Technical prowess has been a key part of America's development from a colonial coastal settlement into a continent-spanning world power, yet ambivalence about science, technology, and professional expertise is been genetically embedded in American culture. This attitude is evident in one of America's great mythological moments, Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815:
What did the American victory really mean? The Battle of New Orleans had been fought after the treaty of peace had been signed...
Americans at the time did not see their great victory as meaningless. What they chose to make of it is instructive. They did not emphasize the fact that the battle had been fought after peace had been agreed. They seldom rejoiced in the multiracial multiethnic nature of the winning army. Neither did they celebrate the technological know-how that enabled their artillery to perform so well. Instead the public seized upon the notion that western riflemen, untrained but sharp-eyed, had defeated the arrogant British. In fact, primary responsibility for the American victory lay with the artillery, not with the frontier marksmen of legend...In any case, the best marksmen were not necessarily frontiersmen: A target contest between Coffee's Tennessee Volunteers and Beale's Rifle Company, composed of middle-class New Orleans citizenry, was won by the latter...
The contrast between the effectiveness of the artillery and the navy with the repeatedly disgraceful performances of the militia in the War of 1812 could scarcely be more glaring. But cannons seemed not altogether satisfactory as a patriotic symbol for the American public. Cannons were products of the industrial revolution and government-sponsored technological development. A predominantly rural people wanted heroes from the countryside. Surely it must be "the American Husbandman, fresh from his plough," a congressional orator insisted, who had bested the best Europe had to offer...
The Battle of New Orleans came to be regarded by Jackson's many admirers as a victory of self-reliant individuals under charismatic leadership. It seemed a triumph of citizen-soldiers over professionals, of the common man over hierarchy, of willpower over rules....
[This] also manifested a failure to foresee how much the future of the United States would owe to mechanization and government-sponsored enterprises like the federal armories that made cannons. Jackson's admirers liked to believe theirs was a country where untutored vigor could prevail; to point out that technical expertise mattered seemed undemocratic.
- Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, p. 16-18
There is a lesson here for cranky scientists (I'm one of them) who like to rant about the scientific illiteracy and anti-intellectual obstinence of those American people who fight stem cell research and want our kids to be taught creationism in public schools. Actually, there are two lessons. First, while promoting science literacy is a great and necessary thing, wariness of expertise and professionals is tightly stitched into our cultural fabric, and it's going to stay there.
Second, Americans love to say one thing and do another: in spite of our cultural ambivalence about science, we have always aggressively used science and technology to achieve our goals (and not just military goals).
We churn out both creationists and Nobel Prize winners. It's confusing to many, both inside and out of America, and some take creationist rants like McLeroy's as a sign of our cultural decline. But the long view suggests that what you see now is about par for the course.
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