans, Fiske was introduced to the Spencerian circle in New York,5 and later, again through Youmans, the British scientists at the center of the development of evolutionary thought, including 1 Milton Berman, John Fiske: The Evolution of a Popularizer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 54. 2 John Fiske, Edward Livingstone Youmans: Interpreter of Science for the People: A Sketch of His Life (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1894), 167. 3 Ibid., 167. 4 Ibid., 167. 5 Fiske met the New York Spencerian circle in March 1864. Youmans introduced him to Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist and Congregationalist minister, the partners of the Appleton © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004264007_008 124 Lightman Thomas Huxley, John Tyndall, Charles Darwin, and Spencer himself. Being a part of this Anglo-American intellectual community enabled Fiske to become one of the foremost American popularizers of evolution. Past scholarship has not neglected Fiske and Youmans’s intellectual debts to Spencer.6 Both Fiske and Youmans were important communicators of Spencerian evolution who were committed to demonstrating Spencer’s dis- tinctive originality and importance, especially to American audiences. There were certainly other American disciples of Spencer. However by focusing on Fiske and Youmans I can delineate how their Spencerism led them to take two different, but complementary, approaches to discipleship. Fiske was the popu- larizer, the productive writer and lecturer who tried to help Spencer complete his philosophical system. Youmans was primarily the organizer, working behind the scenes as Spencer’s American agent. They both took advantage of the new publishing terrain after the American Civil War to bring Spencer’s sys- tem to the forefront of the American intellectual scene, and even beyond. They both appropriated Spencer’s thought in a way that resonated with the American reading public. If we examine the careers of Fiske and Youmans in light of the rich scholarship on nineteenth century print culture, a new picture of their discipleship emerges. The Communications Revolution and the American Publishing Scene Only two years after Fiske and Youmans met, Spencer’s ambitious plan to write a multi-volumed synthesis of knowledge seemed to be on the verge of collapse. The initial volume, First Principles, which started to appear in parts in 1860, was published as a book in 1862. But in the autumn of 1865 Spencer announced that he would no longer be able to issue his series of philosophical works. Spencer had been publishing the books at his own expense, and sales had been disap- pointing, both in Britain and the United States.7 Despite the establishment of a subscription scheme early on, where subscribers would each pay 10s yearly to receive installments, and the help of Youmans with the American market, publishing house, Manton Marble, editor of the New York World, and John W. Draper, chemist and author of History of the Intellectual Development of Europe. See Berman, John Fiske, 54. 6 These are important themes in Berman’s John Fiske and in discussions of Youmans in Richard Hofstader’s Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) and Robert C. Bannister’s Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (1979). 7 Fiske, Edward Livingstone Youmans, 199..
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