The eclipse of 1878, then, arrived at a fortuitous moment in this campaign, and its influence was far-reaching and multifaceted. For the United States, a nation of strivers, the celestial event suggested a higher calling. The only one it can look to here is the educated public.” In a democratic and egalitarian America, the citizenry was in charge of the nation’s destiny, and therefore advancing science in the United States required convincing the populace of the value of research-that it was worth promotion and investment. “In Germany the universities, in France the government, in England the scientific societies. “In other intellectual nations, science has a fostering mother,” he maintained. Simon Newcomb did not subscribe to this view, but the American astronomer agreed that his own country faced a special challenge. “Many Europeans, struck by this fact, have looked upon it as a natural and inevitable result of equality and they have thought that, if a democratic state of society and democratic institutions were ever to prevail over the whole earth, the human mind would gradually find its beacon-lights grow dim, and men would relapse into a period of darkness.” “It must be acknowledged that in few of the civilized nations of our time have the higher sciences made less progress than in the United States,” observed Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker, after his visit to America in 1831. Around that same time, America would start eclipsing the Old World in another realm: the pursuit of science-an eventuality that, a few generations earlier, many in Europe thought would never come to pass. Soon it would project its military might overseas, interpreting Manifest Destiny on an ever-grander scale as it grabbed possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and by 1900 this brawny empire would overshadow its European rivals economically, outperforming Britain, France, and Germany in industrial production. Like an ungainly teenager after a growth spurt, the United States was settling into its larger, more muscular body, and it was beginning to exert its strength.
At the time of the 1878 total solar eclipse, the country was still adjusting to this new reality. Historians have identified the period between 18-from the beginning of the Civil War to the end of Reconstruction-as the era that created the America we recognize today, when a continental power finally coalesced north and south, ocean to ocean.
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