Excerpt from The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Voting returns had already begun to come in (there was no single national election day) and two months later Democrat Samuel Tilden would win the popular vote by a comfortable margin. But he would never take office as president. Instead the Republican secretary of war would threaten to "force a reversal" of the vote, federal troops with fixed bayonets would patrol Washington, and southerners would talk of reigniting the Civil War. That crisis would ultimately be resolved through an extraconstitutional special committee and a political understanding: Republicans would discard the voting returns of three states (Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina) and seize a single disputed electoral vote in Oregon to keep the presidency in the person of Rutherford B. Hayes. But they also would withdraw all federal troops from the South and cease intervening in southern affairs, leaving the Negroes there to fend for themselves.

The war involving the Hopkins was more muted but no less profound. The outcome would help define one element of the character of the nation: the extent to which the nation would accept or reject modern science and, to a lesser degree, how secular it would become, how godly it would remain.

Precisely at 11:00 a.m., a procession of people advanced upon the stage. First came Daniel Coit Gilman, president of the Hopkins, and on his arm was Huxley. Following in single file came the governor, the mayor, and other notables. As they took their seats the conversations in the audience quickly died away, replaced by expectancy of a kind of declaration of war.

Of medium height and middle age (though he already had iron-gray hair and nearly white whiskers) and possessed of what was described as "a pleasant face," Huxley did not look the warrior. But he had a warrior's ruthlessness. His dicta included the pronouncement: "The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying." A brilliant scientist, later president of the Royal Society, he advised investigators, "Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." He also believed that learning had purpose, stating, "The great end of life is not knowledge but action."

To act upon the world himself, he became a proselytizer for faith in human reason. By 1876 he had become the world's foremost advocate of the theory of evolution and of science itself. Indeed, H. L. Mencken said that "it was he, more than any other man, who worked that great change in human thought which marked the Nineteenth Century." Now President Gilman gave a brief and simple introduction. Then Professor Huxley began to speak.

Normally he lectured on evolution, but today he was speaking on a subject of even greater magnitude. He was speaking about the process of intellectual inquiry. The Hopkins was to be unlike any other university in America. Aiming almost exclusively at the education of graduate students and the furtherance of science, it was intended by its trustees to rival not Harvard or Yale (neither of them considered worthy of emulation) but the greatest institutions of Europe, and particularly Germany. Perhaps only in the United States, a nation ever in the act of creating itself, could such an institution come into existence both so fully formed in concept and already so renowned, even before the foundation of a single building had been laid.

"His voice was low, clear and distinct," reported one listener. "The audience paid the closest attention to every word which fell from the lecturer's lips, occasionally manifesting their approval by applause." Said another, "Professor Huxley's method is slow, precise, and clear, and he guards the positions which he takes with astuteness and ability. He does not utter anything in the reckless fashion which conviction sometimes countenances and excuses, but rather with the deliberation that research and close inquiry foster."

Copyright John M Barry 2004. All rights reserved