The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America 9780226651866

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THE REPUBLIC OF COLOR

THE REPUBLIC OF COLOR Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America

MICHAEL ROSSI

The Univer siTy of ChiCago Press ChiCago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2019 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2019 Printed in the United States of America 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65172-9 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65186-6 (e- book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226651866.001.0001 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Bevington Fund. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rossi, Michael (Historian of science), author. Title: The republic of color : science, perception, and the making of modern America / Michael Rossi. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019008626 | ISBN 9780226651729 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226651866 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Color vision—Research—United States—History—19th century. | Color vision—Research—United States—History—20th century. | Color—Research— United States—History. | Science—Social aspects—United States. | United States— Civilization—1865–1918. Classification: LCC QP483.R67 2019 | DDC 612.7/927—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008626 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper).

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. ACtS 2:2 – 4

CONTENTS

INtRODuCtION / Cloven Tongues of Fire 1 CHAPteR ONe / Modern Chromatics: Ogden Rood and the Wrong-Workings of the Eye 23 CHAPteR twO / From Chemistry to Phanerochemistry: Charles Sanders Peirce and the Semiotic of Color 55 CHAPteR tHRee / Pathologies of Perception: Benjamin Joy Jeffries and the Invention of Color Blindness 85 CHAPteR FOuR / Colors and Cultures: Evolution, Biology, and Society 115 CHAPteR FIve / The Pragmatic Physiology of Color Vision: Christine Ladd-Franklin and the “Evolutionary Theory” of Color 146 CHAPteR SIx / Small Lies for Big Truths: Standards, Values, and Color Terms 176 CHAPteR SeveN / The Logical and the Genetic: Bodies, Work, and Formal Color Notations 203 CONCLuSION / Talking about Color 241 Acknowledgments

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Bibliography

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Index

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I n tr o d uc tI o n

CLOVEN TONGUES OF FIRE

The Vision Consumed by darkness, the dying sun flickered angrily in the sky. From a makeshift observatory in Princeton, New Jersey, Joseph Henry and Stephen Alexander— professors of natural philosophy at the nearby College of New Jersey1— took notes on the solar eclipse of September 18, 1838, watching as the diminutive satellite waged its itinerant campaign to blot out its diurnal rival. Degree by degree, the moon’s shadow grew larger, more apparent, more complete, until, within the space of forty- five minutes, the sun had almost disappeared, except for a glowing ring around a blackened circle. Suddenly, Henry beheld something unexpected: “projections of red flame” arcing from the surface of the sun, glinting against the encroaching shadow. He called out to his colleague in surprise, but Alexander initially couldn’t see the projections, and then confirmed Henry’s observation only with great difficulty. Comparing their experiences later, the two men decided that their different apprehensions of the flames from the sun had been caused by the fact that each scientist had been using a different color of filter on his telescope: Henry, a red filter; Alexander, a yellowish- green filter. Referring to his and Henry’s divergent experiences of the eclipse, Alexander later concluded that there could be no other explanation for this “remark1. The College of New Jersey changed its name to Princeton University in 1896. For ease of reading, when not referring to a specific historical moment, I use “Princeton,” but when historical specificity is needed, I use “College of New Jersey.”

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able circumstance” except that the sun had an atmosphere not unlike that of Earth, “through which, as through our own, the red rays have the greatest penetrative power.” That is, the rays most attracted to the red glass were able to filter through Henry’s lens while remaining invisible to Alexander’s. The observation of the atmosphere of the sun was “of great importance,” thought Alexander.2 Seventeen years later, on the occasion of another eclipse— the “big” eclipse of 1855— Henry, now secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, recalled his luminous vision of 1838 before an audience, sketching, as one reporter put it, a “circle of cloven tongues of fire” on a blackboard and describing in rapturous detail the “beautiful pink color” of the flames. But this time, Henry was no longer certain that he’d actually glimpsed a new, physical fact on that fall day in 1838. Rather than a vision of the sun, Henry had come to suspect that he’d been fooled by his own perceptions. As he told the assembled crowd, he now believed that the colorful projections that he had seen emanating from the sun were what he called “subjective” phenomena— accidents of vision; colors “in the eye”— rather than immediate qualities of the physical world. Should this be the case, Henry mused, the pink protuberances on the sun would “open a field of investigation,” a new scientific discipline focused on the character and functioning of human sensations.3 This was, on the one hand, an exciting prospect to researchers such as Henry. A science predicated upon, in essence, observing observation would extend the reach of scientific inquiry into hitherto- unknown, intimate, and off- limits areas of human existence. On the other hand, it had unsettling implications. For if Henry, a man trained to observe and record reality with unsparing accuracy, could nevertheless so easily fail to distinguish that which was real from that which was a product of his own mind, the possibility arose that all observations— indeed, all the empirical facts upon which civilized humankind built collective knowledge— were based not on facts of the objective world but rather on subjectively variable individual perceptions. This is a book about how this “field of investigation” developed into color science: a polyglot endeavor comprising the physics, physiology, psychol2. Joseph Henry to John Vaughn, Oct. 13, 1838, in The Papers of Joseph Henry, ed. Nathan Reingold, 12 vols. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972–2008), 4:120; “Stated Meeting, November 2,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1, no. 5 (1838): 50– 51; “Stated Meeting, December 21,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 1, no. 5 (1838): 65; “The Sun Has Red Flames,” Daily Comet, Oct. 27, 1855. 3. “The Sun Has Red Flames.”

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ogy, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics of human color vision. From pink protuberances in an astronomer’s eye to precipitates of Prussian blue; from the color of railroad signals in New England to the color of the Arctic Ocean; from the brilliance of lemons to the deep black of coal; from mysterious isabel to enigmatic elephant’s breath; from the colors of canaries to the colors of skin— color mattered deeply to nineteenth- century Americans. Between the time of Henry’s vision of cloven tongues of fire and the middle of the twentieth century, an expansive array of scientists, government administrators, artists, educators, laborers, and industrialists— among many other groups and many other communities— worked to define and redefine, explain and reexplain, what it meant to experience color. They devised tests and regulations for indicating color sensations; they argued over relationships between labor and aesthesis; they constructed pedagogical programs for teaching color vision to schoolchildren and territorial subjects; they crafted new philosophies of logic and mind based on principles of scientific color perception; they made models of standard color relationships and color harmonies and attempted to coordinate them with ideas of ideal observers. And in doing all these things (and more) they formulated not simply laws of perception but a republic of color: an ideological, administrative, and political apparatus for ensuring that all those who could experience color would do so with the moral and aesthetic cohesion required of a rapidly expanding and self- consciously modernizing American nation. In twenty- first- century writing on culture and history, color holds a peculiar ground. It is at once an aspect of the world that is generally assumed to be meaningful to all human beings, and yet it stands out as especially important to the historical production of industrial modernity. In the first instance, a large and ever- growing body of scholarly and popular literature explores the historical significance of colors— examining both the relationship between color and visual culture in general and the symbolism attached to particular colors in particular times and places.4 In the second instance, historians have tended to see the efflorescence of commercially

4. General overviews of color and culture include Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004). Works on specific colors include Michel Pastoureau’s Red (2017), Green (2014), Black (2008), and Blue (2001) (all Princeton: Princeton University Press); Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (repr., New York: Harper

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available forms of color production at the turn of the century as paradigmatic of American modernity itself— as colored lights and bright, synthetic pigments came to distinguish aesthetic life in the fin de siècle from life before.5 Taken collectively, this scholarship tells a story about the ways in which color— as a universal aspect of human consciousness— expresses itself through techniques and technologies which themselves shape human societies. A color like mauve, a stunning purple dye first synthesized in 1856, can be seen as paradigmatic of both ideas: at once a signal of new production technologies and of a transformation in how people saw the world.6 Hidden beneath these questions of the general meanings and specific manufactures of colors, however, lies a deeper question about how individuals came to know and understand sensory qualities, how this knowledge shaped scientific understandings of bodies and political subjectivity, and how, therefore, beliefs about color came to possess the manifold explanations for cultural production that they do today.7 This book is not, in the main, a story about the significance of particular colors or about the development of color- producing technologies. It is, rather, a story of how it became possible for a diverse array of people in a self- consciously industrialPerennial, 2006); Baruch Sterman, The Rarest Blue: The Remarkable Story of an Ancient Color Lost to History and Rediscovered (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2012); Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 5. See esp. Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 6. Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 7. Foremost among consonant approaches to questions of color sensation, aesthesis, and scientific and social practice, consider Nicholas Gaskill’s excellent Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which treats the emergence of a modern notion of color sensation in nineteenth- century American literature. Gaskill pays especially close attention to the construction and mediation of color through language, examining the philosophy, pedagogy, science, and technology which underwrote literary approaches to color. Other scholarship on color perception as a social, scientific, technological, and linguistic phenomenon includes Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Barbara Ann Christine Saunders, The Invention of Basic Colour Terms (De Uitvinding van Basiskleurtermen: Met Een Samenvatting in Het Nederlands) (Utrecht: R.U.U.-I.S.O.R., 1992); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1992); Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Hanna Rose Shell, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2012).

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izing and pluralistic country to think about color as meaningful at all— let alone meaningful according to the standards of science. It is a story of arguments and ideas, experiments and misunderstandings, moralisms and formalisms. And it is a story, ultimately, about how color— that seemingly simple, yet infinitely protean object of desire— continually slipped from the grasp of its pursuers.

Color, Time, and PlaCe Americans did not invent inquiries into the nature of color, nor was color a problem unique to the nineteenth century. In the ancient world, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus, among others, speculated in detailed and oftenperplexing passages about the nature and mixture of colors.8 In ninthcentury Baghdad, Abu Yūsuf Yaʿqūb Ibn ʾIshāq as -Sabbāh al-Kindī wrote on ̇ ̇ ̇ ̇ the character of color as a sensory phenomenon and mused on the color of the sky.9 Enlightenment philosophers— René Descartes, Robert Boyle, and John Locke, among others— argued over the question of whether colors existed as phenomena of the physical world, as mental events, or as some hybrid disposition of the two.10 In Cambridge, England, Isaac Newton’s experiments with prisms convinced him that white light contained within it all colors; and a century later, in Prussia, Wolfgang von Goethe lofted a vigorous objection to Newton’s physicalist model of color.11 Sometimes explicitly, often implicitly, American color scientists worked against the backdrop of this centuries- old scholarship about color theory and color character. Color theory in the United States was not— intellectually or materially— a land out of time.

8. Peter Struycken, “Colour Mixtures according to Democritus and Plato,” Mnemosyne 56, no. 3 (2003): 273–305; Eva Keuls, “Skiagraphia Once Again,” American Journal of Archaeology 79, no. 1 (1975): 1–16; Rolf G. Kuehni, Color Space and Its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2003), esp. 22–27. 9. Peter Adamson, “Vision, Light and Color in al-Kindi, Ptolemy and the Ancient Commentators,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 16, no. 2 (2006): 207– 36; David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 10. Zed Adams, On the Genealogy of Color: A Case Study in Historicized Conceptual Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2015). 11. Dennis L. Sepper, Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Frederick Burwick, The Damnation of Newton: Goethe’s Color Theory and Romantic Perception (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986); Myles W. Jackson, “Putting the Subject Back into Color: Accessibility in Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre,” Perspectives on Science 16, no. 4 (Sept. 30, 2008): 378–91.

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Nevertheless, for nineteenth- century American scientists, color posed particular technical, philosophical, political, and practical problems. These problems— encompassing the nature of color itself, the ways through which scientists know the real, and the proper organization and uses of that knowledge— make the development of color science in the United States a rich ground for examining the ways in which questions and assumptions about perception feed back into interconnections between sensation, politics, and ideology. The technical problem of color lay in the fact that, of all natural phenomena studied by nineteenth- century scientists, color in and of itself was uniquely resistant to representation. Clouds, stars, geological formations, living creatures, electrical and optical phenomena— all could be represented, abstracted, cataloged, and analyzed without loss of representational fidelity from variations in local environment or viewer perception.12 It is true, of course, that different sorts of representations possess different sorts of codes and meanings at different times. A drawing of an animal made according to a secondhand account might come over time to seem like a less reliable representation of that animal than a photograph. A photograph might come to seem less informative than a statistical table. But drawing, photograph, and table all maintain their representational fidelity under different viewing conditions and for different observers; an animal— in the same way as a cloud or a star or a subatomic particle— did not need to be represented in its entirety in order to be represented at all. Colors, in contrast, have no salient features except for their color: a square of color in a book of colors is a representation of itself. On the one hand, this means that any given color— whether conveyed through a patch of paint, a chunk of colored glass, a ribbon, or projected from a light source— is completely faithful to the concept that it represents at the moment of its presentation. On the other hand, it is technically difficult to reproduce particular colors with any sort of exactitude: small variations in environment and observer have huge effects on how specific colors look, whether reproduced in pigments or in light.13

12. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison offer an excellent exploration of the ways in which different representational strategies carry different epistemological and ideological weights in their Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Their study demonstrates that producers of scientific atlases— books containing representations of scientific objects of study— compiled their collections according to particular epistemic virtues: ways of verifying truth- value that were embedded in the aesthetic production of the atlases’ images themselves. 13. It was, of course, possible to graphically represent spectra without showing colors per se, especially when one was determined simply to deal with spectral lines. But spectra are not

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The analysis of colors, therefore, called for an array of technologies— from optical equipment like photometers and spectroscopes, to industrial color standards for mass- producing color charts, to pedagogical interventions to regularize color vocabulary. The technical capacity to work on color in this way— for example, in terms of infrastructure, materials, and administrative ability— was deeply entwined with the industrial development of the American state of the late nineteenth century. Yet color science was not simply a response to, as Susan Buck-Morss puts it, “a human sensorium fundamentally altered by the tempos and technologies of factory and urban life.”14 Rather, as with the subjects of atlases, the study of color, too, had its own epistemic virtues, ones derived not uniquely as consequences of the tempos and technologies of factory and urban life but from more basic, philosophical questions about what it means to see and how individuals ought to relate their own senses to the world around them. American scientists like Henry were fixated on these philosophical questions. If scientists were to claim that their work had real truth- value— a claim to higher moral purpose than mere usefulness— then they had to be able to explain why they were so certain that their observations were of essentially real phenomena. Why was it not the case that cognition (rather than experience) was the basis of all knowledge? How could scientists be certain that laws of nature were constant? Why were they so sure that knowledge came from real things in the world and not simply from sensory illusions? In response to these anxieties, American researchers hewed to a form of metaphysics called “common sense” philosophy. Also known as “natural realism”— and, to its detractors, “naive realism”— common sense philosophy held, simply, that the senses give reliable information about the world because the world exists in such a way that human beings can sense it. A product of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and William Hamilton, among others, common sense explained why scientific observation worked. Henry, for instance, thought common sense to be so fundamental to scientific practice that he schooled students in his natural philosophy classes at Princeton on the basics of comcolors; they are relationships between colors and therefore are of a different essential order than colors themselves. On the technical difficulties that bedeviled those who wished to print color reproductions of spectra on paper, see Klaus Hentschel, Mapping the Spectrum: Techniques of Visual Representation in Research and Teaching (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 14. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 63.

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mon sense before he ventured to begin lecturing on electricity, magnetism, or any other topic of science proper.15 Common sense was predicated on four basic tenets. First, there exists an objectively real material world of “matter,” which includes the human body, is based on constant and stable laws, and exists in the same form whether conscious beings are observing it or not. Second, matter is distinct from “mind”— and mind is that which human beings call a soul and experience as consciousness, reason, emotions, and feelings. Third, matter and mind alike have the property of being intelligible. That is, matter makes an impression on mind, and mind is, by its nature, configured to accept those impressions— or as one of Henry’s students jotted in his notes, “[m]atter is that which affects our senses, mind is that which thinks.”16 Fourth, and perhaps most centrally, the senses are the bridge between mind and matter. Henry told his classes, “It is through the senses that we obtain any knowledge of matter: ‘the senses are the gates of a man’s soul.’”17 As another commentator put it, “[t]o make known to us the existence of matter and its qualities is precisely what our senses were given us for.”18 Finally, though not essential to common sense philosophy, most Americans accepted that an omniscient, loving, Christian God had created the world and enabled its constancy and revelation through the senses. Color was important to common sense philosophy. Dugald Stewart as15. On common sense at Princeton, see Charles Bradford Bow, “Samuel Stanhope Smith and Common Sense Philosophy at Princeton,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2010): 189– 209; Owen Anderson, Reason and Faith in the Theology of Charles Hodge: American Common Sense Realism (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2013). On common sense theories of vision in particular, see Lorne Falkenstein, “Reid and Smith on Vision,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 2, no. 2 (Sept. 1, 2004): 103– 18; Giovanni B. Grandi, “Reid’s Direct Realism about Vision,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2006): 225–41; Lorne Falkenstein and Giovanni B. Grandi, “The Role of Material Impressions in Reid’s Theory of Vision: A Critique of Gideon Yaffe’s ‘Reid on the Perception of the Visible Figure,’” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2003): 117– 33; Jonathan Finch, “A Test: Hume’s Missing Shade of Blue,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy 13, no. 3 (Sept. 1, 2015): 219– 28. On antebellum American philosophy of science in general, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Ante-bellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). 16. Abbot Schriver, lecture notes, 1847, box 28, folder 1: Henry, Joseph, Natural Philosophy, 1847, Lecture Notes Collection, 1772– 1990 (AC052), University Archives, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ (hereafter abbreviated as LEC). 17. John MacLean Jr., lecture notes, “Natural Philosophy,” 1857, p. 12, box 28, folder 3: Henry, Joseph, Natural Philosophy, 1857, LEC. 18. Review of Elements of Mental and Moral Science, by George A. M. Payne, Princeton Review 2, no. 2 (Apr. 1830): 196.

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serted that “colour is the primary perception of the sense of Seeing; the others are only consequential.”19 Indeed, he went on to affirm that “if there had been no variety in our sensations of colour, and still more if we had had no sensation of colour whatever, the organ of sight could have given us no information, either with regard to figures or dimensions.”20 Seeing was an essential component of scientific observation, and color was a key component of seeing. Without his sense of color, for instance, Henry could not have discerned the pink protuberances coming from the surface of the sun. But this, of course, created a problem, since Henry had concluded that his observation was in error. The fact of this error called into doubt the very premise of common sense observation: the conviction that the senses gave reliable information about the physical world.21 It was not that common sense didn’t allow for the idea that human beings make mistakes of judgment. Anyone could misinterpret their own senses. This was precisely why (as Henry and his peers argued) science ought to be granted an important place in the functioning of the American Republic. Scientists were trained in the art of making judgments about reality. They had the discipline, expertise, and reason to properly filter misperceptions from actual facts. Indeed, this was why Henry devoted the first lectures of his physical sciences class at Princeton to common sense: without common sense, science didn’t function correctly. Henry’s concern upon rethinking the eclipse of 1838 was not that he had experienced a lapse in judgment. His concern was that he had stumbled upon evidence that his sense of color— and perhaps the color sensations of all his peers— were potentially not the direct bridge between mind and matter that common sense supposed. Such misapprehensions had important political implications. Common sense as a perceptual and philosophical attribute was by no means common 19. The sentiment is that of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, quoted in a letter from Stewart, itself quoted by John Fearn, First Lines of the Human Mind (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1820), xiv. 20. Quoted in Fearn, First Lines of the Human Mind, x. 21. Gaskill describes the long tradition of viewing color as secondary or insubstantial— a tradition extending from natural philosophers like Galileo, Descartes, and Locke to writers like Herman Melville— as “the great swindle of modern thought.” “The reward of secure knowledge,” Gaskill writes, “comes at the price of embodied experience and the colorful world it reveals” (Chromographia, 12). Antebellum American adherents to common sense philosophy were aware, of course, of the philosophical tradition of treating color as a secondary quality, but they explicitly rejected such a “swindle,” not least of all for the cost that it imposed on the moral authority of their science.

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to all humanity. Women, children, “savages,” individuals with dark- hued skin, and other politically marginal groups were seen to have limited access to the world as understood through common sense. In contrast, to see sensibly was the purview of the self- governing liberal subject: the man, as historian Chris Otter puts it, who was “master of the baser instincts and passions, a creature of thrift, energy, perseverance and, critically, reflexive evaluation of [his] own civility.”22 The self- governing subject was a (white) man in full possession of his own mind, body, and sensorium, able to reason clearly, to evaluate his own senses accurately, and to share his conclusions about the world with his fellow, reasonable citizens. Common sense, therefore, was both “common” in the sense of “ordinary” or “plainly apparent” and “common” in the sense of “public” or “shared among peers.” Challenges to common sense thinking about color could come from a number of sources. For example, James Marsh, Congregationalist minister, president of the University of Vermont, and early expositor of German transcendental idealism in the United States, addressed the question of “whether color is subjective or objective” in 1840. He came to the firm conclusion that color did not exist in the sense that natural realists would recognize. Not only was the sense of color objectively unknowable, he wrote, but colors “are not the same for different persons, nor for the same person at all times.”23 Color sensations were not “common sense” indications of the objectively real; rather, they were indications of the particular predilections of particular minds at particular times. For his part, Ralph Waldo Emerson— a disciple of Marsh’s— pointed out that mere sensation was a capacity of animals as well as humans. “The animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy,” he wrote, “sharp outlines and colored surfaces.” But to transcend the merely animal, one had to slough off the “instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature” and “relax the despotism of the senses.”24 In so doing, one would be able to transcend the corporeal and come close to the divinity that was in all humanity— indeed, all of nature— and not offstage, separated eternally from the mind and matter of humankind.

22. Chris Otter, “Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City,” Social History 27, no. 1 (Jan. 2002): 2. 23. James Marsh, “Remarks on Psychology,” in The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, D.D.: Late President and Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, in the University of Vermont, ed. Joseph Torrey (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1843), 300. On Marsh, see also Lewis S. Feuer, “James Marsh and the Conservative Transcendentalist Philosophy: A Political Interpretation,” New England Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1958): 3–31. 24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Idealism,” in Nature: Addresses, and Lectures (Boston: J. Munroe, 1836), 62.

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To Henry and his peers, such rhetoric smacked of turning men into beasts and collapsing the hard- won distinction between mind and matter. Henry admitted that there was no harm in intellectual exploration. “We may speculate,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850, “on the nature of [phenomena] and form ontological systems which may partly satisfy the mind craving for knowledge.” Indeed, such exercises might “in some cases assist us in directing our attention to new objects and new modes of investigation.” Yet, at the end of the day, he concluded, these speculations would “form no part of positive science and do not fall within the category of inductive truths.”25 Science still had to rely on the senses in order to be science at all. The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review—the theological house organ for the College of New Jersey— was more adamant, railing against the “unshackled and unsanctified speculation of the schoolmen” of Concord for their suggestion that “the subject and object are one.”26 For if there was no distinction between subject and object, then according to what law should men be governed? Perhaps ironically, for all its ideal aim, transcendentalism, viewed from the perspective of common sense, “destroys the distinctions of moral good and evil, and reinstalls the flesh.”27 Transcendentalism was a particular bugbear of the faculty at the College. More generally worrisome, however, than the women and men of Concord were challenges to common sense that emerged from the character of the “new field” itself, in the form of sciences of sensation like phrenology and physiological psychology. Phrenology was a doctrine of the 1820s with a widespread following in the United States; it posited that mental life could be linked to some thirty- five “organs” in the brain, each of which controlled a different mental “faculty.” Color was one of these faculties, and it was the job of the faculty of color, as one phrenologist put it, “to discover the various colours as distinguishable from mere degrees of light and shade.”28 Physiological psychology, meanwhile, was similarly a science of locating sensory qualities in the physical stuff of the brain, albeit under a set of experimental rules drawn from physics. For psychophysicists, sensations, including those of color, were not mysterious, spiritual bridges between mind and matter

25. Joseph Henry, “Address to AAAS (Draft),” Aug. 22, 1850, in Papers of Joseph Henry, 8:88–102. 26. “Essays: By R. W. Emerson,” Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review (hereafter Princeton Review) 13, no. 4 (Oct. 1841): 551, 544. 27. Ibid., 544. 28. Color [pseud.], “Color-Blindness,” American Phrenological Journal 41, no. 4 (Apr. 1865): 115.

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but merely physical manifestations of the electrochemical physiology of the brain. Both of these cases represented sciences which purported to make subjective sensations objectively amenable to scientific observation— through a reading of bumps on the head, in the case of phrenology; and through the translation of sensations into nerve impulses, and nerve impulses into graphic and numerical data, in the case of psychophysics. Indeed, these projects held the promise of making subjective sensation more apparent— more truthful— to the trained scientist than to the person experiencing the sensation. They were, in that manner, precisely representative of the “new field” that Henry envisioned. (He, himself, was especially curious about phrenology.) Making subjective senses visible to the scientist entailed a radical extension of the authority and power of science— an extension that many commentators viewed with profound distrust. As one commentator asked in the Princeton Review, “[c]an we know anything about perception, sensation, memory, desire, will &c. except as we know their conscious exercises? Will any amount of external, physiological, anatomical, phrenological observation show us the first glimmer of what these are that has not already been learned from consciousness?”29 What could these new sciences tell the observer except for that which was evident to the senses already? All these sciences did was to reduce matters of sensation— of the soul— to crude materialism. Such shortsighted materialism could be the target of sarcasm. Criticizing the promises of phrenology, for example, one humorist wrote that “[w]hoever sees a group of political hacks sitting around drinking cider and whiskey will doubt the presence of minds in brains.”30 But it was possible to see more nefarious designs in the “new field.” The Princeton Review fumed that “[t]he advocates of this physiological psychology propose to reconstruct education, society, morals, and religion in accordance with it; to make physical science, pure and applied, the chief element in education; to banish from it the classics, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, Christianity, and to replace them with physiology, biology, and a semi- brutish sociology, founded on mere bestial gregariousness.”31 The new field, that is, foretold not just a new topic of scientific investigation but new and potentially de-

29. “Materialism— Physiological Psychology,” Princeton Review 41, no. 4 (Oct. 1869): 624. 30. Russell Jarvis, “On the Humbug of Phrenology,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly Review 7, no. 2 (Aug. 1840): 63. 31. “Materialism— Physiological Psychology,” 624.

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stabilizing ways of understanding everything from religion to education to social relations. These concerns, moreover, accompanied definite changes in the material and structural character of American society. The United States of the late nineteenth century was a nation in the grip of a profound series of economic, cultural, and demographic crises. Beginning in the 1830s, and accelerating between the end of the Civil War through the first decades of the twentieth century, industrial production and commercial trade in the United States skyrocketed. New ways of organizing business and labor, new rules for making money and understanding risk, and unprecedented forms of injury, death, and ruin accompanied huge increases in steel, coal, and factory production, tens of thousands of miles of new railway tracks, and a booming financial industry.32 The growing size and reach of large corporations, financial institutions, and the federal government eroded the traditional notion that America was a country of self- sufficient “island communities,” as people across the nation— rich and poor, urban and rural— found their lives and livelihoods increasingly enmeshed with the functioning of labyrinthine bureaucracies in cities hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away.33 Following opportunities in urban centers— and, in many cases, fleeing racial persecution— Americans left rural communities for 32. On the growth of railroads, see, e.g., Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). On railroad accidents, see Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On industrial growth, see, e.g., Thomas J. Misa, A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865–1925 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). On finance, see, e.g., Robert Sobel, The Big Board: A History of the New York Stock Market (New York: Free Press, 1965). On futures trading in particular, see, e.g., William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 120– 32. On failure as a concept in American life, see Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 33. Robert Wiebe coined the term “island communities” in The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Alan Trachtenberg sketches a similar picture of island communities gradually being drawn together in The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), while Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis examines the increasingly interconnected American commercial, financial, and agricultural communities. On some of the many and far- reaching social and political ramifications of this moment of incorporation, see, e.g., Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1977); Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

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cities in ever- increasing numbers. The proportion of America’s population living in cities rose from 6 percent in 1860 to almost 40 percent in 1900. A portion of this tremendous growth in urbanization and industrialization came from surges of immigrants from southern Europe, eastern Europe, and eastern Asia; from rural areas in the United States; and from women seeking wage employment. These individuals became new consumers and new sources of labor for American business, but they also brought new ways of life to American communities and— from the perspective of established elites— new problems of social order.34 Accompanying these changes in the structures of American lifeways were changes in the ways in which individuals understood themselves and others as rights- bearing (and duty- bearing) beings vis-à- vis family, schools, employers, church and community groups, and local, state, and federal government organs. Among the subtlest but most far reaching of these changes was a transformation in the dominant form of political subjectivity in the United States between 1860 and 1930, from a model based on “proprietary” capitalism, in which the individual displays traits of classical liberal selfhood, to one based on “corporate” capitalism, where some of the notional self- ownership and self- determination of the individual is abrogated to large, bureaucratic structures.35 This sort of administrative pluralism both presages and demands a new form of political subjectivity— one marked not by the assumption of common perspective but by the assumption that there are no necessarily common perspectives except those that are administratively defined, whether legislatively, by contract, or through investment of resources. Such an administration of subjectivity was not, of course, applied consistently, universally, or with great effectiveness in all places, everywhere. But in the case of color, the administration of perception came to be seen by a broad coalition of scientists— and the industrialists, politicians, bureaucrats, and social reformers who were their patrons— as a precondition for managing productivity and safety in a country with a 34. See, e.g., Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880 to 1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 35. Walter Benn-Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); James Livingstone, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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highly mobile and highly pluralistic population vying for economic position and political rights. Color science was, in short, one way in which reformers of various stripes made this new politics sensible—that is, ordered in such a way that sensing beings could join the emergent political structures of a selfconsciously modernizing American state. Historian James Livingstone’s observation that the “new design” of corporate capitalist governance during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era “presupposed the ‘socialization’ of property, production and the market” extends just as well to aesthetics.36 Sensation, perception, sensibility, and sensitivity came increasingly to be included alongside modes of manufacture, finance, and legal and business information as substrates for the rational and productive ordering of society. Color science was a species of social reform— a way of redistributing subjectivity in a manner more amenable to the needs and structures of the emerging industrial order.

Words and Formalisms Colors fade over time. Brilliant yellows ease into grayish green. Vibrant reds fade into pink. Sunlight dwindles and shifts with season and climate; gaslight hardens into halogen. Memories of color change and soften; they resist recording or preservation. For those who experience colors, they seem as indelibly a mark of objecthood as matter itself— and yet colors are indefinite and fleeting. It is impossible to know what, precisely, a given person a century ago saw when they beheld tables of color samples or a series of ribbons or the dazzle of colored lights. Nevertheless, it is possible to know how they wrote about their experiences and how they communicated their understandings of color in terms of themselves and of communities of viewers. This is one of the mysteries of color. For nineteenth- century researchers, words were one way of stabilizing colors— holding them in place, preserving them, relating them to each other, to objects, and to their viewers. Perhaps counterintuitively, color science as a practice of reform was as much a matter of reformulating words as it was of manipulating colored materials. Color scientists, of course, used colored papers, glass, yarns, and pigments to demonstrate colors; they sought out ways of stabilizing and transporting colors over long distances; and they tested the color perceptions of workers, students, and each other with op36. Livingstone, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, 13.

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tical color- mixing devices. But they also focused their energy not just on making novel colors or color- producing technologies but on defining color in terms of words and grammars. Words made color sensible. Words made color durable. In this way, words were more than records of color perceptions. They were implements through which color perception could be shaped. Empirically, this recognition marked an important historical transition. In 1785 common sense philosopher Thomas Reid suggested that the “enchantment of words” was a positive impediment to any understanding of the ways in which sensation related to reality.37 As an advocate of the idea that sensations matched the real exactly, words were, to Reid, simply a screen between the real and the mind. And, indeed, scientists like Henry didn’t worry much about the character of words. But when the correspondence between sensations and things broke down in the face of the “new field” of investigation, language became a profoundly important normative tool. As Henry’s student, the color scientist Ogden Rood, explained, he undertook his work on color in order to “prevent ordinary persons, critics, and even painters, from talking and writing about colour in a loose, inaccurate and not always rational manner.”38 Rood, that is, addressed, not the propriety of perception of color itself, but rather the ways in which people spoke and wrote about color. Far from an “enchantment” that prevented things from being seen for what they were, Rood and his fellows in color science thought of words as a means of helping people to come to an accurate and rational— and therefore better— understanding of color. In this way, it is possible to discern a shift in thinking about words for color as paradigmatic of a shift in subjectivity. When, for instance, in 1814, Patrick Syme— a Scottish flower illustrator and “painter to the Wernerian and Horticultural Societies”— undertook to make an atlas of colors, he labeled each of the hundred and ten squares of color that he included with descriptive names and careful (indeed, sometimes peculiarly specific) descriptions matching the colors to geological, botanical, and zoological referents. The color that Syme called “plum purple” was, reasonably enough, closely identified with plums; “straw yellow,” for its part, was the color of 37. See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: John Bell; London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1785), 39. See also James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 16. 38. Ogden Rood, Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), v–vi.

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“oat straw.” “Prussian blue” was exemplified by the “beauty spot on [the] wing of [a] mallard drake”; while the best exemplar of “bluish black” among members of the animal kingdom was the “largest black slug.”39 For Syme, colors were entities of the natural world— and the way to speak and write about color was to cite their natural referents. In contrast, Albert Munsell’s Atlas of the Munsell Color System (published a century after Syme’s atlas, in 1913) eschewed any labeling of colors in terms of natural objects.40 Instead, Munsell arranged his colors in terms of a notional psychophysical “color solid,” a mental construct that, he explained in no uncertain terms, represented the objective facts of color with far greater fidelity to reality than any objects could. Rather than names drawn from nature, Munsell labeled his colors with alphanumerical codes: administrative indicators of points on his color solid. A word about this term “the real”: if color terms and color grammars— color letters, color numbers, color codes, color coordinates— were meant to stand for “the reality” of color, then what was this “real” anyway? After all, “the real,” as Raymond Williams suggests in his perennially helpful Keywords, is a tricky term.41 Its tangled linguistic history leaves traces of meanings ranging from “the universal” (something like a deep idealism) to the “empirically particular” (like a resolute positivism), with a span of nuanced variations (mentalism, materialism) in between. Felicitously, early in his entry on “realism,” Williams presents the problematic word in terms of color, specifically addressing debates over the nature of realism through the example of different parties’ approach to the idea of “redness.” Williams’s use of redness as a phenomenon through which his readers can understand varying approaches to realism suggests the capacity of color to contain multitudes with respect to the real, while still maintaining an apparent ontological stability. To a certain extent, Williams’s recourse to color as that which is demonstrably real in more than one context sustains the somewhat- conventional use of the term “the real” in this book. With deference to the deep philosophical debates surrounding the use and definition of the term, “the real” 39. Patrick Syme, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, with Additions, Arranged so as to Render it Highly Useful to the Arts and Sciences. Annexed to Which are Examples Selected from Well-known Objects in the Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral Kingdoms (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1814). 40. Albert Henry Munsell, Atlas of the Munsell Color System (Malden, MA: Wadsworth, Howland, 1913). 41. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 257–62.

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here signifies a mostly traditional (dualistic) idea of that- which- is- inactuality, or, more precisely, that- which- can- be- firmly- believed- in. Or, to put the matter as its reverse, “the real” here— as pertains to the concerns of the historical actors in this book— is that which is not imaginary, inauthentic, solipsistic, or made up. The nature of this “real,” moreover, should be seen to be inclusive of, but not exclusively defined by, matters of ontology, expertise, and temporality. “The real” is here not simply a question of what is right now but, rather, a matter of coordinating that- which- was and that- which- is in order to arrive at a stable and predictable sense of thatwhich- will- be.

Plan oF The Book This book follows these novel ways of thinking about color from the beginnings of the “new field” of color science in America in the middle of the nineteenth century to its codification in law and government standards in the early twentieth century. For scientists like Rood (chapter 1) speaking correctly about color was a matter of discarding the old science of “chromatics” and thinking in terms of “modern chromatics”: a science based on the measurement and codification of sensations of color. Following Henry, Rood was trained in common sense observation, but he abandoned this philosophical base in order to reformulate color in psychophysical terms. During his long career, he gained renown for his research in color and worked hard to fuse this novel science with the new society emerging in the United States after the Civil War. He was unable, however, to accept the new relationships between subjective sensation and inner thought that his color science implied— even as others, such as impressionists in France, used his ideas of color to produce novel forms of art suitable for modern viewers. For Rood’s friend Charles Sanders Peirce, philosopher, mathematician, and color scientist (chapter 2), the new form of subjectivity implied by color science was not a cause for distress; rather, it provided insight into the nature of reality itself. Peirce created the philosophy that he called “pragmatism” as a way of understanding how people come to believe things. One of the critical tools of pragmatism was a science that Peirce called “semiotic”— the study of signs. As a primary “sign” of the basic qualities of the universe, color served Peirce as both an experimental foil and an example through which to test his semiotic. Peirce’s experiments helped him to refine his pragmatism and, in turn, his ideas about “community”— that is, a commu-

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nity based on common knowledge rooted not simply in sensation but in semiotic: a science of consciousness, of signs, of words, developed through color science. This community, as explored in chapter 3, was not without perceived dangers that required policing. If Rood and Peirce were primarily interested in shared perceptions of color, Boston ophthalmologist Benjamin Joy Jeffries was concerned about cases in which “signs” for colors did not match up with colors themselves: for example, cases of color blindness. For Jeffries, color blindness was a major public health problem when considered alongside the green and red signals that sustained the safe operation of steamships and locomotives. Under Jeffries and his allies— both domestic and European— the United States embarked upon an adventure in legislating vision, with states and local governments mandating color blindness testing according to Jeffries’s standards, and railroad companies and workers resisting, on the grounds that no one— not even a science- minded physician like Jeffries— could truly rule on what the color- blind saw. Color blindness wasn’t simply a measure of the capacity of human beings to do productive work. For many researchers it was also a mark of “culture” (chapter 4), a term that, for many nineteenth- century commentators, connoted a teleological distinction between “savagery” and an ultimate state of “civilization.” Whether savages could see colors with greater or lesser acuity than their civilized betters was a question that preoccupied a great many American physicians, anthropologists, and ethnologists, not least of all because the answer suggested that color perception could prove to be an objective test of the subjective capacity to become civilized. From this basis, color became central to the redefinition of anthropology as a profession, as color perception— most significantly, as explored by Franz Boas and his students— helped to reformulate the nature of “culture” itself. Even if different cultures had different ways of looking at colors, this still left open the question of the correct way of seeing color in a modern, scientific society. Christine Ladd-Franklin (chapter 5)— a student of Peirce’s— was among the leaders of American color science in the early twentieth century. Her signature accomplishment was the “evolutionary” theory of color, a theory based in a pragmatic analysis of color language which solved a deep rift between two competing theories of color perception: one rooted in psychology, one rooted in physiology. More than simply an elegant scientific solution, though, Ladd-Franklin’s theory was a moral statement— a way of understanding what it meant to see properly, honestly, and well as a member of a society that valued science and reason over tradition and superstition.

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Amid all these questions, the one of how to manage terms for color loomed large. “The Color Question” (chapter 6), as board game magnate and sometimes color scientist Milton Bradley called it, was a series of recurring issues between the 1890s and the 1910s surrounding the development of standardized names for colors. The question of color naming was not simply a practical question but also a moral one: definiteness in nomenclature mapped onto definiteness in intent. Chapter 6 looks at efforts to devise morally and scientifically sound names for colors, focusing particularly on systems devised by Bradley and his associate John H. Pillsbury, Smithsonian Institution ornithologist Robert Ridgway, and Munsell. In these attempts, one finds not only a drive to achieve industrial efficiency but also a great deal of anxiety about the mutability of human beings in modern society: a society in which even basic, shared measures of reality— such as the color of objects— could no longer be communicated reliably between observers. The “color question,” therefore, was simultaneously a matter of industrial convenience and a parable about the pitfalls that potentially littered the paths of “advanced” civilizations. Codifying color nomenclature was never simply a matter of color alone. Formalizing relationships between colors and words was also a matter of defining types of humans that could see color properly and of formalizing relationships between those human beings and social institutions. From artists’ colonies to primary schools, from evolutionary deep time to the immediacy of experience, from eugenics studies to laws of racial hierarchy (chapter 7), color systems never simply defined colors. Rather, color systems encoded, supported, and reflected different ideas about what human beings were like and how they should relate to one another. From a timid beginning as a prospective “new” field, by the early decades of the twentieth century color was an important and far- reaching topic in American science and industry. As psychologist Robert Yerkes (known for designing intelligence tests for the US Army during World War I) wrote in 1912, “I am so impressed with the importance of the problems of color vision for physiology, psychology, and genetics that I am willing to sacrifice almost anything else” to the study of color.42 Color still sat at the cusp of matters of mind and body; but by the twentieth century it was increasingly administrated by institutions of human governance rather than by common 42. Robert Yerkes to Charles Davenport, Oct. 16, 1912, box 97, folder: Yerkes, Robert M. (folder 1), Charles Benedict Davenport Papers (Mss.B.D27), American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

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sense underwritten by divine grace. In the United States, these institutions included official state organs like the National Bureau of Standards, which fielded requests from manufacturers of everything from cheese, meat, and margarine to postal uniforms and steel. They also included private institutions such as the Optical Society of America (OSA), founded in 1916 to serve as a centralizing body for research on light and color, and the Color Association of the United States, founded during World War I by American textile manufacturers cut off from their German sources of synthetic dyes. Moreover, beginning in 1919, the OSA’s Committee on Colorimetry began to take a prominent role in the Commission internationale de l’éclairage (International Commission on Illumination [CIE]), an international body dedicated to setting standards in light and color. Led by members who had cut their teeth at the Munsell Color Company or had been employed by the National Bureau of Standards, in 1931 the CIE published the first internationally recognized model of color, which was based on a mathematical model of an ideal observer. Insofar as a single, unified idea of color emerged from nineteenth- century color science, the CIE’s 1931 “tristimulus” values were it. Even as it was codified by industrial, regulatory, and international consensus, however, color continued to prove elusive. Leonard T. Troland, chairman of the OSA’s Committee on Colorimetry, explained, in a tortured attempt to define color, that while “the existence of any sensation rests upon the operation of the nervous system, this should not lead us to localize it in that system. Although color is not a physical entity,” he continued, “it obviously exists outside of us on the surfaces of objects as we see them, such visual objects or perceptions being themselves nothing but arrangements of color areas in space. This statement, however, should not be misinterpreted to mean that the colors are physical or are located on physical objects. There is no reason for supposing that visual objects are identical or coincident with the objects of physical science.”43 Here the reader discovers that color exists, but it does not exist. It is of the physical world but not of the physical world. It depends on the operation of a sense organ but should not be construed as being located within that sense organ— and (scandalizing common sense) color defines the arrangement of objects in space for the observer but should not therefore be construed as describing those objects in the world. Even as powerful new institutions sutured together the world 43. Leonard T. Troland, “Report of Committee on Colorimetry for 1920– 1921,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 4, no. 6 (1922): 533n3 (emphasis in original).

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of perception after the radical fracture of common sense, color continued to elude definition and apprehension, even by those whose job it was to define and apprehend it. Henry and his peers at the Princeton Review were correct: the “new field” did alter the relationship between observer and observed. Color science posited that instead of each individual’s being the judge of his (or, more rarely, her) own sensations, sense and sensibility were the purview of expert scientists whose authority was increasingly tied to the fortunes of the modern industrial state. As such, the metaphor of “cloven tongues of fire” used by the anonymous journalist to describe Henry’s drawing of the eclipse of 1838 was apt. The phrase was biblical, as the reporter’s readers would have been aware— drawn from a passage in which the Holy Spirit manifests as “cloven tongues of fire” that descend upon the heads of Jesus’s apostles at the first Pentecost, allowing them at once to speak different languages and yet nevertheless remain intelligible to one another. Just so, the new field of color science fractured the unitary idea of sense perception sponsored by common sense into an infinity of possible sensations, an infinity of possible meanings of the world. Nevertheless, if the new field held in it the potential for fracture, it also had the potential for unification, for renormalization— a possibility of translating across sensations, an ability to understand, to see across disparate visions, to know and to trust in a binding and communal truth despite this variability. Under this new order, colors unfolded in previously unimaginable forms. The real and the divine came unmoored from the true and the beautiful; the electrochemical thrum of homeostasis merged with the bureaucratic energies of new institutions, new communities, new borders drawn in color. Insides turned out. Polities cohered and dissolved. The atmosphere of the sun burned away in the blink of an astronomer’s eye.

C h a pte r O n e

MODERN CHROMATICS Ogden Rood and the Wrong-Workings of the Eye

“Awful! Awful!” Late in 1894, Roland Rood returned home to New York City after several years studying painting in Paris.1 He’d worked with the notable muralist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes; he’d practiced portraiture with Léon Bonnat; 1. As Geraldine Wojno Kiefer notes, it is difficult to say with certainty when Roland Rood returned to the United States. See Kiefer, “Roland G. Rood: The Critic as Perceptual Psychologist,” History of Photography 15, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 294– 301. Archival sources on his early years are spare, and published sources are contradictory. Assuming that Roland left the United States after graduating from Columbia University and serving as his father’s laboratory assistant, Kiefer suggests that Roland was in Paris from 1886 until some point between 1889 and 1900. However, it seems likely that Roland was still in New York around February 1889, when he participated in a show at the Etching Club in New York; his work, wrote a reviewer, “lack[ed] the personal accent and emphasis which impart a distinctive value to any work of art” (“The Etching Club Exhibition,” New-York Tribune, Feb. 18, 1889, 7). At some point thereafter, Roland departed for France and began studying with Puvis, taking leave from Paris in 1891 to marry Lily Lewis in London. See Peggy Martin, Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist; A Biocritical Study (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 249. He participated in the 1894 salon Société nationale des beaux-arts, which opened in April. See Salon of the nationale; reprinted in Theodore, Reff, ed., Modern Art in Paris: Two Hundred Catalogues of the Major Exhibitions Reproduced in Facsimile (New York: Garland, 1981). Later that year, Durand-Ruel in New York staged a large and highly publicized exhibition of paintings that included work by impressionists and neo- impressionists; the New York Times specifically mentioned Monet and Pissarro (“Individualists at Durand-Ruel’s: Paintings of Artists of Undeniable Merit Exhibited,” New York Times, Nov. 3, 1894, 4). It is not unreasonable to suppose that this is the exhibit that Ogden had seen— and that Roland had returned home by late 1894 to find his aging father in a funk over the paintings.

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he’d followed the prominent academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau; he’d exhibited in the 1894 Salon des beaux- arts.2 But it was his encounter with French impressionism that had left its greatest mark. In Paris he’d discovered the works of Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat; on a trip to Claude Monet’s home in Giverny he’d “tasted” the shimmering surfaces of Monet’s canvases— and when he arrived back in America, he later recalled, his head was “filled with violent violets and chrome yellows, and the forms of solid bodies seemed a la Giverny as illusory as dreams.”3 Impressionism had transformed Roland’s vision of the world around him, and in his excitement, he went to see his father— the physicist and amateur painter Ogden Rood—bearing with him a copy of his father’s well- known book Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry.4 In Paris Roland had become aware that his favorite painters read his father’s book enthusiastically—Modern Chromatics was, as he put it, “the impressionists’ Bible.” In its pages, Paris’s painterly avant- garde found an account of color based not on pigments and optics but on “psychophysics”— the physiology, psychology, and physics of the sensing body. They read about the ways in which cells in the retina of the eye processed color sensations; they learned how colors mixed unexpectedly when the eye was fatigued; they learned about the paradoxical ways in which the actual colors of objects might not correspond to the colors that the observer perceived. Ultimately, they learned about what Roland called “the wrong- workings” of the eye— the subtle, subjective, protean qualities of color that made it at once so apparent to the consciousness of the observer, so tangibly real, and yet so deeply difficult to grasp. When they applied paint to canvas, then, impressionists were not naively representing landscapes and people and things. They were directly addressing the subjective color sensations of their viewers, as carefully delineated by Rood in Modern Chromatics. Roland intended to thank his father for this contribution to a new mode of art- making. But when the two men met, Roland saw that the elder Rood “seemed . . . mentally much depressed.” “Are you ill?” Roland asked. 2. Kiefer, “Roland G. Rood”; Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 386. 3. Roland Rood, “Professor Rood’s Theories of Color and Impressionism,” Scrip 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1906): 218. 4. Published in 1879 in English, Modern Chromatics was released in its 1881 French translation under the title Théorie scientifique des couleurs et leurs applications à l'art et à l'industrie. Subsequent English editions bore the title Student’s Textbook of Color, or Modern Chromatics.

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“No,” Rood grumbled, “but I have just been to see an exhibition of paintings at the galleries of Durand-Ruel. . . . They are by a lot of Frenchmen who call themselves ‘impressionists’; some are by a fellow called Monet, others by a fellow called Pissarro, and a lot of others.” Roland explained that the painters’ techniques had been based on Rood’s own theories of color and nervously asked his father his opinions of the paintings. “Awful! Awful!” exploded the elderly scientist; “if that is all I have done for art I wish I had never written that book!”5 Art historian Herschel Chipp writes that Rood “freed” colors from “the symbolic and metaphysical associations with which they had been endowed by earlier artists and theoreticians.”6 And indeed, his work had resounding influence. Ophthalmologists and photographers, architects and educators, professional artists and hobbyist decorators, all read Modern Chromatics.7 Classicist Edward Hopkins pointed his readers toward Modern Chromatics to explicate the complicated nature of the term “indigo.”8 Anthropologist Franz Boas cited Rood in his dissertation on the color of water (and Rood later sponsored some of Boas’s first lectures in the United States).9 Philosopher Henri Bergson read Modern Chromatics in its French translation while 5. R. Rood, “Professor Rood’s Theories of Color and Impressionism,” 219. Martin Kemp writes about this incident— and Rood’s influence on impressionism more generally— in “The Impressionists’ Bible,” Nature 453, no. 7191 (May 1, 2008): 37. On Rood and impressionism, see also Michael Rossi, “Seeing and Knowing: From Landscape Painting to Physics (and Back Again),” KNOW 2, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 1–25. 6. Herschel B. Chipp, “Orphism and Color Theory,” Art Bulletin 40, no. 1 (Mar. 1958): 58. 7. On ophthalmology, see, e.g., William S. Dennett to Ogden Rood, Dec. 11, 1888, box 2, folder D, Ogden N. Rood Papers, 1855–1902 (MS 1082), Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, NY (hereafter abbreviated as ONR-CU). On decoration, see, e.g., Frederick Parsons, “Color in Our Homes: On Theories,” Decorator and Furnisher 20, no. 5 (Aug. 1892): 177– 79; Alexander Millar, “Practical Carpet Designing,” Journal of the Society of the Arts 42, no. 2209 (Mar. 1895): 444. On photography, Edward Bierstadt wrote to Rood to say he had “learned more about the theory of colors in your book ‘Modern Chromatics’ than any other book I have read” (Bierstadt to Rood, July 9, 1891, box 2, folder B, ONR-CU). On education, see, e.g., Carrie Newhall Lapthrop, “Observation Lessons— Color,” Ohio Educational Monthly and the National Teacher: A Journal of Education 38, no. 9 (Sept. 1889): 535. In discussions of decorative arts, see Mary Gay Humphreys, “Color in Relation to Decoration,” Art Amateur 5, no. 3 (1881): 54; Mary Gay Humphreys, “Harmonies in Color,” Art Amateur 5, no. 5 (1881): 104–5; William R. Ware, “The Theory of Color,” American Art Review 1, no. 1 (1879): 36–37; William R. Ware, “The Science of Colour,” Art Journal 6 (1880): 187–88. 8. For the use of Rood’s book among classicists, see Edward W. Hopkins, “Words for Color in the Rig Veda,” American Journal of Philology 4, no. 2 (Apr. 1883): 179; Thomas R. Price, “The ColorSystem of Vergil,” American Journal of Philology 4, no. 1 (1883): 3, 7, 11, 12. 9. Rood to Abraham Jacobi, Jan. 30, 1885, in The Professional Correspondence of Franz Boas, microfilm (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, in cooperation with the American Philosophi-

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pondering perception and time.10 Architect Louis Sullivan reached for the book when he designed the interior of the Chicago Stock Exchange in 1893.11 Landscapist Thomas Moran drew from Modern Chromatics in his compositions, and painter, decorator, and glazier John La Farge counted himself as one of Rood’s students. But the tradition that Rood broke was ultimately one that had less to do with color itself and more to do with the rules by which his fellow citizens understood the meaning of vision, aesthetics, and scientific authority. Rood had written Modern Chromatics, as he put it, in order to “prevent ordinary persons, critics, and even painters, from talking and writing about colour in a loose, inaccurate and not always rational manner.”12 It was a book, that is, not about seeing but about understanding. The very title, Modern Chromatics, signaled a departure from the science of color— the “chromatics”— of the previous half century, in which color was simply apparent before the viewer. In place of a science of optics based on common sense, Rood presented a science in which color was a product of occult mental and physiological processes of the viewer— vital and alive, fugitive and mysterious, indelibly real and yet inescapably removed from the everyday experience of “ordinary persons” and “even painters.” This science of color held as one of its implicit tenets that it was irrational (indeed, unscientific) simply to see and believe— one had to consult experts in order to truly understand one’s own apprehension of reality. It was an idea, moreover, which Rood offered to a strata of social reformers bent on navigating a sharp transformation in society from one based on traditional structures of church and family to one based on centralized, rationalized, impersonal structures of power. And yet, it was an idea which took shape within the highly traditional, highly personal structure of painting— one for which Rood hoped to provide new rules for depicting a common reality.

cal Society, 1972), reel 1. See also Franz Boas, Beiträge zur Erkenntnis der Farbe des Wassers (Kiel: Schmidt und Klaunig, 1881), 23. 10. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1889), 38. Much regard to Lily Huang for this reference. 11. On Sullivan and Rood, see Lauren S. Weingarden, “The Colors of Nature: Louis Sullivan’s Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth-Century Color Theory,” Winterthur Portfolio 20, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 243–60; William W. Braham, “Solidity of the Mask: Color Contrasts in Modern Architecture,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 39 (Spring 2001): 192– 214. 12. O. Rood, Modern Chromatics, v–vi.

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ChromAtiCs To understand what was “modern” about Modern Chromatics, it is first necessary to understand what the term “chromatics” meant to mid- nineteenthcentury scientists, artists, and “ordinary people.” Chromatics, as one early nineteenth- century American dictionary defined it, was “the science which examines and explains the various properties of the colours of light and of natural bodies, and which forms a principal branch of optics.”13 It was a natural science— an examination of the objective facts of color, beginning with the relationship of color to light and extending to the ways in which different colors mixed, harmonized, and produced beauty. As such, chromatics was a quintessential example of common sense philosophy— an empirical investigation into the real, in which observation, experimentation, and deduction led the rational observer to discover inviolable laws that bridged the material, mental, and moral constituents of the real. A principal tenet of chromatics was the idea that objects themselves did not have color. Rather, color was a property of different “undulations” of light reflected from the surface of objects. The majority of nineteenthcentury natural philosophers believed that light was caused by waves propagating in an “imponderable” (i.e., not directly measurable) substance called the ether, which suffused all matter in the universe. Although light from the sun might appear to be simply white (or achromatic), it was, in fact, composed of all possible colors— as demonstrated by Isaac Newton’s famous experiment in which he split a beam of white, solar light into a spray of rainbow colors using a glass prism. Colors, Joseph Henry told his natural philosophy classes, were just variations in the “length or frequency of the undulation” of the ether— “the red wave being the longest; the violet the shortest.”14 The colors of things in the world were therefore just a function of the ways that different materials reflected and absorbed light of various frequencies. Color was not an arbitrary property of interactions between matter and ether, though. The fact that colors always appeared in the rainbow in a fixed 13. “Color” in William Nicholson, American Edition of the British Encyclopedia: Or, Dictionary of Arts and Sciences; Comprising an Accurate and Popular View of the Present Improved State of Human Knowledge (Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames and White, 1819). Occasionally, minor corrections have been made to quotations to clarify idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation. 14. Quoted in Charles Irwin Weiner, “Joseph Henry’s Lectures on Natural Philosophy: Teaching and Research in Physics, 1832–1847” (PhD diss., Case Institute of Technology, 1965), 208.

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Figure 1 Brewster’s red, yellow, and blue spectra. (Brewster, Treatise on Optics, 74)

order— Newton identified red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet— suggested a basic, structural relationship among colors. But what was the nature of this relationship? Primary colors provided an initial clue. As painters and pigment manufactures had known for centuries, some colors could not be mixed from other colors. These colors— red, yellow, and blue— were called “primary.” Mixtures of primary colors were called “secondary” colors; these were orange, green, and purple. In the early nineteenth century, Scottish physicist David Brewster explained the order of primary and secondary colors in the solar spectrum by arguing— on the basis of his experiments viewing the spectrum through chunks of colored glass— that rather than one single solar spectrum, white light really consisted of three separate spectra: one composed of red light, one composed of yellow light, and one composed of blue light. The superposition of these three spectra at points of greater and lesser intensity produced the varying hues of the rainbow, as Brewster demonstrated with a diagram (fig. 1). This theory also helped to elucidate another well- known phenomenon of color mixing: that of contrast colors. As color theorists had long noted, every spectral color appeared to have its opposite— a color that, when mixed with the original color, produced a neutral gray. The neutralizing effect of contrast colors could be explained by the fact that each contrast to a primary color was a secondary color composed of the two other primary colors. Red contrasted with green (yellow mixed with blue); yellow with purple (blue mixed with red); and blue with orange (red mixed with yellow). Since secondary colors were composed of primary colors, mixing a primary and its secondary counterpart was like mixing all the primary colors at once— and

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all primary colors combined, as Brewster’s diagram showed, into white (or neutral) light. This idea of mixing primary colors to produce white formed the basis of rules of chromatic harmony. When primary colors produced white light, they were said to be “balanced”— they returned to unity; they harmonized. But, as the varying peaks of the curves on Brewster’s diagram showed, different primary colors had different intensities. To produce a truly harmonious mix, both the contrast and the primary color had to be combined in the proper proportions. Determining these proportions was one of the tasks of chromatics. On the basis of his research, Brewster held the proportions in white light to be two parts red, three parts yellow, and one part blue.15 A composition which used these colors in the proper proportion would therefore be pleasing to the eye because it mimicked the properties of solar light. Brewster said little more about the matter of color harmony, but his contemporary, British painter and pigment manufacturer George Field, devoted successive editions of his textbook Chromatics (1817, 1835, 1845) to ever- more- elaborate explanations of the science of harmonious color composition.16 Field’s foundational principle was the idea that color and music were analogous. Like musical notes, Field wrote, colors were vibrations. And like musical notes, colors combined in ways that were either harmonious (pleasing) or dissonant (ugly). Thus, given the fact that musical harmonies were governed by precise, mathematical relationships, so too must be colorimetric harmonies. This was an old idea, stretching from ancient Greek philosophy through Newton and his contemporaries and into the nineteenth century.17 What 15. David Brewster, A Treatise on Optics (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1831), 74. 16. For an excellent and expansive analysis of Field’s aesthetics, see Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 38– 42. See also John Gage’s comprehensive “A Romantic Colourman: George Field and British Art,” The Volume of the Walpole Society 63 (2001): 1– 73; Linda M. Shires, “On Color Theory, 1835: George Field’s Chromatography,” http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps _articles=linda- m- shires- on- color- theory-1835- george- fields- chromatography. 17. John Gage gives an efficient gloss on questions of color and music in Color and Culture, 227– 46; consider also Klaas Tjalling Agnus Halbertsma, A History of the Theory of Colour (Amsterdam: Swets en Zeilinger, 1949), esp. 12. Ball, too, mentions the historical correspondence between the two in Bright Earth, 23; for primary sources, consider Aristotle, De sensu et sensibilibus 439b–442a; and for a nineteenth- century recitation, see Benjamin Rush, “Inquiry into the relation of tastes and ailments,” in Medical Inquiries and Observations. By Benjamin Rush, M.D. Professor of Chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1794), 137. At Princeton, Henry’s contemporary Richard Sears McCulloh told his students that

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Field did was to formalize this folk wisdom— extending the ratios that governed musical notes to the structures underpinning color compositions. A major chord sounded pleasing because it was composed of notes that fell at intervals of 3/8, 5/8, and 8/8 on a vibrating medium (such as a string). These nodes corresponded to the pitches E, G, and C— the tonic, third, and fifth pitches of the C major scale. In a similar way, Field argued, in order to combine perfectly into white— in order to achieve balance, according to Brewster’s terms— primary colors would have to mix in proportions of “three yellow, five red, and eight blue,” where yellow was the equivalent of E (or major third), red the equivalent of G (the perfect fifth), and blue the root.18 Any composition would be pleasing if its chromatic elements combined in variations on these proportions.19 Moreover, Field wrote, just as playing adjacent notes in a musical scale together produced discordant sounds, so too did using adjacent colors produce a disharmonious composition. Incorporating this formal basis with contemporary science— such as Brewster’s optics, in later editions of Chromatics— Field explained in dizzying detail the mathematics of color combination and color mixing. Each color had a different scale— a different “key”— constructed according to the mathematical proportions in which sets of colors produced balance. Field illustrated this system with sets of triangles (fig. 2)— a trinitarian motif which could be arranged along a musical staff to exemplify the harmony of color. Field’s system, as he took pains to explain, was not merely speculative. It was founded on strict empirical observation. As proof of the empirical validity of his system, Field insisted that readers need look no further than the diagrams in his book. “That the system before us is comfortable to nature,” he explained, “is ocularly demonstrated by the immediate exhibition of its objects, an advantage peculiar to chromatics.”20 In other words, readers could simply look at the colors printed in the book, and they would see for themselves that the colors were harmonious. As such, the science of chromatics, wrote Field, “addresses itself to reason and common sense.”21

“colors are due to the difference in vibrations”— “the same way in sound.” Lemuel C. Howell, lecture notes, 1849, box 39, folder 5: McCulloh, Richard Sears, LEC. 18. Thank you to Bob Kendrik for lending his erudition on the proper musical terminology. 19. For instance, a composition featuring purple and yellow in proportions of thirteen and three, respectively, would be harmonious, since red (five) and blue (eight) mixed to form purple (thirteen), and five red and eight blue mixed with three yellow would form white. 20. George Field, Chromatics (London: A. J. Valpy, 1817), iv. 21. Ibid., v.

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Figure 2 Chromatic scale. (Redrawn from original, hand-colored diagram in Field, Chromatics, plate 4)

This concern with a science of common sense observation did not mean that Field or his fellow researchers ignored the role of ocular physiology in color perception. In successive editions of Chromatics, Field devoted evergreater space to the topic of “transient,” or “accidental,” colors— phenomena such as the contrasting afterimages that appeared when an observer stared for too long at a bright color source, or the apparent shifts in color that occurred when viewing a pale hue against a more vivid one.22 Brewster, similarly, devoted some later pages in his Treatise on Optics (1831) to the “accidental” colors that arose in response to fatigue of the eye.23 The celebrated French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, for his part, made “accidental” colors the centerpiece of his La loi du contraste simultané des couleurs (The law of simultaneous contrast of colors; 1838)— an exhaustive exploration of the optical effects produced when different colors appeared adjacent to one another.24 But the very names used to classify these colors indicate their suspect epistemological status. They were accidental colors— curiosities not essential to the fundamental nature of color. Insofar as they fit within the system 22. Ibid., 52. 23. Brewster, Treatise on Optics, 304–11. 24. Michel-Eugène Chevreul, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs: Et de l’assortiment des objets colorés, considéré d’après cette loi (Paris: Chez Pitois-Levrault, 1839). See also Georges Roque, Bernard Bodo, and Françoise Viénot, Michel-Eugène Chevreul: Un savant des couleurs!, Archives / Musée national d’histoire naturelle (Paris: Éditions du Musée national d’histoire naturelle, 1997). For a particularly in- depth and incisive analysis of the ways in which Chevreul’s work intersected with and informed the technology and philosophy of color in nineteenthcentury France, see Laura Anne Kalba, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017).

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of color set out by chromatics, they served mainly to prove the general rules of color harmony, since ocular fatigue due to one color required a response from complementary colors to restore balance. They did not, however, have much impact on the ontological status of color itself, as a subject of scientific inquiry. As Field put it in the earliest edition of Chromatics, the question of whether the effects of colors “belong to their objects, to their visual subject, or more truly to the concurrence of both” was not the purview of science. Still, he emphasized that it was “reasonable . . . to believe that the physical principles of colours coincide with their aesthetical or sensible relations”; in other words, sensations of color harmony reflected the objective fact of color relations in the world rather than the subjective sensations of viewers.25 This, then, was the science of chromatics— orderly, lawful, and evident to anyone who looked. It was true, Field admitted in later editions, that “that which pleases one imagination disgusts another”— and this admission might therefore seem to cast doubt about the consistency of any purported science of color. But, Field continued, while there might be a “variety of sentiment concerning beauty,” this fact “by no means alters its nature and laws, any more than similar discordances in the judgments of men concerning reason, truth, and good, can invalidate the foundation of reason, truth or goodness.”26 Field held that the “principle of union” that underwrote chromatics “pervades and holds all nature together; and to it is to be attributed not only physical and sensible but also moral and intellectual harmony”— by which Field meant “not only the harmony of colours and sounds, but domestic and social harmony” too.27 To question the scaffolding upon which color harmony rested would mean questioning not only the scaffolding of the physical world but also the foundations of moral law and of civil society itself.

from Common sense to PhysiologiCAl oPtiCs Ogden Rood was born in 1831 to the conservative and comfortable Presbyterian establishment of the Eastern Seaboard, and his early education hinged on this idea of the world as orderly, harmonious, and amenable to clear-

25. Field, Chromatics (1817), 41. 26. George Field, Chromatics: Or, the Analogy, Harmony, and Philosophy of Colours (London: David Bogue, 1845), xiv. 27. Field, Chromatics (1845), 62–63 (emphasis in original).

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eyed observation. His mother was a wealthy and pious Presbyterian whose family had deep roots in the commerce and politics of New York and New Jersey. His father was an influential Presbyterian minister, columnist, and activist for the Republican Party who took a keen interest in the intellectual life of his children, encouraging Rood and his sisters to keep abreast of natural philosophy and theology alike. Microscopy and chemistry were constant themes of discussion among the children, and they kept a small laboratory in the house. One of Rood’s friends joked to him, “you probably talked and had a smattering of chemistry before you were an hour old.”28 As an undergraduate, Rood attended the College of New Jersey from 1847 to 1852, where he studied physical sciences with Joseph Henry, Stephen Alexander, and Richard McCulloh.29 After Princeton, he did a short stint at the University of Virginia, studying analytical chemistry, then spent two years at Yale working on microscopy. Thereafter, he decamped to Europe for postgraduate education. Princeton in the middle of the nineteenth century was a stronghold of conservative natural philosophy.30 Rood’s instructors were men of piety and common sense— not without creativity and imagination but bound by the rules of a divine creator who made his works known to men of science through disciplined observation. Theirs was a habit of looking outward to nature for truth rather than inward to the mind. It is true that, in his notes, Joseph Henry, especially, revealed a fascination with color sensation, wondering about the nature of accidental colors and celebrating the vibrancy of rainbows and sunrises; on one occasion, he agreed to teach “chromatics” to a young painter.31 And yet, it was important that one not lose sight of 28. Niles to Rood, Dec. 10, 1853, box 3, folder N, ONR-CU. 29. Henry had accepted a position as the first secretary of the newly founded Smithsonian Institution in 1846 but retained a position as emeritus professor of natural philosophy at the college and lectured to upperclassmen. It was likely in this capacity that Rood made his acquaintance. See, e.g., “Catalog of the Officers and Students of the College of New Jersey, 1850–1851” (Princeton, NJ: John. T. Robinson Press, 1851); and “Catalog of the Officers and Students of the College of New Jersey, 1851–1852” (Princeton, NJ: John. T. Robinson Press, 1852). A complete set of these catalogs can be found in the University Archives, Princeton University. 30. See, e.g., Sabine Remanofsky, “The Fear of Religious and Social Radicalism: The Princeton Critics’ Reaction against Transcendentalism,” Revue française d’études américaines 2, no. 124 (2010): 66– 81. See also Mark A. Noll, ed., The Princeton Theology, 1812–1921: Scripture, Science, and Theological Method from Archibald Alexander to Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1983). 31. For examples of Henry’s interest in color see, e.g., Joseph Henry, “Record of Experiments,” Aug. 3, 1840, in Papers of Joseph Henry, 4:426; Henry to William Vaughn, June 19, 1839, in Papers of Joseph Henry, 4:237–38; Henry, “Record of Experiments,” Jan. 4, 1841, in Papers of Joseph

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the ultimate cause of sensory phenomena, for while it might be tempting for scientists to speculate upon the “connection of psychology and material science, and particularly [upon] the methods of arriving at truth both in the phenomenon of mind and matter,” Henry nevertheless insisted that it was through “the invariable operations of God, in accordance with the laws he has prescribed to his own acts that he reveals his wisdom in the succession of the phenomena of nature.”32 Nor was Henry alone in this sentiment: his colleague (and Rood’s mathematics teacher) Stephen Alexander agreed, speaking of the human “sense for and enjoyment of color” as a “benediction”— a gift, that is, from a lawmaking God to his sensing subjects.33 Rood took this attitude to heart, delighting in the truth and beauty of visual observation. Mathematics, thought Rood, was an “abstruse” construction of the mind— a fiction limited to the finitude of human thought rather than the enduring substance of the concrete real.34 In contrast, he saw visual observation as expansive, enduring, and real. He read Brewster’s Treatise on Optics and the text impressed Rood: he urged his sister Helen to finish the book, remarking that it was “easy and instructive, and in fact an application of the principles you have gone over already— don’t forget.”35 In a paper

Henry, 5:3; “Locked Book,” Nov. 25, 1864, in Papers of Joseph Henry, 10:433. On Henry’s short career as a painting teacher, see James Alexander to Henry, Mar. 11, 1846, and Henry to James Alexander, Mar. 14, 1846, in Papers of Joseph Henry, 6:390– 91 and 393– 95. The painter in question was Edward Ludlow Mooney, a successful portraitist local to New York and New Jersey. As the editors of the Henry papers note, it’s not clear whether Henry actually did educate Mooney in chromatics and, if he did, whether those lessons had an impact on Mooney’s practice. However, Mooney did paint Henry’s portrait, likely while employed by Princeton in 1848 as a sort of inhouse portraitist— capturing likenesses of esteemed faculty and producing copies of older portraits. Mooney’s original painting of Henry is lost, but an engraving of the portrait later graced the opening pages of the 1852 Annual of Scientific Discovery. See Papers of Joseph Henry, 6:393n2; Barbara N. Parker, review of Princeton Portraits by Donald Drew Egbert, Art Bulletin 30, no. 3 (Sept. 1948): 236–41. 32. Henry, “Address to AAAS (Draft),” Aug. 22, 1850, in Papers of Joseph Henry, 8:88– 102. 33. Quoted by O. Rood in Modern Chromatics, 305. 34. On the abstruseness of mathematics, see Margaret Rood to Ogden Rood, Oct. 22, 1847, box 1, folder 4, Ogden N. Rood Correspondence (C0602), Manuscripts Division, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ (hereafter abbreviated as ONR-PR). Rood explained his epistemological suspicions about mathematics in Ogden N. Rood, The Practical Value of Physical Science: Inaugural Address (Troy, NY: William H. Young, 1859). Physicist Robert Millikan, one of Rood’s few graduate students throughout the color scientist’s long career, remembered that “Rood was genuinely interested in research of the observational sort, though he had no use for mathematical analysis and warned me against Dr. M. I. Pupin, of the mechanical and electrical engineering staff, who was trained in this and was strongly for it.” Robert Andrews Millikan, The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan (New York: Prentice Hall, 1950), 18. 35. Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, 1853, box 1, folder 9, Blake and Rood Families Papers, 1847– 1906 (3485), Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, NY.

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published in 1853, Rood described looking through a microscope at diffraction spectra— colorful rings created when light passed through tiny apertures set on the stage of a compound microscope. Along with the paper’s technical descriptions of microscopy, Rood included his impressions of the “beautiful, colored rings,” describing the “broad bands of yellow, red, blue, yellow, red, green, &c.” as “exceedingly beautiful, the colors being very brilliant.”36 Later, he extolled natural philosophy as a revelation from “[t]he great god, who maketh, and doeth all things well,” and praised the magnificence found in “[His] yellow sunbeams; in His banded rainbows and purple sunsets; in the violent flash of His lightning, and . . . in His white crystalline snow with its blue shadows”— a celebratory description of chromatic phenomena that would have resonated with his instructors.37 In 1854 Rood decamped to Germany with the intention, as he told his sister, of studying “German, chemistry and optics.”38 His first stop was in Munich, to work in the laboratory of Justus von Liebig, an aging star of Continental chemistry. There, he discovered organic chemistry, which he regarded as “a great field for optical investigation.”39 It was a fine “pursuit for a rational man, for a philosopher, or even for a poet,” he told his sister— one in which the researcher came “closest in contact with the Maker of all things [and saw] his handiwork more face to face.”40 After Munich, Rood continued on to Berlin, where he spent the remainder of his time in Germany studying with Heinrich Gustav Magnus and Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, both professors of physics at Berlin University. Writing to future Massachusetts Institute of Technology founder William Barton Rogers in 1858, Rood summed up his German experience in a sentence: “I spent three years in Europe, learning how to make oxygen from Liebig, and studying physics under Dove and Magnus.”41 But Rood learned about more in Germany than simply oxygen and physics. For one thing, he became serious about painting. Upon arriving in Mu36. Ogden N. Rood, “On a Method of Exhibiting the Phenomena of Diffraction with the Compound Microscope,” American Journal of Science and Arts 15, no. 45 (May 1853): 327–28. 37. O. Rood, Practical Value of Physical Science, 19. 38. Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, June 15, 1854, box 1, folder 9, ONR-PR. 39. Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, May 1855, box 1, folder 9, ONR-PR (emphasis in original). 40. Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, Mar. 17, 1855, box 1, folder 9, ONR-PR (emphasis in original). He made good on this ambition in a paper entitled “Optische Eigenschaften des fulminazsauren Ammoniaks und Kalis” (Optical properties of the fulminate of ammonia and potash) that he published in Liebig’s prestigious Annalen der Chemie. 41. Ogden Rood to William Barton Rogers, May 27, 1858, box 3, folder 33, William Barton Rogers Papers (MC.0001), Institute Archives and Special Collections, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

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nich, he wrote to his sister Helen to tell her that he had been “recommended to an artist who will give me lessons in oil painting for 30 cents a lesson . . .— this I shall get into during these preparatory months.”42 He indulged in the abundant (and inexpensive) art that Germany had to offer. “So great! So Old! So magnificent,” he wrote, “the old forlorn looking pictures painted before art had attained respectability, the wooden statues, the old stained glass . . .”43 He informed her that very old paintings could be purchased for only a bit more than the cost of dinner, and he contemplated acquiring a copy of a portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach as a gift for his father (since the Presbyterian minister would have appreciated the subject). Some months later, he was confident enough of his skills to say that he would give Helen “a regular course of lessons in drawing and after that in oil painting” when she visited him and to insist that she “regularly study the history and development of art. There is no reason,” he wrote, “why you should not return to the US well acquainted with the development and peculiarities of different schools.”44 Even more centrally, in Germany Rood learned a new way of thinking about color— not in terms of undulations of light but in terms of the responsiveness of living bodies. Both Dove and Magnus were closely involved in the development of what would come to be called “psychophysics”— the physics, physiology, and psychology of living, sensing beings. Dove was a pioneering theoretical physicist and the author of several studies on subjective colors. His popular monograph Darstellung der Farbenlehre was an answer to Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe’s theories of color. Magnus, also a theoretical physicist, hosted the Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin (Berlin Physical Society) at his house— a group of young scientists, including Herman von Helmholtz and Emil Reymond du Bois, whose preoccupations included discerning the physical processes behind subjective sensations.45 42. Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, June 15, 1854, box 1, folder 9, ONR-PR. 43. Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, May 21, 1854, box 1, folder 9, ONR-PR. 44. Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, n.d., box 1, folder 1, ONR-PR. 45. For histories of the Berlin Physical Society, see M. Norton Wise, Aesthetics, Industry, and Science: Hermann von Helmholtz and the Berlin Physical Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Horst Kant, “Ein ‘Mächtig Anregender Kreis’— die Anfänge der physikalischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin,” n.d., https://www.mpiwg- berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P202.PDF; E. Brüche’s five- part “Aus der Vergangenheit der physikalischen Gesellschaften,” which ran in successive numbers of the Physikalische Blätter from November 1960 to March 1961 (Physikalische Blätter Physik Journal 16, nos. 10, 12 [1960]: 499–506, 616–21; 17, nos. 1, 3, 5, 9 [1961]: 27–33, 120– 27, 225– 32, 400–410). To situate the physical society in the larger milieu of German science, see Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach, The Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from

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As in America, the matter of sensation was a problem for German physical scientists because it was a problem of the real. However, as historian James Kloppenberg writes, “Common sense never caught on in Germany.”46 Instead, by the 1850s scientists wrestled to chart a course between an older, romantic idealism— a Naturphilosophie— and a new emphasis on materialism. Idealism was associated with a more conservative political philosophy; materialism— in ascendancy after the failed revolutions of 1848— with a more hardheaded realism.47 Both approaches, however, authorized a freer fusion of theory and experimental evidence than was available to establishment American scientists, who tended to take a dim view of such speculation. Physiological optics was a constructive place to look for the fusion of the material and ideal. As historian Richard L. Kremer points out, by the time Rood arrived, subjective colors had become “a major problem for optical researchers” in the German- speaking world.48 Rood, with his abiding interest in optics and aesthetics, found himself in a rich ferment of ideas. Rather than deriving from Newton and Brewster, the German physiological tradition in optics traced its lineage back to Goethe’s Beitrage zur Optik (Contributions to optics; 1792) and its lumbering successor Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of colors; 1810). In these polemical works, Goethe attacked Newton’s optics for what he saw as an overreliance on experimental apparatus and method. While it was true that white light, when passed through a prism, yielded a rainbow spray of colors, for Goethe this was merely a special case of optical phenomena— not the basis of a science of color. Rather, Goethe saw the “vital energy” of the eye itself as the source of colors; colors were the response of the living, human, organism to fluctuations of light and dark in its environment. To understand color, then, one had to look not to light but to the living eye. The European scientific establishment largely dismissed Goethe’s ideas about color. At crucial points, he seemed to misunderstand the science beOhm to Einstein, vol. 1, The Torch of Mathematics, 1800 to 1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 110– 12; M. Norton Wise, “Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement,” in The Values of Precision, ed. M. Norton Wise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 222–37; Dieter Hoffmann, “Between Autonomy and Accommodation: The German Physical Society during the Third Reich,” Physics in Perspective 7, no. 3 (Sept. 1, 2005): 294–96. 46. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 17. 47. Timothy Lenoir, Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), esp. 75–95. 48. Richard L. Kremer, “Innovation through Synthesis,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan, California Studies in the History of Science 12 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 219.

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hind Newton’s claims; other times, his texts appeared to descend into romantic ramblings.49 By the 1830s Goethe’s color theory was a dead letter everywhere in European science— everywhere, that is, except in Germany, where (as Dove put it) people still wanted to know: whose side are you on— Goethe’s or Newton’s?50 In Germany, Goethe’s color studies inaugurated a new sort of science: a physiological psychology, or “psychophysics,” as one of Goethe’s devotees, Gustave Fechner, called it.51 Pursued by researchers such as Fechner and the pioneering physiologist Johannes Müller (who also admired Goethe’s color theory), this new physiological idea understood sensation not primarily in terms of physical causes but in terms of the responses of nerves to specific sorts of stimuli.52 Color, in this view, was in no way a phenomenon of light. Rather, it was simply the reaction of specialized nerves in the eye whose purpose was to deliver sensations of color, whether those sensations were caused by light, pressure, electric shocks, or chemical stimulation.53 Müller’s student Helmholtz was a staunch materialist who rejected Müller’s ro-

49. For a close and sympathetic reading of Goethe’s argument against Newton, see Sepper, Goethe contra Newton. Myles W. Jackson examines the political foundations of Goethe’s color science in “A Spectrum of Belief: Goethe’s ‘Republic’ versus Newtonian ‘Despotism,’” Social Studies of Science 24, no. 4 (Nov. 1994): 673– 701. For a broader look at sensation, perception, and romanticism, both German and English, see Burwick, Damnation of Newton. On the apparent robustness of Newton’s theory of color in particular, see Simon Schaffer, “Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Use of Experiment,” in The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67–104. Schaffer argues that Newton’s color theory relied much on Newton’s marshaling of trust and authority around experimental apparatus— an account answered by Alan E. Shapiro with an emphasis on the powerful consensus- building force of theory in “The Gradual Acceptance of Newton’s Theory of Light and Color, 1672–1727” Perspectives in Science 4 (1996): 59–140. See also Alan Shapiro, “The Evolving Structure of Newton’s Theory of White Light and Color,” Isis 71, no. 2 (June 1980): 211–35. 50. Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, Darstellung der Farbenlehre und optische Studien (Berlin: G. F. W. Müller, 1853), 14–15. 51. For an example of Fechner’s early admiration of Goethe, see Gustav Theodor Fechner, “Kurtze Darstellung der Goethe’schen Farbentheorie,” in Lehrbuch der Experimental-Physik oder Erfahrungs-Naturlehre, by Jean Baptiste Biot and Gustav Theodor Fechner (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1828). See also Michael Heidelberger, Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). 52. Laura Otis, Müller’s Lab (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 38; Michel Meulders, Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 49. 53. Laura Otis translates Müller’s famous pronouncement on the nature of aesthesis as “sensation is not the conduction to our consciousness of a quality of or circumstance of external bodies, but the conduction to our consciousness of a quality or circumstance of our nerves brought about by an external cause” (Otis, Müller’s Lab, 9).

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mantic idea of the purposefulness of nerves. Nevertheless, Helmholtz took his teacher’s ideas one step further. In a pair of papers in 1852, he decisively overturned Brewster’s concept of the tripartite spectrum on the grounds that Brewster hadn’t considered the ways that his own eye responded to light— for example, the effects of contrast colors; the response of the eye to shifts in light and dark; and the reaction of the eye to colors of different intensities.54 If he had, Helmholtz claimed, Brewster would have understood that light combines in the eye in a completely different way from the manner in which pigments mix. These “hitherto unobserved influences,” insisted Helmholtz, “render a sure judgment of the colours impossible, and deprive [Brewster’s] arguments of all force.”55 Although Helmholtz did not yet propose a specific neurophysical explanation of color as he would in coming years, by 1855 his model of subjective vision had displaced Brewster’s— a triumph that Dove celebrated in his own Darstellung. This approach to color was thus very different from the common sense chromatics taught by Henry and his peers. Indeed, it was an idea that could be seen as an assault on the assumptions of science and morality alike. For Brewster, Goethe’s theory of color represented a risky departure from common sense— one in which, he wrote, “the reason and the imagination were permitted to exercise a mingled and a dangerous control.”56 Henry, meanwhile, found Müller’s work comprehensive but “disappointing” because “it contains a good deal of indefinite speculation” but “gives but little positive knowledge.”57 Even more seriously, as Henry’s contemporary (and future president of Columbia College) Frederick A. P. Barnard wrote, the entire

54. Herman von Helmholtz, “On Sir David Brewster’s New Analysis of Solar Light,” Philosophical Magazine 4, no. 27 (1852): 401–16. Kremer’s “Innovation through Synthesis” offers an excellent gloss on both Helmholtz’s and Brewster’s views; see esp. 210– 16. 55. Helmholtz, “On Brewster’s New Analysis,” 416. 56. The stated goal of Brewster’s review was to “protect . . . Inductive Philosophy” against the “sophistries of German metaphysics.” See David Brewster, review of Goethe’s Theory of Colours, Translated from the German, with Notes, trans. Charles Eastlake, Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1840, 99. Elsewhere, he repeated a more general conviction that the subjective processes of vision were no topic for inductive science— cautioning readers of the popular science publication the Library of Useful Knowledge that “the manner in which external objects act upon the mind admits of no direct observation, and all theories respecting it can therefore rest on no sound foundation.” See David Brewster, “Introduction to Optics,” in Library of Useful Knowledge: Natural Philosophy, by Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1832), lxxxi. In this instance, Brewster referred to the general formation of images on the retina, rather than color specifically, but the warning applied equally to those who wished to study the color sense. See also Burwick, Damnation of Newton, 34–36. 57. Henry to Rood, 18 June 1860, box 1, folder: Henry, ONR-CU.

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project of psychophysics rested on suspect methodological and moral grounds. “Sensation, will, emotion, passion, thought,” maintained Barnard, “are in no conceivable sense physical.” He explained, “The philosophy [i.e., the science] which makes thought a form of force . . . converts the thinking being into a mechanical automaton, whose sensations, emotions, intellections, are mere vibrations produced in its material substance by the play of physical forces, and whose conscious existence must forever cease when the exhausted organism shall at length fail to respond to these external impulses.”58 In other words, to begin investigating the physical foundations of sensory experience was, ultimately, to cast aside not only the notion of human will and moral responsibility but also the idea of the soul and, ultimately, the divine hand that underwrote all of creation. This was a dangerous field of inquiry, and one that had little place in common sense American science. For Rood, however, the new field wasn’t just dangerous— it was captivating. Rather than observing the colors of rainbows and sunsets— or looking through microscopes at diffraction spectra— in his work with Dove and Magnus, Rood discovered color as a product of his own, embodied experience. As early as 1854, he had jolted with surprise when, awakening from a chloroform stupor induced in a Munich dentist’s office, he saw that the dentist’s hair had turned a “bright purplish hue”— an effect that, as it wore off, Rood took to be a hallucination caused by the effects of the chloroform on the nerves of his eyes.59 Now, in Berlin, he visited painting galleries and noticed how the qualities of the colors changed in nonlinear fashion as the light grew dim at the end of the day (Dove had written extensively on this phenomenon).60 From Dove, also, he learned experimental techniques: how to mix colors in a spectroscope (a device like a telescope connected to a prism) and on a color wheel, and how to make colors appear from spinning disks marked with patterns of black and white squares and spirals. As Dove later recalled, psychophysics at the time was among those “departments of optics in which the way is not yet [paved], and where at each step one is obliged to invent new methods of observation.” Rood was adept at finding 58. Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, “Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science,” in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Seventh Meeting, Held at Chicago, Il, August 1868 (Cambridge, MA: Joseph Lovering, 1869), 91. 59. Rood remembered his experiences with chloroform in “Observations on a Property of the Retina, First Noticed by Tait,” American Journal of Science and Arts 13, no. 73 (June 1877): 32–33. 60. O. Rood, Modern Chromatics, 189.

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solutions to experimental difficulties, and his work, thought Dove, “made a very favorable impression.”61 The work, in turn, made a very favorable impression on Rood. Reversing his initial enthusiasm for Brewster, he wrote to his sister to complain that “[t]here are no modern works on optics in English.” When he returned to the United States, he said, the two of them must “translate some German works on optics.” He was “serious about this,” he warned, “so study up your optics and German.”62 He did not say what precisely was lacking in modern works on optics in English, but it is apparent that Rood returned to the United States with a subtly different outlook on the relationship of the senses to science, having dipped his toe in the “new field” that Henry had speculated upon. Rood still— for a time— claimed to experience the touch of the Creator in the practice of science. But God’s hand was now held more closely to His vest, shrouded by the electrical and chemical processes that made up the innermost lives of living things. This was the characteristic of “modern” work on physiological optics, and it was one that Rood would spend his career exploring.

modern ChromAtiCs Shortly after he returned to the United States, Rood found employment as a professor of chemistry at Troy University, a newly founded agricultural college in upstate New York. The school was a “small hand” as Rood put it— underfunded and underequipped— and when Rood arrived, the nascent university was in disarray. The star in the faculty’s firmament, astronomer and mathematician John Monroe van Vleck, had fled Troy for Wesleyan University almost as soon as he had arrived, leaving an empty chair in mathematics. A second professor, one “Dr. Spencer,” had quit when the trustees of the university refused to raise his salary and build a house for him. This left Marvin Vincent, a nineteen- year- old philologist and theologian, as the sole professor at the university until Rood arrived. In the absence of capable educators, Rood was initially stuck teaching not only chemistry but also Greek, German, English, and— perhaps worst for all concerned—

61. Heinrich Dove to the Trustees of Columbia University, Nov. 15, 1863, “Columbiania,” Testimonials submitted to Trustees, 1863, series 1: Manuscript volumes, item 118, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 62. Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, n.d., box 1, folder 1, ONR-PR.

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mathematics. Faced with “a so- called library, where four or five hundred volumes, chiefly of classical authors, were displayed on a dreary expanse of shelving; in an ill- lighted lecture- room with a few bottles of chemicals,” Rood wondered whether he would be supplied with a proper laboratory, but he directed most of his energy toward securing a private bathroom in the faculty dormitory for himself and his wife, Mathilde. The windows of the university leaked, the dormitory was cold, the food was bad, and Rood joked that he and the other professors were given rainwater to drink.63 Still, things were not all bad at Troy, and while in upstate New York, Rood undertook some of the earliest experimental work in physiological psychology in the United States. While grinding microscope slides one day, Rood experienced “a numbness” in his hand and, “at times, an absolute inability to relax the grip” due to the vibration imparted by the grinder. This observation inspired him to fashion a machine specifically to test his body’s response to vibration. Upon gripping the machine’s handle— a brass tube in which an iron rod rotated rapidly at various speeds— he found that “a feeling of numbness is first perceived; the muscles involuntarily contract with considerable force,” and thereafter, it was “almost impossible, by an effort of the will to relax [his] grasp”— a sensation that he likened to electromagnetic force. This led him to speculate that the electrical impulses in the nerves might be akin to vibrations— a continuation of Helmholtz’s mechanistic view of nerves, with implications for understanding sensation.64 In another instance, Rood had been attempting to measure the duration of the discharge of a spark of gunpowder by viewing the spark through a rotating disk with small slits cut into it. Happening to glimpse a gaslight through the rotating disk, he noticed that the ordinarily yellowish light appeared to be green when the disk rotated at a fast speed and ranged from a reddish to a deep violet when the disk spun more slowly. “It was evident,” he later wrote, “that these appearances depended much on the state of the 63. Ogden and Mathilde Rood described the poor accommodations in Troy at length and with no small measure of dark humor in several vivid letters. For the most informative of these, see Ogden Rood to Helen Rood, Oct. 7, 1858, box 1, folder 9, Blake and Rood Families Papers, 1847– 1906 (3485), Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections; Mathilde Rood to Helen Rood, n.d. (ca. 1858), box 1, folder 9, ONR-PR. Edward Nichols quotes Marvin Vincent on Rood and Troy in a biography of Rood published by the National Academy of Sciences; see Edward Leamington Nichols, “Biographical Memoir of Ogden Nicholas Rood, 1831– 1902,” in National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs, vol. 6 (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1909), 451–53. 64. Ogden Rood, “On Contraction of the Muscles, Induced by Contact with Bodies in Vibration,” American Journal of Science and Arts 29 (May 1860): 449.

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eye.” And what was more, he discovered that his colleague Professor Vincent “was unable to perceive the reddish hue, with which my eyes at that very moment were dazzled.”65 Rood concluded that the colors were “subjective” and caused by oscillating states of the eye: a result akin to those that he would have seen when studying with Dove. Rood sent a letter describing the results of these experiments to Henry and received a favorable reply: “I am pleased to learn from your note of the 16th that you are giving attention to the general subject of the spectral phenomena of the eye,” Henry began. “A good digest of what has been done in regard to these appearances is much wanted and the compilation of a brief account of all the facts belonging to this class would be an important preliminary to your own investigations.” Henry then went on to recall his own interest in “subjective colour,” remembering the “pink protuberances” on the surface of the sun that had first set him thinking about the topic. Henry encouraged Rood to keep working on the congruencies between mechanical vibrations, electrical vibrations, and vibrations of the nerves, closing with the comment “How surprising is the co- relation of different branches of science— no phenomenon stands alone and could we change the essential character of a single physical fact we would change the whole system of laws by which the universe is now governed.”66 Of course, as both he and Rood were aware, the sort of psychophysical research that Rood was performing did change the “essential character” of facts. Pink protuberances suddenly became artifacts of perception rather than astronomical features. Light became deceptive as well as revelatory. The yellow of the Creator’s sunbeams might not be yellow as a matter of objective fact but rather just the sensation of yellow, unmoored from any necessary referent. The entire program of common sense observation was, in this way of thinking, upended— though not from idealism or speculation or materialism but from its own aesthetic emphases turned inward. Rood’s nascent work in psychophysics took hold in a turbulent time for Rood personally, for the nation politically, and for professional science socially. War had broken out in 1861, and the demands of assembling a military sucked young men from the countryside— in New York State roughly one- sixth of all able- bodied men were drafted. Receipts at Troy, which had been thin at best, plummeted. Amid the banging of cannons, the school 65. Ogden Rood, “On a New Theory of Light Proposed by J. Smith,” American Journal of Science and Arts 30 (June 1860): 182. 66. Henry to Ogden Rood, June 18, 1860, box 1, folder: Henry, ONR-CU.

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ended with a bureaucratic whimper as the New York State Assembly shut down the school for failure to comply with the financial demands of its charter. Upon hearing that her brother was out of work, Helen could summon only lukewarm comfort, writing, “you will find another situation and a better one if the country is ever at rest again, but now science and art must hope for little, I suppose.”67 As it turned out, both science and Rood fared better in the war years than Helen had predicted. In the North, war catalyzed a long- standing effort by groups of powerful professionals— among them industrialists, financiers, legislators, and academics— to bind science to American statecraft. Although neither ideologically nor sociologically homogeneous, these groups of modernizing reformers believed that science— and scientists— could be brought to bear in streamlining, rationalizing, and directing the shape of American society. The 1862 Morrill Act, for instance, authorized federal funds for new educational institutions which were “to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts . . . without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics.”68 In 1863 Congress authorized the formation of the National Academy of Sciences— an assembly of scientists convened to formally advise the federal government on technical matters.69 And as early as 1861, the United States Sanitary Commission— a private organization commissioned by Congress— replaced piecemeal charitable work on the battlefield with an organized network of hospitals and supply chains, administered centrally through the collection of statistics on everything from camp conditions, mortality, and morbidity to physical qualities of soldiers, their education, and— significantly— their capacity for color vision. In a sort of recursive loop, to promote science was the duty of a modern society, because a modern society was necessarily run scientifically. These moves reflected what, in 1867, chemist, photographer, and social theorist John William Draper called “central” or “organized” intelligence: the idea that modern societies would inevitably replace highly personal networks of control and knowledge- making— centered on traditional reli67. Helen Blake to Ogden Rood, Dec. 31, 1862, box 1, folder 9, Blake and Rood Families Papers, 1847–1906 (3485), Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. 68. Act of July 2, 1862, ch. 130, 12 Stat. 503, 7 U.S.C. 301 et seq. (sec. 4). 69. Frederick W. True, A History of the First Half-Century of the National Academy of Sciences, 1863–1913 (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1913); Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 226– 27.

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gious, social, ethnic, and family groups— with impersonal, abstract modes of understanding the world, based on bureaucracies guided by scientific expertise.70 This did not, of course, mean the complete abnegation of traditional religious, social, ethnic, and familial groups. Indeed, centralizing reformers, while neither ideologically nor sociologically homogeneous, nevertheless frequently socialized at the same elite clubs, shared religious affiliations, had strong family ties— and were overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy. But the idea of “organized intelligence” implied a rebuke to the idea of individual self- possession— common sense— as a superior guide to truth, reality, and moral rectitude. As one of Rood’s former colleagues at Troy, mathematician Charlton T. Lewis, put it, by the end of the Civil War, a new science was taking shape in “the History and Biography of nations and individuals, in the Annals of Crime, in the dawning truths of Physiology, and in the Records of Lunatic Asylums”— a science which would guide society based on “laws as reliable as any known in the material world and far more fruitful.”71 In other words, these laws would transcend the narrow, sectarian concerns of individual perceptions lashed to small communities, instead indicating a rational, true, and good way toward a prosperous national future.72 As for Rood, the war intervened in his favor when Richard McCulloh— formerly one of his natural philosophy professors at Princeton, now the chair of physics at Columbia College in New York City— defected to the South in October 1863, perhaps after having served the first two years of the war as

70. See John William Draper, Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1865), esp. 248; John William Draper, History of the American Civil War, vol. 3 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1867), esp. 669. For the historical background to Draper’s work, see George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 199–201; Donald Fleming, John William Draper and the Religion of Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950). 71. Charlton Thomas Lewis, Place of Mathematics in University Education: Inaugural Address of Charlton T. Lewis, Professor of Pure Mathematics in Troy University, Delivered Before the Trustees at Their Annual Meeting July 20th, 1859 (Troy, NY: A. W. Scribner, 1859), 9. 72. Nor, it must be said, was this simply a dream of Northern academics. Virginian George Frederick Holmes fantasized about the discovery of “true laws of social organization, with the design of thence descending to the true amelioration of the social distemper of the times”— by which he meant a scientific proof of the moral rectitude of slavery. Holmes quoted in Harvey Wish, “George Frederick Holmes and the Genesis of American Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 46, no. 5 (Mar. 1941): 704. See also Theodore Dwight Bozeman on Georgian Joseph LeConte’s attempts to formulate scientific laws of society that would justify white supremacy: “Joseph LeConte: Organic Science and a ‘Sociology for the South,’” Journal of Southern History 39, no. 4 (1973): 565–82.

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a spy for the Confederacy.73 Rood took the chair and along with it a position as one of those reformers who championed a new vision of American society. Among the trustees of Columbia who hired him was a founder of the Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, who recorded with great pleasure Rood’s demonstration of the “Rumkorff ” coil: a high- voltage spark generator which emitted, as Strong recalled, “beaded streams of colored light, blue, rose- pink, and green . . . most lovely— far beyond any fireworks I ever saw.” From this, Strong decided that “Rood seems a brick” (i.e., a good fellow).74 Others agreed. Rood joined Strong as a member of the elite Century Club— a “facility for social intercourse among gentlemen of cultivated and liberal pursuits”— where he met like- minded intellectuals.75 Along with fellow Columbia professor (and Century Club member) Charles Joy— and with the support of Strong— Rood was one of the first faculty at Columbia to allow women to sit in on his classes, a controversial position that perhaps reflected the influence of the scientific aspirations of his sisters. He also championed the cause of evolutionary theory enthusiastically enough that he sent Charles Darwin a sketch of a pair of ears for inclusion in The Descent of Man (Darwin thanked Rood through his emissary, Asa Gray, and expressed regret that the book was already in press when he had received the drawings).76 These moves earned Rood the reputation of a “dangerous” atheist, one of those “rationalistic professors in the chairs once occupied by the great theologians of the Church” whose work was undermining the foundations of American society, as Morgan Dix, rector of Trinity Church, put it.77 By all evidence, this reputation delighted Rood, and he was proud to take a position as an elite reformer on the side of science and modernity and against the failing pretenses of outmoded tradition.78 73. See Robert A. McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 143. In his diary George Templeton Strong mentions that McCulloh worked in a “military laboratory”: Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 363, 366. 74. Strong, Diary, 3:404. 75. John Hamilton Gourlie, The Origin and History of “The Century” (W. C. Bryant, 1856), 5. 76. Asa Gray to Rood, n.d. (original note to Gray from Darwin, June 3, 1874), box 1, folder 6, ONR-PR. 77. Dix quoted in Rosalind Rosenberg, Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think about Sex and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 22. For general contours of “the battle over coeducation” at Columbia, see ibid., 17– 47. 78. For instance, Rood jokes about his “religious character” in a letter to his fellow color theorist Alfred Marshall Mayer: Ogden Rood to Alfred Mayer, Apr. 11, 1887, box 6, folder 54, Hyatt and Mayer Collection (C0076), Manuscripts Division, Princeton University Library.

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But it was in the science of aesthetics that Rood based his most farreaching work. At the Century Club, Rood hobnobbed with the prominent artists of the middle of the century. He befriended Asher B. Durand, a renowned landscape painter known for his deep fidelity to the practice of empirical observation. He visited the Hudson River school painter Frederick Edwin Church at his house in Upstate New York, where, Church was happy to boast, he and his wife “wore old clothes” and were “not ashamed to offer our friends ham and eggs.”79 Rood conversed with Albert Bierstadt, painter of grand landscapes of the American Southwest, about telegraphy; and with Bierstadt’s brother, Edward, about color photography.80 He gave his paintings as gifts to fellow Century Club members; physicist Alfred Meyer received a painting of “‘Monument Mountain,’ Stockbridge, just after sunset, mists gathering over the low, damp ground, etc.” And, at the club’s art gallery in 1877, Rood displayed at least one of his own paintings, entitled, simply, Landscape.81 As one of the earliest members of the American Watercolor Society, Rood kept up a serious painting practice and availed himself of the society’s libraries and galleries. He corresponded with John Ruskin, and Ruskin sent him watercolor paintings and pastel drawings of Ruskin’s own making.82 Most importantly, Rood became a public exponent of the importance of science in the production of art. In 1873 he gave two popular lectures, “Optics in Modern Art,” at the American Academy of Design. These lectures, accompanied by dramatic demonstrations, promoted the idea of a new chromatics: a “chromatics from a modern point of view,” as he later termed the idea. Beginning around 1877, he turned to his fellow Century Club member William H. Appleton to publish his views on color in the book that would become Modern Chromatics. In Modern Chromatics, Rood gave his readers color as a living experience— a product not of static systems of harmony but of the suppleness and mysteriousness of the living eye and nervous system. While Brewster and Field, for instance, began their expositions of color by discussing physical

79. Frederick Edwin Church to Ogden Rood, May 16, 1875, box 1, folder: Church, ONR-CU. 80. Albert Bierstadt to Ogden Rood, June 22, 1885, box 1, folder: Bierstadt, ONR-CU; Edward Bierstadt to Ogden Rood, July 9, 1891, box 2, folder B, ONR-CU. 81. Ogden Rood to Alfred Mayer, Nov. 2, 1880, box 6, folder 54, Hyatt and Mayer Collection, Manuscripts Division, Princeton University Library. 82. J. H. Van Amringe and John La Farge, “Ogden Nicholas Rood: Commemorative Addresses Delivered before the Century Association, December 6th, 1902,” in Century Association: Reports, Constitution, By-Laws and List of Members for the Year 1902 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1903), 57.

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theories of light, Rood opened with a scene of the “optic nerve of the living eye” subjected to electrical shocks and pressure, such that “a series of brilliant, changing, fantastic figures seem to pass before the experimenter.”83 Rood emphasized that these figures— manifesting in brilliant shades of “bright red, green or violet and other hues”— appeared even in a darkened room, proving that “the sense of vision can be excited without the presence of light.” Nevertheless, since light was the stimulus most commonly provocative of color sensations, the study of light warranted close attention in Rood’s chromatics. Rood then delved into a detailed treatment of ocular physiology: the “wonderfully fine network of minute blood- vessels and nerves” within the retina, “interspersed with vast numbers of tiny atoms, which under the microscope look like little rods and cones” and which, in their “mysterious manner,” are “capable of being acted upon by light” and thereby send “nerve signals to the brain which awake in us the sensation of vision.”84 This focus on the physiological was a dialogue with his artist friends, who in many instances were versed in the chromatics of Brewster and Field. Church, in particular, was a devotee of Field, an inclination that he perhaps inherited from his own teacher, the landscapist Thomas Cole, who had devoted a great deal of study to Field’s Chromatics. Durand, too, while seemingly unsympathetic to the fusion of optical science and painterly practice, appears to have been versed in the chromatics of the previous half century. Indeed, Field’s chromatics was a staple of nineteenth- century American art education, ubiquitous in both scientific and popular texts. This was a view of science and painting alike as orderly and consisting of prescriptive reflections of the real. The psychophysical study of color perception, on the other hand, made it clear that theories such as Field’s, based, as they were, in analogies to music, were, as Rood put it, “quite worthless.”85 For one thing, he noted, whereas musical notes repeated in clearly delineated segments (i.e., octaves), there were no octaves in color— just more or less well- realized family resemblances. This meant that any color- ordering system had to be based not on regular repetition but on qualities of color. Moreover, whereas musical notes were spaced in evenly placed intervals, there was no such even spacing in color: sometimes, small shifts in measurable wavelengths of light 83. O. Rood, Modern Chromatics, 9. 84. Ibid., 10. 85. Ibid., 304.

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led viewers to report dramatically new color sensations; sometimes large shifts in wavelengths caused very little change in perception of color. Perhaps most important of all was that while musical notes remained distinct to the hearer, even as they mixed to produce harmony or disharmony, mixing colors simply produced an entirely different color— even an artist couldn’t distinguish where one stopped and the other began. Just as Müller had intimated, each sensation was produced by its own type of “nerve,” and the nerves— and sensations— of the eye and ear were unimpeachably distinct. Moreover, the shift to thinking in terms of nerves rather than in terms of light entailed a shift in the very fundamentals upon which color was based. As Rood explained, rather than Field’s musical analogies, he looked to the physiology of the eye. Specifically, he looked to the theory— first proposed by British scientist Thomas Young in 1801, researched by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, and incorporated by Helmholtz into the second volume of his massive Handbuch der physiologischen Optik in 1860— that the retina was composed of three kinds of sensitive “fibrils,” or “nerves.”86 Each one of these nerves was receptive to a different primary color, and the cumulative responses of these nerves gave rise to the millions of color perceptions that humans could experience. The tricky thing was that— as Helmholtz had noted— color mixed differently in the eye than in pigments, and the nerves of the eye were sensitive to red, green, and bluish- violet light— rather than red, yellow, and blue. This, in turn, led to paradoxical results— most prominently the fact that yellow, which viewers tended to experience as an indivisible, primary color, was actually a secondary color, composed of stimuli from red- sensitive and green- sensitive fibrils. Although by 1860 nobody had actually identified these nerve fibrils in the retina, Helmholtz felt confident enough to provide a diagram of the sensitivity curves for each nerve (fig. 3). Helmholtz’s curves, were, of course, strikingly similar to Brewster’s diagram of his tripartite spectra. But while Brewster’s diagram depicted overlapping spectra of light that could be seen 86. All three volumes of Helmholtz’s Physiologischen Optik were published together in 1867. For the passages on color, see Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1867), 224–308. In 1924 the Optical Society of America released an annotated English translation; on color, see Hermann von Helmholtz, Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics, ed. James P. C. Southall (Rochester, NY: Optical Society of America, 1924), 61–172. While Kremer (“Innovation through Synthesis”) argues that Helmholtz arrived at the trichromatic theory more or less independently, Heesen argues that Helmholtz was aware of (and simply silent about) his readings of the prior work of Young and Maxwell. See Remco Heesen, “The Young-(Helmholtz)-Maxwell Theory of Color Vision,” preprint, Jan. 23, 2015, http://philsci - archive.pitt.edu/11279/.

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Figure 3 Helmholtz’s trichromatic curves: red, green, and blue. (Rood, Modern Chromatics, 114)

as conterminous with sensations (fig. 1), Helmholtz’s diagram was a sketch simply of signals— impulses generated by electrochemical reactions, contained within the body of the sensing subject. As one of Helmholtz’s biographers later put it, physiological optics inexorably led to the conclusion that “sensations of light and color are only symbols for relations of reality, giving no knowledge of the real nature of external phenomena.”87 Rood advanced this skepticism in Modern Chromatics. “Outside of ourselves,” Rood insisted, “there is no such thing as colour, which is a mere sensation that varies with the length of the wave producing it.”88 Indeed, in later research, he came to believe that no two people experienced the same sensations for color at all. “Some time ago,” he wrote, “for the purpose of comparing my own color- vision with that of others, an extensive set of experiments were made with the flicker photometer [a device for measuring the luminosity of a color] and while it turned out that not a single person agreed with me, it also was found that no two persons agreed with each other. These divergences were so large that it was impossible to attribute them to errors of observation, and the application to them of a control method showed them to have a real existence.”89 In other words, not only did colors exist only in the mind of the observer, but different minds were differently disposed toward any given color. Other experimenters acknowledged this problem.

87. Louis Karpinski, “Herman von Helmholtz,” Scientific Monthly 13, no. 1 (July 1, 1921): 28. 88. O. Rood, Modern Chromatics, 109. 89. Ogden Rood, “On Color-Vision and the Flicker Photometer,” American Journal of Science (1880–1910); New Haven 8, no. 46 (Oct. 1899): 258.

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As Kansas City, Missouri, ophthalmologist Leroy Dibble pointed out, “the color limit, even in normal eyes, is by no means uniform.” How an individual perceived the world was a matter of the “party’s mentality”— in color perception, Dibble mused, “as in other affairs of life.”90 But then, where did this leave painters, to say nothing of ordinary people? After all, Rood had not abandoned the concept of the real. “The object of painting,” he wrote, “is the production by the use of colour of more or less perfect representations of natural objects.”91 Indeed, he continued, even when representing imaginary objects, the painter should strive to include colors “such as might exist or might be imagined to exist”— in order that “our fundamental notions about these matters are not flatly contradicted.” 92 How could it be, then, that even the imagination must correspond to “fundamental notions” when no two human beings’ fundamental notions might necessarily be expected to coincide? Helmholtz had given some thought to the topic, writing, as historian Timothy Lenoir puts it, that “painters succeeded at their craft not by copying the natural object, but rather by representing on the canvas the rules and codes the mind uses in constructing visual representations from sense data.”93 In like manner, Modern Chromatics set about instructing Rood’s readers in the rules and codes which would guide them in the absence of the straightforward, visual certainty offered by traditional chromatics. For instance, Rood noted that small dots of color placed near each other could stimulate the retina in much the same way as when light was mixed: a more luminous experience of color than simply a flat field of pigment. In other passages, he remarked that seemingly counterintuitive color combinations— the sort that would be expected to be disharmonious on a reading of Field— could be used to express varied luminosity. “The scarlet coat of a soldier when shaded appears red,” he wrote; “the sunlit portion is orange- red. Grass in the sunshine acquires a yellowish- green hue; in the shade its colour is more bluish.”94 If these color combinations seemed like violations of common sense, these were nevertheless simply “natural consequences of the kind of illumination to which these objects are exposed.” And given the fact that red and green receptors in the retina combined to give a 90. Leroy Dibble, “Color Blindness vs. Color Ignorance,” Railway Surgeon 10, no. 7 (Dec. 1903): 203. 91. O. Rood, Modern Chromatics, 306 (emphasis added). 92. Ibid., 307. 93. Lenoir, Instituting Science, 147. 94. O. Rood, Modern Chromatics, 273.

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sensation of yellow, it followed that, when painting foliage, the painter could safely incorporate reds and yellows into the composition, giving a greater impression of living foliage than a simple palette of green.95 The point, taken overall, was not that painters should follow any particular rules for creating leaves or grass or soldiers’ jackets. Rather, the point was that painters should be alert to the fact that their own physiology militated against their ability to simply and directly look and then represent the reality before their eyes. Rood’s circumstances thus put him in a puzzling position. As a member of a newly empowered class of experts, he nevertheless spoke to— and championed— a traditional practice of representation. Painting, to Rood, had to represent nature with utmost fidelity, but it had to do so according to new rules, and the juxtaposition between laboratory practice and everyday experience could be jarring. For example, in his discussion of the colors of light polarized through different sorts of crystals, Rood extolled the “wild freaks” of composition presented before the eye: the “pale grey or white” of selenite, for instance, “deepening into a fox- coloured yellow, followed by a red- violet, brightening into a sea- green dashed with pure ultramarine”; or the “curved lines” of crystals of tartaric acid, “tinted with soft grey and pale yellow, with here and there dashes of colour like the spots on a peacock’s tail, glowing like coals of fire; all this being set off by very dark shades of olive green dark browns and greys if the crystals are thin.”96 Colors such as these would “astonish and dazzle in their audacity and total disregard of all known laws of chromatic composition,” Rood said. And yet, he hesitated to recommend such rule breaking to his readers.97 For, as he noted, “[i]n ordinary life the colours of polarization are never seen; the fairy world where they reign cannot be entered without other aid than the unassisted eye.” Lest his readers mourn the loss of access to this privileged form of seeing, he reminded them that this was not “a matter for regret”: for “the purity of the hues and the audacious character of their combinations cause their gayety to appear strange and unnatural to eyes accustomed to the far more somber hues appropriate to a world in which labour and trouble are such important and ever present elements.”98 A world of “labour and trouble”— this was the demesne of modern chromatics, not a “fairy world” of rule breaking in the name of science, not a

95. Ibid., 83. 96. Ibid., 46. 97. Ibid., 45–46. 98. Ibid., 48.

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realm of ideal experimentation, but the world of the everyday, where rules of the real mattered. Unlike the reader of Field’s Chromatics, who could see the rectitude of the rules of color as obviously as they were printed on the page, the reader of Modern Chromatics could view the phenomena presented only as part of a “fairy world”— and yet, it was necessary to understand this fairy world in pursuit of fidelity to the real. This understanding would thus come not from the individual eye but from networks of professionals like Rood.

ConClusion: subjeCtive visions Years after their initial conversation about impressionism, Roland and Ogden went painting in the hills of Massachusetts to see how it was that Monet, Pissarro, and the “lot of others” had arrived at their painting style through Rood’s book. As they worked, they tried “many experiments in landscape painting, always referring to his book for the rules.”99 And, indeed, in some of Ogden Rood’s surviving paintings from this period, pink washes in the ground pick up the bright pink of the sky; a tree’s foliage rustles brightly in the sunset, splotches of purple offsetting patches of orange amid the darkgreen leaves; the structure of a house peeks through a busy patchwork of overgrowth dotted in bright orange, green, and purple. In the intervening years, Ogden Rood’s work had, indeed, changed how people “wrote and spoke about color.” As early as 1874, Charles Townsend— a writer in New York who attended Rood’s lectures at the Academy of Design—praised Rood as the discoverer of subjective colors. Rood tried to correct him, writing that he “did not claim any originality in the matter of the subjectivity of color.”100 But Townsend persisted, replying that Rood’s “remarkable conclusion, that colors have no existence outside of ourselves” “fully entitles you to a new discovery in the practical overthrow of that old complicated dogma in optical science.”101 Because his work had practical value, Rood was the discoverer of a new way of seeing, whether he liked it or not. In a similar vein, an 1892 letter to the editor of the journal Painting and Decorating excoriated the author of an article which claimed that colors harmonized according to musical analogy, and that the three primary colors were red, yellow, and blue. “With regard to the Brewster primaries, and 99. R. Rood, “Professor Rood’s Theories of Color and Impressionism,” 219. 100. Charles E. Townsend to O. Rood, Feb. 5, 1874, box 3, folder T, ONR-CU. 101. Ibid.

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the superstructure of color harmonies raised thereon by George Field, we can but come to this conclusion,” fumed the writer: “That the physical basis being false, the fabric erected thereon must be equally false.” Instead of Brewster and Field, the writer recommended that his fellow readers turn to Modern Chromatics for the truth about color.102 Rood’s work had redefined— and popularized— a new sort of “physical basis” for vision, and this had, in turn, allowed for a new “fabric” of the real. Modern Chromatics was an attempt to give that fabric shape: to ensure that subjective perception was properly administrated; that the signals sent by the nerve fibrils of the eye did not get mistranslated or spoken of incorrectly or irrationally. This, in brief, was Rood’s problem with impressionism. Modern chromatics was about trying to understand the link between the representation of the real and the real itself. Impressionists had taken the process of representation— literally, the re- presentation— as the thing itself: the thing to be represented. They had taken the fairy world of the laboratory and turned it into a moment of aesthesis. Roland recalled that, as the two men painted together, it dawned on the elder Rood that perhaps he had, indeed, underwritten impressionism without knowing it— that “while searching for truth in one direction he had also uncovered it elsewhere.” He later concluded, “My son, I always knew that a painter could see anything he wanted to in nature, but I never before knew that he could see anything he chose in a book.”103 102. F.P., “Color and the Associations,” Painting and Decorating 8, no. 2 (Nov. 1892): 168–71. 103. R. Rood, “Professor Rood’s Theories of Color and Impressionism,” 215.

C h a pte r tw o

FROM CHEMISTRY TO PHANEROCHEMISTRY Charles Sanders Peirce and the Semiotic of Color

Pragmatism Late in the fall of 1876— before he started work on Modern Chromatics; before galvanizing Pissarro and Seurat and “a lot of others”; before he grumbled about the meaning of colors and doubted the significance of words— Ogden Rood met Charles Sanders Peirce in the thick atmosphere of erudition, homosocial bonding, and cigar smoke that was the Century Club in New York City. An astronomer, chemist, mathematician, and philosopher, Peirce had recently returned from Europe, where he had occupied the previous four months taking gravimetric and astronomical measurements, meeting with leading natural philosophers, having a nervous breakdown, and representing the United States as the first American representative to the International Geodetic Conference in Paris. As he traveled the Continent, Peirce had taken with him an astrophotometer— a device for measuring the brightness of stars. But instead of the heavens, Peirce turned his photometer earthward, attempting to study, not the luminosity of astral bodies, but the nature of thought itself. Placing everyday objects within the field of the photometer, he took careful note of his impressions of the brightness of the items, which included a “dark red ticket” and a piece of “Ward’s cream paper,” and of “three intense colors”— red, green, and violet— mixed in varying combinations in an optical device called a “color box.” He recorded the results in a notebook, keeping careful track of how his subjective attempts to measure the brightness of different-

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colored artifacts varied at each attempt. And sometime between March 8 and May 19, he jotted a salient observation in his notebook, between the tables of numbers and error tabulations: “What is [a] thought?” he asked himself. A thought “must have, first, some sensible element. Then there must be a habit connecting this with another sensation. In other words, a thought is a relationship (a third) between two sensations (two seconds), which themselves are signs of qualities of possibility (a first) of the real.”1 This question— what is a thought?— lay at the heart of Peirce’s philosophy, which he called “pragmatism.” Pragmatism was concerned with the nature of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and feelings— and scientific thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and feelings took an especially central place. For Peirce, it wasn’t enough simply to say that thoughts were manifestations of the material world in the mind, as common sense philosophy might have it. Nor was it enough to say, along with psychophysicists, that thoughts were simply electrochemical impulses racing through the nerves of the brain in response to stimulus. Rather, believed Peirce, any theory of thoughts had to show how reality emerged from what his friend William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the real. How was it that red was red, and not the smell of lavender? How was it that tactility and vision were distinct sensations? How did human beings come to believe— in facts, in feelings, in science, in the divine, in anything? For Peirce, phenomena such as these suggested that thoughts were actions rather than things—processes through which metaphysical properties of the universe became real through continual reiteration among communities of people. The general process through which this continual reiteration took place Peirce called “semiotic”— the science of signs, where a sign, to Peirce, was anything that “produces an effect upon a person.”2 The pragmatist looked at the practical effects of a thing— its signs; its relations to other things; the way that it signaled its presence in the world— in order to understand it. Color was foundational to Peirce’s pragmatism. When Rood asked his new friend in color science for “an account of the nature of the researches into color upon which [he was] engaged,” Peirce answered him pragmati-

1. Charles S. Peirce, note, n.d., Köln notebook, folder 1018, Charles S. Peirce Papers, 1787– 1951 (MS Am 1632), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter abbreviated as CSP). 2. Charles Peirce to Victoria Welby, December 23, 1908, in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Nathan Houser, Christian J. W. Kloesel, and Peirce Edition Project, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992–98), 2:478 (emphasis in original).

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cally.3 Light, replied Peirce, “may be considered from three points of view. First, from a purely objective way, as it exists, without reference to the sensation it produces. Second, in a purely subjective way, as a sensation without reference to its cause in the external world. Third, in a mixed way, in regard to the relations of the varieties of light- sensation to the varieties of lightwaves which produce them.”4 In other words, color was— as he had written in his notebook of photometric observations— a form of thought: “a relationship (a third) between two sensations (two seconds), which themselves are signs of qualities of possibility (a first) of the real”— and thus, pragmatically, color was a perfect demonstration of semiotic.5 As Peirce subsequently explained in a review of Rood’s Modern Chromatics, chromatics was not a science of chemistry or of optics or of physiology; rather, it was a science of relations— the relations between colors in and of themselves and between sensations of color as experienced and identified by communities of viewers. Indeed, color, believed Peirce, was as “near to the first impression of sense, as any perception which it is in our power to extricate from the complexus of consciousness.”6 As such, color— protean, strange, emerging in infinite complexity from the simple possibility of white light— was the perfect vehicle to test Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic. Peirce’s pragmatism has had long legs. For more than a century, social theorists in anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and political theory have applied the works of Peirce and his colleagues, students, and interlocutors— William James, John Dewey, George Santayana, Mary Douglas, George Herbert Mead, among a catalog of others— to the most pressing problems of their times. Peirce’s semiotic has proven particularly useful, as scholars have turned to semiotic to explain everything from aesthetics and politics, to mass communication and mass society, to the workings of medicine and the nature of life itself.7 And yet, for all of its longevity, pragmatism had its roots in the very specific circumstances of nineteenth- century American science, philosophy, 3. Charles Peirce to Ogden Rood, n.d. (ca. 1877), folder L382: Ogden Rood Correspondence, CSP. 4. Ibid. 5. Charles S. Peirce, note, n.d., Köln notebook, folder 1018, CSP. 6. Charles Peirce, “Rood’s Chromatics,” Nation 29, no. 746 (Oct. 16, 1879): 260. 7. See, e.g., Michael Leja, “Peirce, Visuality, and Art,” Representations, no. 72 (2000): 97–122; Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

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and society. Peirce’s pragmatism has been read in many ways: as a response to the violence and uncertainty of the Civil War; as a reaction to German idealist philosophy; as a rejection of Emersonian individualism; as an attempt to reconcile transcendentalism with American academic philosophy; as a tension between theory and practice in American life.8 Peirce’s polyglot interests, his penchant for obscure neologisms, and his habit of retroactively revising his corpus (the word “pragmatism” did not appear in print until 1898, after which Peirce applied it ex post facto to his work since the 1860s) complicate any attempt to give a succinct genealogy of the philosophy. But more than just a consequence of nebulous social forces or abstract mentation, Peirce’s pragmatism was a response to the same problem that bedeviled Rood: the problem of how to make sense of thinking, sensing, feeling beings in a time in which science had taken on new meaning. Late in life, Peirce penned a letter to his former student Christine LaddFranklin (herself a renowned color scientist; see chapter 5) in which he stated, “Pragmatism is one of the results of my study of the formal laws of signs” (in other words, his semiotic). This was, he claimed, “a study guided by mathematics and the familiar facts of everyday experience, and by no other science whatsoever.”9 Such a blanket disavowal aside, however, Peirce’s published papers, notes, and correspondence all suggest that, in fact, he did lean very heavily on one particular science— the science of color perception— when formulating his pragmatism in general and his study of signs in particular.10 From early work in chemistry and psychophysics, to the articula8. See, respectively, Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720– 2000 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), esp. 42– 68; Joan Richardson, Pragmatism and American Experience: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 9. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 13, no. 26 (1916): 720 (emphasis added). 10. Within the expansive corpus of scholarly work on Peirce, few researchers have taken up Peirce’s interest in color and its relation to pragmatism. Those who do tend to treat color as a more or less uncontested given rather than the active scientific question that it was for both Peirce and his peers. This perspective naturally limits the possibilities for historical analysis of the relationship between Peirce’s color science and his pragmatism and has rendered the connections between the two somewhat obscure. Among extant scholarship on Peirce’s work in color, Roberta Kevelson’s Peirce, Science, Signs (New York: P. Lang, 1996) devotes the greatest attention to the historical aspects of Peirce’s scientific color work. For an in- depth index of the occurrences of color in general in Peirce’s work on logic and mathematics, see José F. Vericat’s “Color as Abstraction,” in Living Doubt: Essays concerning the Epistemology of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. G. Debrock and Menno Hulswit (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1994), 289– 302. A somewhat- different

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tion of his semiotic, to a late fusion of semiotic and chemistry that he called “phanerochemistry,” Peirce worked on his pragmatism through the material and conceptual lens provided by color science. As such, the very problem of individual subjectivity that entangled Rood became, for Peirce, central in articulating the way that the real came to be as a communal act of signification. In building pragmatism on color science, Peirce formulated a new way of thinking about living, sensing beings and the societies that they make— as coextensive collectives of beings, enmeshed in communities of “corporate” perception.

Chemistry In 1861 Peirce— then twenty- two years old and a student of chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard— wrote a lecture entitled “Views on Chemistry, Sketched for Young Ladies.” Although the nominal topic of the lecture was chemistry, the real topic was Peirce’s developing views on the nature of the real, as known through scientific inquiry. The first thing that Peirce wanted his notional audience of young ladies to know was that chemistry— and, indeed, all of science— had changed in modern times. “Once,” explained Peirce, “men were contented with facts and names and uses. Now, we always ask ‘what is the meaning of this thing?’”11 This was a freighted question, because it contained the tacit assumption that the meaning of a thing was not simply the thing itself, as would be the case with common sense observation. Rather, to ask about the meaning of a thing was to ask how it related to other things or, more precisely, what it signified, what it pointed to: what, besides the simple fact of being, underwrote sensible reality? This was, in a sense, a restatement of Rood’s problem: the identity of an observed thing was not, necessarily, simply that thing. It view of the importance of color (or the lack thereof) in Peirce’s work on logic and thought can be found in philosopher Esther Ramharter’s Eine Frage der Farbe: Modalitäten des Zeichengebrauchs in der Logik (Berlin: Parerga, 2011). Ramharter discusses both Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein in her book; for further reading on connections between the color work of Peirce and Wittgenstein, see anthropologist Barbara Saunders’s “Peirce on Color (with Reference to Wittgenstein),” in Language and World: Papers of the 32nd International Wittgenstein Symposium, Kirchberg am Wechsel, ed. Joseph Wang, Klaus Puhl, and Volker A. Munz (Frankfurt am Main: Ontos; distributed in North and South America by Transaction Books, 2010). Numerous other scholars mention Peirce’s work on color in passing; see, e.g., Jonathan Crary in his Suspensions of Perception (159). 11. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Views on Chemistry, Sketched for Young Ladies,” in Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 8 vols. to date, ed. Max Harold Fisch and Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982–), 1:50.

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was something else, something deferred and not quite known. In naming “meaning” as the central question of modern science, Peirce acknowledged that the entire tenor of science had changed. This required a new philosophy of the real— a philosophy of how matter became manifest to thinking, sensing beings. Second, Peirce continued, it was necessary to understand that chemistry—the analysis of matter— wasn’t really predicated on matter at all, but on thought. That is to say, the most important thing for the scientist to discern was not, immediately, the substance of matter itself but, rather, how one came to know this matter as something rather than nothing— as something definite and identifiable rather than as nameless chaos. In this, sensation and distinction were key components. As Peirce put it, a thing must be “sensible in order to be anything to us, and it must be distinct or distinguished in order to be a form to us”— in other words, in order to be present before consciousness, a thing had to be amenable to comparisons between sensations.12 Peirce honed his point through an anecdote about the color sense, explaining that “there is a gentleman in England who has shown by an ingenious research that everything appears green to him. Green, however, is not a refreshing color to him, because it is undistinguished.”13 If everything is green, then the quality of being green doesn’t signify anything— it is undistinguished, or meaningless. As with green, so too with anything present before consciousness: the universe is indistinct unless it becomes distinct before the thinking mind. Peirce came to his musings on color and chemistry from a lifetime of schooling in science and medicine. The second child of Sarah Hunt Mills, daughter of an influential member of Congress, and Benjamin Peirce, a renowned professor of mathematics at Harvard University, he grew up in a household politically and vocationally at the center of American science. Benjamin Peirce was among the small clique of men— including Joseph Henry— who exerted outsized influence on the shape of nineteenth- century American science. In addition to his stature as a mathematician, Benjamin was among the founding principals of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Academy of Sciences, and Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School.14 He lobbied Congress hard to increase the scope and authority of the US

12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. See, e.g., Edward R. Hogan, Of the Human Heart: A Biography of Benjamin Peirce (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008).

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Coast and Geodetic Survey— the preeminent federal scientific agency of the time— and, in 1872, became its director. Benjamin dominated Charles’s early intellectual development, training him in philosophy, mathematics, and science and predicting scientific greatness for his son from the moment of Charles’s birth.15 Chemistry was among the first sciences that Charles learned. When he was seven years old, his aunt Charlotte Elizabeth Peirce (a librarian at Harvard) and his uncle Charles Henry Peirce (a well- known chemist and translator of Julius Adolph Stöckhardt’s ubiquitous textbook Principles of Chemistry) shepherded him through Justus von Liebig’s course in qualitative chemical analysis. The “hundred bottles” as it was colloquially called, presented students with a series of increasingly complicated compounds in unmarked bottles, which the student would endeavor to identify through basic experimental procedures.16 An important part of this process was the cultivation not only of chemical theory but of what Liebig called the “excitement of the student’s own powers of observation and reflection.”17 Through the hundred bottles, students would gain the ability to discern the “qualities” of which basic chemical combinations consisted. One gets a sense of the tenor of this practice of observation from his uncle’s translated manual— which Peirce consulted in his attempt to surmount the hundred bottles— in which Stöckhardt emphasized that “every experiment is a question put to a body, the answer to which we receive through a phenomenon, that is, through a change which we observe, sometimes by the sight or the smell, sometimes by the other senses.”18 From this course, Peirce learned about the ways in which chemicals combined and about the various forces— heat, magnetism, electricity— through which matter mysteriously took form. But to Peirce, in retrospect, the real mystery of chemistry was not how chemicals came to make different forms of matter but, rather, how the mind came to know that matter in the first place. As he put it later in life, “[t]he young chemist precipitates Prussian 15. On Peirce’s early life and Benjamin Peirce’s high aspirations for his son, see Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 36– 50. 16. William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: The Chemical Gatekeeper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 45–47 (for mention of Liebig’s method). 17. Heinrich Will, Outlines of the Course of Qualitative Analysis Followed in the Giessen Laboratory (London: Taylor and Walton, 1846), vi. For another characterization of Liebig’s method, see Liebig’s assistant C. Remigius Fresenius’s Manual of Qualitative Chemical Analysis, trans. Horace L. Wells (New York: Wiley, 1897). 18. Julius Adolph Stöckhardt, The Principles of Chemistry, Illustrated by Simple Experiments, trans. Charles H. Peirce (Cambridge, MA: John Bartlett, 1850), 8.

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blue from two nearly colorless fluids a hundred times over without ceasing to marvel at it. Yet he finds no marvel in the fact that any one precipitate when compared in color with the other seems similar every time. It is quite as much a mystery, in truth, and you can no more get at the heart of it than you can get at the heart of an onion.”19 The question, then, was not “how do two chemicals combine to form Prussian blue?” The real question was “how do human beings come to understand that blue as blue, every time?” One way to answer this question was through psychophysical research. And, indeed, Peirce remembered, “When, in 1862, two years after Fechner’s ‘Psychophysik,’ Wundt emerged from the physiological laboratory with his Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung [Inquiry into the theory of sense perception] students in this country there were who saw in the little volume the harbinger of a new science of experimental psychology.”20 Peirce was among those students who thought that the new science would both “keep pace with the other strictly experimental sciences” and, indeed, “outstrip all those sciences . . . in which experimentation had not become practicable”— by which he meant sciences such as aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics, among others.21 As an enthusiast, Peirce kept up with his reading in psychophysics, as evidenced, for example, in an 1868 paper, when he turned toward “facts of physiopsychology”— of sensory nerves, of the physiology of light on the retina, of color perception— in enumerating “certain faculties claimed for man.”22 But Peirce’s faith in psychophysics eroded. Whereas initially he had trusted Wundt’s experimental psychology, he came to sense that Fechner, Wundt, Helmholtz, and their fellows had erred as philosopher- scientists. Rather than seeing their work as an exploration of the relations of commu19. Peirce, unpublished manuscript, 1893, edited as “The Logic of Quantity” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), 3:87. Precipitate of Prussian blue occurs a number of times throughout Liebig’s course of analysis: for example, in his discussion of sequidoxide of iron and hydrocyanic acid. See Will, Outlines of the Course of Qualitative Analysis, 20, 67. 20. Charles S. Peirce, review of Principles of Physiological Psychology, vol. 1, by Wilhelm Wundt, Nation 81 (July 20, 1905): 56. 21. Ibid. 22. Charles S. Peirce, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1868): 103–14. For his work in the psychophysics of color, Cadwallader posits Peirce as the “first American experimental psychologist.” See Thomas C. Cadwallader, “Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914): The First American Experimental Psychologist,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 10, no. 3 (July 1974): 291–98. While the question of priority is of limited usefulness for the present argument, it bears noting that Rood was doing similar work about five years earlier.

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nities of human beings to the universe, they had settled on a crude materialism, treating sensation merely as a matter of the electrochemical physiology of individuals. It was true, Peirce wrote, that Wundt’s early work on sensory nerves was masterful. And it was true that Wundt had set an admirable example in calibrating his work against everyday experience. But where Wundt had gone wrong was in failing to understand how psychophysics— the study of the link between perception, sensation, and the real— underwrote basic knowledge of and experience of the universe. The problem could be summed up in psychophysicists’ approach to color sensations. As Peirce reported with astonishment in 1877, “a learned man of science”— likely Rood— had gone “so far as to say to me the other day, that there was no reason to suppose that the sensations of color of one person had any resemblance to those of another!”23 To psychophysicists, Peirce claimed, “there was no meaning in the comparison of the intensity of a red and green light”: light of a given color was simply a stimulus— an ether wave impinging on the retina— just like light of any other color.24 Peirce reiterated this criticism in an 1894 obituary for Helmholtz that he penned for The Nation. Between paragraphs praising the German scientist for his modesty, his brilliance, and his admirable work ethic, Peirce took aim at Helmholtz’s color theory as a particularly intolerable example of the problem with physiological materialism. For it was the case, Peirce wrote, that Helmholtz’s research demonstrated that “vibration- systems essentially different give rise to precisely the same color- sensations”— and therefore that the “conclusion of Helmholtz is that the sense- qualities distinguish the things in themselves about as well and about as arbitrarily as the names Henry, Charles, and John parcel out human kind.”25 Helmholtz and Rood alike, that is, thought of the senses as fundamentally just electrochemical impulses, with little necessary connection to any common assessment of reality. For Peirce this line of thinking was obviously inadequate. For one thing, as he pointed out in 1877, people named colors and agreed upon those names. Groups of individuals attached similar signs to similar sensations— a strong suggestion that some sort of quality of similarity gave rise to those names. Perhaps more importantly, colors appeared to have definite and nonequivalent relationships to one another. As Peirce explained in his obituary for

23. Charles S. Peirce, “On a New Class of Observations, Suggested by Principles of Logic,” in Essential Peirce, 1:108 (emphasis in original). 24. Ibid., 106 (emphasis in original). 25. Charles S. Peirce, “Herman von Helmholtz,” Nation 59 (Sept. 13, 1894): 191– 93.

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Helmholtz, “if a melody is transposed to another key, the effect is nearly the same; but a painter who should transpose red to yellow, yellow to green, green to blue, and blue to violet, would make a nightmare of his painting.” Musical notes were fundamentally arbitrary labels for vibrations, as could be seen from the fact that melodies retained their meaning regardless of what key they were played in. For colors, however, this was not the case. Colors meant something very specific to the people who saw them. “Sensequalities” such as color were therefore not just customary responses of individual organisms to ether vibrations of different frequencies. Different observers experienced and identified colors in the same way because colors had meaning. The goal of any proper science of thought, then, was not merely to correlate stimulus and response. It was to explain how thoughts and things were related, what they meant. This required diving deep into the relationship between subject and object that psychophysics only superficially skimmed. Such an investigation was not merely a matter of curiosity: it was a line of questioning which could ultimately reveal the foundations of scientific knowledge. Peirce thought that “[i]f Wundt had possessed any analytical strength, it would have been possible for him to imagine that he could base such matters as dynamics, geometry, and arithmetic upon his physiological experiments.”26 Instead, psychophysicists like Wundt, Helmholtz, and even his friend Rood had suffered a lapse of insight, replicating precisely the problem of the disconnect between mind and matter that Peirce felt physiological psychology was designed to solve.

semiotiC Psychophysics was incomplete because, for Peirce, the color of a jar of precipitate of Prussian blue was not merely a point of sense data. It was a “sign.” A sign, for Peirce, was a specialized term denoting anything that “determines an effect upon a person.”27 The appearance of a rich blue color in a beaker, for instance, was a sign of the oxidation of ferrocyanide. The appearance of blue produced the effect in a viewer of believing that a particular

26. Peirce, review of Principles of Physiological Psychology, 57. 27. Peirce to Victoria Welby, Dec. 23, 1908, in Essential Peirce, 2:478. This late definition of “sign” is simply a concise articulation of the ideas explored in, e.g., “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly 12 ( Jan. 1878): 286– 302; his unpublished manuscript chapter “What Is a Sign?” (1894, in Essential Peirce, 2:4–10); among many others.

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chemical reaction had taken place. Blue, to an observer versed in chemistry, indicated—pointed toward— a chemical reaction. This chemical reaction was the meaning of blue for an observer who had performed Justus von Liebig’s hundred bottles. But this was only one example of the effect that a sign could produce. For Peirce, the more general idea was that the appearance of blue was a sign that pointed toward other experiences of blue. For something to appear to be blue, a viewer had to judge her sense impressions as “blue”— and she did so, said Peirce, by comparing past experiences of blue to the present experience before her and, indeed, to the experiences of other people. Blue was “distinct” because it was not another color. This is what Peirce meant when he lectured that the color green would not be meaningful to someone who could see only green. If “green” and “not green” were the same thing, then there would be no particular relation between green and any other color. Green would not be a sign of anything, since it would point to both everything and nothing. Semiotic was the formal explanation of the working of signs. At their most general, Peirce saw all signs as representations of three fundamental modes of being, which he called, with uncharacteristic clarity, “Firstness,” “Secondness,” and “Thirdness.”28 Firstness, for Peirce, was a state of pure possibility without relation to any object or thought. For example, he explained, “[t]he mode of being a redness before anything in the universe was yet red, was nevertheless a positive qualitative possibility. And redness in itself, even if it be embodied, is something positive and sui generis. That I call Firstness.”29 To be clear, the sensation of red was not an example of Firstness. Properly speaking, Firstness was, by definition, insensible— because to sense anything requires rendering the possible into the extant, whereupon it would no longer be Firstness. But, as a necessary quality of the world, Firstness was logically fundamental. Sensations in and of themselves, in contrast, were examples of Secondness— the mode of being in relation to something else (including the mode of being, in and of itself). Secondness was characterized by the presence of actualizing force— comparison, attention, volition, interaction, surprise, distinction, conflict— what Peirce called the “brute force” of the real. Sec-

28. One can see glimmers of the three fundamental varieties in Peirce’s 1861 paper, but they reach their apotheosis in 1868’s “On a New List of Categories,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1868): 287–98. 29. Edited from Peirce’s 1903 Lowell lectures as “Nominalism” in Collected Papers, 1:7.

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ondness was the emergence of a distinct something from the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of Firstness. When one considers the sentence “the stove is black,” wrote Peirce, the term “is black” is an example of Secondness, a relation between the potential for a color (blackness) in relation to a fact about existence (the fact of “is- ness”: being one color and not another).30 Nevertheless, while sensations might appear at first consideration to be present before the consciousness in an unmediated fashion, they were, in and of themselves, incomprehensible without a third element that related them to each other— a mode of being that Peirce described as “Thirdness.” Take, for example, the commonplace occurrence of seeing a red object. Peirce explained, “If anybody should ask how we can be so sure that it seems red, we shall reply, ‘do we not see it? Seeing is believing.’ Yet we certainly do not see that it seems red. What we see is an image. What we say is a judgement and is as utterly disparate to an image as can be.”31 This judgment of redness— which necessitates comparing one sensation to another and referring to it by the judgment “red”— is an example of Thirdness, a category that included all thoughts, ideas, perceptions, words, habits, and laws. Thirdness, for Peirce, was roughly synonymous with— but not identical to— the world as perceived. Signs were the functionaries of this tripartite metaphysics, and semiotic was the process through which possibility became actuality. As with much of Peirce’s philosophy, semiotic classifications could become sprawling and unwieldy; at one point he identified twenty- seven distinct possible kinds of signs. But in making sense of everyday experience, Peirce stressed the particular importance of three kinds of signs that he called “icon,” “index,” and “symbol.” An “icon” is a sign that conveys an element of Firstness; it is a reference to some essential quality of a thing. A doodle of a hand, for instance, is an icon, insofar as it captures some indeterminate features of hand- ness that, though incomplete, nevertheless call to mind some distinct qualities of a hand (fig. 4). An “index”— a semiotic Secondness— is a sign of some physical fact of a thing. A handprint in wet clay, for instance, is an index of a hand; it represents the action of a hand on clay. Finally, a “symbol” is an equivalent of Thirdness, insofar as it calls to mind a conventional or habitual idea of a thing. The word “hand” is a symbol of a hand, insofar as it lacks any indexical or iconic association with hands (the word “hand” neither looks like a 30. Peirce, “On a New List of Categories,” 288. 31. Peirce, “Logic viewed as Semiotic. Introduction no 2. Phaneroscopy,” n.d. (1900s), folder 337, CSP.

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figure 4 Examples of icon, index, and symbol. (Drawn by author)

hand nor does it have any concrete association with the action of hands) but nevertheless calls to mind a hand among a particular community of language users. These semiotic categories— as with Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness— were neither tightly defined nor mutually exclusive. An ink drawing of a hand might be both a symbol of a hand and an icon of a hand, while the fact of the drawing itself would be an index of the passage of a pen— perhaps held by a hand— on the paper. Taken together, these categories made up the relations through which everyday cognition took place. Semiotic, Peirce emphasized, was not just about representations of the real. Semiotic was the action through which the world became real. Recognition of colors was just one example of this. Over and over again, individuals and groups of individuals— people organized in communities of knowledge— would continually compare and identify particular qualities of the world as colors. The action of identification through which colors became manifest before the mind were habits—continual reiterations of the same judgments of qualities of the world. These habits, properly speaking, were the meaning of colors. But this didn’t mean that colors weren’t real or were merely agreed upon by convention. On the contrary, colors were a very real quality of the universe— one with the unique property of manifesting as itself. The color red is, itself, a sign of redness. Colors are among the very clearest examples of simultaneously iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. Just as colors were both habitual and real, so too did Peirce consider all laws of nature to be habits. Laws, for Peirce, were simply habits that allowed people to predict future events. As such, they were conventional relations of Thirdness— associations between other semiotic categories, such as qualities of possibility and the brute facts that arose from them. A law of nature seldom holds true in all cases. Rather, it’s a way of looking at the world that relates causes and effects. This relation is based on long and complicated chains of signs— each pointing from one to the other to the other. But ultimately, laws are simply the expression of Firstness through semiosis as

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understood by sensing beings. As Peirce concluded, “matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.”32 Objective facts were objective facts— but only by dint of the power of minds. Science, for Peirce, was nothing less than constantly tested habits of thought which gave rise to distinct possibilities of the universe. This idea had far- reaching implications. As he wrote to Victoria Welby, a correspondent in his later life, after Peirce had come to think about logical relationships among signs as constitutive of thought, it was never “in my power to study anything— mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economic[s], the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as study of semiotic.”33 These logical relations, in turn, became the basis of his pragmatism— a way of formally understanding the effects of things and why people believe what they believe. Indeed, had Wundt and his ilk understood semiotic, they could not, he felt, “have failed to perceive the value of the pragmatist analysis in binding together nerve- physiology and psychology.”34 Pragmatism (Peirce thought) would fundamentally change the way that people thought about science, facts, and subjective being.

PhaneroChemistry By what mechanism did pragmatism and semiotic reveal the aesthetic fundamentals of science? Late in his life, Peirce penned an essay entitled “The Basis of Pragmaticism in Phaneroscopy.”35 Phaneroscopy (or “phanerochemistry” as Peirce sometimes called it) was Peirce’s late neologism for semiotic ( just as “pragmaticism” was his neologism for “pragmatism”). The “phaneron” was “anything that appears before consciousness,” and “phanerochemistry” was the “chemistry of appearances”— the logical analysis of the constituent elements of experience. As with semiotic, these constituent elements came in varieties of possibility (Firstness, iconicity), force (Secondness, indexicality), and cognition (Thirdness, symbolism). And as 32. Charles S. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” Monist 1, no. 2 (Jan. 1891): 170. 33. Peirce to Victoria Welby-Gregory, in Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. Charles S. Hardwick and James Cook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 85–86. 34. Peirce, review of Principles of Physiological Psychology, 57. 35. Peirce, untitled notes published as “The Basis of Pragmaticism in Phaneroscopy,” in Essential Peirce, 2:361–70.

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with semiotic it was through chains of these phanerochemical elements that mind manifested matter. Just as atoms composed different chemical constituents of matter, so too did phanerochemical (semiotic) elements compose all experience. Pragmatism was the analysis of the effects of things. Among the most fundamental of these effects were feelings. Therefore, the analysis of feelings— impressions, perceptions, thoughts— in terms of their constituent parts would yield an analysis of the effects of the things (and laws and ideas) that formed the basis of empirical sciences. Peirce was uncharacteristically self- conscious about the speculative character of this formulation of pragmatism. “I know very well,” he wrote, “that much of the substance of [phanerochemistry] has a distinct resemblance to a certain species of demilunatic stuff of which there is so much in the world.” He took pains to make sure that his reader did not think him “capable of reasoning by analogy from the constitution of chemical substances to the logical constitution of thought.” Nevertheless, if mere analogy was a “crude argument” that was beneath a thinker of Peirce’s caliber, “it is certainly true that all physical science involves the postulate of a resemblance between nature’s law and what it is natural for man to think.”36 In other words, mind and matter habitually cohered— such was the precise character of natural laws. Through an investigation of the “chemistry of appearances” one would begin to see the character of mind and of matter as they combined in the habitual real. Peirce was confident of this assessment not least of all because he had spent long periods of his life empirically testing his phanerochemistry, mostly through experiments with color. “All the Passions” of his younger days, he recalled, had been devoted “to the study of phanerochemistry, in almost every waking hour, dreaming of nothing else.”37 Much of this dreaming took place alongside practical work in science, which he undertook to make money while waiting for what he was sure would be a prestigious professorship in logic. Semiotic, for Peirce, was “done not by the unaided brain, but needs the cooperation of the eyes and hands,” and he was skilled at turning remunerative work in science into grist for philosophical exploration.38 His work on color occupied two distinct phases:

36. Ibid., 363. 37. Peirce, untitled manuscript, 1905, MS 1338, CSP; published as “The Real Meaning of Pragmaticism” in Charles Sanders Peirce, The Logic of Interdisciplinarity: The Monist-Series, ed. Elize Bisanz (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), 296. 38. Introduction to Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 6:xxix.

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the first, during the 1870s, when he was fine- tuning the nuts and bolts of pragmatism, and the second, from the mid-1880s to the end of his life, when he was searching for pragmatic answers to the nature of feeling and the (semiotic) meaning of life. Before he left for Europe in 1875 Peirce applied to a fund run by his father’s friend, Alexander Dallas Bache, for two grants for the “study of color” and “comparison of sensations.”39 The grants— authorized by Bache, Joseph Henry, and Benjamin Peirce— provided Charles with money to buy instruments in pursuit of his subject. On March 1, 1875, Peirce wrote to Fairman Rogers, the treasurer of the fund, asking for $800 and promising to “consult with the leading opticians in regard to the instrument I have in mind” for conducting research into color.40 On October 2, 1875, Peirce again wrote to Rogers from Paris to say that he had paid 1,800 francs (about $400) for a “color box”— the instrument that he used in mixing colors for his photometric experiments.41 Upon returning to the United States and befriending Rood, he borrowed a set of colored disks to continue his experiments. This work was an extension of an astrophotometry job that his father had procured for him. As an assistant to the director of Harvard Observatory, Charles’s duties consisted of attempting to reconcile tables of the magnitudes of stars produced by different astronomers. One of the problems of accurately judging the brightness of stars was the fact that stars came in all different colors. Different observers would assess the brightness of different colors in different ways, and thus the same star would have different magnitudes in tables compiled by different observers. Peirce undertook to solve this problem through use of a Zöllner astrophotometer— a device which used a kerosene lamp to generate an “artificial star” beside the image of the real star in the telescope’s eyepiece.42 Two

39. See, e.g., “Report on the A. D. Bache Fund,” in Report of the National Academy of Sciences for the Year 1900 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901), 40. 40. Charles S. Peirce to Fairman Rogers, Mar. 1, 1875, box 1, folder 17, National Academy of Sciences, Records, 1863– 1887 (SIA RU 7115), Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC. 41. Charles S. Peirce to Fairman Rogers, Oct. 2, 1875, box 1, folder 17, National Academy of Sciences, Records (RU 7115), Smithsonian Institution Archives. 42. For an excellent description of the Zöllner photometer and a fascinating account of the challenges attendant upon attempting to replicate nineteenth- century technology in the twenty- first century, see, e.g., Klaus Staubermann, “The Trouble with the Instrument: Zöllner’s Photometer,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 31, no. 4 (Nov. 1, 2000): 323– 38. See also Klaus Staubermann, “Making Stars: Projection Culture in Nineteenth-Century German Astronomy,” British Journal for the History of Science 34, no. 4 (2001): 439– 51; Peirce gets passing mention on 450n46. A useful schematic demonstrating how the light source and star are made to appear side by side can be found in John Benson Sidgwick’s Amateur Astronomer’s Handbook (New York: Mac-

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graded dials controlled the artificial star’s brightness and color. By adjusting the artificial star’s brightness and color until it matched the real star in magnitude, the astronomer could, in principle, get a reading of star magnitude that was normalized across stars of different colors. Indeed, this was precisely the problem that the photometer had been designed to solve. As a later astronomical manual put it, the Zöllner photometer gave “considerably more accurate results than can ever be obtained by visual estimation”— although with “strongly coloured stars” the problem of subjective variation in judgment became “particularly rampageous.”43 In practice, the device was tricky to use. The wick of the kerosene lamp had to be meticulously maintained, and it had a tendency to gutter in the wind and in high heat. A screen intended to shield the lamp from breezes choked off its oxygen, and the air supply system provided by its maker to correct this problem didn’t work properly, requiring Peirce to rework the device himself. The light from the lamp varied greatly in color from use to use, and the color adjustment knob wasn’t finely graded enough to meet Peirce’s standards of precision, so he gave up attempting to equalize color across observations. During the summer of 1872, Peirce reported, “swarms of insects” made observations difficult.44 Still, Peirce concluded that it was neither the quirks of the photometer nor any inherent difficulty with comparing lights of different colors that created problems in methodically assessing star magnitudes. Rather, it was a misapprehension of the nature of color itself that made measuring star brightness so difficult. In explaining this, Peirce began his report on his astrophotometry work— the only book he ever published, entitled Photometric Researches (1877)— with what he glossed as an “application of known principles of physiological optics to the subject of star magnitude.”45 These known principles included Helmholtz’s trichromatic color theory and Gustave Fechner’s law of sensation, which held that the intensity of sensations varied logarithmically with respect to their stimulus (so that, e.g., a small degree of variation in a very faint stimulus seems to an observer to bring about a much greater change in intensity than the same degree of variation in a very strong stimulus). The application of psychophysics to problems of astronomy was not an millan, 1955), 382–83. Peirce also provides a fine description of the photometer in his Photometric Researches (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1878), 88–103. 43. Sidgwick, Amateur Astronomer’s Handbook, 383. 44. Peirce, Photometric Researches, 90. 45. Charles S. Peirce, “Early Abstract of Photometric Researches” (1875), in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 3:206.

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innovation of Peirce’s. Since the 1840s, astronomers had paid careful attention to the “personal equation”: individual deviations in perception, particularly of time. To be a good observer of astronomical phenomena, one had to be aware of one’s own psychophysical limits— and the psychophysical tendencies of one’s subordinates— the better to discipline self and others to conform to a single standard. The same, for that matter, was true of physicists. Helmholtz’s psychophysical studies— of time perception, tactile perception, auditory perception, and color perception— doubled as controls for physical experiments.46 But Peirce approached his photometry task in a way that revealed a new psychophysical phenomenon and, with it, a pragmatic way of understanding sensation. Photometry was a science of the comparison of appearances, as Peirce explained— as in, for instance, comparisons between real stars and artificial stars. For the most part, Peirce felt, psychophysics was likewise a science of comparisons of appearances, in which there was no real “clear general conception of any relation between different sensations except that of more or less.”47 With color, however, it was possible to assign three variables to a sensation (red, green, and blue) rather than just two (“more” or “less”). Moreover, by combining these three variables with Fechner’s law (which, in effect, was really just one of “more” or “less”), it was possible mathematically to model the ways in which each variable responded to increases in brightness.48 This complicated the picture of color sensation immeasurably. Comparing his mathematical model to his readings from the photometer, Peirce discovered two important, conjoined phenomena. The first con46. On the “personal equation” in astronomy, see also Simon Schaffer, “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2, no. 1 (1988): 115–45. On methodological, ethical, and ideological parallels between physical and human sciences around the turn of the century, see Simon Schaffer, From Physics to Anthropology and Back Again (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 1994). For a contrasting view, see Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice Hall, 1950). 47. Peirce, Photometric Researches, 5. By relations simply of “more” or “less,” Peirce meant that psychophysical research tended to understand sensations mostly in terms of degree: for example, louder or softer in the case of sounds; more or less pressure or pain in the case of touch; greater or lesser brightness in terms of vision; etc. In these and other instances, the chief question approached by psychophysics was how human beings apprehend the variation of amount of stimulus (“more” or “less”) rather than other aspects of relationships between sensations (e.g., relationships between colors, types of touch, or types of smell). 48. Peirce articulated this relationship as follows: given three “elementary sensations” i, j, k, and their relative proportions x, y, z, and I, J, K as three constants, then the sensation produced by the mixture of the lights would be I log xi + J log yj + K log zk.

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cerned the appearance of brightness. Given any two lights of differing color, it might be intuitively expected that increasing the luminosity of each light source by equal degrees would lead to an equivalent increase in the appearance of the brightness of both lights. This, however, was not the case. In fact, identical increases in luminosity led to dissimilar appearances in the brightness of different colors. Begin with two lights of equal intensity, Peirce wrote— one red and one blue— and double the objective intensity of both. It would seem sensible to predict that an observer would report that both lights had become twice as bright. However, Peirce noted, “if a red and a blue light which appear equally bright are both doubled in brightness . . . , they will no longer appear equally bright, but the red will appear the brighter.”49 Brightness varied with color. Second, and more important, color varied with brightness. Not only would the red and blue lights not appear to have the same brightness once their intensities doubled, but their qualities would shift as their brightness shifted. “The brighter a light is, the more red and the less blue it appears,” Peirce explained. Indeed, in subsequent research conducted with the devices that he bought from the Bache fund, he found that color shifts converged on a point roughly equivalent to the yellow at the middle of the solar spectrum.50 The problem with compiling tables of star magnitudes, Peirce concluded, was not that it was difficult in any given moment to compare the brightness of different colors. Indeed, Peirce assembled a set of seventy- five numbered ribbons which he sorted according to brightness both introspectively and using his photometer. This he felt he could do easily and accurately. The problem was in comparing past experiences of colors of different brightness with present experiences of colors since the very nature of color itself would have changed between observations. This suggested two things to Peirce. First, as he wrote in his 1877 “On a New Class of Observations, Suggested by the Principles of Logic” (i.e., on the principles of semiotic, or 49. Ibid., 6. 50. Peirce appears to have first reported the corresponding shifts in hue and brightness to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 1872 and that same year at the Philosophical Society of Washington, but his results were never formally published. In 1873 von Bezold published his account of the same phenomenon, which later became known as the Bezold/Brucke phenomenon. William von Bezold, “Über das Gesetz der Farbmischung und die physiologischen Grundfarben,” Poggendorf’s Annalen der Physik und der physikalischen Chemie 150 (1873): 221– 47. Peirce later published a partial account of his research in Photometric Researches and a more comprehensive account as “Note on the Sensation of Color,” in American Journal of Science and Arts 13, no. 76 (Apr. 1877): 247– 52. Peirce evidently thought his discovery important enough to mention it again in his review of Modern Chromatics in the Nation.

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phanerochemistry), there was no such thing as a pure sensation. Any sensation was— as he had supposed— a relation between qualities rather than any single, objectively measurable stimulus. Second, the eye was “habituated” to glossing changes in color due to brightness as a simple quality. Color as commonly understood was a habit. Thus, color, properly speaking, could be classified not simply according to its red, green, and violet components but according to those components with respect to brightness— a “relation to the natural powers of discrimination”: that is, the natural way in which color truly operated.51 This is what he meant when, in his 1879 review of Modern Chromatics, he wondered, “what is there, then, in color which is not relative, what difference which is indescribable, and in what ways does the pure sense- element enter into its composition?”52 By 1879 Peirce had put aside his work on color to pursue other tasks. After Benjamin Peirce was named director of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, he hired Charles as his assistant, effectively placing his son as second in command of the most powerful American scientific institution of the era— a move which even the typically aloof Charles worried would seem to his peers to be an egregious case of self- dealing. In 1879, while still maintaining his post at the Coast Survey under his father, Charles took a job as a lecturer in logic at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University— a position that he believed would become the permanent academic post that he craved. In all these appointments, Peirce was a brilliant but difficult colleague: arrogant, disorganized, violently temperamental, and (ironically) poor at making his ideas clear. In 1880 Benjamin Peirce died. Absent his father’s protection, Charles’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. Johns Hopkins dismissed him in 1884 from his lectureship when one of his enemies whispered (correctly) to the trustees of the university that Peirce had failed fully to divorce his first wife before cohabitating with his second— a scandal in the academic world of the Gilded Age. In 1891 he resigned his position at the Coast Survey during an investigation over misuse of public funds (Peirce was exonerated, but his reputation was damaged). In 1883 he had taken an assignment writing definitions for the Century Dictionary; after his dismissal from Johns Hopkins and from the Coast Survey, piecework such as these definitions— along with occasional assignments to write articles and reviews and to give lec51. Peirce, “Note on the Sensation of Color,” 251. 52. Peirce, “Rood’s Chromatics,” 260.

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tures that were sent his way by a dwindling core of loyal friends— became his only source of income (the Helmholtz obituary was one such piece).53 Started in 1882 under the auspices of the Century Company (no relation to the Century Club), the Century Dictionary was to be a “general dictionary of the English language . . . serviceable for every literary and practical use,” with a particular focus on “the technical terms of the various sciences, arts, trades, and professions.”54 Among “the technical terms of the various sciences” included within Peirce’s lexicographical remit were words for colors, and Peirce threw himself into the task with the same seriousness that had accompanied his astronomical work. The definitions were, of course, remunerative work, but they were more than this. As Peirce scholar Max Fisch has noted, “it is hard to overstate the importance of Peirce’s lexicographical work, not only for the income it produced, but especially for its impact on Peirce’s intellectual development.”55 Definitions were not unlike astrophotometry or writing equations for colors. Defining was a process of comparison: of bringing a word— a thought— into alignment and identity with other words and thoughts. As with comparing artificial stars to their referents in a photometer, dictionary definitions involved marshaling a series of judgments— an assessment of past experiences and examples— concerning things present before the consciousness (in this case, a word). Definitions established equivalencies between thoughts— but only rough equivalencies. Definitions, especially of color, were, by definition, variable, multivalent, based on feelings and impressions rather than any possible direct correspondence. In this way, they were not unlike laws. Peirce’s approach to defining color was likewise variable and multivalent. In researching his definitions, he first compiled lists of color terms, arranged by class. For instance, in his notes for the color “red” he listed “red,” “vermilion, cherry- cold, red lead, rust, flesh color, carbuncle, foxy, pink, damask, chestnut, and chocolate” among some thirty other words for reddish colors. He annotated the words with hieroglyphs which coded to other semiotic indications (words for complexion, for instance, such as “florid”

53. In his biography of Peirce (Charles Sanders Peirce, esp. 82–202), Brent details the multiple crises roiling Peirce’s life in this period. 54. Preface to The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, ed. William Dwight Whitney (New York: Century, 1889), i, xiii–xiv. 55. Max Fisch, introduction to Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 8:xxvii.

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and “ruddy,” he annotated with a little drawing of a face; words like “foxy” he annotated with a stick figure of an animal). He compiled similar lists for green, yellow, and blue, as well as a list of terms that indicated the “effects of juxtaposing different colors,” such as “spectrum,” “zebra,” “harlequin,” and “motley.” He also acquired a copy of ornithologist Robert Ridgway’s Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists (1886), which included hand- painted rectangles of colors sorted according to type and labeled by Ridgway with memorable if somewhat- idiosyncratic names (see chapter 6). Borrowing a pair of “beautiful mixing disks” from Rood, Peirce attempted to analyze the composition of the painted squares of colors within the book, in one instance jotting his results in the margin.56 These were some of the constitutive elements of color, but (as he had demonstrated during his photometry work) they did not define the sensation of color. As he wrote in his dictionary notes, “[a] color may be defined by the amounts of standard red, green, and violet light it contains,” but “for ordinary purposes, it is more convenient to define a color in terms of 1st its luminosity (or photometric value), 2nd its chroma, and 3rd its hue.”57 These new terms— luminosity, chroma, and hue— corresponded to color experience rather than color analysis. By “luminosity,” Peirce meant “the intensity of light in a color measured photometrically,” a quantity that could be arrived at, he specified, by comparing the luminosity of one color with another.58 “Chroma”— another of Peirce’s neologisms— was “the degree of departure of a color- sensation from that of white or gray; the intensity of distinctive hue; color- intensity” (again, a comparative measure).59 And by “hue,” Peirce meant “the respect with which colors may differ though they have the same luminosity and chroma. Thus, scarlet and crimson differ in hue; but buff and yellow especially in chroma, myrtle and emerald- green chiefly in luminosity.” Hue was “the respect in which red, yellow, green, blue, etc., differ one from another.” In other words, hue “is the distinctive quality of a color.”60

56. Peirce’s annotated copy of Robert Ridgway’s A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists: And Compendium of Useful Knowledge for Ornithologists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1886) is in the possession of the Peirce Edition Project, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts. Deepest thanks to Andre De Tienne and April Inez Witt for calling my attention to the book and for making it available, along with their prodigious erudition. 57. Peirce, “Notes on Color Words and Words about Luminosity,” n.d., folder 1154, CSP. 58. Peirce, “Luminosity,” in Century Dictionary, 4:3540. 59. Peirce, “Chroma,” in ibid., 2:986. 60. Peirce, “Hue,” in ibid., 4:2909.

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These experiential values allowed Peirce to define colors in ways that did not depend on psychometric equipment. For instance, “pink” he defined as “a pale red— that is, a red of low chroma and high luminosity.”61 Violet, meanwhile, was a “general class of colors, of which the violet- flower is a highly chromatic example,” though he noted that “the sensation of violet is produced by a pure blue whose chroma has been diminished while its luminosity has been increased. Thus,” he concluded, “blue and violet are the same color, though the sensations are different.”62 Blue and violet could be defined in terms of one another by means of hue, luminosity, and chroma— a philosophically enriching point, though doubtless one that was unhelpful to the casual reader. More than any particular, uniform description of color, however, Peirce’s color definitions tended to be collections of terms, pointing in aggregate toward the meaning of the color. Red, for instance, was “one of the most general color names” and described “a color more or less resembling that of blood, or the lower end of the spectrum.”63 Yellow he defined as the “color of gold, butter, the neutral chromates of lead, potassa, etc., and of light of wave- length about 0.581 micron.”64 Purple was “a color formed by the mixture of blue and red, including the violet of the spectrum above wave- length 0.417 micron.”65 In each of his definitions for general color terms, Peirce listed subsidiary colors, each with its own short definition. For some, he was unhelpfully otiose. “Apple- green,” he wrote, was the “light- green color of certain apples, as the [apple varietal known as the] greening.”66 Apple green, in other words, was the color of a green apple. For others, he was analytically specific: following his definition of “purple,” he listed “color disk formulae” to “identify several purples” (mauve, e.g., was 37 red, 50 blue, 0 black, and 13 white).67 In still other definitions, there was a hint of personal history: “Prussian blue” was “a pigment made by precipitating ferric sulphate with yellow prussiate of potash,” Peirce wrote. “Its chroma is strong, but its luminosity is low.”68 All these different components— analysis by color wheel; description in

61. Peirce, “Red,” in ibid., 6:5016. 62. Peirce, “Violet,” in ibid., 8:6761. 63. Peirce, “Red,” in ibid., 6:5016. 64. Peirce, “Yellow,” in ibid., 8:7015. 65. Peirce, “Purple,” in ibid., 6:4857. 66. Peirce, “Apple- green,” in ibid., 1:274. 67. Peirce, “Purple,” in ibid., 6:4857. 68. Peirce, “Prussian Blue,” under entry “Blue,” in ibid., 1:599.

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terms of hue, luminosity, and chroma; examples of things in the world— were signs, ways of pointing toward the effects of things: other experiences of color, indications of facts of physiology, mathematical models, possibilities of experience, other signs. They were signs, that is, which pointed toward the feeling of a color—and feelings were the elemental units of phanerochemistry. Examining a piece of bright- red sealing wax as he wrote on the connection of pragmatism and phaneroscopy, Peirce mused that it was true that he could “take down my color wheel, analyze this color, and define it in an equation.” But, he wrote, this was not how he saw the color; it was merely an analysis. He could also describe the color “in terms of its luminosity, chroma (or degree of departure from grey) and hue; as one might say that the color of this sealing wax is moderately luminous but extremely chromatic color, pretty nearly pure red in hue, yet decidedly leaning towards scarlet.” But still, this was not exactly the feeling of red itself, since such qualities were “not seen in the color taken by itself but only in the color as it appears in the comparison with others.” Without other colors, the red of the sealing wax had no definition— and yet, there was still a feeling of redness in the sealing wax itself. Therefore, ultimately, the redness of the stick had to be “an element for I do not see it as composite.” Just as the word “red” could be pronounced in an infinite number of subtle variations and yet still indicate the quality of red, so too did the quality of red itself admit endless variation.69 This pointed to the other quality of definitions: they assumed a readership that would be able to decipher the homologies posited between words on either side of the equation. That is, they assumed a homology of feelings. For definitions to work, words— in this case, words for colors— had to possess some elemental qualities that transcended their psychophysical or mathematical delineation. This was one way of seeing the difference between pragmatism and common sense philosophy. On the one hand, they both assumed that the senses underwrote an authentic experience of the real. On the other hand, common sense philosophy predicted an individual viewer. Pragmatism predicted a community of feeling. It was this community of feeling that gave Peirce confidence in the actuality of his phanerochemical elements. In an 1892 essay entitled “Man’s Glassy Essence” Peirce set out to elucidate the relationship between “the psychical and physical aspects of a substance” through “the framing of a molecular theory of protoplasm” (or “life slime” as he put it). Beginning with a 69. Peirce, “Basis of Pragmatism in Phaneroscopy,” 366.

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lengthy treatise on the nature of matter according to contemporary physics (“an atom is simply a distribution of component potential energy throughout space . . . combined with inertia”), he first discussed some of the commonly known properties of protoplasm. As a complex chemical— there were billons of possible permutations of the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen that made up protoplasm— there must, Peirce reasoned, be separate molecular compositions that would account “not only for the differences between nerve- slime and muscle- slime, between whale- slime and lion- slime, but also for those minuter pervasive variations” between “different breeds and individuals.” All these possible permutations of protoplasm, however, had certain things in common. All protoplasm could grow. All protoplasm could “waste” (or die). All protoplasm could reproduce. Moreover, all protoplasm “took habits,” tending to grow in the same ways as it had previously. “Very extraordinary, certainly, are all these properties of protoplasm,” wrote Peirce. “But the one which has next to be mentioned,” he continued, “while equally undeniable, is infinitely more wonderful. It is that protoplasm feels. . . . It not only feels, but exercises all the functions of mind.”70 How could this property of feeling be explained? It was no sort of mystical vitalism that Peirce was peddling, as he assured his readers. For, Peirce wrote, protoplasm “is nothing but a chemical compound. There is no inherent impossibility in its being formed synthetically in the laboratory, out of its chemical elements; and if it were so made, it would present all the characters of natural protoplasm. No doubt, then, it would feel.” He cautioned his readers that “[t]o hesitate to admit this would be puerile and ultra- puerile.” Rather, this property of feeling was the result of the fact that feelings (such as those of color) were simply habitual remnants of the material manifestations of mind. Because, to Peirce, “physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical events,” protoplasm retained its habitual feeling— and these feelings were precisely what Peirce thought of as general laws of reality. The fact of this generality led Peirce to conclude that the feelings of individual beings were interconnected; composed and interrelated to the feelings of others on a molecular (or phanerochemical) level. Such a “corporate” feeling could indeed, said Peirce, be seen in the common phenomenon of individuals taking collective action: for instance, the fact that, “on one day half a dozen people, strangers to one another, will take it into their heads to do one and the same strange deed, whether it be a physical experiment, 70. Peirce, “Man’s Glassy Essence,” Monist 3, no. 1 (1892): 12.

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a crime, or an act of virtue.” Such acts— as well as, more generally, the facts of physical laws, and shared apprehensions of the world, such as those of color— were examples of what Peirce called “corporate personality”: “something like personal consciousness in bodies of men who are in intimate and intensely sympathetic communion.”71 “Man’s Glassy Essence” was a weird read, even by the standards of Peirce’s dense prose. Ladd-Franklin thought it might as well have been called “Glacial Man” and wondered if it marked the point where Peirce began losing his mind.72 Peirce himself acknowledged that he sometimes couldn’t follow his own thinking. In an unfinished letter to Ladd-Franklin, he wrote, “How many times, in going over the proofs of the Century Dictionary have I berated them for inserting ignorant, weak, and irredeemable stuff, and then found I had written it myself[?]” Upon considering how such a state of affairs had come to pass, he concluded that “it was because I had pushed my inquiries further than I had later remembered!”73 Nevertheless, in finding thought to be a “corporate” property of living beings, Peirce articulated an important solution to Rood’s problem of subjectivity. Subjective and objective reality could come into alignment, not through the individual mysticism of common sense, but through the allowance that collective thoughts— the effects of signs extending from molecular possibilities through the stuff of life itself— shaped the real. The very fact that human beings could sense, perceive, and define color with such profound certainty— such deep belief— proved that this was true.

ConClusion: a short Parable about Community In July 1889 Rood adventured from his home on East Fifty-Eighth Street in New York City in response to an urgent request from Peirce: had Rood ever heard of a color called “isabel,” and if so, what did it look like? Rood had neither seen nor heard of the color, but— as he explained in a letter mailed in reply— he was diligent in his attempts to find out. First, he inquired of “several ladies” if they knew what isabel color was, but he had no luck. Then he undertook an expedition to A. T. Stewart’s store, a mammoth retail establishment on lower Broadway famous for its prodigious overabundance of

71. Ibid., 21. 72. Ladd-Franklin, “Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins.” 73. Peirce to Christine Ladd-Franklin, Aug. 29, 1891 (unfinished and apparently unsent), folder L237, CSP.

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colored goods. If isabel was to be found, it would be at A. T. Stewart’s. However, as Rood explained to Peirce, “[t]he people there had not heard of it.” He moreover “examined the pattern books with ‘shades’ of color and names, many of which were quite new to me, but the term ‘isabel’ did not make its appearance.”74 Rood’s expedition was a failure. But if it was a failure in the sense that Rood didn’t get the wished- for information, his expedition nevertheless can serve as a pragmatic parable about knowledge. “Isabel” (or “isabella”), as Peirce was doubtless aware, was not only the name for a color. It was also the name of the character in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure who implores a draconian magistrate not to put her brother to death over a minor offense, urging him to consider that man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep.

The “glassy essence” of which Isabella spoke was, for Peirce, a perfect metaphor for the illusion of individual knowledge. The “individual man,” Peirce wrote, is “only a negation” when taken out of the community of his fellows.75 Instead of the isolated individual, Peirce saw all knowledge— all reality— as communal: held together by the gossamer weave of semiosis, which connects all living things and shapes communities of feeling and laws of nature. The glassy essence is a reminder at once of the literal insignificance of individual human existence and of the robustness of the infinite mutability of the real. This is what pragmatism was: a way of understanding human knowledge, not as isolated within individual subjects, but as distributed across a community in which the real, the truthful, and the good are mediated through collective intelligence guided by scientific inquiry. How was isabel known? Not through the eyes alone but through communities of fellow seekers: from a friendly colleague, also obsessed with color, who would venture out to seek the identity of isabel; from ladies and store clerks who knew about colors; from books of color swatches; and, in74. Ogden Rood to Peirce, July 31, 1889, folder L382, CSP. 75. Charles S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2, no. 3 (1868): 155.

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deed, ultimately from these actions collected in a dictionary like the Century Dictionary. The same was true of all colors, and all knowledge. As Peirce put it in 1868, “the very origin of the conception of reality involves the notion of a community without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase in knowledge”; thus, “reality depends on the ultimate decision of the community.”76 Any one observer might be mistaken— might, for example, find green to be undistinguished. But a community of observers would converge on the truth, much as would one observer taking repeated photometric observations of the same star (or ticket or piece of Ward’s cream paper). In theory, such a community was as expansive as the fellowship of all humankind— a community that could encompass all observers, anywhere, who contributed to the process of signification, of making the world meaningful and real. In practice, the community that Peirce imagined was substantially more limited, comprising mainly the elite scientific and social circles in which he had spent his entire life. Peirce had little patience for the “uneducated,” a class that he at one point estimated included all but roughly ten thousand of his fellow citizens.77 Nor did he immediately regard people of non-European descent as among the community of “man.”78 And while it was true that his community of “man” did include those women of his social stratum, this did not stop him from casually equating women with servants, much to the disgust of his student Ladd-Franklin.79 Perhaps ironically, then, Peirce had little aptitude for navigating even the relatively close- knit community of nineteenth- century American science. His violent temper and quickness to take offense alienated his friends; his disorderly work and personal affairs put off colleagues; his insistence on novel methodologies and baroque elaboration made him inscrutable to his peers. As one of his colleagues at the Coast Survey wrote, Peirce “has no system, no idea or order of business & with all his talent is a dead- weight.”80 The philosopher Thomas Davidson— having listened to Peirce deliver a lecture on logic that was “capacious, bright, and poor”— summed up the mat76. Ibid. 77. See Peirce to Isaac Funk, July 12, 1892, folder L153, CSP. Thank you to Andre De Tienne for sharing this series of correspondence with me. 78. See, e.g., Menand, Metaphysical Club, 161. See also Peirce’s rather explicit musing that he would consider Toussaint L’Ouverture first a “Negro” and subsequently a “man,” in “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” 147. 79. See Christine Ladd-Franklin, untitled note, Dec. 1923, box 73, folder: Peirce, C. S. #1, Christine Ladd-Franklin and Fabian Franklin Papers, ca. 1900–1939 (MS Coll Franklin), Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 80. B. A. Collona quoted in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, 6:xxxvii.

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ter this way: “the Peirce’s [sic] are all a little crazy, I think.”81 One of Peirce’s colleagues suspected that Peirce had been dishonest in his scientific practice: that he had “faked his observations— wrote down imaginary results.”82 By 1893 Peirce was unwelcome at the Century Club as a result of nonpayment of dues. His friendship with Rood collapsed in 1894— a casualty of Peirce’s increasingly erratic behavior.83 Except for William James— who set up a small trust in Peirce’s name and tried to secure paying lectures for his friend— by the 1900s Peirce was largely cut off from the community of science that he felt was his chief audience. He died in poverty in 1914. Nor did Peirce’s published work bring his thinking into the reach of the wider community of his fellow citizens. His writing proved too obtuse for him to make a successful career as a popular essayist. He lashed out against those editors who had the temerity to suggest that he simplify his writing for a popular audience— as when, for example, he argued bitterly with the Smithsonian Institution’s Samuel Langley over a popular essay that Langley had commissioned from him on Hume and the laws of nature, with reference to Peirce’s “pragmatical” logic. (Langley felt that Peirce’s essay made for “too hard reading” and eventually wrote the essay himself.)84 An assignment that Peirce undertook compiling a practical table of color definitions for Isaac Funk and Adam Wagnalls’s new Standard Dictionary similarly ended in failure in 1892, with the editors gently informing him that his definitions were “so technical and scientific as to be out of the reach of the average consulter of a Dictionary.”85 (Rood subsequently took over the assignment.) 81. Thomas Davidson quoted in ibid., 3:560n7–9. 82. Ladd-Franklin, untitled note, Dec. 1923, box 73, folder: Peirce, C. S. #1, Christine LaddFranklin and Fabian Franklin Papers. 83. Ogden Rood to Peirce, Mar. 14, 1894, L 382, CSP. 84. Samuel Langley to Peirce, May 18, 1901, box 52, folder 6 (Peirce, Charles: 1902–1904), SI Office of the Secretary Correspondence, 1866– 1906 (SIA RU 31), Smithsonian Institution Archives. While Langley expressed admiration for Peirce’s pragmatism, it is clear from their correspondence that Langley did not understand Peirce’s fundamental idea about the mutability of laws of nature. This doubtless antagonized Peirce, who doubled down on his opaque prose in subsequent drafts, which ultimately resulted in the essay’s being taken away from him. 85. Funk and Wagnalls Co. to Peirce, June 3, 1892, folder L153, CSP. As with Langley, it is worth noting that the editorial board of Funk and Wagnalls clearly did not understand the fundamental principles from which Peirce was writing— in this instance, the fundamentals of modern chromatics. In a letter dated May 11, 1891, Peirce’s correspondent suggested that, rather than providing the disk formula for colors in terms of percentages of spinning- disk portions of red, green, and ultramarine, he should instead tell his readers to mix (in pigment form) “so many parts of R., so many parts of G., and so many parts of U.” in order to achieve the color that they desired. This conflation of subtractive and additive color could only have enraged Peirce and cemented his sense of frustration and alienation.

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Around 1897 Peirce approached Benjamin Eli Smith, the managing editor for the Century Dictionary, with a grand plan for a dictionary that would classify “all of the words in a language, or what’s the same thing, all the ideas that seek expression.” (He would begin, he said, with all the words for color— “a little syllabus on the doctrine of chromatics.”)86 Smith politely declined. A proposal for a sweeping series of lectures on his phanerochemistry similarly foundered in 1903. In his aptly named The Brown Decades (1931), Lewis Mumford took Gilded Age society to task for failing to recognize Peirce’s contributions to American philosophy.87 And it is, indeed, largely the case that while his students and associates rose to prominence, Peirce’s peculiarly aesthetic variant of pragmatism— premised on shared feelings, signs, sensations— remained largely unexplored until the middle of the twentieth century. Outside the study of philosophy, however, during the last decades of Peirce’s life the sort of corporate feeling that he wrote about was quietly mobilized in new institutions, agencies, and ideas about color. In 1893 one of his students at Johns Hopkins, Joseph Jastrow, presided over the Psychology Pavilion at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and performed mass testing for color perception as part of the exhibit’s hybrids of practical science and entertainment (chapter 3). That same year, Christine LaddFranklin repurposed a version of semiotic pragmatism to formulate her “evolutionary” theory of color— a world- class competitor against leading psychological and physiological theories of color perception (chapter 5). In 1898 Albert Munsell turned to the Century Dictionary’s definitions of color as he formulated his standardized system of color (chapters 6– 7). When the Munsell Color Company revealed its “color grammar” in 1905, its standards were predicated on Peirce’s “hue,” “luminosity,” and “chroma,” and its colors were calibrated according to the definitions he gave in the Century Dictionary. Peirce’s star had not really dimmed. It had just changed color. 86. Peirce to Benjamin E. Smith, n.d. but before Sept. 9, 1897, folder L80, CSP. 87. Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).

C h a pte r th r e e

PATHOLOGIES OF PERCEPTION Benjamin Joy Jeffries and the Invention of Color Blindness

Color in the White City The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition sprawled across almost seven hundred acres of fairground in southern Chicago. Along its wide avenues and man- made canals, gardens, and lagoons, more than two hundred newly constructed buildings housed tens of thousands of exhibits from more than twenty nations. The grandest of the exhibition halls reached skyward, their neoclassical exteriors manicured in white plaster, earning the fair the nickname “the White City.” At night the fairgrounds glowed with more electric light bulbs than existed in all the rest of Chicago. Elevators whisked visitors to the upper floors of the great halls. The halls themselves hosted displays of industrial technologies (locomotives, electrical generators, steamships, tractors, naval cannons); commercial products (paint, dyes, oil, grains, medicines, rubber, steel); natural history (birds, beasts, and botanical specimens), arts and crafts (gilded statuary and reliefs in plaster and wood), and administrative techniques (banking, finance, industrial education, standardized weights and measures). As a lesson in contrasts, a set of “Indian Villages”— composed by assistant curator of anthropology Franz Boas and featuring re- creations of notional indigenous North American villages— jostled for attention with Javanese bands and Chinese orchestras along the exposition’s grassy Midway Plaisance, a reminder of the long journey from primitive origins to industrial modernity. The entire exposition was intended as “an illustrated encyclopedia of civilization”— and it was one in

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which the progress of the United States and its “influence upon the history of the world” took pride of place.1 Against this backdrop of celebration, Joseph Jastrow faced a problem. A professor at the University of Wisconsin, leading experimental psychologist, and former student of Charles Peirce’s, Jastrow had accepted an assignment as the director of the Section of Psychology at the exposition. The sciences of subjective color perception were a central part of the exhibit, and Jastrow wanted to give a substantial demonstration of the new field. He was particularly interested in dramatizing the existence of color blindness. This condition had been systematically described and diagnosed only within the past two decades, but it apparently afflicted roughly 5 percent of Americans— mysteriously, mainly men— with an inability to distinguish certain colors, for instance, red and green. To demonstrate the existence of color blindness and its importance to the scientific understandings of human visual experience, Jastrow’s plan was to present fairgoers with a device featuring twenty numbered circles of color surrounding a larger, central circle. The central circle would change color, and exhibit- goers would be asked to match the central color to one of the numbered colors at the periphery. Their answers would then be automatically tallied by mechanical means, and a diagnosis reached. Jastrow additionally imagined modifying the device so that it would detect the viewer’s reaction time— recording the amount of time it took for the viewer to correctly cogitate an answer. Through this test, Jastrow felt, viewers could “determine any gross defects in color vision as well as difficulties in color matching.”2 In finalizing his plan, Jastrow sent a letter describing the proposed device to Benjamin Joy Jeffries, a Boston ophthalmologist and world expert on

1. George Brown Goode, First Draft of a System of Classification for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1893), 654. For histories of the exposition, see, e.g., Norm Bolotin and Christine Laing, The World’s Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World’s Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016); Norm Bolotin and Christine Laing, Chicago’s Grand Midway: A Walk around the World at the Columbian Exposition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Crown, 2003) gives an enjoyable and well- researched popular account of the exposition. 2. Joseph Jastrow to Benjamin Joy Jeffries, Feb. 10, 1893, folder 5, Benjamin Joy Jeffries Misc. Papers (28.D.39), Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Rare Books Library, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.

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color blindness. The reply Jastrow received was frosty. The test proposed, Jeffries responded, wouldn’t be at all well suited for detecting color blindness. It would simply give variable data on the ability of particular people to identify colors, without classifying any particular defect in color sense. Color blindness was a distinct, medical condition, with distinct symptoms. None of these would be captured in the proposed demonstration. Moreover, in creating an automated test that eliminated expert adjudication, Jastrow had misunderstood the whole point of testing for color blindness. The point was not simply to affirm the fact of subjective perception. The point was to concretize subjective perception in an objective form, as understood by a body of experts with a professional stake in judging perceptual acuity. Jastrow’s demonstration wasn’t, properly speaking, science. It wasn’t medicine. And it didn’t at all represent the progress that Jeffries and his peers had painstakingly made over the past twenty- five years in describing, diagnosing, explaining, and legislating against the pernicious effects of color blindness in modern, industrialized society. Color blindness was paradigmatic of both the exciting new vistas foretokened by the scientific study of color and the unexpected dangers to individuals and society that the new field revealed. On the one hand, color blindness gave vivid proof that the perceptual real was more protean and flexible than it appeared. If— as was often the case— red could appear to be green, and green could appear to be red (with other colors accordingly shifting their positions in the spectrum), then there was potentially no limit to the possibilities of the visual world. On the other hand, the existence of hitherto- unrecognized horizons in perceptual difference predicted practical and legislative dangers— not least of all the possibility of locomotive engineers and ship pilots who were unable to distinguish red “stop” signals from green “go” signals. As Jeffries told the State Board of Health of Massachusetts in 1878, given “the prevalence of color blindness, the value of scientific investigation in detecting it, [and] its danger for the community,” it was of utmost importance that the government implement a comprehensive program of mandatory color blindness testing— run by medical experts and predicated on the rigors of science.3 Between 1877 and his death in 1916, Jeffries worked tirelessly on the cause of color blindness awareness, detection, and control. He hounded politicians to introduce color acuity testing standards into state and federal law. 3. Benjamin Joy Jeffries, “Dangers Arising from Color-Blindness,” in Ninth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts (Boston: Band, Abery, 1878), 112.

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He pestered the directors of railroad and steamship companies to test their employees for color blindness. He harangued magazine and newspaper editors to run articles and opinion pieces about the importance of color blindness research. He conducted testing programs on rail workers, sailors, soldiers, and schoolchildren and publicized the results in popular and scientific journals. As one of Jeffries’s peers gushed in the June 1894 issue of the Railway Surgeon magazine, “[t]o Dr. B. Joy Jeffries belongs the great credit of bringing this subject to such prominence among railway officials and to the public, and of local and general governments insisting upon the examination of the color sense wherein applicants are placed in positions important to the safety of the traveling public and to themselves.”4 Through the control and regulation of color blindness, color perception became a platform upon which medical and scientific experts could assume a position of moral and technical leadership— shaping not only the social contours of modern America but the scope of its “influence upon the history of the world.”

A Frightening Sight Jeffries was not the first person to posit that some individuals experienced color very differently from others. The “Great, and Experienced Oculist” Dawbeney Turbervile wrote in 1684 to the British Royal Society to report the case of a twenty- two- year- old woman who— in addition to nightly visits by phantasmagoric bulls and bears— was seemingly incapable of distinguishing colors other than shades of gray.5 In 1777 one Joseph Huddart wrote about a shoemaker whom he had seen in Cumberland, England, who was apparently unable to recognize a number of colors.6 That same year, George Palmer, an English dye- maker, color theorist, mercenary soldier, and generally shady character (who also went by the names Giros von Gentilly and Girod de Chantilly, evidently to avoid punishment for patent in-

4. Emmet Welsh, “Color Blindness,” Railway Surgeon 1, no. 1 (June 5, 1894): 8. 5. Dawbeney Turbervile, “Two Letters from the Great, and Experienced Oculist, Dr. Turbervile of Salisbury, to Mr. William Musgrave S. P. S. of Oxon, Containing Several Remarkable Cases in Physick, Relating Chiefly to the Eyes,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 164 (Aug. 4, 1684): 736. 6. Joseph Huddart, “An Account of Persons Who Could Not Distinguish Colours By Mr. Joseph Huddart, in a Letter to the Rev. Joseph Priestley, LL.D. F. R. S.,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 67 (Jan. 1, 1777): 260–65.

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fringements), included a discussion of color blindness in his monograph Theory of Colours and Vision.7 Indeed, the notion that individuals might actually possess a variable, rather than absolute, color sense made a significant enough impact in England to have caught the attention of King George III, who remarked in the 1780s to the writer Frances Burney that “there are people who have no eye for difference of colour. The Duke of Marlborough actually cannot tell scarlet from green!”8 Moreover, while these accounts were mainly anecdotal, in 1798 the celebrated British chemist John Dalton published the first systematic analysis of color blindness using his own inability to differentiate shades of blue, purple, pink, and crimson as a test case. Dalton hypothesized that his curious perception of color was the result of a bluish tint to the vitreous humor of his eyes— a guess that he instructed should be tested after his death.9 In 1844 Dalton succumbed to a stroke, and his physician, Joseph Ransom, dutifully plucked the chemist’s eyes from his head, decanting the contents of one eye into a transparent watch glass. Ransom could detect no tint to the fluid, blue or otherwise, and reported that the contents of Dalton’s eye were as clear as could be expected given Dalton’s advanced age. The inventive Ransom then sliced the back off of Dalton’s remaining eye and, peering through it, observed that blue and pink objects looked much as they usually did. There seemed, therefore, to be little in the macroscopic structure of Dalton’s eye that would selectively filter incoming rays of light, lending credence to a remark made by Thomas Young in 1807 that “[Dalton] thinks it probable that the vitreous humor [of his eye] is of a deep blue tinge: but this has never been observed by anatomists, and it is much more simple to suppose the absence or paralysis of those fibers of the retina, which are calculated to perceive red.”10 Thus did Dalton’s color blindness— or “Daltonism”

7. On Palmer/Gentilly/Chantilly, see Gordon L. Walls, “The G. Palmer Story (or, What It’s Like, Sometimes, to Be a Scientist),” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 11, no. 1 (1956): 66–96. See also George Palmer, Theory of Colours and Vision (London, 1777). 8. Quoted in Elizabeth Green Musselman, Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 58. See also D. M. Hunt et al., “The Chemistry of John Dalton’s Color Blindness,” Science 267, no. 5200 (Feb. 17, 1995): 987n8. 9. John Dalton, “Extraordinary facts relating to the Vision of Colours,” Memoirs of the Literary Philosophical Society of Manchester 5 (1798): 28–45. 10. Thomas Young, A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (London: J. Johnson, 1807), 345.

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as color blindness was, for a time, colloquially known— provide an early hint of the viability of trichromatic theory.11 Meanwhile, shortly before Dalton’s death, a physician in Philadelphia in 1840 recorded an attempt to treat a case of acute color blindness. In a study written for the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, ophthalmologist Isaac Hays reported on a young “seegar” maker, Mary Bishop, who had checked into Philadelphia’s Wills Hospital for the Blind and Lame in 1839 having lost the ability to see colors. Hays, who was her attending physician, traced her condition to a humoral imbalance caused by occluded menstruation and prescribed a course of bloodletting, mustard compresses to her inner thighs and breasts, blistering of her lower back, a vegetable diet, and the fortnightly application of fifty to sixty leeches on her temples. After several months, Hays wrote, the treatment proved successful. Bishop’s menstrual cycle returned and, with it, most of her ability to distinguish colors— all except violet, a fact which Hays implied might have less to do with Bishop’s physiological health than with her only “moderate intelligence.”12 Such reports, however, particularly in the United States, tended to be treated as anomalous incidents, unconnected with matters of mainstream medical, scientific, or social concern. Following the 1855 publication of Scottish chemist George Wilson’s Researches on Color Blindness, with a Supplement on the Danger Attending the Present System of Railway and Marine Coloured Signals, the editors of the Monthly Stethoscope, a southern medical journal, dismissed Wilson’s claims that no fewer than one in eighteen people likely experienced some sort of color blindness. “[I]nstead of this being the case,” the editors wrote, “we have never known but one case of color- blindness; we are therefore skeptical of the correctness of Dr. Wilson’s experiments.”13 Joseph Henry expressed a similar, albeit less brusquely worded sentiment, remarking that, with one or two exceptions (including Hays’s report), “[o]bservations on this peculiarity of vision have as yet been confined, so far as we know, to Europe.”14 Indeed, the rare mention of color blindness in American publications tended to occur in foreign- literature digests which glossed Wilson’s work. A letter published in the New York Times in 1860 castigating 11. See D. Hunt et al., “Chemistry of John Dalton’s Color Blindness,” 984–85; Charles Snyder, “The Eyes of John Dalton,” Archives of Ophthalmology 67 (May 1962): 673. 12. Isaac Hays, “Report of Cases Treated in the Wills Hospital for the Blind and Lame during the Months of October, November and December, 1839, with Observations,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences 52 (Aug. 1840): 280. 13. “Color Blindness,” Monthly Stethoscope and Medical Reporter 1, no. 9 (Sept. 1856): 609. 14. Joseph Henry, “On Color Blindness” Princeton Review 17 (July 1845): 487.

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physicians and rail managers for their “ignorance or inattention” to the dangers of color blindness on the rails was a rarity. Although the correspondent believed that color acuity testing of American rail workers would perform “a service to humanity” and enlighten those rail managers “whose culpable neglect of the trust imposed on them, has brought darkness and desolation to the hearth- stones of thousands,” little heed was paid to the matter in antebellum America.15 This attitude of “ignorance or inattention” changed sharply during the late 1870s following a terrible rail accident outside Lagerlunda, Sweden. In the early- morning hours of November 15, two trains collided head on, at full speed. Nine people died. An observer at the scene wrote that the two locomotives were “raised against one another like a couple of rearing horses. The arm of one of the drivers was sticking out from the wreckage. His whole chest was ripped open, a frightening sight.”16 The cause of the accident was initially thought to originate with a negligent stationmaster, who was promptly imprisoned. But Alarik Frithiof Holmgren— a prominent physiologist at Uppsala University— thought differently. Holmgren had spent several years after medical school studying physiological optics with the luminaries of the field and had become fascinated with, as he put it, replacing “subjective perception, which is always uncertain, with objective phenomena and exact dimensions.”17 With his work on the electrophysiology of the eye which he began with Helmholtz’s colleague Emil du Bois-Reymond, he became the first researcher to experimentally demonstrate that visual sensation was electrical in nature. Concluding that “[c]olor theory occupies a large and important place in physiological optics,” he spent a subsequent year working in Helmholtz’s laboratory, where he became well versed in the workings of the red, green, and blue- violet “nerves” in the retina of the eye.18 In Helmholtz’s laboratory he also began experimenting with standardized tests for anomalous color vision. It was from this firm foundation that Holmgren felt comfortable in declaring— at a medical congress in July 1876— that the rail accident in Lagerlunda was not the fault of the stationmaster but had been caused by the 15. “The Hudson River Railroad Accident,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 1860, 2. 16. Carl Larsson, Carl Larsson: The Autobiography of Sweden’s Most Beloved Artist, trans. John Z. Lofgren (Iowa City: Penfield Press, 1992), 72–73. 17. Frithiof Holmgren, “Metod att objektivera effecten af ljusintryck på retina,” Upsala läkareförenings förhandlingar, 1865–1866 1 (1875): 177–78. 18. Frithiof Holmgren, “Om färgblindhet och den Young-Helmholtzska färgteorin,” Upsala läkareförenings förhandlingar, 1870–1871 6 (1898): 635.

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(now- dead) engineer on one of the trains, who was color- blind. Against those who doubted the very existence of color blindness, Holmgren arranged a dramatic demonstration of his test for the condition— complete with uniformed rail personnel and signal lamps— which won Holmgren the right to test the color vision of employees of the Swedish Royal Railroad.19 His results, which he published in 1877 as Om färgblindheten: I dess förhållande till jernvägstrafiken och sjöväsendet (Color blindness in its relation to accidents by rail and sea; 1877), suggested that roughly 4 percent of the men employed by the railroad company could not distinguish the colors used in signaling. The finding created a scandal. On the basis of Holmgren’s recommendations, the Swedish king initiated mandatory color blindness testing of Swedish railroad employees, and Holmgren’s monograph was translated into French (1877), German (1878), and English (1878), galvanizing movements for mandatory testing on both sides of the Atlantic.

“the FunguS oF QuACkery” Jeffries was among the earliest and most enthusiastic supporters of Holmgren’s theories in America. Although it is not clear whether he knew of Holmgren through Om färgblindheten or through his already- substantial network of transatlantic contacts, Jeffries began corresponding with the Swedish scientist in 1877 and thereafter served as Holmgren’s translator for several articles in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (despite admitting that Swedish was difficult for him to translate).20 He not only adopted Holmgren’s ideas about color blindness and testing methods but copied parts of Om färgblindheten (in English) directly into his own monograph, ColorBlindness: Its Dangers and Its Detection, published in 1879. It wasn’t simply the practical utility of Holmgren’s observations that Jeffries admired, however. Rather, Jeffries saw Holmgren as a pioneer of scientific medicine— that is, medicine based not on traditional beliefs or

19. For an especially detailed account of the accident and Holmgren’s role in its aftermath, see J. D. Mollon and L. R. Cavonius, “The Lagerlunda Collision and the Introduction of Color Vision Testing,” Survey of Ophthalmology 57, no. 2 (Mar.–Apr. 2012): 178– 94. In addition, see Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 46– 48; J. D. Mollon, “The Origins of Modern Color Science,” in The Science of Color, ed. Steven K. Shevell (Oxford: Elsevier, 2003), 32. 20. Jeffries to Holmgren, June 9, 1892, Frithiof Holmgren Papers, Nordiska museets arkiv, Stockholm, Sweden. See also Benjamin Joy Jeffries, Color-Blindness: Its Dangers and Its Detection (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879), viii.

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on therapeutic negotiations between patients and physicians but on hardnosed investigations into the causes and cures of human malady, underwritten by rational thinking and rigorous experiment.21 Born in 1833, Jeffries was the son of John Jeffries, a Harvard- trained ophthalmologist and cofounder of the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary (1824).22 Jeffries followed his father to Harvard College’s medical department before decamping to Europe for an apprenticeship with the notable Viennese ophthalmologist Carl Ferdinand von Arlt.23 As with many American physicians of his generation, Jeffries returned from his travels with a reformist urge to refashion American medicine in the mold of Continental practice— convinced of what historian John Harley Warner has called the beneficial aspects of “specialism, diagnostic instruments, and reliance on the experimental laboratory.”24 In June 1865 Jeffries, recently back from Vienna, expounded on his views before an audience of twenty specialists composing the second annual meeting of the American Ophthalmological Society. Jeffries’s speech was a call for members “to learn, appreciate, and adopt all advances in ophthalmological science as well as in ophthalmological medicine and surgery.”25 American ophthalmology, he noted, had made appreciable inroads as a sovereign medical discipline in the past several decades.26 Nevertheless, Jeffries quoted one “non- medical” writer who complained, “In the ordinary diseases to which the eye . . . is subject, we may safely confide in the skill of 21. On changes in American medicine between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, see, e.g., Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Joseph F. Kett, The Formation of the American Medical Profession: The Role of Institutions, 1780–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). On clinical practice, see William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 22. “Dr. John Jeffries,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Aug. 10, 1876, 155–59. 23. Frederick E. Cheney, “Dr. Benjamin Joy Jeffries,” Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society Annual Meeting 14, no. 2 (1916): 427–29. 24. Warner, Against the Spirit of System, 313–14. 25. Benjamin Joy Jeffries, “Report on the Progress of Ophthalmology during the Past Year,” Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society Annual Meeting 1, no. 2 (1865): 4. 26. See Alvin Allace Hubbell, The Development of Ophthalmology in America, 1800 to 1870 (Chicago: W. T. Keener, 1908), 16– 38; Peter John Brownlee, “Ophthalmology, Popular Physiology, and the Market Revolution in Vision, 1800–1850,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 597–626.

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the experienced physician; but in the diseases to which it is liable as an optical instrument, where optical science can alone direct us, we regret that professional assistance is difficult to be found.”27 A skilled doctor might competently perform eye surgery or “craft an artificial pupil,” remarked Jeffries, but to truly care for a patient’s sight, one had to understand the science of vision— particularly physiological optics of the sort practiced by Helmholtz and his followers. Absent in Jeffries’s index of appropriate courses of study for those who wished to become “scientific ophthalmologists” were therapies such as the mustard plasters and leeches used to cure the young “seegar” maker in Philadelphia.28 Instead, Jeffries emphasized that sound ophthalmological practice “sprung from philosophic ophthalmologists applying the laws of optics to physiology.” In contrast with previous inattention to the deep workings of vision, Jeffries singled out physiological optics as a most “attractive field” of investigation for modern ophthalmology. The diagnoses and treatments that came out of these practices “were not stumbled on, but wrought out by patient investigation and experiment.”29 They were not a matter of scholastic tradition, that is, but of scientific inquiry. They successfully married the theories of psychophysical laboratories to the exigencies of modern, clinical care. Indeed, they were essential to the practice of ophthalmology as a specialized field of medical practice. As Jeffries explained, it was only through scientific medicine that he and his fellow ophthalmologists could “retain the position which our medical brethren are according us” by “shaking off from our specialty the fungus of quackery springing up from the soil of ignorance.”30 It is not clear precisely when Jeffries first settled on color blindness as his tool for uprooting the fungus of quackery, though by early 1877— perhaps as a result of the Lagerlunda crash and his correspondence with Holmgren— Jeffries was preoccupied with the topic. In February he wrote to the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners asking about the state’s color acuity standards for railroad men and sailors (there were none).31 He checked Chevreul’s De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs and Wilson’s ColourBlindness out of the Boston Public Library and found them worthy of no-

27. Jeffries, “Report on the Progress of Ophthalmology during the Past Year,” 4. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 8–9. 30. Ibid. 31. Jeffries, Color-Blindness, 138.

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tice.32 He solicited a copy of Wilhelm von Bezold’s Theory of Color from its translator, Sylvester Rosa Koehler— the Louis Prang Lithography Company’s technical director, who was soon to be named editor of the American Art Review and the first curator of prints at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.33 The two men hit it off, and that February, in frequent correspondence with Koehler, Jeffries set about re- creating some of von Bezold’s experiments on subjective color vision using the ubiquitous spinning disks of psychophysical investigation. For several months, Koehler and Jeffries traded tips, test results, and research materials.34 In March, Jeffries began to develop a series of color sensitivity diagnostics using a set of disks that Koehler had produced for him; Jeffries thanked him, writing, “I mean [to] work up my color tests by the disks you made for me and will report any results I get.”35 Jeffries never perfected his disk- based color acuity tests, but it was precisely this sort of psychophysical science that made Holmgren’s methods for testing color blindness so appealing to him. The most basic means of testing an individual’s color perception, of course, was simply to present him or her with a variety of colored objects and compare the test taker’s description of the objects’ colors with the test giver’s. In the case of Mary Bishop, the color- blind seegar maker at Wills Hospital, Hays simply pointed to objects of different colors— ribbons, flowers, and so forth— and asked Bishop what she saw. A specialized instrument for color acuity testing proposed by the ophthalmologist Henry Noyes in 1871 was only marginally more sophisticated. Instead of colored objects, Noyes recommended pasting “slips of colored paper . . . as numerous as is thought needful” on to the flat outer edge of a round paddle to which was affixed a rotating disk of similar size with a transparent window positioned to reveal each slip of paper, one by one. The examiner would rotate the window from color to color, recording the test taker’s responses as he went.36 For Holmgren and Jeffries, however, tests based on conventions of color 32. Jeffries to Koehler, Mar. 11, 1877, in Benjamin Joy Jeffries, Correspondence, 1877– 1891 (Crerar Ms 202), Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. 33. Jeffries to Koehler, Feb. 1877, folder 5, Benjamin Joy Jeffries Misc. Papers. 34. Jeffries’s wife was apparently an active participant in his research. She was responsible for making some of the disks and evidently participated as a test subject in his color experiments. It seems that Jeffries and Koehler were trying in particular to re- create some of Wilhelm von Bezold’s experiments in subjective color mixing: see Jeffries to Koehler, Feb. 20, 1877, and Jeffries to Koehler, Feb. 21, 1877, both in Benjamin Joy Jeffries, Correspondence. 35. Jeffries to Koehler, Mar. 11, 1877, Benjamin Joy Jeffries, Correspondence. 36. Henry D. Noyes, “An Apparatus for Testing the Perception of Color,” Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society Annual Meeting 1, no. 8 (1871): 118.

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naming failed to properly discriminate between the subjective and objective aspects of perception. “The object of the test [for color blindness] is to ascertain a subjective sensation from an objective expression,” explained Holmgren; thus, a truly scientific test of color perception had to dissociate a subject’s contextual experience of color from what science understood to be its objective structure.37 Such a critical translation between subjectivity and objectivity was essential because the color- blind were, in Holmgren’s estimation, quite adept at fooling both themselves and others about their condition. “We must . . . remember,” cautioned Holmgren, “that the names [that the color- blind] give colors are often exactly adapted to conceal their defect,” a lexical proficiency that allowed the color- blind to correctly name colors even if they were physiologically unable to experience the sensations they named.38 Naturally, Holmgren admitted, over a long run of tests, a truly color- blind individual would make revealing mistakes that exposed his or her condition. But how many examples were enough to correctly ascertain an examinee’s perceptual acuity? One? Ten? One hundred? One thousand? Purely on the basis of time and efficiency, color- naming tests had to be considered impractical. Moreover, wrote Holmgren, tests requiring their subjects to name colors might also snag “normal- eyed” individuals who, through “carelessness, inattention, or even from lapsus linguae [i.e., through a slip of the tongue],” failed to correctly identify the colors of test lanterns and flags.39 In the case of rail safety, one might wonder which scenario really posed more harm to the public good: a color- blind railroad employee who could distinguish signals correctly or a “normal- eyed” railroad employee who was too inattentive to notice their colors. Nevertheless, the point of testing was to root out color blindness, not carelessness; therefore, Jeffries and Holmgren viewed tests based on an individual’s ability to name colors as inherently faulty. Instead of taking test subjects at their word, Holmgren felt that by understanding the physiological mechanism of color blindness, he would be able to anticipate the sensations experienced by color- blind observers. To do this, he turned to the Young-Helmholtz theory, paying particular attention to the diagram of the three types of “nerve fibres” and their relative impact on the perception of color that Helmholtz had provided in his Handbuch der physiologischen Optik. 37. Quoted in Jeffries, Color-Blindness, 207. 38. Quoted in ibid., 185. 39. Quoted in ibid.

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Just as it could explain the “normal” perception of color (fig. 5a), so too could the Young-Helmholtz theory be used to explain “abnormal” color perception, through the conceit that color blindness was simply a condition of dysfunction of one or more of the specialized classes of nerve fibers. Thus, science could distinguish three varieties of color blindness, named according to the dysfunctional nerve fiber: red blindness, green blindness, and violet blindness. By modifying Helmholtz’s diagram, as Holmgren pointed out in Om färgblindheten (and Jeffries reprinted in Color-Blindness), it was possible to deduce which color sensations would result from the loss of a particular receptor. Examining Helmholtz’s spectral curves with the red band removed, for instance, indicated that colors ordinarily experienced as “red” would take on greater proportions of green light and would be experienced as a dark- green color, because of the diminished input of the “red” stimulation. Yellows— combinations of red and green— would appear to be somewhat- darker greens for the same reason. And greens themselves would take on a more luminous appearance, since what little “red” stimulation usually impinged on sensations of “green” would be lost (fig. 5b). The same exercise could be conducted with the nerves sensitive to green and violet wavelengths of light. Those individuals in whom the “green” nerve fibers were absent or “paralyzed” would similarly confuse green and red, much like their red- blind peers, but in this instance both colors would be perceived as being akin to purple in varying degrees, since the blue curve impinged upon both the long and the middle range of the spectrum (fig. 5c). Finally, in cases of violet blindness, reds and greens appeared distinct from one another, but blues and violets took on a green appearance (fig. 5d)— although, as Holmgren noted, violet blindness appeared to be extremely rare. Jeffries and Holmgren emphasized that these “theoretical” constructions of different sorts of color vision were essential to understanding how the color- blind saw the world. Without knowing how to anticipate what the color- blind saw, it was impossible to truly identify the “character” of their ailment and thereby to develop diagnostic procedures to test for it. But even when curves didn’t appear to match an individual’s color sensations, Holmgren insisted, the problem was not the theory itself but simply the degree of its application. Instances of incongruities between color blindness as known through Helmholtz’s graphs and the reported visual experience of colorblind observers could be accounted for by assuming that the individual’s relevant nerve fibers were only partially disabled, admitting some degree of color sensation but not the full range. “It is very easy to construct curves in conformity with this idea,” wrote Holmgren, “and not less easy to arrange

figure 5a Helmholtz’s diagrammatic curves for “normal” color vision. The lines marked 1, 2, and 3 stand for the stimulation from red, green, and violet receptors, respectively. Their location on the solar spectrum is indicated by the R, O, Y, G, B, and V on the x-axis.

figure 5b Curves for red blindness. Notice that without input from red nerves, yellow is composed mainly of green, with some blue stimulation, while red itself is composed mainly of a low intensity of green stimulation.

figure 5c Curves for green blindness. In this instance, both red and blue are readily discernible, while green appears as a mix of the two (a dark reddish purple). Yellow, meanwhile, registers as a low-intensity red.

figure 5d Curves for violet blindness. In this instance, red, yellow, and green are readily discernible, while blue and violet register as progressively less luminous shades of green. (Jeffries, Color-Blindness, 27, 31, 33, 34)

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in this manner a continuous series of transitions and gradual forms between one kind of complete color blindness on one side and the normal chromatic sense on the other.”40 Indeed, it was possible to imagine— with the help of the curves— a whole spectrum, as it were, of impairments to color vision, including completely achromatic vision and “a feeble sense of colours,” both of which resulted from the simultaneous diminishment of all three classes of color- sensing nerves. Of course, if all visual experience could be thought of as existing on a continuum between normal and pathological (as, indeed, Rood had suggested), then Holmgren had to admit that it was difficult “to decide how far a defect of this kind should be considered as having a pathological origin.”41 Nevertheless, this difficulty seemed only to indicate that yet more research was necessary in order to establish precise norms. In this manner, testing for color blindness provided its own raison d’être. Ambiguities in the borders between normal and pathological aside, once it was possible to predict what the color- blind saw without having to rely on their own subjective accounts, Holmgren felt confident in formulating a diagnostic procedure to detect the condition. Employing strands of “Berlin worsted”— a type of yarn that was cheap, readily available, and came in a wide variety of bright, light- fast colors— Holmgren settled on a matching exercise. Three skeins of yarn— one a pale green, one a pinkish- rose color, and one a bright red— served as “test” colors. These were the baselines against which a subject’s color acuity would be judged. Other strands— several varieties of green and brown, one of blue, one of a peachy orange, one of dark purple— served as “confusion” colors, or colors that individuals with different varieties of color blindness would (according to Holmgren’s analysis of Helmholtz’s curves) find indistinguishable from the test skeins. Those confusion colors were, in turn, mixed in with a random assortment of other colored yarns, and the test could begin. As Holmgren described the procedure, “The Berlin worsteds are placed in a pile on a large plane surface, and in broad daylight; a skein of the test- color is taken from the pile, and laid aside far enough from the others not to be confounded with them during the trial; and the person examined requested to select the other skeins most resembling this in color, and place them by the side of the sample.”42 It was not necessary for participants to match test colors exactly; rather, the point of the test was for the person being examined to select the skeins of 40. Quoted in ibid., 35. 41. Ibid., 36. 42. Ibid., 210.

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yarn that best matched the shade of the test color while eschewing those skeins that no individual with “normal” color perception would pick. Thus, a disposition to match the blue or dark- purple confusion strands with the pale- rose test strand betrayed red blindness. An attempt to match the darkgreen or orange- brown confusion strands with the pale- rose test strand betrayed green blindness. To aid physicians in picking the best colors of yarn for the test, Holmgren supplied— and Jeffries reprinted— a table of colors of test and confusion strands. Under Jeffries’s direction, in the 1880s Boston yarn dealers N. D. Whitney began providing standardized sets of Holmgren yarns, followed by opticians such as J. Lloyd and Company in the 1890s.43 The key to preserving the test’s ability to objectively characterize subjective sensations, Holmgren and Jeffries insisted, was that test takers should not be allowed to speak during the test: they could express their sensations only through the act of picking through the colored yarns. “It is [the hands] which we rightly have greater confidence in than the spoken word,” explained Holmgren.44 Speech was untrustworthy; actions spoke louder than words. “If it is in [a color- blind test subject’s] interest . . . not to expose his defective perception,” declared Holmgren, “but rather to conceal it, he certainly can do this better by speech than by the hands. . . . [T]his is why we maintain the principle that it is necessary to leave to the activity of the hands the task of revealing the nature of the sensations and to have recourse to the tongue only for verification when there is need of more information.”45 The silent picking and sorting of Holmgren’s test subjects, then, dramatized the way in which Holmgren’s testing regimen combined a theory of vision with a practical demonstration of modern, scientific subjectivity, to arrive at an ostensibly objective measure of color perception. Given these restrictions, Holmgren and Jeffries insisted it was important that an expert “surgeon” (as railroad doctors were called) administer the test. Even if the tests were relatively uniform, the people taking the tests could vary a great deal in terms of class, intelligence, education, and cooperativeness, and it took experience to avoid mischaracterizing mistakes or subterfuge as greater or lesser indicators of color acuity. “The examination is most difficult,” noted Holmgren, “with people of small intelligence, or of feeble and uncultivated color perception.” The same was true of those who knew they were color- blind but wished to hide it and— less

43. Benjamin Joy Jeffries, “Report on Worsteds for Holmgren’s Test,” Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society 7 (1895): 327–28. 44. Jeffries, Color-Blindness, 207. 45. Ibid.

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frequently— of the normal- eyed who wished to feign color blindness. In some instances, people simply appeared not to understand the test; Holmgren reported cases where participants plucked the confusion skeins willynilly from the pile and placed them randomly next to the test skeins. It was in these moments that the skill and patience of the administering ophthalmologist were crucial for determining whether participants were really color- blind or just unclear about what was being asked of them. Indeed, Holmgren suggested that by relying on body language alone, a truly expert test administrator could “detect color- blindness by the first gesture of the examined.”46 Jeffries agreed, claiming that on more than one occasion he had diagnosed a case of color blindness simply by observing the “peculiar, dazed, half- anxious expression of the face and eyes of a looker- on awaiting his turn.”47 In the future, Jeffries speculated, the best physicians might diagnose color blindness simply by gazing upon the visage of their patients, since the anxieties of the color- blind, “called into play from mental impressions through the eyes,” might very well give “the colour- blind eye its own peculiar facial expression.”48 Holmgren’s test became immensely popular in the United States, where Jeffries publicized it relentlessly, but it was not the only procedure available. In 1880 William Thompson, a surgeon on the Pennsylvania Railroad— and sibling of the company’s president, Frank Thompson— devised a simplified version of Holmgren’s test in order to examine the vision of his brother’s eighty thousand employees.49 Thompson’s “stick”— as the test was known— consisted of a cluster of Holmgren’s confusion yarns hanging from a board, each with a numbered tag at the end; three separate yarns served as test colors. The diagnostic procedure worked the same way as Holmgren’s worsted test, except that the numbers on the ends of the threads allowed a “nonprofessional person [to] conduct the testing, record it properly, and transmit it to an expert capable of deciding upon the written results”— thus lightening the load of the overworked surgeon.50 At the same time, Charles Oliver, a Philadelphia ophthalmologist, proposed his own wool test, based on 46. Ibid., 208. 47. Ibid., 67. 48. Benjamin Joy Jeffries, “Observations on a Peculiar Expression of the Eyes of the ColourBlind,” in Transactions of the International Medical Congress, Seventh Session, Held in London, August 2d to 9th, 1881, ed. William MacCormac (London: J. W. Kolckmann, 1881), 122. 49. On Dr. Thompson’s well- placed brother, see “Obituary Notices: William Thompson,” Railroad Gazette 43 (1907): 187. 50. Edward Nettleship and William Thompson, Diseases of the Eye (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1890), 464. Thompson specifically wrote the section of the book on testing for color perception.

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hues similar to those of Thompson and Holmgren but with the addition of blue and yellow— colors which he thought essential to the proper diagnosis of color blindness. Furthermore, although like Thompson, Oliver labeled his skeins for easy record keeping, his wools were tagged with a symbolic nomenclature that would be “incomprehensible to all but the scientifically initiated” and thus limiting the risk of the test’s secret falling into the wrong hands.51 These tests, and many others like them, circulated throughout Gilded Age America, stimulating debate and interest in the detection of variable color vision.

the Community Starting in 1877, when he gave his first talks on color blindness before the Thursday Club, a gathering of upper- class Bostonians interested in contemporary science, Jeffries pushed the matter of color blindness testing relentlessly. The medium of the public scientific lecture— enlivened with “diagrams and experiments”— allowed Jeffries to assume a position of authority while still striking a popularizing chord. Indeed, the day before his lecture at the Thursday Club, Jeffries made the somewhat- curious gesture of apologizing in advance to Massachusetts Institute of Technology founder William Barton Rogers for the “almost infantile” presentation of his topic. While his treatment of the material might seem “very elementary,” Jeffries explained, it was imperative that he didn’t confuse audience members who were unused to thinking about color perception as anything other than a uniform, universally shared experience. He suggested that rather than judging his talk on its content, Rogers might better ask attendees, “‘did you understand the doctor?’” as a measure of his success.52 Jeffries’s caution in presenting his work on color blindness is suggestive of just how strange color blindness seemed to nineteenth- century Americans— even those interested in science, as was the case with the audience at the Thursday Club. Other outlets could be less subtle: “Peculiar Freaks of Color Blindness,” cried the headline of an otherwise- bland article on color blindness testing in the Los Angeles Times.53 In a similar vein, in Science in 1888 physician W. B. Harlow described his own inability to distinguish between

51. Charles A. Oliver, “A Series of Wools for the Ready Detection of ‘Color Blindness,’” Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society 6 (1893): 539. 52. Jeffries to Rogers, Feb. 28, 1877, box 5, folder 74, William Barton Rogers Papers. 53. “Peculiar Freaks of Color Blindness,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1902, A15.

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certain hues as “due to a freak of nature.”54 Moreover, it could be quite unclear what, precisely, color blindness was. A trade card manufactured by Sanford’s Ginger Company in the 1880s offered a “test for color blindness” in which the holder of the card was instructed to stare at a bright- red Sanford’s logo, then avert his or her eyes to a clear spot on the card, whereupon the space would “slowly assume a bluish-green tint, in the middle of which ‘Sanford’s’ will re- appear, but in red instead of white.” The card, of course, was in no way a test for color blindness: the phenomenon on view was that of successive contrast. Nevertheless, that color blindness could serve as an advertising trope— while simultaneously being confused with a completely different optical phenomenon— serves as some measure of both its mystery and its prominence in the public imagination. If the science of color blindness wasn’t well understood in late nineteenthcentury America, rail disasters were, and Jeffries’s emphasis on the perils of color blindness on the nation’s railways had a great deal of resonance with his audiences. As historian Barbara Welke writes, in the decades following the Civil War, rail accidents changed the ways that individuals thought about bodily injury, personal liberty, and corporate responsibility. “The daily human toll of accidents,” writes Welke, “punctuated at ever more regular intervals by horrific disasters claiming the lives of hundreds in a single accident, generated a tide of anger at corporations that seemed increasingly distant even as they penetrated the landscape more thoroughly.”55 In antebellum America, accidents had been seen as a part of life. The self- possessed, liberal citizen was generally supposed responsible for his (mainly “his”) own safety. In contrast, the scope and frequency of railroad accidents during the Gilded Age seemed to demand government intervention to hold corporations liable if they neglected to ensure the mental and physical health of their patrons. Failing to screen employees for color blindness was one example of this new sort of corporate liability. Following a talk by Jeffries before the Railroad Committee of the Massachusetts State legislature in 1879, an editorial in the New York Times demanded a “mandatory statute” that would ensure that “railroad and steam- boat companies [would] be compelled to exclude from their service employees in whom this, or any other, defect of vision exists.”56 Echoing this sentiment, Kansas physician John Fee wrote, “[the fact] that color- blindness is the source of acci54. W. B. Harlow, “Color-Blindness,” Science 11, no. 261 (Feb. 3, 1888): 58. 55. Welke, Recasting American Liberty, 3. 56. Editorial, New York Times, July 23, 1879, 4.

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dents and calamities on railroads, in which property and life are sacrificed, is as apparent as any fact in pure mathematics.” He urged the Kansas State legislature to consider whether “some protective legislation can be secured against railroad collisions, so as to render transit on railways less perilous to life.”57 Likewise, the Detroit Lancet, a medical journal, wrote that “the public should be so educated as to demand this protection. . . . Such color vision, we hold, these companies are now bound to guarantee as one of the means for safe conveyance.”58 The efforts of Jeffries and his supporters bore fruit, and by the late 1880s a number of public and private regulations came into effect. In 1881 Connecticut became the first state to pass laws specifying procedures for testing key rail workers and penalties for failure to do so: railway men who worked with colored signals were to be tested by experts skilled in Holmgren’s method, and companies that hired men who couldn’t prove they had passed the test would have to pay fines of $100–$200 per man. Massachusetts followed suit in 1883; Ohio in 1885; and Alabama in 1887. Still other states, such as New York and California, eschewed direct legislation but relied on state railroad boards to pass regulatory guidelines for color blindness testing. In rare but significant instances, railroad companies voluntarily implemented testing programs. In 1881 Thompson began using his “stick” method to test employees of his brother’s Pennsylvania Railroad, and in 1887 he brokered an agreement between employees and managers of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad which produced a program of color vision testing. Federal attention to color blindness tended to focus mainly on military and maritime matters and on international treaties regarding color acuity testing. In 1883 newly elected president Chester A. Arthur endorsed “the advisability of providing for representation of the United States in any international convention that may be organized for the purpose of establishing uniform standards of measure of color- perception and acuteness of vision.”59 On paper, these steps were laudable; however, their implementation could prove uneven. For one thing, the systematic testing of thousands of railroad employees presented a logistical challenge that could hamper the effective administration of the tests. In 1890 the New York Central Railroad

57. John Fee, “Color Blindness, and Railway Accidents,” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1879–1880) 7 (1880): 35, 36. 58. Leartus Connor, “Dangers from Color Blindness,” Detroit Lancet 1, no. 8 (Aug. 1878): 633. 59. Quoted in Benjamin Joy Jeffries, “Control of the Dangers from Defective Vision,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 68, no. 408 (May 1884): 868.

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began ordering its thousands of employees to show up at scheduled times in offices in New York and Buffalo for color testing; when this system proved ineffective, it hired two surgeons to travel its seven thousand miles of rail rooting out cases of color blindness. For another thing, while Holmgren and Jeffries’s ideal physician was a scrupulous adherent to procedure, the actual conduct of doctors could differ substantially. As Jeffries complained to Holmgren in 1890, among American inspectors “[m]any, of course do not understand [the test] yet, will not use it correctly, or do not have the correct colors in their worsteds.”60 A 1901 newspaper article on the US Navy described a recruit’s first color blindness test, conducted by a doctor who, after thumping the candidate’s chest and ordering him to run around the examining room naked, stopped him and said, “Oh, by the way, here (shoving a pile of colored bunches of yarn towards [the candidate]) pick out all the reds there are. Good. Now the greens. Yes: now the yellows. None there? Um! That’s so; dropped on the deck. That will do for you.”61 Although the article emphasized that “a naval recruit’s eyes must be in first class order as regards acuteness of vision and color blindness,” it is doubtful that the doctor’s test protocol would have met Jeffries’s approval. More importantly, color blindness testing was a political lightning rod. In Connecticut, the new railroad safety law was unpopular enough to be used as a bludgeon with which Republicans and Democrats alike battered one another in the months leading up to statewide elections. A revised bill introduced after the upset election was diluted to near uselessness.62 As one congressman put it, “[t]he introduction of color blindness into politics afforded food for merriment, at the expense of the State.”63 The debacle in Connecticut inspired Massachusetts State legislators later that year to pass a color vision law almost ostentatious in its flimsiness: editorials in the Boston Daily Advertiser and the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal ridiculed the legislation as pandering to the railroad companies; incoming Massachusetts governor John Davis Long scorned the law in his inaugural address as “too loose”; while as far away as California, doctors described the law as

60. Jeffries to Holmgren, Oct. 10, 1890, Frithiof Holmgren Papers. 61. “Recruiting a Sailor,” New York Times, Oct. 27, 1901, 32. 62. On Connecticut’s color blindness regulations, see “Connecticut’s Best Men,” New York Times, Aug. 12, 1880, 1; “Color Blindness in Connecticut,” New York Times, Mar. 13, 1881, 9; Marshall Monroe Kirkman, Railway Train and Station Service: Describing the Organization and Manner of Operating Trains, and the Duties of Train and Station Officials (Chicago: C. N. Trivess, 1884), 85. 63. Benjamin W. Harris, Speech of Hon. Benjamin W. Harris in the House of Representatives, February 18, 1881 (Washington, 1881), 8.

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“nearly worthless.”64 A revised regulation in 1883 took on more of the tone of the original, stricter, Connecticut law, in spite of what Jeffries, writing in Harper’s magazine, described as “desperate attempts by railroad employés and officials . . . to repeal or nullify it.”65 Among early legislative attempts at color blindness testing, Alabama’s was seemingly among the more robust: in the 1888 case of Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway Company v. the State of Alabama, the US Supreme Court ruled that state regulation of rail workers’ “visual organs” did not violate the commerce clause of the Constitution.66 Jeffries was correct that much of the political force against color blindness testing came from a strategic union of railroad workers and railroad managers, although it was also the case that each party opposed the tests on different grounds. Railroad managers who wished to avoid the time and costs incurred by mass color blindness testing of their employees simply denied that variations in subjective perception were an issue for rail transportation. A survey of railroad superintendents by Railroad Age magazine, for instance, found that none of the thirty- two respondents were aware of any accidents caused by color blindness, and only six thought that testing of any sort was a good idea.67 A Chicago Daily Tribune commentary sympathetic to this position noted that color blindness testing following the passage of Connecticut’s 1881 law was “generally regarded as all humbug, excepting by the two experts who made the examination and netted better than $50 a day each.”68 Similarly, Jeffries recalled a presentation he gave to the board of directors of a rail company in which “[o]ne otherwise pleasant old gentleman sank back in his arm chair, and with almost a snarl of doubt and derision exclaimed, ‘Why Dr. Jeffries I have been railroading more than forty years; now if such a thing as color blindness existed, I must know all about it.’”69

64. See “Appendix VII: Extra Testing,” in The Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of California (1881–1882) (Sacramento: Beard, 1882), 188–92. 65. See Jeffries, “Control of the Dangers from Defective Vision,” 864; Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners, Eleventh Annual Report of the Board of Railroad Commissioners (Boston: Wright and Potter, State Printers, 1880), 65– 66; “Color Blindness and Defective Sight,” in Manual for the Use of the Boards of Health of Massachusetts (Boston: Wright and Potter, State Printers, 1881), 102 (act listed as PS 112 & 179 Acts of 1883, 125). 66. Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway Company v. the State of Alabama, 128 U.S. 96, U.S. Supreme Court (1888). 67. Kirkman, Railway Train and Station Service, 89. 68. “Color Blindness,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar. 20, 1881, 3. 69. Benjamin Joy Jeffries, “Re-Establishment of the Medical Profession: Annual Address to the Massachusetts Medical Society, June 13, 1888,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 118 (June 21, 1888): 614.

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Those in a position of relative power could snarl and deride, but the laboring employees of rail companies often experienced the tests as arbitrary, underhanded, and stressful. Following the passage of Connecticut’s testing legislation, “[i]nstances were related,” wrote one commentator, “in which persons whose vision was entirely normal, were unable to pass the examination, simply from nervousness, and one man fainted entirely away under the ordeal.”70 Seasoned railroad men found themselves out of work despite stellar reputations. As one inspector told the New York Sun, his company was “constantly surprised at finding that some of our most careful engineers, men who had driven engines for years without any accident that could be traced to mistaken signals, were affected.” He went on, “When an old employé fails, we try to find him something to do in some other department, but there is little hope of his staying long at the business.”71 Indeed, as late as 1935, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on a rail worker who committed suicide after having been removed from his job as an engineer and placed in a switching yard when it was discovered that he was color- blind.72 The man had been on the job for thirty- two years, reported the article. It is therefore likely that, having started work in 1903, he would have been familiar with the conflicts over color blindness testing earlier in the century and, indeed, may have even managed to pass Holmgren’s test early in his career. His particular response was unusual, but his peers felt a similar sense of subjugation in the face of the tests. “It is hard on them,” admitted an inspector.73 The problem wasn’t simply that the tests caused hardship; they also appeared to be predicated on a novel, exacting, and possibly illegitimate notion of perceptual experience. In the first place, some men disputed that the tests revealed defective vision, insisting instead that the tests simply unmasked test designers’ prejudices about what visual experience ought to be like. Workers in northern New York, for instance, complained in 1885 that “only an expert in color could distinguish the shades submitted to them.”74 In 1887 workers on the Reading Railroad similarly refused to be tested in what they felt were “fancy colors,” insisting that “the standard colors, red, white, blue, and green,” were sufficient, since the men were rail workers and “not applicants for clerkships in dry goods stores.”75 Although Holmgren 70. Kirkman, Railway Train and Station Service, 85. 71. “Peculiar Freaks of Color Blindness,” A15. 72. “Trainman Goes Colorblind; Shifted from Job; Ends Life,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 16, 1935, 18. 73. “Peculiar Freaks of Color Blindness,” A15. 74. “Object to Being Examined for Color-Blindness,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 29, 1885, 1. 75. “Grievances of Reading Railroad Men,” New York Tribune, Aug. 21, 1887, 5.

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and Jeffries emphasized that their tests were precisely designed to avoid just this sort of confusion between the mental comprehension of colors and the physiological sensing of colors, the tests often did not seem to be matters of straightforward looking and picking to those taking them. Moreover, it wasn’t entirely clear that failing to distinguish varieties of colored yarns was the same as failing to distinguish train signals. In the face of this sort of investigation, at least one railroad employee was skeptical. “The truth,” he said, “is the agitation [for color blindness testing] has arisen from the difficulty the normal eyed investigators have in understanding exactly what we, the color blind, really see. We could tell them that although the red and green lights do not give us the true red and green sensation, yet still they are strongly contrasted to us and we are in no danger of mistaking one for the other.”76 Physician W. B. Harlow, writing in Science, agreed, noting that he was capable of passing Holmgren’s test although he couldn’t distinguish cherries or strawberries on their respective plants; he remarked, “I have always believed that the defect of color- blindness could be accurately described only by one who, like myself, is subject to the peculiarity.”77 Similarly, a correspondent writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1901 asserted, “The Holmgren test certainly is about as far as possible from reproducing the actual conditions where color vision is demanded, and this alone should be an efficient argument against it. A test on which the safety of the public may depend, to say nothing of justice to the individual tested, should be reliable beyond reasonable criticism.”78 For these observers, Holmgren’s tests did little to “ascertain a subjective sensation from an objective expression,” as Holmgren had put it.79 Indeed, such tests might even obscure the truth. Rather than allowing color- blind patients to “tell” their examiners about the status of their internal, private perceptions of reality, the very protocol of the test forced the men to remain mute, picking through skeins of yarn that little reflected what they might otherwise describe as the reality of their sensational worlds. If the epistemological misgivings of the workers harmonized with those of some physicians, threats of labor unrest proved a decisive impetus to modifying the testing regimens. Facing a “strike unequalled in the history

76. Quoted in Kirkman, Railway Train and Station Service, 83. 77. Harlow, “Color-Blindness,” 58. 78. “The Holmgren Test,” Journal of the American Medical Association 36, no. 19 (May 11, 1901): 1328. 79. Quoted in Jeffries, Color-Blindness, 207.

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of Pennsylvania Railroad troubles,” officials of the company conceded that employees could be tested using both Thompson’s stick and the actual lanterns and signs used on the job.80 Similarly, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company avoided a strike by agreeing that employees who failed the Holmgren test could be retested using lanterns.81 And in 1892 railroad men in Michigan threatened to strike when four of their coworkers were dismissed for “alleged color blindness.”82 Among the more extreme, if creative, solutions to this epistemological crisis was the testing regimen implemented by Emmet Welsh, railroad surgeon for the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad Company. First, he tested potential hires with the Holmgren test. Then he tested them with the Thompson test. If the employee failed either or both, Welsh then took them to a life- sized replica of the back of a caboose that he’d had constructed in his office, complete with red, green, and white lanterns powered by electric bulbs. At a distance of forty feet, the applicant would be quizzed on the colors of the lanterns as they flashed on and off. Welsh thought it likely that anyone who failed the Holmgren or the Thompson test was definitively color- blind but felt he needed the faux caboose to “prov[e] conclusively to the managers and the most skeptical observer the correctness and importance of the observation.”83 Not all doctors employed such elaborate measures to validate their results, though Welsh’s rather- extreme diagnostic procedure expresses the uncertainty surrounding the tests. Indeed, despite the assertions by Jeffries and other editorialists that the dangers of color blindness were as “apparent as any fact in pure mathematics,” there was ample room for doubt, even among Jeffries’s supporters.84 A commentator for the Philadelphia Medical Times, for instance, while supportive of Jeffries’s campaign for color acuity tests administered by medical experts, nevertheless had to admit that “no railroad accident has ever been traced to this cause”— though the commentator hastened to add that the “possibility of such an accident is beyond question.”85 Similarly, while physician George Townsend praised Jeffries’s efforts in an article written for the

80. “Grievances of Reading Railroad Men,” 5. 81. “Agreeing to the Color Test,” New York Times, May 5, 1885, 2. 82. “A Season of Strikes: Color Blindness May Cause a Big Walkout of Trainmen,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 16, 1892, 2. 83. Welsh, “Color Blindness,” 9. 84. Fee, “Color Blindness, and Railway Accidents,” 35. 85. “Color-Blindness and Other Defects of Vision in Rail-Road Employés,” Philadelphia Medical Times, Feb. 28, 1880, 279.

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Massachusetts Medical Society, he picked his words carefully, noting that although color blindness “may not be proven as a common cause of the fearful accidents by land and by sea, with which our papers daily teem, its probability as a misleading agent cannot be too strongly maintained.”86 As for the Lagerlunda accident— the germinal event of color blindness testing— a 1975 article in the Klinische Monatsblätter für Augenheilkunde by F. G. Frey convincingly argues, on the basis of detailed court testimony of the accident, that the crash was not, in fact, caused by color blindness as Holmgren had supposed but by a failure on the part of both the engineer and the stationmaster to act within regulations.87 In this sense, the rush to color blindness testing can be seen as having been predicated on a falsehood. Nevertheless, the specific truths of the dangers described by Jeffries and his peers were in a larger sense beside the point. For Jeffries, color blindness and its regulation were matters not simply of ophthalmological health and safety but of society— or, more precisely, “community.” As he told the State Board of Health of Massachusetts, any program of color blindness testing simply represented “[t]he community [awakening] to a sense of the importance of asserting its rights.”88 Later in his career, in an intemperate moment he railed against the intransigence of his fellow citizens in refusing to take color blindness as seriously as he did, describing his cause as “a fight between one man against sixty million people”— that is, between himself and the entire population of the United States.89 Hyperbolic though it is, this statement nevertheless underscores what was at stake for Jeffries in color blindness testing. He saw his crusade not solely as a matter of medical professionalism, or as a fight against railroads, but as a cause with ramifications for the prosperity of all of society— the “community” of the United States. This “community,” moreover, was not simply one free of transportation accidents. It was a community guided by the beacon of science instead of commerce, one in which experts such as scientifically trained medical doctors had greater sway over public policy than corporate presidents or railroad directors. “Our profession cannot contend with what is called busi-

86. George J. Townsend, “The Position of the Massachusetts Medical Society; Its Relations to Medical Progress, to the Community in Which We Practise, and to Its Fellows,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 116, no. 24 (June 16, 1887): 572 (emphasis added). 87. F. G. Frey, “Ein Eisenbahngluck vor 100 Jahren als Anlass für systematische Untersuchungen des Farbensehens,” Klinische Monatsblätter für Augenheilkunde 167 (1975): 125–27. 88. Jeffries, “Dangers Arising from Color-Blindness,” 112. 89. In fact, Jeffries overestimated the US population by about eight million people. “Testing of Color Blindness,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1883, 4.

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ness in the accumulation of wealth,” Jeffries reflected in an editorial. But while “[w]ealth is a mighty power,” he wrote, “it falls palsied before knowledge”— by which Jeffries meant specifically scientific knowledge.90 Since the end of the Civil War, Jeffries continued, old social hierarchies had been broken down in the face of what he called “culture”— that is, a commonly shared sense of “knowledge,” both intellectual and sensual. “I think I see the signs of culture becoming a social force,” he wrote. “In such a society our profession [i.e., physicians] should be . . . duly recognized there.”91 This was the meaning of the “guarantee” of color vision referred to by the Detroit Lancet: it was not just a guarantee against loss of health or property but a guarantee of membership in a society in which scientific “culture” held sway over wealth; it was a guarantee of expert knowledge over corporate greed; and it was a guarantee of rational order in the face of the chaos of modernity.

ConCluSion: return to the White City In the view of Jeffries, Holmgren, and their peers, visual health was a linchpin of civil society. Not for nothing did Jeffries excerpt a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes (one of his frequent correspondents) as the epigraph to Color-Blindness: Its Dangers and Its Detection: Why should we look one common faith to find, Where one in every score is color- blind? If here on earth they know not red from green, Will they see better into things unseen?92

If it was the case, as Holmes seemed to indicate, that visual dysfunction was akin to dysfunction between fellows in society, then it was also true that a shared sense of vision was key to a shared sense of community. Holmgren himself put it more bluntly (in Jeffries’s translation) when he wrote, “Since we cannot control the subjective perception of another person we cannot prove that all normal- eyed see colors alike. It may, however, be granted that, at least in reference to the principal colors, their quality is the same for all

90. Jeffries, “Re-Establishment of the Medical Profession,” 590. 91. Ibid., 593. 92. Holmes composed the poem, entitled “The School Boy,” in 1878, to be read as part of the centennial celebration of the Philips Academy. His mention of color blindness would have been cutting edge and au courant.

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those who entirely agree in reference to them. There could not otherwise be any question of color between two individuals, just as there could be no intellectual agreement between man and man, if the functions of the senses were essentially different in the two.”93 Without agreement between individuals about the subjective values of their sensations, that is, there could be no agreement in society. As such, the diagnosis of color blindness and, more generally, the administration of vision were matters of both practical and moral importance. They were a means, of course, of ensuring the safety of individuals and property vis-à- vis new industrial technologies. But, as Jeffries and Holmgren saw it, diagnosis and regulation also offered access to a truth that overruled both the power of wealth to compel “intellectual agreement” and even individuals’ own accounting of their private, sensorial worlds, subject as they were to the vagaries of delusion, misunderstanding, solipsism, and self- interest. Perhaps ironically, it was this notion of a community governed by science that underwrote Jastrow’s attempt at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to bring colorimetric testing to the throngs of fairgoers. As Jeffries and Jastrow bickered by mail, it became more and more clear that Jeffries was correct: Jastrow wasn’t interested in testing for color blindness. He was interested in color perception as a proxy for other aspects of human consciousness. “You must remember,” Jastrow chided in one particularly telling moment, “that these tests which I submitted to you are simply a portion of a larger series of tests, covering most of the senses and particularly such higher mental processes as memory, attention, reaction, association, and the like. A test which, of itself, would perhaps be defective, none- the- less becomes interesting because it yields material which is accurate enough to shed interesting light on the relation of one kind of proficiency to another.”94 Color perception, that is, wasn’t simply of interest in detecting dangers or regulating perception. It was related to a more general understanding of human minds. As such, Jastrow assured Jeffries, “a test that shows me a difference of color perception is just as valuable as a test that shows color blindness.”95 Ultimately, Jastrow ignored Jeffries’s complaints, exhibiting his circular apparatus for testing color discrimination. He also produced a display of

93. Frithiof Holmgren, “How the Color-Blind See Colors,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 104 (June 2, 1881): 510 (emphasis added). 94. Jastrow to Jeffries, Feb. 1, 1893, folder 5, Benjamin Joy Jeffries Misc. Papers. 95. Jastrow to Jeffries, Feb. 10, 1893, folder 5, Benjamin Joy Jeffries Misc. Papers.

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different sorts of color- testing technologies and an exhibit to collect data about preferences for color combinations, sorted by age and sex. (The device was a simple placard showing an array of twenty- five colors and twenty- five color pairs. Exhibit- goers selected a card shape- coded to reflect their sex— square for men, rectangular for women— then recorded their age and preferences for colors and combinations and placed the card in a box.)96 These exhibits and others like them might not have had the full imprimatur of expert authority in a way that Jeffries would have preferred. But Jastrow had “a little more faith” than Jeffries, he sniffed, “in the value of doing some little, even if it is not rigorously scientific.”97 His exhibits were a matter of demonstrating a new and powerful way of thinking about the administration of sensations— and of establishing science, scientists, and doctors practicing scientifically minded medicine as arbiters. Surely that was something that Jeffries could see. Even if they didn’t recognize it, then, the two men shared common ground. Jastrow’s concern for leveraging color perception to discern “the relation of one kind of proficiency to another” was ultimately a matter of just the sort of “culture” and “community” that Jeffries championed. This community was one in which scientists and physicians held places of both moral and technical authority, where they were able to discern— and thereby intervene in— aspects of human consciousness and perception unrealized even by the perceivers themselves. The ability of science and medicine to determine “things unseen” (as Holmes’s poem had put it) extended from color perception to matters of intelligence, faith, reason, trustworthiness, taste, and a host of other qualities perceived to be the foundations of the “community.” When one of the exposition’s planners wrote enthusiastically that the fair would serve as “the best record of human culture in the last decade of the nineteenth century,” it was precisely such a vision of benevolent mastery over the natural world and human nature alike that he had in mind.98 In a gesture of reconciliation, if not concession, Jeffries in the end lent a set of Holmgren’s wools to be displayed in the pavilion. The White City, moreover, was a vision of “culture” and community explicitly organized around a hierarchy that held Euro-American industrial

96. Joseph Jastrow, “The Popular Esthetics of Color,” Popular Science Monthly 50 (Jan. 1897): 361–69. 97. Jastrow to Jeffries, Feb. 1, 1893, folder 5, Benjamin Joy Jeffries Misc. Papers. 98. Goode, First Draft of a System of Classification for the World’s Columbian Exposition, 654 (emphasis in original).

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civilization as the apotheosis of human development. If it was true, as Jastrow wrote, that aesthetic judgments like those of color were “subject to the influences of heredity and environment, of education, of general mental development, and the like,” then it followed that it should also be possible to use color perception— including color blindness—to apprehend the mental lives of individuals with very different influences of heredity and environment. Were rates of color blindness the same for “civilized” as for “primitive” humans? Did darker- skinned people see colors more acutely than their lighter- skinned fellows? What, precisely, was the relationship between color perception, race, and culture? What sorts of “proficiencies” (language use, aesthetic sense, cognitive ability, capacity for “organized intelligence”) could be deduced by examining the color senses of the peoples of the world? Color at the White City— and, for that matter, in Jeffries’s America— was deeply entangled in ideas of “culture” and “civilization.” And “civilization” was synonymous with science, technology, progress, and white, Christian, masculinity. A double irony, then: at the very moment of its ostensible apotheosis at the exposition, this idea of culture— a hierarchy of knowledge, technique, beliefs, and practices— was being actively challenged in no small part by the very individual who had been so instrumental in bringing the Midway’s Indian villages to the fair. For Franz Boas, the assistant curator of the department of anthropology at the exposition, color was a way of thinking, not about hierarchies of perception, but about multiplicities of perception. Just as there could be many ways of seeing color, so too could there be many ways of understanding culture. Color blindness, therefore, could be both a definite metric of culture and a means of unraveling its definiteness.

C h a pte r F o ur

COLORS AND CULTURES Evolution, Biology, and Society

The LeTTer Some 3,500 miles from Boston, while Jeffries harangued railroad officials over matters of color, commerce, and culture, Baptiste Marengo had a job to do. A “halfbreed” member of the Flathead Nation and a speaker of Salish, Marengo worked as an interpreter at Fort Missoula, Montana. He was an “intelligent man,” in the estimation of the post surgeon, Samuel Robinson— and so when, in the fall of 1878, an unusual letter arrived at the fort, Robinson summoned Marengo and put him to work.1 The author of the letter was Hugo Magnus, an ophthalmologist at the Ethnological Museum in Leipzig who had a particular interest in color perception. The letter had been forwarded to the fort under the auspices of the surgeon general of the US Army,

1. Samuel Robinson to surgeon general, Dec. 3, 1878, letter 3676-’78, Office of the Surgeon General Document File 1871–1894 (RG 112), National Archives, Washington, DC (hereafter abbreviated as OSG). For a record of Marengo’s employment, see Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States, on the Thirtieth of September, 1875 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1876), 366, which lists Marengo as employed by the Office of Indian Affairs in Montana for $400 per year. As an interpreter, Marengo had translated negotiations over the placement of the fort in 1877, which settled the political disposition of its white inhabitants vis-à- vis the Bitterroot Salish and the Nez Perce. He had also mediated the 1872 agreement signed by a majority of the leaders of the Salish Nation and by James A. Garfield, a special appointee of the secretary of the interior (and future US president), which dictated the removal of the Flathead from the Bitterroot valley north to a reservation on the Flathead River. See Richard Dwight Seifried, “Early Administration of the Flathead Indian Reservation, 1855 to 1893” (master’s thesis, University of Montana, 1968), 130.

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figure 6 Color chart used by Magnus for collecting color vocabularies. The colors on the chart from top to bottom are black, gray, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and brown. (Magnus, Untersuchungen über den Farbensinn der Naturvölker)

at the suggestion of Magnus’s good friend Benjamin Joy Jeffries. Magnus’s request was simple: to determine “in what degree do the uncivilized tribes perceive colours and distinguish them by means after the manner of civilized nations,” he asked that recipients of his letter “examine persons of the same tribe or nation with the help of the annexed scale of colours [in order to] ascertain in what degree they are able to discern hues belonging either to groups of bright, or groups of dull colours as being different among themselves and to give them separate names (whether they designate for example blue, violet, black, green or red, orange, yellow, with the same word or not).”2 Included with the letter was a blank chart with squares of color down the middle: black, gray, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and brown (fig. 6). The chart contained fields for recording the names of colors in different languages; and the letter included instructions on how to go about performing the tests. By indicating the swatches of paint on the chart and asking local informants about the names for colors in North American languages, Magnus hoped, as he later put it, to elucidate “the relationship between people’s ability to perceive colour and the possible influence of

2. Office of the Surgeon General to H. S. Spencer, n.d., letter 5039, OSG.

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their cultural environment”— in other words, the relationship between color and culture.3 In twenty- first- century scholarship, culture is frequently invoked as an overarching structure for thinking about color.4 Pluralistic, nonhierarchical, and value neutral, “culture,” in this sense, can be understood as a broad attribute of all human societies. Neither good nor bad, neither advanced nor retrograde, culture— and its plural form, “cultures”— provide a powerful explanation for a vast array of human actions and beliefs, including the perception of color. In art historian John Gage’s Color and Culture (1999), for instance, Gage writes that the meaning of color “must be related to the wider experience of colour in a given culture, this experience differing among different groups within this culture to whom colour is of some concern.”5 Similarly, journalist Victoria Finlay invokes culture as an organizing principle for thinking about the meanings of colors when she writes that “in Western culture, black often represents death,” while “in many cultures, red is both death and life.” (If one wishes to see “ochre in culture,” meanwhile, one ought to visit the Tiwi Islands.)6 In his monograph Green (2014), historian of color Michel Pastoureau endeavors to “recount the long social, cultural, and symbolic history of green in European societies”— while explaining that he limits his study because he has no wish to rely on third- and fourth- hand accounts of the color green in “non-European cultures.”7 Indeed, Pastoureau takes the point of view that “perception is always cultural”— that is, “culture” explains the ways in which people see the world, not only in terms of attitudes or beliefs, but in terms of elementary understandings of sensory data.8 It is this sense of “culture” that Gage, Findlay, Pastoureau, and a host of other writers on the topic— including the present author— employ.

3. Hugo Magnus, Untersuchingen über den Farbesinn der Naturvölker ( Jena: Fischer, 1880); translated in Barbara Saunders, ed., The Debate about Colour Naming in 19th Century German Philology: Selected Translations, trans. Ida-Theresia Marth, Studia Anthropologica (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), 134. 4. Raymond Williams identifies “culture” as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” See his Keywords, 87– 93. See also Rosemary J. Coombe, “Cultural and Intellectual Properties: Occupying the Colonial Imagination,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 16, no. 1 (Mar. 1, 1993): 8–15; Brad Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 5. Gage, Color and Culture, 79. 6. Finlay, Color, 97 (black), 142 (red), 39 (ocher). 7. Pastoureau, Green, 7–8 (emphasis added). 8. Ibid., 9.

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For Magnus and his nineteenth- century peers, however, precisely the opposite relationship between color and culture obtained. Particularly among Americans, culture was more frequently understood as unilineal and teleological. Human societies executed the temporal march from states of savagery to states of civilization according to distinct developmental phases which corresponded to mental development. These phases of mental and cultural development, in turn, corresponded tightly with a notion of biologically bounded race— and thus cultural development represented the mental capacities of different races of people. This was the syllogism at the core of Magnus’s inquiry. If primitive people named colors in primitive ways, then color served simultaneously as a powerful proof that culture progressed along a linear path and as a powerful diagnostic for measuring the development of culture. Those societies that named colors in a manner closer to that of the civilized were more advanced; those that did not were less so. Before culture could explain color, then, color was a formative concept for thinking about culture. At least initially, color naming and color perception seemed to move in harmony with the advance of culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the results of widespread color blindness testing of the sort advocated by Jeffries had complicated this picture, suggesting that, in fact, nonwhite, “uncivilized” people might possess better color acuity than whites, regardless of their linguistic conventions for naming colors. This revelation engendered, on the one hand, a reconsideration of the mechanics of color perception and culture: from a scheme in which culture and color converged to one in which attenuated color perception was, in fact, a sign of civilization (in effect, preserving Magnus’s premise but applying it to different results). On the other hand, attempts to coordinate color perception and cultural advancement catalyzed a revaluation of the very concept of culture, introduced most cogently by anthropologist Franz Boas and his followers. In their view, rather than progressing through fixed stages of differentiation, culture was plastic, transformable, and multiple. In this view, there was no metric against which to measure the progress of culture. Rather, all cultures (plural) sprung from the fact that human beings classified their sensory perceptions— including those of color— in fundamentally arbitrary ways. This transformation in thinking about the idea of culture was, of course, multicausal and neither immediately nor universally embraced. But however one felt about the best way to evaluate how human beings make and share knowledge, values, and beliefs about the

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world around them, the road to “culture” in turn- of- the- century America went through color.

“A NATurAL LAw of AwAreNess” In the United States of the late nineteenth century, the term “culture” spoke to a distinct set of values that placed scientific knowledge, aesthetic temperance, abstract thought, and technological proliferation at the pinnacle of human achievement. For Jeffries, recall, “culture” was science— a “force in society” that stood contraposed against base love of money. For Peirce— who had literally written the definition of culture in yet another entry for the Century Dictionary—culture was “the result of mental cultivation, or the state of being cultivated; refinement or enlightenment; learning and taste; in a broad sense, civilization.” To this definition, Peirce appended the one offered by British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who wrote that “[c]ulture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”9 This idea of culture, moreover, was best understood as cumulative and progressive: as anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan explained— echoing Tylor— human societies moved through three distinct phases, proceeding from savagery to barbarism and thenceforth to civilization.10 Although commentators disagreed about the fixity of cultural attainment among a given people, for the most part a society’s degree of culture mapped onto assumptions of cognitive capacity, which, in turn, corresponded to taxonomies of race (and, to a lesser extent, class)— thus explaining the apparent supremacy of wealthy, white Europeans over the darkerskinned peoples of the world. In 1896 prominent ethnologist and physician Daniel Garrison Brinton crystallized this point of view, insisting that no group of humans could “escape the mental correlations of its physical struc-

9. Peirce, “Culture,” in Century Dictionary, 2:1393. 10. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, John Harvard Library (New York: H. Holt, 1878). For Morgan vis-à- vis midcentury statecraft and science, see, e.g., Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 67– 94; John S. Haller Jr., Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859– 1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 95– 120; Elisabeth Tooker, “Lewis H. Morgan and His Contemporaries,” American Anthropologist 94, no. 2 (1992): 357– 75.

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ture.” He explained that “the black, the brown, and the red races differ anatomically so much from the white . . . that even with equal cerebral capacity they never could rival its results by equal efforts.” The goal of the human sciences was, in Brinton’s view, to sort out the “peculiarities” which differentiated the mental lives of races of people— not just for the sake of scientific curiosity but because “these peculiarities, as ascertained by objective investigation, supply the only sure foundation for legislation; not a priori notions of the rights of man, nor abstract theories of what should constitute a perfect state, as was the fashion with the older philosophies and still is with the modern social reformers.”11 It was thus no accident that Magnus’s inquiry received solicitous attention from both Jeffries and the surgeon general’s office. Questions of culture sat squarely at the point where racial typology and mental life met matters of law and statecraft. Between 1865 and 1900 American institutions shook under tremendous changes in demography and economy. The naturalization of black Americans and the enfranchisement of 3.5 million former slaves with the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were (in the eastern states) only the most immediately apparent of these transformations to civic, legal, and economic life. As federal authority backed by military force expanded across the North American continent and later claimed territorial possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, it put a premium on the assimilation or annihilation of the groups of people already living in the newly occupied territories. At the same time, between 1865 and 1882, three hundred thousand Chinese workers immigrated to the West Coast of the United States, sparking widespread resistance by white populists. The question, as Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan put it, of “whether a particular race will or will not assimilate with our people, and whether they can or cannot with safety to our institutions be brought within the operation of the Constitution,” was one of culture— that is, of whether the rules of civilization could apply to those who did not see the world in a civilized way.12 Culture was powerful, but culture was also fragile— and the “safety” of institutions hung on understanding how different people saw the world. The analysis of culture in the scientific terms desired by Brinton and his like- minded peers fell to a cluster of overlapping disciplines and practices. Physiologists and physicians— those with medical training and an interest in the human body— were frequent practitioners of and contributors to 11. Daniel G. Brinton, “The Aims of Anthropology,” Science 2, no. 35 (1895): 249. 12. John Marshall Harlan, Dissenting, Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901), 384.

Plates 1 and 2 Primary Colors. In “subtractive” models of color mixing, red, yellow, and blue are primary colors. The mixture of paints is one familiar form of subtractive color mixing and was the basis of many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century color theories. Colors appear as they do, in this understanding of color, because objects selectively absorb white light and reflect those colors that are unabsorbed. “Additive” models of color mixing, in contrast, are premised on mixtures of wavelengths of light rather than pigment. Rather than being absorbed (or subtracted) from one another, wavelengths combine (or add) together to form new colors. Owing to the physiology of the human eye, additive models of color mixing—like Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory— treat red, green, and blue as primary colors. Yellow, in this sense, is a compound color: a combination of green and red wavelengths. Ewald Hering’s theory of “opponent” colors (chapter 5) proposes six primary colors arranged into three pairs: red/green; yellow/blue; and white/black. Different wavelengths of light stimulate different opponent pairs to varying degrees, and the combined effects of the stimulus are interpreted by the observer as sensations of color. Hering posed his theory as a contrast to Helmholtz’s “trichromatic theory.” In practice, all three color theories are involved in the process of human color perception. (Illustration by author)

Plate 3 Painting and Physics. In the summer of 1901, physicist Ogden Rood (chapter 1) and his son Roland experimented with the painting techniques suggested by Rood’s Modern Chromatics in the hills around Rood’s summer house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The purpose was to see whether, by painting according to his own text, he could make paintings in the style of French impressionism, a school that he professed to loathe. In these watercolors, Ogden Rood’s handling of paint suggests his attempts to apply points of paint in order to make naturalistic light—for instance, including flecks of red and orange in the depiction of green foliage, as his book recommends. Ultimately, Rood concluded that it was possible that he had, indeed, laid the groundwork for impressionism, even if it was not the path he had intended. (Watercolor paintings by Ogden Rood, July–September 1901. Courtesy of Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

Plate 4 Colors and Words. Philosopher Charles Peirce (chapter 2) used ornithologist Robert Ridgway’s Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists (1886; chapter 6) when writing color definitions for the Century Dictionary. Note, for instance, Peirce’s marginalia on Ridgway’s table of purple hues. These jottings represent the percentages of component colors of Ridgway’s different purples that Peirce determined using colored disks borrowed from Rood. Ridgway’s goal had been to provide an easily usable and stable system of color standards—a goal, in this case, reiterated through the Century Dictionary. (Plates from Charles Peirce’s copy of Robert Ridgway’s Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists. By permission of the Peirce Edition Project, Institute for American Thought, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts.)

Plates 5 and 6 Color Blindness and Culture. “Holmgren’s wools” (chapter 3) were a test for color blindness used in the United States between roughly 1880 and 1940. Test takers would attempt to match the color of the three “test” skeins (marked A, B, and C in plate 5) with the numerous “confusion” skeins. Their ability or inability to do so would indicate their color acuity. The labeled tags in this particular test, manufactured by the American Optical Company around 1900, allowed test administrators to quickly and precisely record the results of the test. (Author’s photo. Collection of the author.) For Franz Boas (chapter 4), color perception was a matter not just of physiology but of culture. While it is not the case, as is commonly claimed, that Boas came to think about color and culture through conversations about the color of icebergs with the Inuits of Baffin Island, his doctoral thesis in physics was on the color of water, and he paid close attention to the color of ice and seawater on his expedition to Baffinland in 1883. The watercolor shown in plate 6, made by Boas during that expedition, testifies to his keen sense of the transformation of light through the translucent medium of the iceberg. (Franz Boas, Eisberg, 1883. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.)

Plate 7 The Evolutionary Theory of Color. Christine Ladd-Franklin used this image to demonstrate her proposed three “developmental” or “evolutionary” stages of color perception across species and time. Viewing the sequence from left to right, the animal species depicted are representatives of different sorts of color vision. Cats, for instance, possess achromatic vision. Bees (center) can see combinations of yellow and blue. Human beings (represented by the house on the far right) can see a full spectrum of colors. Indeed, LaddFranklin went one step further, explaining her illustration not just in terms of a continuum of life but also of deep time: In Carboniferous times, when there were no coloured birds and no coloured flowers, a colour-sense would have been of no use to the low animals which existed—their vision was achromatic. (That of the cat and of other night-prowling animals is achromatic still.) In the Cretaceous period came in together bees and coloured flowers. But the bees . . . see two colours only (yellow and blue) like our own atavistic partially colourblind individuals, their vision is dichromatic. With birds, most mammals, and normal human beings, yellow has been differentiated into red and green—vision has become tetrachromatic. (Ladd-Franklin, Colour and Colour Theories, 279–80)

Plate 8 Color Standards. This table—the frontispiece to Milton Bradley’s Elementary Color—displays Bradley’s ninety original “pure spectrum” colored papers arranged in their scientifically proper order with their corresponding nomenclature. In Bradley’s system, “T” stands for “tint” (a color made with white), and “S” stands for “shade” (a color made with black). The “broken spectrum” colors to the right of the pure spectrum colors were mixtures of the pure spectrum colors with a proportion of their complementary colors. (Courtesy of the Huntington Museum Library.)

Plates 9 and 10 The Color Sphere and the Color Tree. Munsell’s color system (chapters 6 and 7) was not simply an ideal representation of color. It could be realized (through careful craftsmanship) in the physical world. Although the actual “shape” of color space was irregular—as represented by Munsell’s color “tree” (plate 10)—within the color tree lurked the color sphere (plate 9), a geometrically perfect configuration of the middle points of all colors. When set spinning on its axis, the colors blended together, producing bands of light, middle, and dark gray, which was proof that the color sphere was chromatically balanced. (Author’s photo. Sphere and tree courtesy of Morton R. Godine Library, Massachusetts College of Art and Design.)

Plate 11 Measuring Color. Intended to teach children about additive color mixing, Milton Bradley’s color top could be easily repurposed for analyzing the color composition of textiles, pigments, and, in certain instances, human skin (chapter 7). To measure a given color with the top, the user would first cut a single slit in each paper disk, so that when placed over the spindle and onto the measuring dial, the disks could overlap. When the user spun the top, all the exposed colors would blend into a single color. Adjusting the amount of overlap between the disks allowed different mixtures of color. Once the color of the spinning disk matched the color to be measured, the graded dial would allow users to estimate the percentage of each color exposed. Using only red, yellow, black, and white disks, eugenicists Gertrude and Charles Davenport felt that they could accurately quantify an individual’s race on the basis of skin color. (Author’s photo. Color top courtesy of Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

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the emerging science of anthropology: a field that took as its purview the natural history of human beings, including the physical measurements of different races, their psychological attributes, and their geographical distribution.13 Those interested in the customs, folklore, and rituals of indigenous peoples, meanwhile, styled themselves “ethnologists” and “collected” the stories, songs, and artifacts of the people they studied.14 Philologists studied language. Although the bulk of the work of philology concerned ancient languages— Greek, Latin, Hebrew— philologists in North America performed a significant amount of work on the structures and vocabularies of Indian languages, sometimes working from notes collected by missionaries or by surveying and military expeditions and sometimes as missionaries or as members of surveying or military expeditions themselves. In practice, these fields overlapped. The American Ethnological Society, for instance, founded in 1858, was dedicated to addressing “geography, archeology, philology, and inquiries generally connected with the human race,” while anthropologists were seldom shy about weighing in on matters of folklore and language.15 Understanding the disposition of the savage vis-à- vis the civilized— and thereby governing both appropriately— required an ability to objectively study the progress of races as they ascended the ladder of culture. Color perception provided one such metric.16 This was because, as one correspondent wrote to Jeffries, color perception— in particular, variations in color 13. See, e.g., Paul Broca, “The Progress of Anthropology in Europe and America,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of New York 1 (1871): 29–31. 14. Confusingly, “ethnologists” did not practice “ethnography”— for “ethnography” meant the practice of measuring people. 15. Robert E. Bider and Thomas G. Tax, “From Ethnologists to Anthropologists: A Brief History of the American Ethnological Society,” in American Anthropology, the Early Years, ed. John V. Murra (St. Paul, MN: West, 1976), 12. 16. This was not to say, of course, that color perception was the only metric used to compare groups of humans. For example, in his Crania Americana (Philadelphia: J. Dobson; London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1839) Samuel Morton— an American physician and anthropologist— argued that his careful measurements of hundreds of skulls, ancient and modern, allowed him to rank the races of humankind with great precision, from the “Caucasian race,” which possessed “the highest intellectual endowments” to the “Ethiopian race,” “of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity” (5– 7). Between the “Caucasian” and the “Ethiopian” races, Morton listed the “Mongolian race,” the “Malay race,” and the “American race,” in descending order of intelligence. It was furthermore possible to think about culture in terms of language; Albert Gallatin speculated that the origins of language held clues to the origins of reason. See his “A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains, and in the British Possessions in North America,” in Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 2 (Cambridge: University Press, 1836), 201–8.

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perception like color blindness— “pertains to the mental and physiological organization of [the] race.”17 The “race” that the correspondent referred to was the human race in general, but color perception offered an avenue into thinking more specifically about relationships between the “mental and physiological” organizations of different notional races of human beings and their concomitant development in terms of culture. This was the supposition that guided Magnus’s study, and it built on two decades of philological debate about the historical progress of color perception and language, where language served as a stand- in for “culture.” In 1858 philologist and future British prime minister William Gladstone published Studies on Homer, a three- volume disquisition in which, among other things, he pointed out the remarkable “indeterminacy” of words for color in Homer’s works: for example, “wine- coloured oxen, smutty thunderbolts, violet- colored sheep,” in addition to Homer’s well- known “wine- dark” seas.18 In this and subsequent works, Gladstone argued that “the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age,” and that it was through generations of sharpening their sense of observation that Europeans had come to the detailed color acuity that they exhibited in the nineteenth century.19 Gladstone’s treatise on Homer preceded Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species by one year. Thereafter, biological evolution supplemented philology as a robust scientific framework for thinking about color perception. In the early 1870s, interpreting ancient Vedic poems, Hebrew scriptures, and Icelandic sagas through a framework of Darwinian evolution, Lazarus Geiger, a German philologist, honed Gladstone’s argument by proposing that the apprehension of color had, indeed, changed over the centuries, as part of a natural evolutionary progression from less to more complicated forms of vision. This could be seen, argued Geiger, if one assumed that the order in which color terms entered a language reflected the evolution of the physiology of color vision: primitive people had the physical capacity to see, and therefore name, only reddish (or dark) sensations; somewhat more advanced people saw and named perceptions of yellow; still more advanced people saw and spoke about sensations of green; and finally, the most evolutionarily advanced people— such as Europeans— were physically and cog-

17. Salem Wilder to Jeffries, June 8, 1885, folder 5, Benjamin Joy Jeffries Misc. Papers. 18. William Ewart Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1858), 487, 472. 19. Ibid., 488.

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nitively equipped to distinguish all color sensations, including those of blue and purple.20 Gladstone and Geiger’s philological theories found a felicitous parallel in ethnological observation in the United States. In his Instructions for Research Relative to the Ethnology and Philology of America (1863), George Gibbs (an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institution and older brother to Rood’s friend Oliver Wolcott) cautioned readers who would attempt to compile vocabularies of the native people of North America that “the character of the Indian mind is so essentially different from that of the white man, they think in so different a manner, that many precautions are necessary to avoid giving them wrong impressions of our meaning, and of course obtaining incorrect replies.” Color was among the concepts that Gibbs singled out as indicative of dissimilarities in the mental constitution of savages. “The idea of color seems to be indistinct,” he wrote, “dark blue and dark green having, in many languages, the same names as black, and yellow the same as light green.”21 Albert S. Gatschet, an ethnologist working for the US Geological Survey who was in contact with Magnus, similarly reported that the Modoc and Klamath Lake Indians of the Pacific Northwest (both of whom spoke varieties of Klamath) did not have a word for “color” and used only a few words to describe particular abstract color sensations. Instead of existing in the abstract, colors in Klamath tended to retain strong associations with particular objects. For example, Gatschet wrote that “[t]he Klamath language has two terms for green, one when applied to the color of the vegetals (kakd’kli), another when applied to garments and dress (tolalh’ptchi). Blue when said of beads is again another word than blue in flowers and blue in garments.” Indeed, Gatschet recalled Klamath speakers “qualifying certain 20. Natasha Eaton situates the color theories of Gladstone, Magnus, and their interlocutors against the wider history of color and colonialism in Colour, Art and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), esp. 162–77. Nicholas Gaskill writes about Gladstone et al. against the backdrop of studies in synesthesia in “The Articulate Eye: Color-Music, the Color Sense, and the Language of Abstraction,” Configurations 25, no. 4 (Oct. 26, 2017): 475–505. See also Patricia Sloane, The Visual Nature of Color (New York: Design Press, 1989), 193– 98; Deutscher, Through the Language Glass. While a Lamarckian idea of color perception as modified through repeated viewings of different varieties of color held sway in parts of Europe, Anglophone students of color after 1859 tended to adhere (though not dogmatically) to variations on Darwinian theory. See, e.g., Saunders, Invention of Basic Colour Terms; Jaap Van Brakel, “The Plasticity of Categories: The Case of Colour,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44, no. 1 (1993): 103–35. See also Lazarus Geiger, Contributions to the History of the Development of the Human Race, trans. David Asher (London: Trübner, 1880), esp. 48– 64. 21. George Gibbs, Instructions for Research Relative to the Ethnology and Philology of America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1863), 14, 16.

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objects of nature by their color and then calling them by the same attribute, even when their color has been altered.” As an example of this phenomenon, Gatschet specified that “the name applied to the color of a quadruped may remain even when the animal has changed its color through the change of seasons.”22 The results that Magnus received from the questionnaire that he sent to western forts were in line with these predictions. Speakers of Pah Ute, wrote Washington Matthews from Modaco, California, did not have a stable word for “orange,” using the name “red” or “yellow” instead. Speakers of Klamath, while labeling “orange” consistently, conflated the words for green and blue.23 In a similar way, from Fort Keogh in Montana, A. C. Girard wrote that the speaker of Umatilla whom he interviewed had glossed the word for “blue” as “pretty near green”— again, in line with Magnus’s prediction. Girard also found two speakers of Nez Perce who told him that the word for “purple” in Nez Perce was “neither blue nor brown,” while the word for “brown” was formed from the words meaning “neither black nor red.”24 And from Neah Bay, on the Pacific coast, H. S. Spencer reported that, while Makahs had a full complement of color terms at their disposal, for the Skomisch speakers of the nearby Twanas, “[b]lack, white, red, yellow- green were the only colors known . . . before the coming of the whites,” and he recorded no words for “grey” or “purple.”25 This said, on the evidence of the forms returned, apparent variations in Indian color terms owed as much to differences in the methods used by army surgeons doing the recording as they did to any semantic idiosyncrasies in Indian languages. Matthews, for instance, prided himself on being a student of Indian languages (he would later go on to work for the Bureau of Ethnology), and his returned charts bear witness to a close attention to the precise genealogy of terms. “It will be seen,” he jotted next to his list of Shoshone color terms, “that in this language which is kindred to the Pah Ute, the radical parts of the names for color are much alike in each, while the terminal part, or suffix, is different. . . . The Sho Sho Ne word for blue seems to be much the same as the Pah Ute word given for violet or brown,” though “my informant may have been somewhat at fault.” However, Mat-

22. Albert S. Gatschet, “Adjectives of Color in Indian Languages,” American Naturalist 13, no. 8 (Aug. 1879): 483, 484. 23. Washington Matthews to Office of the Surgeon General, Nov. 20, 1878, letter 5069, OSG. 24. A. C. Girard to Office of the Surgeon General, Feb. 22, 1879, letter 1156, OSG. 25. H. S. Spencer to Office of the Surgeon General, Nov. 20, 1878, letter 5039, OSG.

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thews also noted, “For many of the names of the finer tints [in Hidatsa] I knew no English equivalent and had to translate them with much circumlocution”; he filled his chart with multiple variations on Magnus’s ostensibly basic terms.26 Spencer, in contrast, relied on the work of missionary Reverend M. Eells rather than conducting the wished- for interviews himself. His notes were cursory and sparse. Girard’s conversations with two speakers of Nez Perce served as the basis of his recorded color vocabularies, but Robinson— working not with Marengo but with a speaker of Nez Perce— reported very different words than Girard did for purple and brown, as well as different words for blue and yellow. And from Fort Fetterman, in Wyoming, John Goff could only “respectfully state that there are no Indians settled within an hundred miles of this station.”27 Uneven reporting aside, Magnus nevertheless felt that he could make some definite conclusions on the basis of the results of the questionnaires returned to him from America, as well as from dozens of other “doctors, missionaries, overseas trading firms, and similar establishments” around the world. As he wrote in his Untersuchen über den Farbesinn der Naturvölker (Investigation into the color sense of primitive peoples; 1880), it was clear, first of all, that all primitive people acknowledged and named the color red, sharply distinguishing it from other colors. Yellow was the second most sharply distinguished color— although some people named it with a specific, abstract term, and others used words for yellow objects. Orange was more problematic: sometimes people identified it with a specific name, though just as often they labeled it either red or yellow. As for green and blue, the degree of insensitivity to these colors among primitive peoples was enough to make Magnus “stand back in amazement and shake [his] head.” Primitive people seemed to have little ability to tell the two colors apart. Purple and brown, likewise, were inconsistently identified at best. And variations in the lightness and darkness of colors— shades and tints of the basic spectral colors, plus brown— made “very little impression on native people unlike the strong awareness which highly civilized people have developed in the course of their progress.”28 Whether these facts were “linguistically engendered or physiologicallyanatomically conditioned as part of the natural growth of man,” Magnus

26. Matthews to Office of the Surgeon General, Nov. 20, 1878, letter 5069, OSG. 27. John Goff to Office of the Surgeon General ( John Maynard Woodworth), letter 4569, Oct. 16, 1878, OSG. 28. Magnus, translated in Saunders, Debate about Colour Naming, 138, 154.

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initially hesitated to say. It was true that he “could not attribute any specific racial differences between primitive and civilized peoples” in terms of color perception. When rigorously tested, savages seemed to see colors almost as well as the civilized, ruling out a form of racially based color blindness.29 Nevertheless, Magnus proposed, should scientists keep an open mind, they would almost certainly discover a sort of “quality factor” that influenced both culture and physiological development. It was likely this “factor”— existing as it did in greater quantities among white Europeans than among their darker- skinned conspecifics— that caused a more pronounced tendency to name and appreciate colors among white Europeans. Whatever the mechanisms, one thing was clear: Magnus’s findings were distinct enough for him to assert that they represented “a natural law of awareness.”30 Primitive people saw color in a primitive way. Color perception synchronized neatly with culture and evolutionary development.

“A DiseAse of CiviLizATioN” Magnus’s theory had intuitive appeal, but it was subject to serious objections. For one thing, as Canadian psychologist Grant Allen pointed out in a somewhat- gleeful skewering of Magnus’s work, evolution was too slow to account for the claimed differences in color perception between Homeric Greeks and modern Europeans— to say nothing of between modern Europeans and modern savages.31 Indeed, as Allen pointed out, science had shown that organisms such as bees had acute senses of color, and it was incongruous to assume that bees were more advanced than even the least advanced human. This criticism was reinforced by the fact that Allen’s own surveys suggested there was no evidence that primitive people saw color any differently from the civilized. Ophthalmologist Lawrence Webster Fox shared this opinion on the basis of his years of treating eye diseases among the Blackfoot Indians. He explained, “Present day barbarians have essentially the same power [of color perception] as ourselves”— this sensation being “as old as hunger,” he went on, and just as evolutionarily useful.32 29. Ibid., 145, 138. 30. Ibid., 145. 31. Grant Allen, The Colour-Sense: Its Origin and Development; An Essay in Comparative Psychology (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892). 32. Lawrence Webster Fox and George Milbrey Gould, The Human Color-Sense Considered as the Organic Response to Natural Stimuli (Saint Louis, MO: J. H. Chambers, 1886), 17 (reprinted from Journal of Ophthalmology, Sept. 1886).

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More seriously, when segmented by race, the results from mass color blindness testing appeared to show that, far from displaying greater color acuity than their cultural inferiors, rates of color blindness among white men greatly exceeded those of nonwhites and of women of all races. As a survey of the “Military and Anthropological Statistics” of the Union Army conducted during the Civil War showed, approximately 5 percent of all white troops had some sort of deficiency in color perception. This was nearly double the proportion of those “Indian” and “negro” troops found similarly afflicted.33 Similarly, at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Fox tested the color acuity of 161 men and 89 women from “twenty seven different [Indigenous North American] tribes,” using Thompson’s stick.34 Of the 250 people tested, Fox found that three— two Cheyenne half brothers and a Sioux man— were color- blind; that is, approximately 1.8 percent of the male population of the test takers. In a similar 1889 study, University of Kansas physicists Lucien Ira Blake and William Studdards Franklin tested 285 men and 133 women— again of “many tribes”— at another “Indian Industrial Training School,” the paramilitary Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Their results— this time obtained using Holmgren’s worsted test— were even more striking: a 0.7 percent color blindness rate among the people they tested.35 In Boston, Jeffries tested for color blindness among “colored” schoolchildren and reported a rate of about 2 percent, though he cautioned that his small sample size might have skewed his results.36 Swann M. Burnett, in Washington, DC, claimed more robust results among 3,040 “colored” children whom he examined, again finding less than half the cases of color blindness than would be expected among a population of white schoolchildren.37 In his years of examining railroad employees, meanwhile, ophthalmologist David DeBeck reported that he did “not recall ever having seen a color- blind negro,” while railroad surgeon W. H. Allport similarly reported testing 2,000 “colored” employees of rail compa33. Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869). See also United States Sanitary Commission Records, Statistical Bureau Archives, 1861–1869 (MssCol 18780), New York Public Library, New York, NY. 34. Lawrence Webster Fox, “Examination of Indians at the Government School in Carlisle, PA. for Acuteness of Vision and Color-Blindness,” Philadelphia Medical Times, Feb. 25, 1882, 346. 35. L. I. Blake and W. S. Franklin, “Color-Blindness a Product of Civilization,” Science 13, no. 317 (Mar. 1, 1889): 171. 36. Jeffries, Color-Blindness, 68. 37. Swann M. Burnett, “Results of an examination of the Color-Sense of 3,040 children in the public schools of the District of Columbia,” Archives of Ophthalmology 8, no. 2 (1879): 191– 99.

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nies without finding a single case.38 And in China, American physician and missionary Adele Fielde found consistently lower rates of red- green blindness among the people whom she tested than would be expected in a white population; however, Fielde did suspect that many more of her subjects were violet- blind than would be represented in other groups.39 These numbers were alarming if one wished to believe in a direct correlation between superior color perception and white cultural superiority. As DeBeck remarked, attacking Magnus and his sympathizers, “if the negro, not quite so high up on the culture scale, has a relatively better color- sense than the white, this is a weighty argument against the view held by some that there has been a decided development of the color- sense in recent times.”40 In other words, since it was manifestly clear that “negroes” were less civilized than whites, Magnus’s case that color perception correlated with civilization failed— for who could argue that the culture of “negroes” was superior to that of “the white”? Indeed, this very suggestion was a slippery slope. Discussing the low incidence of color blindness among women, an article in the New York Times joked, “It has to be conceded, at the outset, without the least reservation, that the ladies are in this respect quite ‘out of sight’ the superiors of men.” But— and here the article turned serious— “this argument must not be accepted too hastily as proving the superiority of woman; for it equally proves the superiority of the negro.”41 In this passage, color perception became a parable about social order: beginning with the tacit assumption that women were not the superiors of men, the author allowed one exception in the case of color perception— only to conclude with the realization that one small concession could lead the entire edifice to crumble. This did not mean, however, that color perception was useless as a metric of culture. Instead, it was possible to argue, as Blake and Franklin did, that “defective color- vision is in some way the product of civilization”— or even, as Allen put it, that color blindness “must be regarded . . . as a disease of civilization.”42 For Blake and Franklin, the equation was simple: 38. David DeBeck, “Ophthalmolic Memoranda: Ocular Troubles Among the Negroes,” Cincinnati Lancet, Jan. 13, 1900, 28. On Allport, see “American News and Notes,” Philadelphia Medical Journal 4, no. 20 (Nov. 11, 1899): 394. 39. Adele Fielde, “Color Sense and Color-Blindness among the Chinese, Based on an Examination of Twelve-Hundred Persons,” Medical and Surgical Reporter 60, no. 22 (June 1, 1889): 651–53. 40. DeBeck, “Ophthalmolic Memoranda,” 29. 41. “Color Blindness,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 1879, 4. 42. Blake and Franklin, “Color-Blindness a Product of Civilization,” 171; Allen, ColourSense, 219.

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while they did not detect any color blindness among students of mixed Indian-European descent, they nevertheless reported that “half- breeds showed more instances of blunted color- sense than the full- bloods.”43 In other words, those who were halfway civilized were prone to a sort of halfway color blindness. By extension, those who were fully civilized suffered full color blindness, while those who were uncivilized suffered none at all. Fox made a similar, if somewhat less clearly articulated, claim when he remarked that “[t]he acuteness of vision of nomadic tribes has long been noted. [Among test subjects] the few that were deficient were found among the semi- civilized Creeks.”44 Meanwhile, at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, Robert S. Woodworth and Frank G. Bruner tested 252 people from the recently occupied Philippines and found that while Christians and “Moros” (i.e., Muslim) Filipinos had rates of color blindness slightly greater than the 5 percent expected in European males, members of “the ‘wild tribes’ of the Philippines (Igorots, Tinguianes and Bagobos)” had significantly less (2.7 percent), while “Negritos” (“a more primitive type of man”) had none at all.45 Decreased color acuity, in other words, was not a sign of regression to a previous state of evolutionary existence; rather, it was a sign of cultural advancement. Perhaps ironically, this notion of color blindness as a disease— or a product— of civilization worked according to a mechanism not dissimilar to Magnus’s idea of “quality factor.” As physician Leroy Dibble remarked, the causes of color blindness could more often than not be traced to a depletion of “vitality.” Any “exhausting disease is liable to interfere temporarily with the color sense,” Dibble wrote, noting that he had seen “a loss of color sense in nursing women where their vitality had been lowered during lactation.” By the same token, Dibble listed typhoid fever and anemia as potential causes of color blindness.46 More commonly still, tobacco and alcohol were seen as common culprits of color blindness— and tobacco and alcohol were products of civilization. Comparing rates of color blindness between “civilized countries” and “North American Indians,” a short editorial in hygiene reformer John Harvey Kellogg’s journal Good Health noted that there was no explanation for the discrepancy in color perception “ex-

43. Blake and Franklin, “Color-Blindness a Product of Civilization,” 171. 44. Fox, “Examination of Indians,” 347. 45. R. S. Woodworth, “Color Sense in Different Races of Mankind,” Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine 3, no. 1 (Sept. 1, 1904): 24– 26. 46. Dibble, “Color Blindness vs. Color Ignorance,” 203.

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cept the use of tobacco.” As such, the editorial concluded, “[t]he use of tobacco must be condemned, on every ground of healthy living, as a source of race- deterioration.”47 Whether through diseases of cities, the rush of modern life, or the debilitating effects of tobacco and alcohol, color blindness was both a symptom and a disease of civilization. This said, vital depletion of the color sense was not merely pathological; it could also be seen as part of the normal march of civilization. As British sociologist Herbert Spencer wrote in an influential 1876 essay, “The Comparative Psychology of Man,” greater sensory acuity came at the cost of lesser mental function.48 In this view, the mental energies of human beings were finite, and apprehension of the world was a zero- sum game between sensory input and cognitive acumen. Noncivilized people could afford to have enhanced senses because they did not expend their mental energies thinking about the things that civilized people did, such as higher mathematics, justice, civic organization, and building a rational society. In America, Spencer’s theories took hold with particular vigor.49 It was not that aesthetic perception was, itself, uncivilized— but at its most extreme, as art historian Sarah Burns notes, it did mean that for followers of Spencer, anything from the “simple physiological enjoyment of color to the more complex emotional pleasures yielded by the associations of past experience with present sensation” could fall outside the realm of intellectual— and therefore cultural— achievement.50 Such an equation between lower mental function and increased appre-

47. “Color Blindness and Tobacco Using,” Good Health 28 (July 1893): 216. 48. Although published originally in Mind, Edward Youmans, the editor of Popular Science Monthly and a friend of Spencer’s, reprinted “The Comparative Psychology of Man” in Popular Science Monthly, Jan. 1876, 257– 69; it also appears in Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891), 351–70. 49. The classic assessment of Spencer in America is Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (New York: G. Braziller, 1959), 31– 50. See also Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Lee D. Baker gives a curt if satisfying account of Spencer’s uptake into nineteenth- century American anthropology in From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 26– 31. For a view of Spencer’s influence on American philanthropy— with ramifications for scientific funding— see John White, “Andrew Carnegie and Herbert Spencer: A Special Relationship,” Journal of American Studies 13, no. 1 (Apr. 1979): 57–71. It is worth mentioning that the term “social Darwinism” is not unproblematic, as described by, among others, Halliday; see R. J. Halliday, “Social Darwinism: A Definition,” Victorian Studies 14, no. 4 (June 1971): 389–405. 50. Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 34.

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ciation of sensual stimulus explained not only the relatively deficient color sense of white men but also the positive love of color among the uncivilized. For instance, wrote Fox, it was not that savages had evolved only enough to discriminate red, as Magnus might have it. Rather, “[t]he delight in [bright red] by the crude aesthetic sense, flows naturally from the ages of history, when bravery and courage were in man almost the only, certainly the highest of all qualities.”51 In contrast, among civilized people who valued subtler feelings than those cultivated by the exigencies of mere brute force, subtler color sensations were to be expected: for just as civilization “flowed naturally from the ages of history” so did the sense of color. Applying this idea to ethnological data, William H. Holmes, an anthropologist in the employ of the American Bureau of Ethnology, observed that the Iroquois craftspeople whose work he had studied thought “more of the exquisite coloring of these ornaments than of the outline or surface finish”— yet another example of “the innate and universal appreciation of the beauty of color by savage peoples.”52 The Iroquois people, Holmes felt, were beguiled by color, ignoring the properties of form (a higher intellectual process) for the more basic pleasures of visual stimulation. Their cultural attainment, therefore, was correspondingly basic. Indeed, the inverse relationship between color and culture could explain not only race but also sex and class within the matrix of unilineal civilization. As Allen wrote in a pithy parable, “red forms the favorite colour, not only of primitive man and of modern savages, but also of the young and coarse- natured among our European nations. The Central African is bribed with yards of red calico; the West Indian negress adorns herself in a red turban; the baby in its cradle jumps at a bunch of red rags; the London servant- maid trims her cap with scarlet ribbons and admires the soldiers’ coat as the most beautiful of human costumes.”53 In this telling, a historical march of racial and class hierarchy— from youth to maturity, and therefore from male and female black people in Africa and the Caribbean, to notionally white babies in the cradle, to white female servants and white male soldiers— could be traced according to color preferences. So commonly held was the idea that those with less intellectual cultiva-

51. Fox and Gould, Human Color-Sense. 52. William Henry Holmes, “Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans,” in Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1880–81, ed. John Wesley Powell (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1883), 261. 53. Allen, Colour-Sense, 229.

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tion had a greater appreciation of color that it could be the subject of hilarity. In 1908 Mark Twain gave a speech at the elite Lotos Club in New York in which he was presented with the doctoral robe of Oxford University, which had awarded him an honorary degree the year before. Shrugging into the bright red garment, Twain exclaimed, Oh, this is all right! I should have bought them myself if I had thought of it. I like the giddy costume. I was born for a savage. There isn’t any color that is too bright or too strong for me, and the red— isn’t that red? There is no such red as that outside the arteries of an archangel could compare with this. I should just like to wear it all the time, and to go up and down Fifth Avenue and hear the people envy me and wish they dared to wear a costume like that. I am going to have luncheon shortly with ladies— just ladies. I will be the only lady there of my sex, and I shall put on this gown and make those ladies look dim.54

The joke, of course, was that for Twain to love a bright- red robe, he needed to physically transform: he needed to go from being a white man (an honoree of the Lotos Club and Oxford University, even!) to a racially nonwhite savage and then to a woman. Aesthetic apprehension meant physical transformation. Twain was, of course, playing the idea for laughs. But his joke made sense only against the colloquially and scientifically pervasive idea that culture and color perception were inversely related.

oN ALTerNATiNg souNDs, AND CoLors If these two basic schemes for understanding culture by means of color ran opposite to one another, they were nevertheless both predicated on a common idea: there is an objective order to color perception that is correlated with, but distinct from, the order of culture. The color chart that Magnus included with his letter was a manifestation of this idea. It asserted that there was a single, acceptable number of colors and a specific relationship between colors, and that this relationship was predicated on natural divisions between discrete colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple; perhaps brown, black, and white) and their hues and the shades (i.e., lighter and darker variations) of these hues. Any accurate apprehension of colors would minimally include these colors, and the colors in the set would always 54. “Dinner Speech, Lotos Club, January 11, 1908,” in Mark Twain Speaking, ed. Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 610 (emphasis added).

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stand in the same relationship to one another, regardless of the observer or the medium through which they were observed. The chart, then, represented color as it actually was—a fact that Magnus made clear when he instructed his correspondents to pay attention to whether the subjects whom they interviewed “perceive the different hues either of the bright or of the dull groups of colours in reality to each other as exactly identified.”55 The “reality” of the chart as understood by Magnus (or the surgeon administering the test) superseded any other interpretation. The same was true, for that matter, of Holmgren’s wools. Rather like Magnus’s chart, Holmgren intended his wools to represent color as it really was. Rendering an objective fact from a subjective sensation meant determining whether a subjective sensation accorded well with the objective fact of color. Indeed, to Magnus, the charts and Holmgren’s wools were equivalent in their presentation of the reality of color. As Magnus noted in the published account of his research, he had originally wished to use Holmgren’s test materials as a source of color, but the cost and inconvenience of mailing bulky wools made him choose paper instead. The material constitution of sets of colors made little difference; what mattered was that any given set of colors represented the “reality” of color. For both proponents and opponents of Magnus, color fit into fixed and orderly classifications. Misclassifying was indicative of mischance in perception of one sort or another. Classifying according to the rules of the chart meant that one accurately comprehended the “reality” of color. Not everyone, however, was sympathetic to this idea. From his post at Camp Bidwell, army surgeon Matthews disputed the basic assumption built into the scale, admonishing Magnus and Jeffries that “[y]ou cannot learn much by formal questioning. If you learn something of a tongue and then have opportunities to hear it frequently spoken you will acquire terms which you could never have gained by more direct methods of investigation.” Matthews informed Jeffries and Magnus that he had come by his knowledge of Hidatsa color terms through “a residence of many years with the tribe, [and] by hundreds of conversations with Indians of all ages and sexes,” which enabled him to “thoroughly vouch” for his own correctness. As for Shoshone, he could provide the words from only “one adult male” whom he had met a long while ago in Idaho and whose color vocabulary he attained “by showing him various colored articles.”56 In both cases, Mat55. Office of the Surgeon General to Spencer, n.d., letter 5039, OSG. 56. Matthews to Office of the Surgeon General, Nov. 20, 1878, letter 5069, OSG.

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thews indicated that no color chart was needed. Instead, one needed to live among those whose color sense he was querying. To put it more forcefully, even ideas as seemingly obvious as the connection between words for color and perception of colors had to be understood not just in the ethnologist’s terms but also in terms of the speaker’s own perceptions. This was the underlying implication of “On Alternating Sounds,” an 1889 essay by Franz Boas, a young German anthropologist, at the time almost unknown in the United States. “On Alternating Sounds” addressed the problem of “sound- blindness.” Like color blindness, sound blindness was a condition recently identified in psychological literature in which the subject appeared to be unable to distinguish between certain basic sounds. The term was not uncritically accepted; as Boas pointed out, along with other commentators, sound blindness might better be termed “tonedeafness” in order to avoid an unappealing homology between eye and ear; but the analogy with color blindness situated phonetic confusion within the familiar body of work on color perception and culture.57 Boas was critical of the way in which sound blindness had been used— like color blindness and color perception— in ranking the primitivity of different language communities. Specifically, he wrote in response to a talk delivered in 1887 by Brinton, in which Brinton proposed that an insensitivity to the nuances of certain sounds was characteristic of the most “primitive” of human languages. Speakers of primitive languages, Brinton said, attached great importance to particular sounds, which were used to parse fundamental, abstract categories of the real. And yet, said Brinton, “[i]n spite of the significance attached to the phonetic elements, they are, in many American languages, singularly vague and fluctuating.”58 The speakers of these languages— including Klamath, with which Boas was familiar— were incapable of precisely defining important sounds, such that, as Brinton said, “[t]he same person pronounces the same word differently and when his attention is called to it will insist that it is the same.”59 As an example, Brinton gave the report of his colleague Karl Hermann Behrendt, a German

57. Franz Boas, “On Alternating Sounds,” American Anthropologist 2, no. 1 (1889): 47–54. Contemporary accounts of sound blindness include “Sound-Blindness,” Science 10, no. 250 (Nov. 18, 1887): 244–45; Sara E. Wiltse, “Experimental (Psychological Literature),” American Journal of Psychology 1, no. 4 (1888): 702–5. Joseph LeConte, for his part, objected to the term “sound blindness” in “Sound-Blindness,” Science 10, no. 255 (Dec. 23, 1887): 312. 58. Daniel Garrison Brinton, “The Earliest Form of Human Speech, as Revealed by American Tongues,” in Essays of an Americanist (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1890), 397. 59. Ibid., 398.

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American physician and ethnologist, who said that speakers of Chapanec would call “the devil” “Tixambi” one time and “Sisambui” another time.60 This vagueness and fluctuation were supposed to be a result of the primitivity of the minds of the speakers; and thus, Brinton proposed, American Indian languages represented “the baby talk of the race”— that is, a window into primitive origins of speech.61 In much the same way as other anthropologists ranked groups of people on the basis of how they classified colors, so too, proposed Brinton, could groups of people be ranked on the basis of how they classified sounds. To Boas, however, it seemed that Brinton and his peers were more likely misclassifying the sounds that they were hearing rather than detecting an actual historical echo of the linguistic past— a point that Boas made through recourse to prior work on color perception. “It is well- known,” wrote Boas, “that many languages lack a term for green. If we show an individual speaking such a language a series of green worsteds, he will call part of them yellow, another part blue, the limit of both divisions being doubtful. Certain colors he will classify to- day as yellow, to- morow as blue. He apperceives green by means of yellow and blue.”62 Just as people without a word for “green” would appear to be color- blind when really they simply didn’t have a good way of classifying “green,” so too did Boas suspect that Brinton and his peers were merely unable to classify the sounds that they believed were “alternating.” Boas’s recourse to color as an analogy was based on his own experience as a researcher. As a graduate student in Germany in the 1870s, Boas had wanted to work on problems of statistical error with Helmholtz in Berlin.63

60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 392. 62. Boas, “Alternating Sounds,” 50. 63. On Boas’s early life and research, see, e.g., Melville J. Herskovits, “Some Further Notes on Franz Boas’ Arctic Expedition,” American Anthropologist 59, no. 1 (1957): 112– 16; George W. Stocking, “From Physics to Ethnology: Franz Boas’ Arctic Expedition as a Problem in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1965): 53–66; Douglas Cole, Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858–1906 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). On the links between Boas’s understandings of language, material collections, and model- making, see Colin Garon, “Boas, Multiple: Culture in Plaster, Posture, and Text” (forthcoming). For more general biographical information, see Ruth Benedict, “Obituary of Franz Boas,” Science 97 (1943): 60–62; Melville J. Herskovits, Franz Boas: The Science of Man in the Making (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953); Clyde Kluckhohn and Olaf Prufer, “Influences during the Formative Years,” in The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth, ed. Walter Goldschmidt, American Anthropological Association Memoir 89 (Menasha,

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Sickness in his family, however, forced him to take his PhD at Kiel, where his adviser, Gustav Karsten (a former member of the Berlin Physical Society, along with Helmholtz), assigned him a dissertation on the color of water. As Boas noted, the mystery of the color of water was an old one. Water came in many “nuanced colors,” wrote Boas, “from deepest indigo blue overlaid with sky blue and green, to yellowish brown and dark brown.” Just think of Lake Geneva, he urged readers of his dissertation, “the color of which competes with the blue of the sky”; or take the greens of the Baltic and North Seas; or the “deep indigo blue” to “inky black” of the open ocean; or the striking difference between the color of the Gulf Stream and its surrounding water. Each body of water had its own, distinct color. And yet, should the researcher take “thin slices”— small samples— of water from any of these places, all the samples would look the same.64 What was it that made bodies of water— composed of fundamentally the same stuff— appear so different from place to place? Boas undertook to study the problem by means of laboratory apparatus, sampling water from the bay at Kiel and taking measurements of the reflectivity and refraction of distilled water.65 The work was technically difficult (at one point Boas had to discard months of measurements and start again) and intellectually thankless; Boas was frustrated. He published his dissertation in 1881 with the title Beiträge zur Erkenntniss der Farbe des Wassers (An investigation into the color of water). The results of the dissertation were, as Boas himself put it, “nothing special.”66 But in an oblique fashion, the work had long- term ramifications for Boas’s thinking about sensation, science, and culture. First, differences in the color of water confronted Boas with the more general problem of how human beings know the world around them. The color of water had little to do with some essential, chromatic quality of water itself. Rather, the color of any given body of water depended on a plurality of particulars— from suspended matter in the water, to the environment surrounding the water, to the perceptual idiosyncrasies of the observer (in this case, Boas) trying to measure its color. Boas later wrote to his uncle that “photometric difficulties” had led him to “psychological problems”; and “psychological problems” had led Boas to consider “the relation between the life of a people and their physical environment.”67 WI: American Anthropological Association, 1959), 4–28; Regna Darnell, And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998). 64. Boas, Beiträge zur Erkenntniss der Farbe des Wassers, 5– 6. 65. Cole, Boas, 52–53. 66. Quoted in ibid., 53. 67. Quoted in ibid., 54.

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This problem, in turn, rekindled Boas’s long- standing interest in geography—specifically the question of how a people’s surroundings influenced their psychology. This was a problem best studied in situ among, he wrote, “a people living in the simplest possible circumstances.” In Boas’s youth, he had been fascinated with polar exploration. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that he concluded that he “might have found” such a suitable group of people “in the Eskimo” of northeastern North America.68 After a year of obligatory military service, he traveled to Berlin to undertake the necessary training and preparation to become a polar explorer. He studied cartography, Inuktitut, and English; he learned how to take meteorological and astronomical measurements. He arranged funding for his trip through the Berliner Tageblatt, a daily newspaper for which Boas promised to write articles detailing his travels. From Adolf Bastian at the Berlin Museum of Ethnology he learned how to “collect” languages and artifacts. From Bastian’s colleague Rudolf Virchow— a distinguished physician, anthropologist, and social reformer— Boas learned how to make anthropological measurements.69 Indeed, Virchow had recently undertaken anthropometric measurements of a group of “Eskimo” visiting Berlin, including testing their color perception. This work led him to conclude that although the Eskimos were “primitive,” they nevertheless were also quite intelligent and could discern color as well as Europeans.70 Amid this preparation, Boas never ceased thinking of his central question as a problem of psychophysics: as late as July 1883, he was busy planning a book on the “new philosophical discipline.”71 But for Boas, problems of the relation between the subjective

68. Stocking, “From Physics to Ethnology,” 56. 69. Franz Boas, Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883–1884, ed. Ludger MüllerWille, trans. William Barr (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). On Virchow’s influence on Boas, see Rainer Baehre, “Early Anthropological Discourse on the Inuit and the Influence of Virchow on Boas,” Études/Inuit/Studies 32, no. 2 (2008): 13–34. 70. Rudolph Virchow, “Eskimos von Labrador,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 12 (1880): 253– 74. 71. Boas’s primary psychophysical work focused on the question of difference thresholds— the point at which changes in sensations become noticeable (in other words, Peirce’s “more or less”; see chapter 2). As with his work on the color of water, he came to believe that any general law of sensory thresholds would be impossible to formulate, since the circumstances of each particular viewer influenced how they perceived the world. He published four papers on the topic between 1881 and 1883, then returned to the question in 1888, with a scathing attack on Jastrow’s theory of stable difference thresholds. See, e.g., Franz Boas, “Über die verschiedenen Formen des Unterschiedsschwellenwertes,” Pflüger's Archiv für Physiologie 27 (1882): 214– 22; Franz Boas, “Über die Berechnung der Unterschiedsschwellenwerthe nach der Methode der richtigen und falschen Falle,” Pflüger's Archiv für Physiologie 28 (1882): 84–94; Franz Boas, “Die Bestimmung der Unterschiedsempfindlichkeit nach der Methode der ubermerklichen Unterschiede,” Pflüger's Archiv für Physiologie 28 (1882): 562–66. See also Boas’s criticism of Jastrow in “A Critique of Psycho-

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and the objective— including color perception— extended beyond individual perception and into the influences of society and surroundings. In August 1883 Boas stepped off the polar research schooner Germania and onto Kekerken Island, a small whaling outpost off the coast of Baffin Island’s looming Cumberland peninsula. He spent the next year “fully occupied with cartographic and ethnographic work.” Contrary to apocryphal stories, there is no evidence that Boas spent time testing the differences between his own perceptions of the color of icebergs and those of his Inuit hosts (though he did continue to pay close attention to his own apprehension of the color of seawater).72 He did, however, record measurements of the tides, the position of the sun, and the weather. And he made careful notes and maps of the coastlines and charted routes across Baffin Island. Through a combination of gifts and threats, he coerced the Inuits he came in contact with to draw their own maps of the land. These he found to be, for the most part, as accurate as his own instrument- guided sketches— a sign of the intelligence that Virchow, too, had seen. He tried learning the languages of his hosts. Inuktitut was difficult, he felt, while he found the Scotchaccented English spoken by the whalers to be “worse than atrocious.” He recorded phonetic transcriptions of both languages in his notebook.73 With the necessary tutelage of his Inuit hosts, he learned to adapt to life in the Arctic: he wore clothes made of caribou and hunted seals. He wrote that he had “important conversations with the Eskimos about their customs, songs, religion, etc.”; and he sang songs and told stories of his own to his hosts.74 In his diary entries, one senses Boas’s low opinion of the fumblings of his beleaguered German servant, Wilhelm Welke, who was rendered unable to walk for some time by frostbite. In contrast, Boas came to take pride in his own facility for surviving in the snow. “Life here truly transforms people,”

Physic Methods,” Science 11, no. 266 (Mar. 9, 1888): 119– 20; and Jastrow’s reply: “A Critique of Psychophysic Methods,” Science 11, no. 268 (Mar. 23, 1888): 145. 72. Stocking (“From Physics to Ethnology,” 53) notes that this story “circulated for some time among Boas’ students with his tacit approbation,” ending up in Ruth Benedict’s obituary for Boas. For a deep description of the changing color of water, see, e.g., Boas’s notebook entry for July 17, 1883: “the foot [of an ice floe] appears greenish; the deeper in the water the more intense the colour; by reflection this also makes the side surfaces of the floes appear green. The colour of the ice itself is generally sky blue. This appears only when one is looking at ice that is saturated in water, which makes it transparent enough to let in the light penetrating from above through the white upper surface. The dry surface always appears white. When waves break over the edge they often make the floes appear green” (Franz Boas among the Inuit, 55, 51, 58). 73. Boas to Marie Krakowitzer, Dec. 4, 1883, in Franz Boas among the Inuit, 147. 74. Boas to Krakowitzer, Dec. 2, 1883, in ibid., 146.

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he wrote to his fiancée, Marie Krakowitzer.75 A smear of seal blood on another letter testified to his immersion. “I am now truly just like a typical Eskimo,” he wrote.76 His sojourn in the Arctic led Boas to the conclusion that “culture” was simply a property of all human societies, rather than a graded measure of advancement. “Feelings of what is pleasant and unpleasant are really quite relative,” he wrote to Marie from a small shelter in the midst of a blizzard. “At home we would be infinitely sorry for someone in our situation, yet here we are cheerful and in good spirits.”77 Beyond feelings of comfort and discomfort, so too were scales of value and moral worth quite relative. “These are ‘savages’ whose lives are supposed to be worth nothing compared with a civilized European,” he wrote to Marie; and yet, he said, “I am totally contented with the Eskimos.” Indeed, he mused in his notebook, “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over the ‘savages,’ and the more I see of their customs, I find that we really have no grounds to look down on them contemptuously.”78 (Two weeks earlier, Boas seemed to test his own thesis when he lamented that the deaths of two Inuit children due to diphtheria caused an “inconvenient disruption in the making of my caribou clothing.”)79 The “Eskimo,” he concluded, were “far from being an uncivilized people.”80 When he returned to the United States, he attempted to convince a lecture audience at Columbia (in a lecture sponsored by Ogden Rood, a friend of Boas’s uncle) that not only were “the Esquimaux” civilized but they were, indeed, quite intelligent.81 In this way of thinking, the very idea of a ladder of civilization segmented by innate racial distinctions was simply an artifact of the perspective of civilized viewers. All humans living in groups created their own cultures— their own ways of adapting to and interacting with the world— on the basis of the contingencies of history and environment. “The idea of a cultured individual,” wrote Boas, “is merely relative.”82 Boas was not, of course, the first person to make this observation. One need consider only Montesquieu’s Persian Letters— or Ishmael’s insistence,

75. Boas to Krakowitzer, Dec. 16, 1883, in ibid., 154. 76. Boas to Krakowitzer, Feb. 15, 1884, in ibid., 182. 77. Boas to Krakowitzer, Dec. 13, 1883, in ibid., 152. 78. Boas to Krakowitzer, Dec. 23, 1883, in ibid., 159. 79. Boas to Krakowitzer, Dec. 9, 1883, in ibid., 149. 80. Boas to his parents and sisters, Oct. 3, 1883, in ibid., 110. 81. “The Lectures by Dr. Franz Boas,” Columbia Daily Spectator 16, no. 3 (Mar. 18, 1885): 40. 82. Quoted in Stocking, “Physics to Ethnology,” 61. Cf. the translation provided in Franz Boas among the Inuit (159), which emphasizes “the relativity of all education” (emphasis in original).

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in Moby Dick, that he preferred the company of cannibals to Christians— to find complementary sentiments.83 But what Boas did was to ground this general idea of the relative value of civilization in a historically specific science: that of psychophysics and, especially, the psychophysics of color perception. This was the core of his claim in “On Alternating Sounds.” It wasn’t simply moral worth or virtuous behavior that was relative. Even apparently baseline perceptions of reality— the apprehension of which seemed to his peers so clearly to distinguish savage from civilized— were, in fact, matters of arbitrary classification: of custom rather than objective fact. Boas invited his readers to consider a counterexample: imagine that he, Boas, was administered a test in which he was shown “a bluish white first and a yellowish white a little later.” If called upon later to name the two, he said, “the probability is that, on being asked, I shall declare both to be of the same color.”84 That is, Boas would call the two colors “white,” even though they were, in fact, different colors. To an observer who had been conditioned— through language, through culture, through repeated experience— to distinguish between the two colors, Boas would have failed to see an apparently obvious fact about the world. He would appear to be deficient in his color sense, if not his intellect. From Boas’s own perspective, though, he would have made a perfectly reasonable— even intelligent— judgment on the basis of the way that he had been taught to classify the real. Neither Boas nor his interlocutor would be wrong. They would simply be classifying, and therefore seeing, the same reality in different ways. Boas’s 1889 answer to Brinton, then, was a quibble with far- reaching implications. Far from simply objecting to the idea of “sound- blindness,” Boas was suggesting that all human apprehensions of the real were customary— dictated by fundamentally arbitrary habits of classification rather than by any necessary developmental match between subjective and objective truth. “[W]hat we call one sensation,” wrote Boas (e.g., the “red” patch on Magnus’s scale of colors), was not really one sensation. Rather, a sensation that we call “red” “corresponds to a certain series of slightly different stimuli,” each one of which contributes to a general categorical understanding of redness.85 The reason that these stimuli seem unitary is that the observer interprets

83. See Clifford Geertz, “Anti Anti- relativism,” American Anthropologist 86, no. 2 (1984): 263– 78. See also John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 84. Boas, “Alternating Sounds,” 48. 85. Ibid., 49.

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any given stimulus in light of prior experience: as Boas put it, “a new sensation is apperceived by means of similar sensations that form part of our knowledge.”86 Thus do “many different individual experiences appear to us as representations of the same category of thought”— a simple “psychological fact” of human minds.87 Like thin, transparent layers of water deepening into different colors as they accumulate in different places for different observers, so too did humans come to very different conclusions about the nature of the real on the basis of the accretion of tiny variations in their experiences of classifying sensory perceptions. Seen in this light, words for color were no more an indication of cultural advancement than the diversity of colors of water was an indication of water’s advancement or atavism. As Boas later told a lecture audience, anthropologists were “misled by our familiar classifications to search for the same classifications in primitive languages.”88 Any attempt to rank perceptions of the savage on the basis of comparisons with the civilized simply represented a psychological fallacy on the part of the anthropologist, rather than an objective fact of the world. Boas did not, it must be pointed out, immediately or completely reject the idea that race— especially seen as an index of skin color— was a salient category for thinking about people, although he did insist that racial type was not “absolutely stable.”89 Nor did he completely dispense with talk of “stages of culture.”90 Nor, for that matter, was Boas himself exempt from his own highly personal ways of framing questions. In an 1898 lecture given at the New York State Normal School, for instance, he assured his audience that the apparently lower intelligence of African Americans was due to the fact that “negro” brain development ceased at an early age. In contrast, said Boas, “we have fairly good evidence that, among the whites, the structural organization of the central nervous system continues up to the fortieth year, or even later.”91 Boas was himself, at the time, forty years old. 86. Ibid., 50. 87. Franz Boas, untitled notes, n.d., box 16, folder: Boas— Unidentified Miscellaneous #2, Franz Boas Professional Correspondence (Mss.B.B61p), American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter abbreviated as FB-APS). 88. Franz Boas, “Primitive Language,” 1896, box 14, folder: Boas Lectures “Primitive Language,” FB-APS. 89. See, e.g., Franz Boas, untitled lecture notes, Mar. 2, 1895, box 14, folder: Boas Lectures 1895 Mar. 2, FB-APS. 90. Franz Boas, “Psychological Problems in Anthropology,” American Journal of Psychology 21, no. 3 (July 1910): 377. 91. Franz Boas, “Growth,” 1898, box 14, folder: Boas— Lectures— “Growth” 1898, FB-APS.

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But throughout his career, Boas continued to insist that, whatever physiological differences affected the mental lives of different races, differences in culture could never be compared hierarchically. Seemingly inexplicable differences in aesthetics, religion, kinship, law— even acts as seemingly obviously immoral as infanticide— might be explicable, rational, and even laudable depending on the circumstances of the society. It was the job of anthropology to sort out the bases of these different perspectives— not to plug different societies into an assumed hierarchy of progress. Following George Stocking, historian Simon Schaffer writes that, for Boas, the shift from psychophysics to anthropology wasn’t a “‘conversion experience’— a sudden realization of the importance of culture.”92 Rather, it was a gradual process of reflection and action that led him to view culture as central to understanding humans. Viewed in the long tradition of research on the color perceptions of the savage and civilized, however, Boas’s relativism wasn’t even so much the product of a particular genius but part of a long history in which color perception stood as an impossibly paradoxical metric for understanding how human beings see the world.

CoNCLusioN: reLATivisms Boas’s conviction that “the intelligence and mental powers of primitive races is by no means so inferior as is generally thought, if indeed it is at all inferior to that of modern man,” might have seemed “slightly too extreme” to some of his peers, as one reviewer noted.93 Nevertheless, the idea had legs, recasting seemingly absolute properties of the real in terms of the variable and nebulous demands of culture. As a professor of anthropology at Columbia University from 1899 to 1937, Boas taught a generation of anthropologists that the mental life of a community of people was flexible and contingent on environment and history rather than set in stone— that culture was, in a word, “relative.” As his student Margaret Mead later wrote of the Boasian program: We have stood out against any grading of cultures in hierarchical systems which would place our own culture at the top and place the other cultures of the world in a descending scale according to the extent that they differ

92. Schaffer, From Physics to Anthropology and Back Again, 8. 93. Review of The Mind of Primitive Man, by Franz Boas, American Journal of Psychology 23, no. 2 (1912): 339.

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from ours. Refusing to admit that one culture could be said to be better than another, except in its capacity to adapt to a state of civilization imposed by its neighbors, we have stood out for a sort of democracy of cultures, a concept which would naturally take its place beside the other great democratic beliefs.94

In this “democracy of cultures,” every culture— every race— had equal standing. It would be increasingly difficult to argue that “the negro” was “not quite so high up on the culture scale” as “the white.” Indeed, it would be unscientific to do so, since there was no “scale” of culture, no way of measuring the progress of civilization by any objective standard. Perhaps ironically, the moral standing of cultural relativism as a “great democratic belief ” in turn rested on the less relative— or more absolute— bedrock of the economic prosperity of a specifically American (or Americanized) vision of the order of industrial society. As early as January 1884, as he sailed away from Baffin Island contemplating his new career, Boas wrote to Marie, “what I want, what I will live and die for, is equal rights for all, equal opportunities to work and strive for poor and rich.”95 To work and to strive— this was Boas’s definition of equality. And, indeed, he continued, in order to fight for such equality, it would be necessary to work in America— for such an opportunity would, he was convinced, “certainly never be granted me in Germany.”96 Two decades later, Boas had the opportunity to put this desire into practice. In 1906 the Dillingham Commission— a congressional committee assembled to study the potentially detrimental effects of immigration from non-Western European “races” to the United States— approached Boas to file a brief. Boas’s landmark report, “Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,” argued— on the basis of Boas’s extensive measurements of the proportions of recent immigrants and their children— that the physical characteristics of human beings were highly mutable.97 Immersion in an American environment physically changed people. And if it was possible to physically change, Boas pointed out, it was possible to mentally change. (Indeed, the financial panic of 1893, thought Boas, was responsible for some of the morphological changes he had charted.) To Jus94. Margaret Mead, “The Role of Small South Sea Cultures in the Post War World,” American Anthropologist 45, no. 2 (1943): 193. 95. Boas to Krakowitzer, Jan. 22, 1884, in Franz Boas among the Inuit, 171. 96. Ibid. 97. Franz Boas, “Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,” American Anthropologist 14, no. 3 (1912): 530–62.

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tice Harlan’s anguished question about “whether a particular race will or will not assimilate with our people, and whether they can or cannot with safety to our institutions be brought within the operation of the Constitution,” the answer, Boas suggested, was emphatically “yes.” As such, relativism had freed culture from a fixed framework, but it didn’t release culture from its duty to provide a moral order to industrial society. Rather, it turned culture into an affirmation of the potential of a pluralistic society to put human beings to profitable labor, when those human beings were properly understood. Like the “discovery” of the subjectivity of color that had so bedeviled Rood, the idea that culture was both relative and comprehensible in terms set by scientific experts was entirely compatible with the exigencies of a centralizing state extending its reach over increasingly heterogeneous (and spatially far- flung) groups of people. Relativism enabled an imagination of the productive potential of the primitive, the savage, the barbarian in a way more expansive and powerful than those offered by geographical surveys, missionaries, railroads, Indian Industrial Schools, public health surveys, or expositions— and it did so in a way that could be administered by a novel science of human beings. As Boas told an audience at Clark University in 1909, it was the job of anthropologists to sort out “the fundamental categories under which phenomena are classified by man in various stages of culture.” By way of example, he continued, it has been observed that colors are classified according to their similarities in quite distinct groups without any accompanying difference in the ability to differentiate shades of color. What we call green and blue are often combined under some such term as “gall- like color,” or yellow and green are combined into one concept which may be named “young- leaves color.” The importance of the fact that in thought and in speech these color- names convey the impression for quite different groups of sensations can hardly be over- rated.98

For Boas, then, color perception provided an important way not of judging the progress of a particular group’s enculturation but of scientifically understanding the effects of culture. Indeed, Boas’s student Edward Sapir— and, even more so, Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf— took this idea to its terminus, arguing that words shaped all human perceptions; without a word 98. Boas, “Psychological Problems in Anthropology,” 377.

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for “green” in one’s vocabulary (and, therefore, a concept of green in one’s mental system of classification) it would be impossible to see “green” in any meaningful way.99 In this sense, Brinton and his followers were correct that the human sciences might provide a guide to structuring modern societies, but not in the way they predicted. Anthropology did provide a way of thinking about humans in community: one in which there was no singular reality except for the reality of science, and one in which science had profound moral importance. Boas’s was not, of course, a sudden or complete revolution in thinking about color perception or human beings. For instance, Boas’s correspondent and colleague, the influential geneticist Charles Davenport (chapter 7), fought Boas bitterly for decades, insisting that different races of people had innately different capacities to do cultural work— not least of all as evinced by what Davenport took in 1926 to be the “more original and perhaps more primitive taste in use of colors” shown by “negroes.”100 Nevertheless, arguments over race, culture, and perceptual propriety profoundly shaped the ways in which researchers addressed questions of what kind of beings Americans were and should be, and what kinds of moral, administrative, and ideological mechanisms would best shape that polity.

99. On this, see Deutscher, Through the Language Glass. 100. Davenport, untitled notes, n.d., box 133, folder: Steggerda, Morris, 1926 (Apr.– Sept.), Charles Benedict Davenport Papers (Mss.B.D27), American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

C h a pte r F i v e

THE PRAGMATIC PHYSIOLOGY OF COLOR VISION Christine Ladd-Franklin and the “Evolutionary Theory” of Color

Language from Labrador In 1901 American psychologist Christine Ladd-Franklin published a review of British anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers’s recent work on “Eskimo” color vision. As with many of his contemporaries, Rivers was convinced that it was possible to understand the evolution of culture by studying color vision. He had written on the color vision of the Toda people in India, of Egyptian peasants, and, most famously, of the indigenous people of the Torres Straits.1 In each instance he had come to a familiar conclusion: even if, as seemed to be the case, the color vision of different groups of humans didn’t differ very much between groups, it was nevertheless the case that “savage” peoples experienced colors in a more “primitive” way than the “civilized.” Degrees of cultural sophistication, thought Rivers, correlated tightly with degrees of perceptual sophistication. In his study of the “Eskimo,” however, Rivers had encountered a surprise. On the basis of his examination of eighteen men and women— recently arrived in London from Labrador to be displayed at the Exhibition Hall at Kensington— Rivers concluded that his informants showed a “definiteness 1. William Halse Rivers Rivers, “Observations on the Senses of the Todas,” British Journal of Psychology 1, no. 4 (Oct. 1, 1905): 321–96; William Halse Rivers Rivers, “The Colour Vision of the Natives of Upper Egypt,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 31 (1901): 229–47; Alfred Cort Haddon et al., Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. 2, Physiology and Psychology, pt. 1, Introduction and Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901).

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of nomenclature” for colors that was quite exceptional among such “primitive” people. Other “savages” that Rivers had studied— for example, those peoples that he had encountered during his 1898 expedition to the Torres Straits— presented what he felt to be a notable tendency to transpose object names and color names. For example, Rivers wrote, “[i]n the Island of Mabuiag, a man might give more than thirty names to different colours all derived from familiar natural objects.”2 In contrast, the Inuits that Rivers interviewed appeared to have a parsimonious vocabulary, consisting only of words which translated to “red,” “yellow,” “green,” “blue,” “white,” and “black.” These terms could be combined with one another and/or modified by affixes meaning “light” and “dark” to describe almost any color. This indicated to Rivers a “higher psychological development of nomenclature” than the “multiplication of [color] names which is one of the chief features of the stages of mental development found among savage races.”3 The Inuits were the exception who proved the rule that culture followed color. For Ladd-Franklin, however, Rivers’s work on “Eskimo” color terms was interesting not for what it suggested about the progress of culture but rather for what it suggested about the evolution of color vision— understood as a logical relationship between color terms, mental processes, and visual physiology. Ladd-Franklin was the author of the “development” or “evolutionary” theory of color perception: an attempt to understand experiences of color in a way that would reconcile a growing rift between physicalist theories of color propounded by followers of Herman von Helmholtz and psychological theories propounded by Helmholtz’s rival Ewald Hering. Rather than thinking about the problem as a choice between physical and mental accounts of color perception, Ladd-Franklin bridged the two— proposing that color perception had unfolded over deep time through the multiphase development of a specialized color- sensitive “molecule” in the visual systems of living things. The “evolution” of this molecule left in its wake psychologically “unitary” experiences of red, green, blue, yellow, black, and white. The Inuit color vocabulary— with its basic terms for “red,” “green,” “yellow,” “blue,” “black,” and “white”— could be seen as mirroring the physiology of the visual system, providing strong confirmation of the truth of her theory. The way the “Eskimo” saw the world was “a perfect reflection of the facts of consciousness.” Ladd-Franklin voiced her approval in the strongest way she 2. William Halse Rivers Rivers, “The Colour Vision of the Eskimo,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 11, no. 2 (1902): 146. 3. Ibid., 148.

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knew how: the color vocabulary of this “half- civilized race of beings,” she declared, was not simply lucid or sophisticated— it was “scientific.”4 In emphasizing “science” as a means by which to understand relationships between visual physiology, color perception, and language, and as a term signifying that which was true and good, Ladd-Franklin’s theory made explicit what was implicit in debates over color sensibility and cultural development. Anthropologists, physicians, philologists, ethnologists— Rivers, Boas, and their peers— might differ in their interpretations of the origins of culture. They might debate the moral worth of “primitive” versus “civilized” societies. But all shared a common and largely unexamined belief in the value of science as a means of interpreting the world. Rivers and his fellows trusted science to assert the superiority of European civilization over the other “ethnicities” of the world. Boas and his fellows trusted science to dismantle that very claim of superiority. Both accounts, however, began with an assumption— an unspoken but deeply held belief— that scientific inquiry transcended the particularities of human existence: of accidents of culture, in the case of Rivers; and of the vagaries of biology, in the case of Boas. Requiring no articulation, science in these accounts served as a sort of superordinate device for ensuring a kind of truth that transcended natural history and human history alike. Ladd-Franklin also took scientific reason (or “logic” in her parlance) to be the foundation of any color theory worthy of the name. But where Rivers and Boas and their peers took science as an unmarked, morally neutral vantage point, Ladd-Franklin explicitly held scientific inquiry to be a positive ethical practice— a mode of inquiry that, when practiced correctly, held tremendous potential for being able to see the world with clarity, honesty, and authority, but which therefore suggested definite responsibilities for its practitioners. Science, for Ladd-Franklin, was more than simply a value- neutral mode of collecting and assessing facts about the world. It was a self- consciously moral practice— a virtue of mind and action. To be scientific required discipline and rigor but also openness to the ways in which knowledge unfolded in society. Ladd-Franklin joked that she didn’t have any “unscientific friends” among the philosophers, educators, politicians, writers (and, of course, scientists) who made up her milieu. To fail to be scientific in such a community, felt Ladd-Franklin, was not simply to be ignorant or naive; 4. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Color-Introspection on the Part of the Eskimo,” Psychological Review 8, no. 4 (July 1901): 399 (emphasis added).

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it was tantamount to a “crime,” or even a “sin”: a violation of communally held standards of behavior. In contrast, to “be scientific” was to bring value to the community— to advance the practical and ethical progress of society. This attitude was essential to her color theory as well as to her understanding of her theory’s value within the elite circles within which she moved. In the first place, it was a practical solution to a thorny question: how to choose between two theories? A good color theory had to account for the ways in which objective facts (derived, for example, through carefully controlled experiments) and subjective perceptions (words, experiences, feelings) could coexist simultaneously. As an ethical and social practice, science had to be able to contain these multitudes. Such capaciousness would mean that her color theory could serve as a model for thinking about scientific change as a function of social change. If the color molecule could evolve, leaving in its wake a firm structure upon which the visual apprehension of reality was based, so too could—should—society progress. Histories of the “epistemic virtues” involved in scientific self- fashioning, of codes of credibility and gentlemanly conduct in scientific research, and of the emergence of the “modest witness” as an ideal scientific observer (among many other studies) attest to the ways in which the production of scientific truth requires that researchers position themselves as vectors of the trustworthy, the authoritative, and the good.5 In the particular case of Ladd-Franklin, historian Laurel Furumoto has written that the development theory of color was Ladd-Franklin’s attempt to secure “scientific authority” for herself in the overwhelmingly sexist scientific community of the turn of the century. Certainly, authority was important to LaddFranklin, who cultivated an aggressive, uncompromising, and righteous persona in promoting and defending her work and her status as a scientist.6 But the development theory did more than provide Ladd-Franklin with a (partial) fortification against institutionalized gender discrimination. With its imagination of beings in time, words and things, individual vision and

5. See, e.g., Daston and Galison, Objectivity; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997). On “reason” as an epistemic and political virtue, especially vis-à- vis the somewhat- orthogonal concept of “rationality,” see Paul Erickson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 6. See esp. Laurel Furumoto, “Christine Ladd-Franklin’s Color Theory: Strategy for Claiming Scientific Authority?,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 727 (Dec. 30, 1994): 91– 100.

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communities of viewers, Ladd-Franklin’s research constituted a new vision of the changing nature and purpose of knowledge production in a progressive, pluralistic society.

HeLmHoLtz and Hering Within circles of physicists and physicians of the late nineteenth century, Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory of color served as a foundational way of understanding the objective origins of subjective sensations of color. It was not, however, immune from criticism, and little more than a decade after its debut, Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory found a serious rival in psychologist Ewald Hering’s account of “opponent colors.” Each theory gave a radically different explanation for the vital aspects of color theory, from the number of primary colors to the physiological mechanism behind color sensations. Each theory accounted differently for the experience of color as a function of mental life. And each theory had dedicated and motivated partisans with the factual knowledge and scientific credentials to argue for their respective account of color sensation. Ladd-Franklin’s development, or evolutionary, theory originated out of this disagreement. Hers was an attempt to reconcile two competing theories that ultimately superseded both. When he published his Physiological Optics in 1860, Helmholtz had constructed his theory of three types of color- receptive cells in the retina of the human eye largely on the basis of inference. No one had categorically identified the red, green, and blue receptors that formed the backbone of his theory. The oft- reprinted diagram with which he demonstrated the response curves of each cell type reflected reasoned supposition rather than observed anatomical features. Within a few years, however, observations by physiologists appeared to corroborate his assumptions. Since the 1830s, work on the microanatomy of the eye had suggested that there were two types of cells in the retina— ones shaped like rods and ones shaped like cones. In 1866 German physiologist Max Schultze concluded that “rod” cells were mainly sensitive to changes in light and dark, while “cone” cells were responsible for color vision.7 Moreover, in human cone cells, Schulze discerned structures that appeared to be the physiological correlates of red, green, and blue receptor nerves. This did not correspond precisely to the idea of separate cells 7. Max Schultze, “Zur Anatomie und Physiologie der Retina,” Archiv für mikroskopische Anatomie 2 (1866): 175–286; Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 80–82.

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each keyed to a primary color, but Schultze— and Helmholtz’s supporters— nevertheless took this discovery as strong evidence that Helmholtz was on the right track. Helmholtz’s assistant Arthur König began a series of experiments to precisely determine the shape of Helmholtz’s trichromatic response curves. Using a cooperative human subject and a color- mixing device of Helmholtz’s design, it was possible to match any specific wavelength of spectral light with combinations of the three spectral primary colors. From measurements made on color- blind and “normal- eyed” subjects, König first calculated the precise wavelengths of each of the three “fundamental” sensations and then graphed the response curves of the nerves of the “normal eyes” across the visible spectrum. These graphs of empirically measured retinal response approximated the ones that Helmholtz had based on guesswork and put the Young-Helmholtz theory on firmer empirical ground. Increased scrutiny, however, also brought to light persistent gaps in Helmholtz’s account of color. Among the most glaring were problems stemming from the colors yellow and white. Under trichromatic theory, yellow and white had to be understood as compound colors: yellow was a combination of red and green stimuli; white was a combination of red, green, and blue stimuli. There was no “primary” yellow in trichromatic theory, just as white was not, technically, an achromatic sensation but a multichromatic sensation. Nevertheless, the sticky fact remained that observers did not report experiencing yellow as a shade of “greenish red.” They described it simply as “yellow”— a unitary or primary color. By the same token, observers didn’t say they experienced white as “reddish- greenish- blue” but rather as “white,” a baseline experience of light. This problem was compounded by work with subjects who were “unilaterally” color- blind, that is, red- or green- blind in only one eye. Exposing each eye individually to a yellow stimulus ought to have yielded different reports of the same color stimulus given by the same person since each eye functioned differently. But rather than reporting sensations of “yellow” from their fully trichromatic eye and a dullish red or green from their color- blind eye, unilaterally color- blind subjects relayed experiencing sensations of “yellow” from both eyes. If, as was generally assumed, color blindness stemmed from the paralysis of either one of the red or green nerves that gave rise to the sensation of yellow, this experience should have been an impossibility. Such experimental results gave credence to the testimony of other red- and green- blind individuals who likewise reported sensations of yellow that countered the predictions of trichromatic theory. Answering these shortcomings, in 1872 German psychologist Ewald

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Hering introduced his theory of Gegenfarben— opponent colors— as an alternative to trichromatic theory. Instead of three retinal receptors each keyed to one color, Hering proposed that color vision was mediated by three types of “visual substance” composed of paired sets of colors: one pair responsive to red and green stimulus, one pair responsive to blue and yellow stimulus, and one pair responsive to white and black stimulus. Color sensations, according to Hering, emerged when the visual substance “assimilated” upon exposure to light that corresponded to one pole of an opponentcolor pair, and “dissimilated” when exposed to the other. In its resting state, the substance was nonreactive, neither assimilated nor dissimilated. A “pure”- yellow light, for example, would cause the yellow/blue substance to “assimilate,” resulting in the viewer reporting a sensation of “yellow.” A pure- blue light would cause the substance to “dissimilate,” resulting in the viewer reporting a sensation of “blue.” These same pure- blue and pure- yellow lights, meanwhile, would have no effect on the red/green substance, which would remain in a state of quiescence and therefore yield no sensation whatsoever. But they would stimulate the black/white substance, which the interpreter would observe as a degree of the blue or yellow light’s intensity. A sensation reported as “bright blue” would therefore be the combined result of the yellow/blue substance reaching a fully “dissimilated” state and the white/black substance arriving at a highly “assimilated” state. The same process would hold true for sensations of pure red and pure green with respect to the red/green substance and, for that matter, for sensations of lightness and darkness with respect to the white/black substance. In the world beyond the instrumentation of a psychologist’s laboratory, of course, the visual substances would rarely have occasion to work in such discrete ways. The apprehension of colors in everyday life confronted the observer with an infinite number of combinations of wavelengths of light and therefore with an infinite number of reactions from all three types of substances in the observer’s visual system. It was the inputs from the constant processes of assimilation and dissimilation of the three sorts of visual substances responding to light that produced the gamut of color sensations observers reported. Throughout the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s, partisans of Helmholtz’s and Hering’s camps clashed over the methodological and philosophical underpinnings of these theories.8 Each side could bring strong evidence to bear in 8. See R. Steven Turner, In the Eye’s Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), for a detailed history of the disputes between Helmholtz and Hering, based in a science, technology, and society “conflict studies” framework.

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support of its own view of color, and neither was willing to concede major points to the other. In promoting his theory, Hering declared that the work of the Helmholtz camp was based on “quite arbitrary, demonstrably erroneous, and rather prejudicial assumptions,” which he could not believe they would not acknowledge.9 Hering thought that Helmholtz and his partisans had needlessly favored elaborate experiments over elementary “introspection”— the careful querying of one’s own cognitive states. If yellow appeared to be a primary color, then why should it not be treated as such? Merely because an experimental model said so? Such a claim subverted the entire ethos of scientific observation: if experience did not provide the starting point from which to understand the world, what did? No number of fancy calculations with color- mixing machines could explain away a subject’s introspective cognition of her own senses. Moreover, opponent colors explained some of the curious limits of human color experience. For example, the fact that human beings were incapable of experiencing “reddish green” or “bluish yellow” could be traced back to the fact that these colors were “opposite” to one another. This oppositional relation was a function of the visual substance, which meant that the colors could never be combined. Further still, opponent- color theory also explained why those individuals who were notionally “blind” to red and green sensations could still report seeing “yellow.” Yellow was a function of a discrete variety of visual substance, not a combination of red and green inputs. Such explanatory power bolstered the veracity of Hering’s theory by suggesting that Helmholtz’s theory failed to account for the everyday experience of color in a simple and effective way. In response, Helmholtz chided Hering for his “dogmatic certainty” and his reliance on a spurious “inner observation” rather than carefully derived facts.10 Wasn’t it the case that mistaken introspection had led Brewster to propound his erroneous theory of red, yellow, and blue spectra (which Helmholtz had so decisively overthrown)? Might Hering and his supporters be perpetrating the same sort of mistaken introspection? It was hardly clear from introspection that the vibrancy of a pure, bright red was due to the contribution of “white” stimulation, as Hering’s theory suggested. Pure, bright red was pure and bright because it maximally stimulated the red receptors in the retina, not because of any contribution from a sensation of

9. Ewald Hering, “Beleuchtung eines Angriffes auf die Theorie der Gegenfarben,” Pflüger’s Archiv 41, no. 1 (Dec. 1, 1887): 29, 44n3. 10. Herman von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1909), 378–80.

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whiteness or brightness. This much was evident upon even the most inattentive introspection, to say nothing of the measurement of instruments. (At the 1878 meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Rood attempted to disprove Hering’s theory on just these grounds, delivering data from his own experiments that he felt were “fatal” to opponent colors. Peirce, also present at the meeting, registered his approval.)11 If it was possible for Hering and his proponents to make elementary mistakes like these, who was to say that they weren’t wrong about the primary characteristics of yellow or white? Hering and his allies, felt Helmholtz’s partisans, had fallen prey to “illusions of judgment.” To fall into the trap of believing the simple reports of the senses in the face of experimental evidence was to regress to the naive realism out of which psychophysicists had so painfully clawed their way. These arguments raised questions beyond the matter of how to count primary colors. They provoked new thought about how people saw and experienced the world and what kinds of subjects they were in it. In Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, the human organism was a well- coordinated machine. The locus of the visual system was the retina, a tightly functioning system of independent inputs and outputs that produced either sensation (colors, light) or nothing at all (black; technically a noncolor, in Helmholtz’s estimation). In Hering’s sixfold color theory, the observer was an integrated and lively system in constant biochemical fluctuation around a state of equilibrium. Hering interpreted the retina, optic nerve, and “related parts of the brain” as parts of a single “visual system,” any one or more parts of which could play host to the “visual substance” and provide continual feedback even in states of equipoise (black was an active color sensation, thought Hering).12 In these accounts, nothing less than the nature of vision, cognition, and human nature was at play— and perhaps even, as Hering suggested, the character of life itself.13 This was a debate with high stakes that Ladd-Franklin was well equipped to engage.

11. Ogden Rood, “Hering’s Theory of Color,” Science News, Nov. 15, 1878, 28– 29. 12. Leo M. Hurvich, introduction to Ewald Hering, Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, trans. Leo M. Hurvich and Dorothea Jameson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), xiv. 13. Hering, Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, 108. On different notions of life, labor, and physiology implied by Hering’s and Helmholtz’s conceptions of human bodies, see, respectively, Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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Born in 1847 in Windsor, Connecticut, Ladd-Franklin grew up in a welloff and politically reformist family.14 Her mother and aunt were energetic advocates of women’s rights. Her father, a successful businessman, was unusually supportive of his daughter’s intellectual curiosity (though he did worry, in line with the mainstream medical thinking of the day, that excessive scholarly exertion might impair her physical and mental well- being).15 Ladd-Franklin recalled that when she was an undergraduate at Vassar between 1866 and 1869, women were denied access to the laboratory equipment necessary to study her principal interest, physics, so she turned to mathematics, the closest subject that didn’t require access to experimental equipment.16 After finishing Vassar and teaching elementary school for nine years, she went on to do graduate work in logic with Peirce at Johns Hopkins University, where she published her thesis, “On the Algebra of Logic,” in 1883 as part of a compendium of works on logic by his students.17 In Peirce, LaddFranklin found a mind as keen and combative as her own, and in subsequent years, Ladd-Franklin became his friend, frequent correspondent, and philosophical sparring partner. In her own work, she adapted many tenets of Peirce’s pragmatism— including his expansive view of logic as a matter of aesthetics and ethics as well as ratiocination— to the problem of color vision.18 While working with Peirce at Johns Hopkins, she became interested in the problem of the “horopter”— the geometrical form defining the field of binocular vision. This issue had also occupied Hering and Helmholtz, and Ladd-Franklin familiarized herself with both scientists’ work in preparation

14. Furumoto provides the most thorough biographical accounts of Ladd-Franklin in her “Christine Ladd-Franklin’s Color Theory”; “Joining Separate Spheres: Christine Ladd-Franklin, Woman Scientist (1847– 1930),” American Psychologist 47 (Feb. 1992): 175– 82; and, with Elizabeth Scarborough, Untold Lives: The First Generation of American Women Psychologists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 109–32. For an account of Ladd-Franklin’s life from a fellow color scientist, see Dorothea Jameson Hurvich, “Christine Ladd-Franklin,” in Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 3, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971), 354–56. 15. Furumoto, “Joining Separate Spheres,” 179. 16. “Christine Ladd-Franklin,” in Biographical Cyclopedia of American Women, vol. 3 (New York: Halvord, 1928), 136. 17. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “On the Algebra of Logic,” in Studies in Logic, ed. Charles S. Peirce (Boston: Little, Brown, 1883), 17–61. 18. On Ladd-Franklin’s pragmatism, see, e.g., David W. Agler and Deniz Durmuş, “Christine Ladd-Franklin: Pragmatist Feminist,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49, no. 3 (July 1, 2013): 299–321.

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for her 1887 paper, “A Method for the Experimental Determination of the Horopter.”19 Two years later, she returned to problems of visual perception— this time the perception of color— while accompanying her husband (also a mathematician) on a sabbatical year in Germany. In Gottingen, she introduced herself to George Elias Müller, an experimental psychologist and outspoken ally of Hering’s. Müller was impressed with Ladd-Franklin: although the university did not allow women to attend classes, he agreed to give her private lectures. Outside of lecture, she assisted Müller with his laboratory work on color and memory. She also spent at least one felicitous week working with Hering himself, though, as she later speculated, their happy dealings might have had something to do with the fact that she had not yet challenged his color theory.20 Later that year, she traveled from Gottingen to Berlin to do research in Helmholtz’s laboratory, where she worked with the Farbmischungsapparat to precisely determine the differences in perception that resulted when the brightness of different colors was increased (the same problem that had preoccupied Peirce). This work led her to discern an important extension of the so- called Purkinje phenomenon to include achromatic light. During a subsequent stint in Helmholtz’s laboratory, she also codiscovered, with König, foveal night blindness, a phenomenon in which the fovea, a part of the retina which contains only cone cells, becomes “blind” at low levels of illumination. This was further evidence that rod and cone cells gave qualitatively different information about light.21 This work left her with a secure understanding of the stakes and meth-

19. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “A Method for the Experimental Determination of the Horopter,” American Journal of Psychology 1, no. 1 (1887): 99–111. 20. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 50, folder: G. E. Müller, Christine LaddFranklin and Fabian Franklin Papers (Ms Coll Franklin), Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, NY (hereafter abbreviated as CLF). A note on Ladd-Franklin’s papers: Ladd-Franklin’s primary archive at Columbia University contains some twenty boxes of Ladd-Franklin’s notes on her color research. These notes consist of everything from commentary on readings and experimental results to ideas and passing thoughts, and they were largely scrawled freehand (often in evident excitement) on pieces of loose paper and then clipped together— more often than not without date or title. When a title is evident on the notes, I have included it, and where it is possible to estimate the date of writing from the context of the note, I have indicated so. By and large, however, the descriptor “untitled notes, n.d.,” applies to the vast majority of the pieces pertaining to color in Ladd-Franklin’s papers. 21. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “On Theories of Light,” in Colour and Colour Theories (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 90; Arthur König, “Die Grundempfindungen in normalen und anomalen Farbsystemen und ihre Intensitätsvertheilung im Spectrum,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 4 (1892): 241–347.

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ods of the debate over color perception as well as with a deep dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of both theories. Both theories were based in facts and experience, but neither could fully account for those facts and experiences. It was, in some ways, a perfect pragmatic problem. Rather than attempting to square the theories on their own terms, Ladd-Franklin created a third explanation: a new perspective from which to view the physiological meaning of sensations of color. Instead of thinking about color sensations as static properties of either mind or matter, Ladd-Franklin imagined a light- sensitive “molecule” that transformed over evolutionary time. At one point in the distant past, she proposed, this “molecule” provided the first visual sensations within the eyes (or other light- sensing organs) of prehistoric living things by disintegrating upon contact with solar radiation to give a sensation of brightness, or “white.” This was the type of molecule that one might imagine to be found in achromatic “rod” cells in the retina. At a later stage, a quantity of these retinal molecules differentiated, changing into one substance responsive to “warm,” or lower, frequencies of light, which Ladd-Franklin glossed as “yellow,” and another responsive to “cold,” or higher, frequencies of light, which she glossed as “blue.” Different intensities of low- and high- frequency light would yield varying degrees of sensation of yellow/warm and blue/cold, while their combination in the correct proportions would stimulate an atavistic sensation of white. Finally, at a yet later stage of unfolding, the “warm” molecule differentiated again, such that low- frequency “warm” light gave a sensation of “red,” while higher- frequency “warm” light gave a sensation of “green.” As with the “white” molecule, different intensities of green and red light would yield sensations from reddish orange to yellowish green, while their combination in the correct proportions would give a sensation of psychologically unitary “yellow.” Ladd-Franklin revealed her “development,” or “evolutionary,” theory in 1892 at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology in London and published it shortly thereafter to widespread acclaim.22 Her theory answered the “physicists” by providing a correlation between wavelengths of light and chemical structures that could accommodate the facts of König’s color- mixing measurements. Early on, she defined her four unitary colors

22. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “A New Theory of Light Sensation,” Science 22, no. 545 (July 14, 1893): 18– 19. Also published in Christine Ladd-Franklin, “A New Theory of Light Sensation,” Proceedings of the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, London, 1892, 103– 8; and in Ladd-Franklin, Colour and Colour Theories, 66–71.

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as “sensations which are produced in their purity by, about, the wavelengths 576 μμ, 505 μμ, 470 μμ, and a colour a little less yellow than the red end of the spectrum.”23 Her theory answered the psychologists because it accounted for the unitary character of yellow and white lights and insisted on the mental character of color perception: wavelengths of light were not the same thing as color sensations since, as she wrote, “a single sensation, say, a greygreen- blue, can be excited by a thousand different combinations of electromagnetic radiations— by a million, rather.”24 Moreover, Ladd-Franklin’s theory provided an explanation for the many and complicated variations of color blindness. Just as “normal” perceptions of colors were the result of the evolution of the color molecule, so too were different varieties of color blindness simply evidence of previous stages of evolution.

Words and tHings Ladd-Franklin’s work was among the earliest examples of a “zone” theory of color perception. Rather than holding to a model in which a physical stimulus led directly to a proportional psychological response, it accounted for color perception by proposing different stages, or “zones,” of physiological, neurological, and psychological apprehension of color sensations. It was not clear, to be sure, at what precise stage of perception the hypothetical “molecule” acted. As Ladd-Franklin wrote in her notes, color sensations could be thought of in terms of “some final neuro- psychic organ” or “some cell body” or some structure “in the calcarine fissure of the cortex.” “A thing can have more than one function!” she noted cheerfully.25 If this made her account of color perception seem jury- rigged, it was simply because color perception itself was a psychophysical bricolage. Whereas musical notes corresponded to vibrations and smells to molecules, “poor nature,” as Ladd-Franklin put it, had come up with a “sad makeshift” in the case of color, one in which stimulus and response did not reliably correspond and which therefore required a catholic, if rigorous, view of the nature of evidence and argument.26 As Ladd-Franklin was quick to point out, facts from other areas of research supported her theory. She triumphantly noted findings by Span-

23. Ladd-Franklin, “Vision,” in Colour and Colour Theories, 8. 24. Ibid. 25. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 62, folder: Color, CLF. 26. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 54, folder: Prismatic Colors, CLF.

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ish physician Ramon y Cajal that suggested that color- sensing cone cells in the retina were evolutionarily newer versions of the achromatic rod cells.27 Likewise, she approvingly cited an 1893 article by physiologist J. S. BurdonSanderson in Nature, which noted the presence of light- sensitive molecules even in microbes— a fact that Ladd-Franklin took to suggest that the most basic form of her light- sensing molecule might still exist in primitive creatures.28 In one set of undated and unpublished notes, she wrote of a potential chemical model for her molecule: “a certain dyestuff ”— “carboxylate rosaniline”— which provided a “beautiful analogy” for the assumptions of her theory, insofar as its states of disintegration when exposed to light “form exactly the combinations required to parallel the case of the colors red and green (which make yellow) and yellow and blue (which make white).”29 But the strength of her theory, as she saw it, lay not in any particular body of facts but in the ways in which it “logically” united the known facts of color with a given individual’s reported color sensations. As she explained to her readers upon unveiling her color theory, “[t]he satisfaction which we should feel in a good hypothesis would be the satisfaction, not of the knowledge- loving, but of the logic- loving part of our emotional nature.”30 This distinction between “knowledge” and “logic” was critical to her theory. “Knowledge”— facts of experiment and experience— was localized; atomistic; singular. “Logic” was a matter of discerning underlying relationships between these localized facts. Facts about color abounded in physics, psychophysics, and psychology, but there was no systematic accounting of how any particular fact related to another. Thus, Ladd-Franklin concluded, “The requirements which a light sensation theory must meet, are at present, wholly of a logical nature”— wholly, that is, a matter of understanding relationships.31 This was one point where Hering and Helmholtz had gone wrong. Focused on their own particular clusters of facts about color, they had failed to appreciate the presence of a more general structure that explained all color sensations— and they had thus ended up bewildered, isolated, restricted to a self- imposed exile. In contrast, a true science of colors, wrote Ladd-Franklin, was one “purely of the properties of colors without reference to their entstehung 27. Ladd-Franklin, “Vision,” 48. 28. J. S. Burdon-Sanderson, “Inaugural Address, British Association,” Nature 1246, no. 48 (Sept. 14, 1893): 470. 29. Ladd-Franklin, unpublished essay, n.d., box 57, folder: Development of Visual Sense, CLF. 30. Ladd-Franklin, “On Theories of Light-Sensation,” Mind 2, no. 8 (Oct. 1, 1893): 474. 31. Ibid.

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(origins).”32 It wouldn’t do— as had both Helmholtz and Hering— to proffer physical and physiological sources of color perception without first explaining how those perceptions related to one another. Among the most basic logical properties that existed between any two colors was the nature of their resemblance or dissimilarity. If colors have a “sensation feature in common,” wrote Ladd-Franklin, “they will resemble each other sensationally.” Red and purple, for instance, resembled each other because they had “the sensation quality redness in common.”33 Colors might also have an affective commonality: for instance, red and yellow were both “warm” colors. Importantly, however, a color like reddish yellow would have a sensation quality in common with red (redness) and with yellow (yellowness); but yellow and red themselves had only an affective quality (warmth) in common. These qualities of color— their effects— pointed toward a physiological union between the physical and psychical aspects of color perception. To study these aspects, the researcher could look in a number of directions. She could turn to introspection, as when, on a notebook page marked “a faire” (to do), Ladd-Franklin reminded herself to “get a long good bk- wh series, + by its side a long, good bk- gr series. Sit down before them and by introspection see if they are or are not similar series.”34 By this, Ladd-Franklin meant that she would sit down with one series of color swatches that graded from black to white, with gray in between, and another series that graded from black to gray so as to examine her own sensations of how they differed or coincided. By understanding how colors changed in resemblance, she would, in this instance, be able to determine whether gray was a sensation in its own right or a combination of white and black (a fact about color relations with important implications for understanding how the color molecule might work). She could also turn to experimental apparatus to allow her to empirically measure her own sensations and those of her students. Ladd-Franklin was an enthusiast of German psychophysical instrument catalogs, and she diligently marked those instruments that she was excited about ordering.35 But of even greater experimental importance than either introspective 32. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 50, folder: Contra Hering, CLF (emphasis in original). 33. Ladd-Franklin, “Analysis of the Colors of the Spectrum,” box 62, folder: Color, CLF (emphasis in original). 34. Ladd-Franklin, notes: “A Faire,” n.d., box 50, folder: Experiment to do re: vision, CLF (emphasis in original). 35. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 54, folder: Apparatus, CLF.

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or instrumental data about sensations of color were the particular ways in which people spoke about colors. In her notes, Ladd-Franklin mulled the Shakespearean puzzle “What’s in a name?” “The implication in this question,” she answered, “is that there is nothing in a name as far as possible from the truth.” But, she insisted, when one considered color terms, this was not the case.36 Words, for Ladd-Franklin, were indications of fundamental, underlying properties of color. “We have the terms yellow green, reddish yellow, bluish green, greenish blue, blue- green, green- blue and blush red &c.,” wrote Ladd-Franklin in her notes. “But why not reddish green or greenish red? You may say that language is an accident— and doesn’t decide things but not when the case is like this!”37 The fact that red and green lights could be mixed to produce yellow, but “yellow” could not be recognized as red- green was indicative of a logical property of color relations: a truth about color (in this case, the fact that a color could be simultaneously physiologically compound but psychologically primary). “Try to introduce the word” for a composite “yellow,” Ladd-Franklin challenged a lecture audience. “[A]dd some visible green to red [i.e., mix red and green lights to make yellow], say the word + teach the child: this, my love, is called a red- green, or a green- red, whichever you like. He would hate you, for introducing a nasty trick into his science studies!”38 To mistake the importance of language was to miss a fundamental aspect of color science. This was the blunder made by psychologist Edward Scripture, who dismissed Ladd-Franklin’s logical assessment of the color molecule on the grounds that language provided merely a conventional understanding of the order of color— not one informed by any sort of underlying structure. For instance, Scripture argued that those who consciously learned to see “violet” as a combination of “red” and “blue” would mentally decompose the color into its constituent parts; those who had not learned to do so would simply think of purple as primary in its own right. To children (who in his view were linguistically naive), Scripture claimed, “orange is as much a primary color as red is.”39 But Scripture’s assumption that color was merely an arbitrary marker was an error, thought Ladd-Franklin. In defense of her theory, Ladd-Franklin confronted Scripture with linguistic 36. Ladd-Franklin, notes: “Terms Purple and Orange,” n.d., box 62, folder: Color, CLF. 37. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 50, folder: MS re Color Theory and Color Terms, CLF (emphasis in original). 38. Ibid. 39. Edward Scripture, review of Sight, an Exposition of the Principles of Monocular and Binocular Vision, by Joseph LeConte, Psychological Review 4, no. 5 (Sept. 1897): 545.

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evidence of her own— namely, an experience related by her own daughter at an age when she didn’t know the word for purple. When one day viewing a “large and brilliantly lighted up surface of that color,” the girl gave it her full attention and, in Ladd-Franklin’s recollection, “said, in what we used to call her hypothetical tone of voice: ‘B’u— Wed!— Wed!— B’u!’” which LaddFranklin interpreted to mean “perhaps I should call this blue!— Perhaps I should call it red!”40 To Ladd-Franklin, the conclusion was clear: if purple had been a unitary color, like yellow, her daughter would not have been able to disentangle its chromatic elements so easily. She would instead have struggled to find a word to describe a sensation that was unlike any other in her mind. The fact that her daughter had immediately tried to discern a relationship between its two component properties therefore spoke both to the nonunitary nature of purple and to the fact of unitary red and blue. To complete the experiment, Ladd-Franklin sardonically suggested that it would be necessary to find a child “brought up in an aesthetic atmosphere of nothing but blue- greens and green- yellows” in order to see whether, when presented with a swatch of pure green, the child recognized it as simply green or as one of the hybrid colors that she had known.41 Far from merely arbitrary or conventional labels for sensations, words served as active signs that, when considered in relation to one another, pointed toward the existence of the underlying physiological structure of color in ways that neither physical color experiments nor introspective work alone could. As Ladd-Franklin mused in her notes, “[t]he universe in which we find ourselves consists of three regions: the physical, the intracorporeal and the extracorporeal. Color phenomena, like other phenomena of the conscious organism include in the first place the physical, in the last place the psychical, and in the middle place the physiological.”42 The evolutionary theory of color bound these realms together, revealing the structure of color perceptions as they existed physically (in terms of molecules and wavelengths of light), mentally (in terms of words for sensations), and physiologically (in terms of organisms that evolved over time). This relationship could be sketched graphically, as a sort of flowchart showing the chronological transformation of the color molecule and the relationships between color sensations that the molecule left in its wake (fig. 7). Seen this way, the Ladd-Franklin theory could be seen to provide 40. Ladd-Franklin, “Color-Introspection on the Part of the Eskimo,” 398. 41. Ibid. 42. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 53, folder: Methodology, CLF.

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figure 7 Stages of Ladd-Franklin’s color molecule. (Ladd-Franklin, Colour and Colour Theories, 53)

both for the apparently trichromatic character of human color vision and for the apparently “opponent” phenomena of color vision. The entanglement of these two apparently different processes showed how those sensations denominated “yellow” and “white” could be at once psychologically unitary and physiologically compound.43 Ladd-Franklin’s color theory could also be dramatized in a narrative fashion, as she demonstrated with an illustration of a cat slinking through a field of flowers. Read left to right, the first third of the picture, in which the cat’s head interjects, depicts a monochrome world: the cat can see only shades of gray and white and black. In the second third of the picture, bees buzz around bright- blue flowers, while the grassy meadow and part of the cat’s back are yellow— the visual world of bees, captured in two colors. Finally, in the last third of the picture, the color molecule has fully differentiated to reveal brightly colored flowers in pinks, blues, oranges, and purples nestled in a verdant landscape, with a red farmhouse in the distance signaling the color vision of its (presumably Euro-American) residents. The picture was a successful communication tool. “You can’t imagine how much interest this picture excites in everybody who takes it up, scientific and nonscientific people,” Ladd-Franklin told her publisher.44 Thus diagrammed, the evolutionary theory provided a kind of “just so” story, accounting for differences in apprehension of color between organ-

43. Jeremy Kargon writes about Ladd-Franklin’s use of visual displays in “The Logic of Color: Theory and Graphics in Christine Ladd-Franklin’s Explanation of Color Vision,” Leonardo 47, no. 2 (Nov. 14, 2012): 151–57. 44. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 72, folder: C. K. Ogden (1), CLF.

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isms (and, for that matter, between individual humans’ apprehensions of color) as a function not merely of a particular species’ physiology but of physiology interpreted as part of a continuum of living beings through time. The point was not lost on popular commentators, who glossed LaddFranklin’s theory as suggesting the continuity of human life with life in general while at the same time gesturing toward new possibilities for sensation itself. An article in the New York Evening Journal, for instance, by Garrett P. Serviss— “Eminent Astronomer and Authority on Subjects of Scientific Interest”— did not situate Ladd-Franklin’s view in the context of color theory but explored instead how it could “help to throw light upon the problem of the manner of man’s origin, and his relationship to other animals.” The theory, he wrote, gave “glimpses . . . of the way the world looks, and has in much earlier times, to creatures other than ourselves.” Armed with Ladd-Franklin’s theory, Serviss could imagine the color vision of dinosaurs, rhapsodizing that “the animal contemporaries of the coal- forming plants . . . saw no play or gleam of color anywhere, however the sunbeams at their busy work of storing up thermal energy for use in the coming age of man may have been spectrally splintered.” But in the same way, Serviss could imagine the future of those human beneficiaries of prehistoric largesse, suggesting that the retina “may not yet have reached its highest stage of development”— there might be yet more colors than could possibly be imagined, waiting to be revealed by evolution.45 A subsequent article in the World Magazine picked up on this promise of color, cautioning readers that, should they try to “invent or imagine an entirely new color,” such an exercise would be impossible unless the readers’ “eyes and mind are millions of years ahead of the present development of the human race.” Following Ladd-Franklin’s theory, they assured readers that “by mixing and blending four real color- tones with each other and with black and white we can produce every variety of which it is possible to conceive.” Nevertheless, conceptions of color such as those belonging to human beings were not permanent. Although “we may not at the present time be able to conjure up the faintest images of colors as yet unseen by man,” one had only to “consider that no cat can conceive of blue, and no bee can imagine a red; and yet we know that these exist for us. What colors, then, shall we see when our eyes arrive at the ‘fourth stage’? And— what an inconceivably 45. Garrett P. Serviss, “Garrett P. Serviss on Color Influence,” New York Evening Journal, June 28, 1922.

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polychromatic world— in the hundredth stage!”46 The world of evolutionary color was a world of possibility.

science and etHics Seen in this light, the evolutionary theory of color vision was an example of how science used logic to draw together observation and experiment, words and experience, and objects and sensations in order to reveal the constantly unfolding possibilities of the universe. Indeed, science was a process like evolution in which new discoveries necessarily conformed to a social niche while nevertheless generating new forms of social being. It was this process of constant, structural adaptation that enabled scientific knowledge to be not only intrinsically factual but also worthwhile: usable for a particular community. As Ladd-Franklin remarked in an unpublished note, the first test “always present in the determination of new matter in a system of knowledge” was “will it work in the whole of society? Will it bear the social test?”47 This question was a particularly loaded one for Ladd-Franklin. In one sense, her theory clearly passed the social test. Its publication in 1893 catapulted her to scientific fame, which remained unabated until her death in 1931. Helmholtz himself responded favorably upon first hearing LaddFranklin’s theory in London, murmuring, “ach . . . Frau Franklin—die versteht die Sache!” (ah! Mrs. Franklin understands the matter!).48 Three years later, physicist LeConte Stevens, delivering the keynote address at the 1895 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, gestured toward Ladd-Franklin’s theory as one of the few American contributions that could truly match European work in scientific excellence. 49 In 1903 an influential textbook noted that her theory was “in some respects more in harmony with recent observations in the physiology of vision” than any other.50 And in 1922 the New York Times printed a letter praising Ladd-

46. Ernest Brennecke, “It’s a Black and White World to a Cat,” World Magazine, June 10, 1923, 9. 47. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, ca. 1901, box 35, folder: J. Baldwin, CLF. 48. Ladd-Franklin, “Reply to a Critic,” n.d., box 51, folder 2, CLF. 49. LeConte Stevens, “Recent Progress in Optics,” in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the Forty Fourth Meeting Held at Springfield, Mass, August– September, 1895 (Salem, MA: published by the Permanent Secretary, 1896), 34. 50. Henry Pickering Bowditch, An American Text-Book of Physiology, 2nd rev. ed. (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1903), 337.

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Franklin as a “superwoman in the fields of logic and color perception”— not only the “most distinguished living American scientist, but . . . the most distinguished woman scientist America has produced.”51 The most distinguished woman scientist in America was still, however, a woman— and as such, even if her theory had value, she was continually hampered by the institutional sexism of turn- of- the- century science. The very fact that Johns Hopkins admitted her at all to its degree program was based in no small part on subterfuge. Her application had been entered under the name of “C. Ladd,” and when her true identity became known, it was only through the intercession of James Sylvester— first professor of mathematics at the university— that she was allowed to continue in the program. Once she completed the required work for her PhD in 1882— a degree that the university declined to endorse officially— she found that the burgeoning ranks of American psychology departments restricted women from holding tenured positions and barred married women from teaching altogether. In 1901 Ladd-Franklin took a job as an associate editor on James Mark Baldwin’s mammoth Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, cowriting the entry on logic with Peirce and authoring most of the entry on vision herself. In 1904 she leveraged her work with Baldwin into a position as a lecturer on logic in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins. She was the first woman to serve in the position and was permitted to teach two courses a year. In 1910 she moved to New York with her husband and took a position as a lecturer at Columbia University, again teaching only two courses per year. Lack of institutional support for her work exposed Ladd-Franklin to expropriation. While none could claim the evolutionary theory as their own (though some grumbled about its similarity to the color theories of Dutch ophthalmologist Franciscus Donders), in two instances Ladd-Franklin criticized colleagues for failing to credit her with significant discoveries in the physiology of vision. In the first instance, in 1893 Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist who specialized in memory, published a paper detailing his observation of the extended Purkinje effect— the same phenomenon that Ladd-Franklin had discovered in Helmholtz’s laboratory in 1892. Ladd-Franklin had presented a paper on her discovery of this phenomenon that year, at the same congress where she unveiled her evolutionary theory and Ebbinghaus had been in attendance. He did not, however, mention Ladd-Franklin or her work in his own account of the phenomenon. In two 51. Henry W. Burr, “A Superwoman in the Fields of Logic and Color Perception,” New York Times, June 20, 1922, 8.

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scathing articles in Nature and Science, she defended her claim of priority to the discovery and alienated Ebbinghaus for the next fifteen years. In the second instance, she was disheartened to learn that König, with whom she had discovered foveal blindness, had failed to give her credit for her part in the discovery; and indeed, as both Furumoto and David W. Agler and Deniz Durmuş point out, credit for the discovery was given to “Koenig und seine Genossen”— or König and his (male) chums.52 Perhaps most gallingly— at least in terms of the social proof of her theory— Ladd-Franklin was denied a spot with “The Experimentalists,” an elite club founded in 1892 by Edward B. Titchener for the express purpose of connecting established psychologists (“the men who had arrived”) with promising aspirants.53 Meetings of the club formed a vital node in early twentieth- century psychology where researchers could share ideas, techniques, and technologies. Color vision was a central concern at one time or another for many of the Experimentalists: Deane B. Judd, E. C. Sanford, Robert Yerkes, Edward Boring, and Titchener himself among them. Women, however, were barred from the club on the grounds, as one member put it, that “the larger and more heterogeneous the organization, the more likely is vigorous discussion to be misinterpreted and to be taken as an offence by individuals who may happen to be attacked.” It was the case, he continued, “that the presence of women in the organization adds greatly to this danger,” adding that “a small association, [with] no invited guests, and no women members,” was greatly desirable.54 Ladd-Franklin in particular was judged to be a “real threat” to the group. For years, complained Edward Boring, she had sent lab directors “cowering” back to their homes while she “invaded laboratories, took over the director’s desk, had women graduate students manicure her finger- nails, and insisted that everyone meet her genetic theory of color.”55 For Titchener’s part, the mere thought of Ladd-Franklin’s crashing the Columbia meeting of the Experimentalists led him to worry that the entire group might be forced

52. Furumoto, “Christine Ladd-Franklin’s Color Theory”; Agler and Durmuş, “Christine Ladd-Franklin,” 304–5. 53. Laurel Furumoto, “Shared Knowledge: The Experimentalists, 1904– 1929,” in The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology, ed. Jill Gladys Morawski (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 94. 54. Lightner Witmer quoted in Scarborough and Furumoto, Untold Lives, 117– 18; and Agler and Durmuş “Christine Ladd-Franklin,” 309. 55. Edwin G. Boring, “Titchener’s Experimentalists,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 3, no. 4 (Oct. 1, 1967): 322.

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into hiding. (Ladd-Franklin did push her way into one session, but she was locked out of the room for subsequent sessions.) So much for the spirit of vigorous discussion. But whether this reaction conveyed that the Experimentalists were too tough for women or that Ladd-Franklin was too tough for the Experimentalists, the fact remained that she was explicitly barred from this important association— a decision that Ladd-Franklin lambasted in a letter to Titchener as “[s]o unconscientious, so immoral,— worse than that— so unscientific!”56 This close association between conscientiousness, morality, and scientific practice suggests the degree to which science and ethics, for LaddFranklin, were two aspects of the same entity. To be “scientific” in LaddFranklin’s parlance was to act ethically and with clarity; to be unscientific was to dissemble and abnegate one’s duties. This view of the relationship between science, conscientiousness, and morality was simultaneously a reflection on social justice and a comment on her own critical reception by other scientists. It was, moreover, a view grounded in a principle of scientific practice drawn from Peirce’s formal theory of logic. As Peirce remarked in his 1898 lecture, “The First Rule of Logic,” there were many ways to understand the world. To privilege one theory of a given phenomenon over another was no “sin”— a particular theory might or might not work in a given context. It was the researcher’s job to weigh the consequences of a theory or action and judge its worth accordingly. The judgment of an idea’s worth, however, depended on vanquishing all impediments to inquiry— and resistance to a theory (or, more precisely, a theoretician) on the basis of gender was one such impediment that ought to be vanquished. For the scientist to adopt an attitude (or, worse still, a policy) that “barricades the road of further advance toward the truth,” felt Peirce, was the “one unpardonable offense in reasoning.”57 When Peirce wrote to Ladd-Franklin in 1902 that “the science of logic must be based on the science of ethics” and “sound reasoning depends on sound morals more than anything,” he meant specifically that a science of logic based on sound morals was one that allowed free and unrestrained inquiry.58 And when Ladd-Franklin crowed in a letter to Peirce that it was “sad to see how illogical all the [color] theories are— all except mine!”— she was boasting about not only her scientific skill but also her

56. Ladd-Franklin to Titchener, Feb. 10, 1914, box 8, folder: Titchener, CLF. 57. Charles S. Peirce, “First Rule of Logic,” in Essential Peirce, 2:48. 58. Peirce to Ladd-Franklin, “Thanksgiving Day” (Nov. 27), 1902, box 73, folder: Peirce, C. S., no. 8, CLF.

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moral superiority.59 To see the world scientifically was to see the world logically; and to see the world logically was to see the world morally. It was this view of science as following from ethical principles that motivated the core of Ladd-Franklin’s criticisms against Helmholtz’s and Hering’s competing color theories. The two men and their partisans were not just guilty of pursuing incomplete theories of color. They were guilty, in Ladd-Franklin’s view, of committing a “crime against the spirit of science.”60 One form this crime took was the partitioning by gender of scientific researchers and their work into categories of greater and lesser value and authority. There were, however, additional examples of self- serving behavior predicated on a sort of egoism stemming from the same myopic root. Although over the next three decades she vacillated as to which side was the more heinous offender, her basic criticisms of both Helmholtz’s and Hering’s partisans remained consistent. Of Hering’s followers, she fumed, “Although this great body of facts [about Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory] is absolutely inexpugnable, although they involve a great mass of color mixing and of color mixture equations, carried out by instruments of absolute precision, repeated in laboratory after laboratory, and always with reconfirmation— although, I repeat, these facts are indubitable facts, the followers of Hering are obliged, by the terms of their theory, to shut their eyes to them.”61 Helmholtz had supplied useful information based on unimpeachable standards of experimentation, but Hering and his followers chose to ignore it: a case of rank dishonesty. As a result, they wandered in a “fool’s paradise”— oblivious of their own ignorance and content in the righteousness of their theory. But Helmholtz and his followers were no less sinful. Helmholtz’s psychophysical color model was “lemonade!” she wrote in one note; “nonsense!” in another.62 The “physicists,” as she called them, were “psychically color blind,” refusing to recognize (literally, to re- cognize, or rethink) colors as they truly were because of their devotion to trichromatic theory. Psychophysicists’ commitment to thinking of yellow as a compound color was just one example of “the way in which preconceived theoretical considerations have had the effect of extinguishing the plain deliverances of the

59. Ladd-Franklin to Peirce, Mar. 22, 1902, L237, CSP. 60. Ladd-Franklin, “Color-Introspection on the Part of the Eskimo,” 401. 61. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 51, folder: Color Triangle, CLF. 62. Respectively, Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 65, folder: Color; and box 50, folder: König, CLF.

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consciousness.”63 Theirs was a perfect example of the “inertia of the scientific intellect,” of researchers simply continuing to believe in theories out of laziness.64 Worse still, in the case of color blindness, they were guilty of “infer[ing] the sensations of the colour- blind from a theory which they have already adopted,” making up their evidence rather than attempting to understand the experiences of color- blind subjects.65 While Helmholtz’s supporters could point to a great mass of experimental evidence to bolster their theory, they failed to look beyond their experiments to their own experiences of color and those of their subjects. This was the problem with both Helmholtz’s and Hering’s theories— as well as with both men and their followers personally, as theorists. They were dogmatic when they should have been flexible. They willfully ignored inconvenient facts. They were incurious when they should have been open minded. They were, in short, “sinful” when they should have been virtuous— and this virtue would have served their scientific acumen. Thus articulated, science provided a means of entering a community of logic and reason that was morally right because it sought to vanquish obstacles to the inclusive circulation of ideas. Insofar as Ladd-Franklin sought to define what really counted as a scientific community, her version of science was as prescriptive as the ones she accused of dogmatism. Yet in advocating that scientific society should open itself to those practitioners who could cast aside their adherences to outmoded tradition and those subjects who might unsettle staid ways of seeing, her view more specifically championed the revision and contestation of scientific ideas. The case of the “Eskimos” in this way revealed that a “half- civilized race” could attain a more properly scientific apprehension of color than its civilized (and therefore, by default, white and male) fellows. This finding served and was serviced by Ladd-Franklin’s desire to question how scientists like the Experimentalists policed the boundaries of the scientific community. If drawing the boundaries of scientific membership was in these instances immoral, it was not simply because it led to the refusal of a color theory that sat in plain sight but also because it functioned as a (scientific) tool by which researchers could maintain a hierarchical and racialized division between the civilized and the uncivilized.

63. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 66, folder: Color, CLF. 64. Ibid. 65. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Colour-Blindness and William Pole,” in Colour and Colour Theories, 191 (emphasis in original).

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In the case of Ladd-Franklin’s color theory, the work of moral brushclearing was part and parcel of the task of attending to imprecisions in language for color. For unlike Europeans and Americans, “Eskimos” (according to Rivers’s study) didn’t use colored items in commerce: they didn’t trade colored items, didn’t use color in personal decoration, and certainly didn’t invent new sorts of pigments that required novel names. They didn’t mix up objects and colors like English speakers did with terms like “orange,” “olive,” and “violet”; their cognitive sense was unclouded and true— just what one would expect from a good scientist. In a paper read at the American Psychological Association’s 1914 meeting entitled “A Corrected Color Terminology,” Ladd-Franklin reproached her audience: “the words orange and purple should never be admitted into scientific speech— non unitary colors should not be given unitary names. Just as there exist no unitary names for the yellow- greens and the blue- greens, so we should . . . speak always of the red- blues and the red- yellows.”66 The problem with misnaming colors, for Ladd-Franklin, was that these names made colors into fundamental sensations that might not ordinarily be so. In an undated note to herself, Ladd-Franklin fretted about the nature of the color gray: “On account of its unitary name it is a far more unitary thing than it really is and far more unitary than it would be if [we] were always to call it (as we always call the blue- greens) a black- white.”67 In this instance, gray was made a more “unitary thing” by its name than Ladd-Franklin supposed it to be. And as for her competitors’ theories, Ladd-Franklin mocked Hering’s use of language, exclaiming that “his theory is . . . so bound up with his baseless terminology” that to correct his terminology “would suffice, I have no doubt, completely to upset his theory.”68 She concluded from this that “a corrected color terminology, far from being immaterial, is bound to have important logical consequences.”69 66. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “A Corrected Color Terminology,” Psychological Bulletin 11, no. 2 (Feb. 15, 1914): 52. For Ladd-Franklin’s participation in the 1914 APA meeting, see M. E. Haggerty, “Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 11, no. 4 (Feb. 12, 1914): 91– 92. This account does not quote Ladd-Franklin explicitly, but Haggerty’s remarks duplicate some of Ladd-Franklin’s published statements on the topic of color terminology as well as replicating her acerbic tone— suggesting that Haggerty either took detailed notes during Ladd-Franklin’s talk or else took the account of her talk directly from Ladd-Franklin. 67. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d. (ca. 1914?), box 54, folder: Color Terms, CLF. 68. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Color Terminology,” in American Encyclopaedia and Dictionary of Ophthalmology, vol. 4, ed. Casey Albert Wood (Chicago: Cleveland Press, 1913), 2486. 69. Ladd-Franklin, “Corrected Color Terminology,” 53.

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Just as it was evidence of the structure of color vision, language was also evidence of the structure of thought. To speak unclearly or unreflectively was unscientific and obscured the truth. To reflect with care on what words meant vis-à- vis the speaker and her environment was ethically proper. In keeping with this position, Ladd-Franklin proposed a bifurcated vocabulary for color, with terms like “erythogenic, xanthogenic, chlorogenic, cyanogenic and leucogenic” describing the objective quality of radiations that induced subjective sensations that observers described with the words “red,” “yellow,” “green,” “blue,” and “white,” respectively.70 When she proclaimed, then, that “it is wrong for people who wish to think consistently in a scientific fashion to permit the term color to be used with its present ambiguity,” she was delivering pronouncements about the direction that scientists and their associates ought to take in the future.71 Just as careless use of words could lead to misapprehension, confusion, and untruth, so too could unreflective behaviors and policies. The actions of the Experimentalists similarly formed an artificially stratifying constraint on scientific inquiry against the very spirit of observation— indeed, contrary to the very observable facts before them. In the first place, it was evident that their society was no longer small, no longer homogeneous, no longer one that could be easily limited by invitation alone. Science and scientists were, rather, authoritative figures in a chaotic, pluralistic society, in which different subjective views (both literally and figuratively construed) demanded attention, cultivation, and consideration. Moreover, this chaotic pluralism, wrote Ladd-Franklin in 1904, was “changing our views of nature.” Just contemplate Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, she urged, which had upended conventional thinking in physics about the visible spectrum. “If given its full significance,” wrote Ladd-Franklin, this idea not only would change physics but would “deal a final blow to the belief that women can not do great things in science.” Indeed, she wrote, given the proportion of women in science to the groundbreaking discoveries in science made by women, women should “logically” be supposed to make better scientists than men. Marie Curie— whom Ladd-Franklin offered as an exemplar of women in science— worked across the Atlantic Ocean. But “[w]ho knows,” mused Ladd-Franklin, “when an American woman will be the one on whom the sacred fire alights?” Given the great probability of such an event, LaddFranklin concluded that it was “at least our duty to create for her the op70. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Practical Logic and Colour Theories: On a Discussion of the Ladd-Franklin Theory,” in Colour and Colour Theories, 168. 71. Ladd-Franklin, “Corrected Color Terminology,” 52 (emphasis in original).

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portunity without which she will have been endowed with genius in vain.”72 Ladd-Franklin herself was, of course, the genius about whom she spoke. To deprive science— and society— of new knowledge was amoral. To learn to think logically— about relations between words, between colors, between human beings in society— was right.

concLusion: tHe WHoLe of society Ladd-Franklin’s theory did not long outlive her. Deprived of the ability to train students and inaugurate research programs, she lacked the committed disciples (such as Müller was to Hering, or König to Helmholtz) necessary to defend and extend her work after her death. Reviewing Ladd-Franklin’s 1929 book, Colour and Colour Theories—a compendium of Ladd-Franklin’s papers, published the year before her death— Cornell psychologist Elise Murray wrote that despite Ladd-Franklin’s valuable suggestions about the evolutionary roots of color vision, the “laboratory psychologist is compelled to adjudge the postulates of Ladd-Franklin as little satisfactory as the discarded ones of Helmholtz. The explanations of color- blindness discoverable in these pages are sketchy, involved, and little helpful. The psychological premises themselves on which the older theories are attacked and the superiority of the genetic hypothesis advanced are less compelling than in the nineties. Reliance upon the ‘immediate deliverances of consciousness’ in the selection of color ‘primaries’ fell away in the early nineteenhundreds.”73 Ladd-Franklin herself in 1927 lamented the slackening of interest in her work, and in color in general, particularly among physicists, whom she still considered to be a viable audience: “At this time, when one daily expects exciting news from Schrödinger and Heisenberg, it is rather difficult to secure attention for such matters as color theories”— ironic, if only for the fact that Schrödinger had, in fact, published his own theories of color measurement in the 1920s.74 More to the point, Ladd-Franklin’s hypothetical “color molecule” was

72. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Endowed Professorships for Women,” Publications of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae 3, no. 9 (1904): 58. 73. Elsie Murray, review of Colour and Colour Theories, by Christine Ladd-Franklin, American Journal of Psychology 41, no. 4 (Oct. 1929): 655. 74. Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Mischance in the Science of Color,” n.d., box 50, folder: Mischance in the Science of Color, CLF. For Schrödinger’s theories, see, e.g., Erwin Schrödinger, “Theorie der Pigmente von Größter Leuchtkraft,” Annalen der Physik 62, no. 15 (1920): 603–22; Erwin Schrödinger, “Grundlinien einer Theorie der Farbenmetrik im Tagessehen,” Annalen der Physik 63, no. 21 (1920): 397–426.

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increasingly seen by her peers in science as just that— a hypothesis, and an untenable one at that. The color molecule quite simply did not seem to exist. It was an elegant solution to a fundamental discontinuity in theories of color vision; it had been forcefully presented by a clearly brilliant researcher— but it was wrong. Ironically, then, even as Ladd-Franklin’s theory sank from view under the weight of its speculative physical component, neuroscientific studies of color perception increasingly began to adopt her theoretical approach through staged, or “zone,” models of color perception. As psychologist Gerald S. Wasserman argues, because Ladd-Franklin “expressed her ideas in terms of a hypothetical photochemistry which has not stood the test of time, critics have focused on the auxiliary photochemical notions and largely ignored the genuine contribution of her theory.”75 Although she was wrong about the particulars of the color molecule, the larger point of her theory— that color perception occurs as a complicated mix of physical, physiological, and neuropsychic stages— became an enduring model of color perception in the signature biomedical science of the late twentieth century. Beyond the matter of its predictive correctness, Ladd-Franklin’s theory offers a window into the ways that perception, language, morality, and ethical behavior began to interdigitate in the scientific communities of turnof- the- century America and beyond. The evolutionary theory speaks to a growing conviction of the inextricable entanglement of words and things, thoughts and objects. It constitutes an example of adaptation and evolution not only of color but also of theoretical and scientific practice in a new environment. In Ladd-Franklin’s scientific world, color scientists were concerning themselves not simply with objective impulses and subjective responses, as they had previously, but also with communities of perceivers that shifted and transformed over time. In this way, the evolutionary theory stood for the possibility of a bureaucracy of sensation— a governing arrangement for thinking about the real that was both concrete and capable of change. It was an ideal and optimistic metaphor for the society in which Ladd-Franklin found herself working: cobbled together and improvised but capable of cohesion, should only its members learn to see clearly, logically, morally. Such clear vision, of course, was beset by challenges, not least of all persistent misapprehensions about the nature of subject and object. In concerning herself with the moral weight of terms for colors, Ladd-Franklin was not alone. Just as she was pondering the fidelity of Inuit color terms, a bur75. Gerald S. Wasserman, Color Vision: An Historical Introduction (New York: Wiley, 1978), 113.

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geoning sector of American color science, led by lexicographers, educators, and manufacturers, was engaged in a serious effort to bring colloquial and commercial names into line with a single, scientific standard. Their methods were varied, and their ideas were heterogeneous, but they all agreed, along with Ladd-Franklin, that terminology was a vital part of the ways in which individuals experienced color. If their focus was on the material and applied aspects of color terminology, in contrast with Ladd-Franklin’s focus on the psychophysical and purely scientific, they nevertheless saw one thing clearly: how people spoke about color was a matter not just of biology or of culture but of the ways in which color terms conveyed values conducive to the intellectual, commercial, and moral health of a modern industrial polity.

C h a pte r S i x

SMALL LIES FOR BIG TRUTHS Standards, Values, and Color Terms

The MeeTing In September 1908 Christine Ladd-Franklin found herself at an impromptu conference on the state of the art of American color science, convening somewhat unexpectedly in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She had boarded the steamship Marquette in Antwerp after a sojourn in Europe and was bound for Boston. After the Marquette had slipped its dock, she discovered that one of her fellow passengers was Albert Henry Munsell, a professor of drawing at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (MNAS), author of the 1905 book A Color Notation, and inventor of a comprehensive, threedimensional color “space” and its accompanying notational system. His was a scheme, Munsell claimed, capable of describing any color with minute accuracy, according to invariable psychological and physiological “constants” of color perception. As the Marquette plied the blue- black waves of the Atlantic, the two color scientists (occasionally joined by Lawrence Henderson, a Harvard biologist) discussed the stickier points of color perception: How many colors were necessary to properly define the full gamut of human color perceptions? How ought colors be understood— as a matter of light, of the subjective discrimination of the observer, or some combination of each? Once defined, how should color be notated? Munsell pressed a copy of A Color Notation into Ladd-Franklin’s hands (he seems never to have traveled without a few) and, when the Marquette docked in Boston, invited her and Henderson to his Trinity Street studio. There the trio examined the models that Munsell had made of his color system, the instruments he had used to

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define it, and an array of charts showing detailed arrangements of swatches of representative colors.1 Their discussions appear not to have had much impact on the way that either Ladd-Franklin or Munsell conceived of color or practiced their science. Ladd-Franklin questioned the choice and arrangement of Munsell’s primary colors and was unimpressed to find that “the Boston man”— her pejorative private name for Munsell— did not really consider how the psychological and physiological experiences of color connected with his system.2 For his part, Munsell thought that Ladd-Franklin’s suggestion for red and green values based on her color theory were off the mark, in that they excluded “a wide interval of cool color”— thus rendering the system “unbalanced.”3 He dismissed Ladd-Franklin’s suggestion that he incorporate the findings of “psychological works on color” (like her own) into his system, questioning “whether [he] could profitably attack a new and unfamiliar line of study at [his] stage of physical research.” Moreover, although he took the time to jot down a comparison between the color triangle used by physicists and the color “square” that Ladd-Franklin’s red, yellow, green, and blue primary colors suggested to him, Munsell agreed in a subsequent telephone conversation with his fellow MNAS professor Anson Cross that “the psychologists differed so much among themselves that we should wait until they came to an agreement on color” before taking their theories into account.4 Despite their failure to agree on the specifics of their approaches to color, though, both Munsell and Ladd-Franklin had more in common than they might have believed. Munsell was among a group of researchers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who took it upon themselves to produce standardized systems of color. For Robert Ridgway, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian Institution, a standardized system of color would democratize naturalism, allowing amateur and professional alike to identify flora and fauna with precision. For Milton Bradley, the board game mag1. A. H. Munsell, color diary, Sept. 10– 21, 1908. Extant copies of the diary come from a transcription done from the original by the Munsell Color Company ca. 1920–23. In this transcription, Munsell’s handwritten notes have been typed, and his figures and sketches redrawn. A hard copy of the transcription can be found in box 173, Munsell Color Company, Inter- society Color Council Records (#2188), Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE (hereafter abbreviated as HML). An electronic version is available at https://www.rit.edu/cos/colorscience /ab_munsell_diaries.php. 2. Ladd-Franklin, untitled note, n.d., box 58, folder: R. Ridgway, CLF. 3. Munsell, color diary, Sept. 24, 1908, HML (emphasis in original). 4. Ibid.

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nate, it was necessary to “apply, as far as possible, scientific facts of color to elementary instruction in color and the artistic use of color.”5 As a fundamental experience, color ought to be taught to children with the imprimatur and veracity of scientific authority— lest the foundation upon which American society was based should crumble. Munsell’s goal was likewise a matter of social reform. He wished that his fellow citizens not fall prey to incorrect color terms but, rather, speak with accuracy, consistency, and reason about their chromatic sensations. Troubled by the profusion of commercial color names and the laxness with which words referred to sensations, these researchers approached “The Color Question,” as Bradley called it, as a matter of commercial utility, industrial efficiency, aesthetic purity, and ethical verity. Color terms were synecdochical with social order: with clarity, with shared understanding, and with the efficient management of industrial society. Like Ladd-Franklin, these groups saw color terms as conveyances of moral values. But unlike Ladd-Franklin, they saw scientific aesthetics, pedagogy, and commercial production as the avenues by which reform of color terminology would come to fruition.

SalMon TreeS and CruShed-STrawberry graSS Of the many upheavals that set late nineteenth- century American social, cultural, and economic life on its heels, radical transformations in visual culture were perhaps among the more persistent and apparent, if also the more quotidian.6 While novel dye and printing technologies such as aniline colors and chromolithography allowed the production of goods in a hitherto- unimaginable assortment of bright colors, new forms of advertising and distribution such as billboards, shop windows, and electric signage brought these goods— both in actuality and in representation— to ever more distant corners of the United States and abroad.7 From textiles to toys, prints to paints, furniture to feathers, Americans of the late nineteenth cen5. Milton Bradley, “The Color Question Again,” Science 19, no. 477 (Mar. 25, 1892): 175– 76. 6. See esp. Blaszczyk, Color Revolution. 7. On signage, see David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, American Century Series (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), similarly examines aspects of turn- of- the- century consumerism, including sensational displays. On advertising, see Michele Helene Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On billboards especially, see, e.g., Cynthia Meyers, “Godfrey Flury’s Billboard Advertising Business: An Austin Ad Man in the 1910s and 1920s,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 98, no. 4 (Apr. 1995): 568–83.

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tury found what seemed to be an endless variety of goods in an infinitely variable selection of novel colors at their fingertips (if not always within reach of their pocketbooks).8 Moreover, the everyday handling of pigment itself shifted from a professional occupation to a commonplace consumer activity. Noting in an 1890 essay that the manufacture of paint had grown “from very small beginnings” to become “one of the most important of commercial enterprises,” a correspondent for the Decorator and Furnisher magazine extolled the ingenuity of an industry that filled “the vast and increasing demand for paints throughout the entire country.” Indeed, the market for color had become so great that manufacturers found it profitable for the first time to sell premixed industrial paint products not just to professional painters but to the everyday consumer— thus, the writer concluded, “the secret of the professional painter has vanished, and under the present regime every man becomes his own painter.”9 This infusion of new, constantly changing commercial colors could be liberating, but it could also be disorienting. In the case of paints and pigments themselves, one practical hurdle concerned the fact that different manufacturers often used the same commercial name to identify pigments that were qualitatively quite different. For instance, as Robert Ridgway, Smithsonian Institution ornithologist and author of an early book of color nomenclature, pointed out, the “olive” green of the British maker Winsor and Newton was “conspicuously different” from the “olive” green produced by German maker Schoenfeld’s, despite their homonymous designations. At the same time, the opposite could also be true: the same color could be marketed under different names, such as when Schoenfeld’s chose the name “gouache-färben” to identify a color that Ridgway found no different from other manufacturers’ “Chinese White.”10 Such variations in nomenclature considerably complicated efforts to assign singular names to singular pigments. An American watercolorist writing to Art Amateur magazine complained that, having obtained a new set of “French water- colors,” he found it “very difficult to follow instructions under their present names.” The editors of Art Amateur helpfully provided a list of translations.11 Performing a similar service for readers of his Nomenclature of Colors, Ridgway translated 8. For an excellent account of popular responses to the ostensible flood of new colors and color- generating technologies, see Leach, Land of Desire, 39– 70. 9. W. R. Bradshaw, “The Manufacture of Paints,” Decorator and Furnisher 16, no. 1 (Apr. 1890): 26. 10. Ridgway, Nomenclature of Colors, 27. 11. J.H.P., “A Tyro Enlightened,” Art Amateur 7, no. 3 (1882): 65.

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non-English names (like those given by Schoenfeld’s) into their “comparative vernacular synonymy,” providing a handy table of color names crossreferenced in English, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, German, Spanish, and Latin to aid his readers in back- translation. Difficulties in translation, however, were not the sorts of nomenclature issues that especially troubled Munsell, Ridgeway, and their peers. More to the point were those seemingly arbitrary labels invented by manufacturers intent on stoking their customers’ desires for the new and sensational. By the end of the nineteenth century, articles in the popular press commonly extolled the virtues of colors that had apparently never been seen by human eyes, even while admitting that the process through which these new sensations acquired names seemed more than a little bit slapdash. “Looking back on this year’s riotous abundance,” began an 1890 style piece in the New York Times, “the gamut of color embraces every shade heretofore conceived for feminine adornment, and not a few that were never before seen on sea, nor land— nor woman.”12 To define colors that had never before been seen required a correspondingly unprecedented degree of linguistic invention. The Times poked fun at the ubiquity of the term “Eiffel red,” remarking, “If any doubtful shade of red with a tone of lavender, lilac, pink, or brown is left undesignated it is unhesitatingly denominated Eiffel red, and so offered to the public who accept it with unquestioning faith. The original motif, if it may be so called, has been so far lost sight of that the true Eiffel red is as difficult to determine as the color of the tower itself.”13 Meanwhile, “[t]he new red tinted with yellow,” wrote the Times, “though called by some Tomato red is better indicated by the yellow- red nasturtium.”14 Some members of the public were, for their part, enthusiastic about the possibilities of new, indefinable colors. A typical item in the “Scientific” section of an 1873 issue of the Ladies’ Repository praised the “splendid colors” obtained through coal tar chemistry, singling out artificial alizarin as “rival[ing] that from madder in beauty.”15 In an even more exuberant encomium to the new technologies, art critic Sadakichi Hartmann penned a theatrical 12. “New Wool Goods,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1890, 12. 13. Ibid. The color of the Eiffel Tower, it should be noted, has gone through iterations from a deep- red hue in the 1890s, to a stunning yellow between 1892 and 1899, to a pinkish red between 1907 and 1954, to— within a few more years— its current bronze/brown color. 14. Ibid. 15. “Scientific: Coal Tar Dyes,” Ladies’ Repository 12, no. 6 (Dec. 1873): 464. For an earlier example, see, e.g., “Perkin’s Purple,” Vanity Fair 3 (1861): 228.

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biography of Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha in which the spiritual leader’s climactic enlightenment was to be dramatized by “a concert of self- radiant colors . . . represented by pyrotechny, brought by chemistry, electricity and future light- producing sciences” and culminating in a “kaleidoscopical symphony of color effects constantly changing in elation and depression, velocity, intensity, variety and sentiment [and] at last improvising an outburst of new colors, like ultra red and violet, for which optical instruments have first to be invented before the human eye can perceive and enjoy them.”16 For Hartmann, new technologies for producing colors offered the promise of sensations that quite literally exceeded the bounds of human description— where labels such as ultra red and ultra violet pointed to the limits of visual experience, while nevertheless holding out the possibility that such experiences could be available in the foreseeable future. “Chemistry, electricity and future light- producing sciences” were, in Hartman’s imagining, simultaneously technologies of enlightenment and technologies of desire. Others, however, were less optimistic. Francis King, a gardener, followed her British colleague, Gertrude Jekyll, in decrying the “slip slop” of modern color- naming conventions, in particular exemplified by names like “mauve,” which had only within her lifetime come into common use.17 Jekyll, in her volume Wood and Garden, warned her readers against color names both new and old, including “crimson,” which, she noted, “is a word to beware of; it covers such a wide extent of ground . . . that one cannot know whether it stands for a rich blood colour or for a malignant magenta.”18 Magenta was “malignant,” thought Jekyll, because it was a “new” color— the trade name of a novel aniline dye. In the same way, mauve— another aniline color— served as a symbol for historian Thomas Beer, who titled his 1928 book about the dissolution of American intellectual culture at the turn of the century The Mauve Decade, after an apocryphal quip by the artist James 16. Sadakichi Hartmann, Buddha: A Drama in Twelve Scenes (New York: n.p., 1897), 43– 45. This section of the play (scene 12) is dedicated to “Students of Color Psychology” and is written without dialogue but with extensive and lyrical stage directions describing color effects. Thank you to Emily Gephart for pointing out Hartmann’s chromatic fantasy. For a later and more nefandous fantasy of colors never before seen, impossible to comprehend and incipient to madness, see H. P. Lovecraft’s 1927 short story “The Colour out of Space,” in H. P. Lovecraft: Complete and Unabridged (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2008). 17. Quoted in Susan W. Lanman, “Colour in the Garden: ‘Malignant Magenta,’” Garden History 28, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 214. 18. Gertrude Jekyll, Wood and Garden: Notes and Thoughts, Practical and Critical, of a Working Amateur (London: Longmans, Green, 1899), 224.

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McNeil Whistler, presumably made during the 1890s, that “mauve is just pink trying to be purple.”19 More galling still were color names such as “elephant’s breath” and “crushed strawberry”— terms that seemed deliberately to defy any definite signification. Ridgway, for instance, complained in 1886 that “the popular nomenclature of colors has of late years, especially since the introduction of aniline dyes and pigments, become involved in almost chaotic confusion through the coinage of a multitude of new names, many of them synonymous, and still more of them vague or variable in their meaning.”20 He ex19. Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926). Whistler is quoted on the title page; otherwise, the term is mentioned only twice in the book: once in connection with prostitution, the other with money. Interestingly, Lewis Mumford takes a different chromatic tack in The Brown Decades, his 1931 history of Reconstruction era society in the United States. These years, for Mumford, are brown both because the dominant building materials of the decade were brown (brown stone, brown wood panels, brown paintings) and because the spirit of the American people was, for Mumford, brown— ambivalent, muddy, broken by war and greed. Both mauve and brown, of course, stand alongside Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s “gilded” age as chromatic similes for folly, excess, and shortsightedness with which both contemporary and subsequent commentators tarred the age. See Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895 (New York: Harcourt: Brace, 1931); Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1873). 20. Aniline dyes are derived from coal tar— a viscous, brown by- product of the process used in the nineteenth century to render coal into gas for lighting. Composed of a complicated array of carbon- based compounds, by the early 1820s coal tar had attracted the fascination of a burgeoning generation of organic chemists because of the wide range of substances that could be derived through reactions between it and other chemicals. When treated with different reagents, coal tar yielded substances of potentially greater commercial usefulness and scientific interest than the industrial sludge from which they derived. Phenols, for instance, were used as antimicrobial agents. Nitrobenzene held potential as a perfume base. And aniline— a derivative of nitrobenzene— was known to yield brightly colored precipitates under certain circumstances. Nevertheless, the high cost of distilling aniline from coal tar militated against commercial production of these agents as dyes. It wasn’t until 1856, when William Perkin, a student at the Royal College of Chemistry, began to investigate industrial production of a vivid purplish dye that he had stumbled upon while attempting to synthesize quinine, that coal tar dyes began to appear to be viable commercial products. Within three years of the commercial production of the dye that Perkin called “Mauve,” chemists in Britain had taken out twenty- nine patents on different aniline dyes— almost double the number of patents on natural dyes. See Willem J. Hornix, “From Process to Plant: Innovation in the Early Artificial Dye Industry,” British Journal for the History of Science 25, no. 1 (Mar. 1992): 69. By the 1880s, fuchsine, aniline blue, and Hofmann’s violets— as well as newer coal tar “azo” dyes like malachite green, London yellow, and Congo red— flooded the market, providing textile manufacturers and clothing designers with an even- greater spectrum of colors for fabrics and threads with which to ply their trade. The best technical account of the discovery and commercial development of aniline dyes is Anthony S. Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1993). A more popular but no less informative account is Garfield’s Mauve.

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coriated color names such as “Zulu,” “Crushed Strawberry,” and “Elephant’s Breath” as “nonsense” that was “invented at the caprice of the dyer” and unsuitable for any sort of “practical utility.”21 Massachusetts scientist John Pillsbury, likewise, blamed aniline dyes and trade color names for the general state of disarray in color nomenclature and similarly singled out elephant’s breath and crushed strawberry for particular abuse, asking, “What more absurd terms could one easily choose to express an intelligible conception?”22 Pillsbury’s and Ridgway’s frustration was not unfounded. Elephant’s breath— though not an aniline color— was identified in the popular magazine Judy in 1874 as “a very beautiful shade of blue with a sort of mistiness about it”; in American Naturalist in 1880 as “a pale olive- green hue”; in 1887 as a variation on lavender; in 1907 as a “Cool Purple Grey”; and in 1918 as a very gray variant of green.23 Such caprice was more than just semantically vexing; it came associated with unsettlingly permissive aesthetics. A columnist reporting in 1882 on trends in decorating warned his readers that a recent vogue for textile patterns consisting of images such as multicolored animals feeding on “salmon- colored forests and ‘crushed strawberry’ grass plots” was a harbinger of impending “decorative lunacy.”24 This paranoid style in aesthetic critique was echoed by Munsell, who took his own color- naming enterprise seriously enough that his company at one point bore the slogan “Color Anarchy is Replaced by Systematic Color Description” (fig. 8).25 “Nonsense,” “absurd,” “lunatic,” even “anarchic”— these are normative

Travis has also published numerous articles on particular aspects of the aniline dyes industries: see, e.g., “Perkin’s Mauve: Ancestor of the Organic Chemical Industry,” Technology and Culture 31, no. 1 (Jan. 1990): 51– 82; “Science’s Powerful Companion: A. W. Hofmann’s Investigation of Aniline Red and Its Derivatives,” British Journal for the History of Science 25, no. 1 (Mar. 1992): 27– 44; “From Manchester to Massachusetts via Mulhouse: The Transatlantic Voyage of Aniline Black,” Technology and Culture 35, no. 1 ( Jan. 1994): 70–99; “Poisoned Groundwater and Contaminated Soil: The Tribulations and Trial of the First Major Manufacturer of Aniline Dyes in Basel,” Environmental History 2, no. 3 (July 1997): 343–65. On some of the legal aspects of aniline dye production, see Henk van den Belt, “Why Monopoly Failed: The Rise and Fall of Société la Fuchsine,” British Journal for the History of Science 25, no. 1 (Mar. 1992): 45–63. 21. Ridgway, Nomenclature of Colors, 26. 22. J. H. Pillsbury, “A New Color Scheme,” Science 19, no. 473 (Feb. 26, 1892): 114. 23. Deb Salisbury, ed., Elephant’s Breath and London Smoke (Neustadt, ON: Five Rivers, 2009), 75. 24. “Esthetic Idiosyncrasies,” Decorator and Furnisher 1, no. 2 (1882): 64. 25. See, e.g., box 185, HML, for examples of Munsell Color Company brochures bearing the slogan. The slogan was repeated by other commentators. See, e.g., Matthew Luckiesh, Color and Its Applications (New York: Van Nostrand, 1915), 80.

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figure 8 Advertisement for the Munsell Color System, ca. 1914.

terms, all of which describe, in one form or another, human beings’ behaviors in relation to one another. They are terms, that is, which endeavor to delineate proper social conduct. As such, these terms make it clear that color naming was a concern deeply connected to a shared sense of rationality, mutually construed acceptability, and social order. Communicating private, individual perceptions in a reasonable, orderly, and exact fashion sat at the root of a gamut of social activities, from purchasing paint, to decorating rooms, to speaking about the empirical world, to developing those rules of civil society that staved off anarchy. This is not, of course, to overstate the case: did Munsell, Pillsbury, Ridgway, or any of their like- minded peers think that civilization would grind to a halt solely on the basis of runaway color names? Likely not. But their complaints were nevertheless more than just the quibbles of pedants. Color served as a stand- in for perceptual reality writ large: if it was possible to randomly assign names to something as basic as the perception of color, then upon what basis could people truly be said to communicate with precision and fidelity about that which was real and

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important? Commercial color terms represented, in some ways, a return to the “enchantment of words” that had consumed the suspicions of common sense philosophers. To return words to their proper place as signifiers of the real was a task of serious importance to the underpinnings of a functional society— a task that, not coincidentally, held great commercial utility. Seen in this light, images of chrome- yellow cows snacking on crushedstrawberry lawns were the least of contemporary worries.

MeThodS of SignifiCaTion This said, replacing “color anarchy” with “systematic color description” was by no means a simple task. Among the principal problems facing would- be nomenclature revisionists was the question of signification: what, precisely, did different words for colors mean? What did they point toward? What was the relationship between colors, objects, and the sensations experienced by their observers? And how ought terms for color reflect the scientific truth of color (whatever that might be)? Peirce’s semiotic was too obscure to provide much help, and Ladd-Franklin’s theory, while scientifically sophisticated, was difficult to apply in practice. As a result, different practitioners had different solutions to the problem of coordinating color terms with color sensations and colored materials. For Ridgway at the Smithsonian, it seemed reasonable to attempt to standardize color terms on the basis of common objects and commercial colors— a strategy that was not without its shortcomings in epistemological definitude. For Milton Bradley and his collaborator, botanist John Pillsbury, the solar spectrum appeared to offer a more scientific substrate for naming colors, since unlike objects, solar spectra could be reliably segmented according to wavelength and thereby labeled with precision using definite color names. For Munsell, recent developments in psychophysical color theories— studies of retinal and mental responses to colors— seemed to offer a truth of color even more profound than the one offered by the solar spectrum; Munsell intended his color nomenclature to bridge the abstract and somatic experience of color. These three color nomenclatures were by no means the only attempts to identify colors. But their three general modes of epistemological attack— objective, spectral, and psychophysical— typify the most common approaches to color- naming systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and help to emphasize what was at stake in their use and development. Among the earliest American attempts to standardize color nomencla-

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ture was Ridgway’s 1886 A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists: And Compendium of Useful Knowledge for Ornithologists. A prominent ornithologist, Ridgway’s interest in color and naming— as well as birds— took root during a childhood in Mount Carmel, Illinois. The oldest child of “nature loving” parents, Ridgway spent long hours in the forests around his house, where his father pointed out the different species of avian fauna and identified them, often with made- up names: “the Towhee he called ‘Ground Robin,’” remembered Ridgway, “the Wood Thrush was his ‘Bell Bird’; Gnatcatcher, ‘Blue Wren’; Yellow- breasted Chat, ‘Yellow Mockingbird’; etc.”26 Names, for Ridgway, were flexible things. As he grew older, he avidly collected these birds— though, one of his many correspondents recalled, the enthusiastic amateur naturalist had “no idea how to preserve a bird other than in a colored drawing.” This situation sent Ridgway to his father’s pharmacy to mix his own watercolors.27 In 1864, having sent one of his drawings to Washington, DC, in an attempt to identify an unknown bird, Ridgway struck up a correspondence with the Smithsonian Institution’s assistant secretary, Spencer Baird, who identified Ridgway’s mystery bird as a purple finch.28 Three years later, Baird hired Ridgway as a field zoologist, and Ridgway spent the rest of his life observing birds for the Smithsonian. By the time he was named the Smithsonian’s first director of ornithology, in 1880, Ridgway had overcome many of his boyhood obstacles: he was skilled at speaking about birds with Linnaean precision and had learned how to preserve his specimens through taxidermy rather than watercolors. But questions of how precisely to denote the colors of the birds that he observed still preoccupied him.29 Ridgway therefore addressed his 1886 color notation to a “demand” among naturalists “for a nomenclature which shall fix a standard for the numerous hues, tints, and shades which . . . now form part of the language of descriptive natural history.”30 Ridgway’s goal, simply put, was to provide an accurate but colloquially usable means by which naturalists and laypeople could identify the sensations that they experienced and convey them to other people. To this end, Ridgway’s book contained 166 tiny, printed rect-

26. Harry Harris, “Robert Ridgway,” Condor 30, no. 1 (Jan.– Feb. 1928): 9. 27. Ibid., 12. 28. Alexander Wetmore, “Biographical Memoir of Robert Ridgway,” in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, vol. 15 (Washington: Office of the Home Secretary, 1931), 59. 29. H. Harris, “Robert Ridgway,” 13. 30. Ridgway, Nomenclature of Colors, 15. Lewis gives a brief history of the creation of the 1886 Nomenclature in his biography of Ridgway. See Daniel Lewis, The Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 231– 35.

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angles, each hand- painted a different color and labeled with its own evocative name. On plate 6, for instance— devoted to yellowish hues— readers found a color named “Lemon Yellow,” alongside one called “Canary Yellow,” which yielded to “Primrose Yellow,” “Sulphur Yellow,” “Citron Yellow,” and so on through the rows and columns of the chart. To obtain the names of his colors, Ridgway wrote, he had consulted with previous color catalogs such as Patrick Syme’s Werner’s Notation of Color (1821 edition), perused his personal collection of hundreds of commercial watercolors to find typical names, and finally attempted to match colors with “characteristic” natural objects. But this strategy, while lending fixed and memorable names to colors— such as “Broccoli Brown,” “Saturn Red,” and “Berlin Blue”— also presented Ridgway with a serious epistemological quandary. As he explained, The selection of appropriate names for the colors depicted on the plates has been in some cases a matter of considerable difficulty. With regard to certain ones it may appear that the names adopted are not entirely satisfactory; but to forestall such criticism, it may be explained that the purpose of these plates is not to show the color of the particular objects or substances which the names suggest, but to provide for the colors which it has seemed desirable to represent, appropriate or at least approximately appropriate names. In other words, certain colors are selected for illustration, for which names must be provided; and when names that are exclusively pertinent or otherwise entirely satisfactory are not at hand, they must be looked up or invented. It should also be borne in mind that almost any object or substance varies more or less in color; and that therefore if the “orange,” “lemon” or “chestnut” of the plates does not match exactly in color the particular orange, lemon or chestnut which one may compare it with, it may (or in fact does) correspond with other specimens. It is, in fact, only in the case of those colors which derive their names directly from pigments which represent them (as Paris green, orange- cadmium, vermillion, ultramarine blue, madder- brown, etc.) that we have absolute pertinence of names to color.31

Far from putting readers’ misgivings to rest, however, this curious apologia could only have raised significant questions about the precise nature of the colors that Ridgway depicted. If the purpose of his colored plates was “not to show the color of the particular objects or substances,” then what did it matter if 31. Ridgway, Nomenclature of Colors, 16 (emphasis in original).

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the sample of color on plate 6 labeled “Lemon Yellow” matched all lemons, some lemons, one particular lemon, or no lemons at all? (For that matter, how frequently did one encounter a stalk of broccoli that matched his “Broccoli Brown”?) Why should a pigment name such as “Paris Green” be more truthful than the names of objects— especially since Ridgway had already taken pains to counterpose his system against the unreliability of commercial color names? What were the brilliantly colored rectangles in his book indicative of, anyway? Everyday objects? Chemicals? Birds? Sensations? Such was the criticism leveled at Ridgway by William Hallock and Reginald Gordon. The Columbia University physicists and color editors for Funk and Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary lampooned Ridgway’s system as one that endeavored “to take an orange as a type of that color, and in like manner to let a lemon, an olive, etc. be the ultimate definition of those hues.” Such a system would inevitably come up short as a scientific nomenclature, concluded Hallock and Gordon, since any properly scientific system of color terminology had to do more than simply define the color of an object’s surface “by saying that it resembles or differs to a certain extent from some other arbitrary surface.” As editors of a dictionary of the English language that aspired to unimpeachable precision, Hallock and Gordon wished to link color terms with less corporeal referents— and thus championed a color nomenclature based not on objects or pigments but on the solar spectrum. “The scientific method” for naming colors, wrote Hallock and Gordon, “would seem to be to choose from the spectrum itself and locate those colors ideally.”32 Although ephemeral, the spectrum presented a full gamut of “pure” colors with unvarying consistency; what’s more, by using the very pigments and printing technologies that had engendered such color anxiety in the first place, a careful printer could produce samples of paper that fairly represented spectral colors. This was the idea behind Milton Bradley’s “spectrum series” of papers, an endeavor that Hallock and Gordon grudgingly admitted did “much for the introduction of scientific methods into color study.”33 After making his fortune manufacturing board games for Union troops during the American Civil War, Bradley turned his attention to educational reform, with a particular interest in the perceptual pedagogy of small children. To provide a proper foundation for basic education, Bradley felt it was necessary first 32. William Hallock and Reginald Gordon, “Color Standards,” Science 6, no. 136 (Aug. 6, 1897): 214. 33. Ibid.

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to produce definite ideas about color terms and color sensations. With the help of John Pillsbury, a botanist, high school teacher, and sometimes color theorist, he turned his expertise in printing board games to the manufacture of a series of colored papers, watercolors, crayons, and color- mixing tops (wooden spindles set up to act like tiny color wheels) that were not only keyed to the solar spectrum but also labeled according to the ways in which color perception functioned in physical, physiological, and mental life. Rather than “scouring the field of literature for fanciful and arbitrary names,” as Bradley put it (in a thinly veiled swipe at Ridgway), Bradley and Pillsbury based their system on six key colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.34 To locate these colors in the solar spectrum, Bradley and Pillsbury convened a “small company of scientists and teachers” in a darkened auditorium in Springfield, Massachusetts, and invited them to indicate the point on a large, projected spectrum that best represented each of the basic terms.35 Somewhat to Pillsbury’s surprise, the panel exhibited a “very great unanimity of judgment” as to the identities of the “pure” versions of each of Bradley’s chosen colors.36 By matching the colors of colored papers to the wavelengths of the portions of the spectrum indicated by the assembled experts, Bradley and Pillsbury could be sure that their material colors provided an accurate index of immaterial color sensations. Having pinpointed the wavelength of each of their primary colors, Bradley and Pillsbury could then designate each with a single symbol: “R” for red, “O” for orange, and so on. They indicated intermediary colors with combinations of the two symbols: “RO,” for example, stood for “reddish orange.” Darker or lighter versions could be indicated by symbols for tint (T) and shade (S) or white (W) and black (N), while still more complicated colors could be constructed by mixing basic colors on a color wheel, and translating their proportions into color names. A commercial color like “ashes of roses,” instead of being described as a dull grayish pink, could, through comparison with a color wheel bearing Bradley colors in the correct proportions, be rewrit-

34. Bradley quoted in James J. Shea’s It’s All in the Game (New York: Putnam, 1960), 123. Pillsbury offers the most concise explanation of his and Bradley’s work in “A Scheme of Colour Standards,” Nature 52, no. 1347 (1895): 390. 35. Milton Bradley, a Successful Man: A Brief Sketch of His Career and the Growth of the Institution Which He Founded (New York: J. F. Tapley, 1910), 34; Pillsbury, “Scheme of Colour Standards,” 390. 36. Pillsbury, “Scheme of Colour Standards,” 390. See also J. H. Pillsbury, “On Standard Colors,” in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the Forty-Fourth Meeting Held at Springfield Mass. (Salem: published by the Permanent Secretary, 1895), 59.

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ten as “R 8, V 4, W 14, N 74”— or 8 percent red, 4 percent violet, 14 percent white, and 74 percent black.37 Bradley published his spectrum colors in a series of eighteen “pure” and seventy- three “broken” colors, each of which bore a precise, alphanumeric designation. Bradley’s color standards were a decisive step toward providing a precise and empirically grounded vocabulary for colors, but for Munsell, Bradley’s spectrum colors didn’t go far enough in forging an authentic link between colored items, color terminology, and color experience. Like his predecessors, Munsell was concerned with devising a notational system for precisely designating “the indefinite and varying colors of natural objects.”38 And as with his predecessors, Munsell saw his system as an antidote to the “incongruous, irrational and often ludicrous” color names of nineteenth- century commerce.39 Unlike his predecessors, however, Munsell rejected both material and optical referents for his color nomenclature. Words such as “orange” and “violet,” he argued, indicated “variable product[s] of the vegetable kingdom” and thus tended to “excite other ideas not kindred with color.” This went double for fanciful terms like “crushed strawberry.”40 Instead of names or spectral colors, Munsell based his system on a threedimensional construct arranged around what he took to be the three critical “dimensions” of color: “hue,” “chroma,” and “saturation.” By arranging these properties in three dimensions, with five primary and five secondary “hues” (red, yellow- red, yellow, green- yellow, green, blue- green, blue, violet- blue, violet, violet- red) placed at regular, ten- unit intervals along the circumference of a planar circle; a perpendicular, ten- unit scale of neutral “values” originating at the center of the spectral plane; and the (tenunit) distance from the origin of the value scale outward toward the edge of the hue ring indicating chroma, Munsell proposed that any color could be named according to a system of alphanumeric coordinates. Ridgway’s “Lemon Yellow,” for instance, could be notated in the Munsell system as 7.5Y 8/10.5, meaning that it was a yellow color of near- maximum yellowness (7.5Y), was brighter than average (a value of 8), and was as saturated with hue as a color could be.41 Its coordinates in the color solid would remain 37. Pillsbury, “Scheme of Colour Standards,” 392. 38. Albert Henry Munsell, A Color Notation (Boston: George Ellis, 1905), 10. 39. Ibid., 75. 40. Munsell, color diary, Sept. 19, 1905, HML. See also Munsell, Color Notation, 55. 41. D. H. Hamly, “The Ridgway Color Standards with a Munsell Notation Key,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 39, no. 7 (1949): 595. Indeed, the “10.5” indicates that this color was more saturated than Munsell had anticipated in his lifetime. In the years following Munsell’s

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stable and unique over time. Unlike two different lemons— which might be different shades of yellow— two different colors could not coexist at 7.5Y 8/10.5 in the Munsell solid: 7.5Y 8/10.5 notated a singular, unique, and ontologically stable sensation. Munsell initially based his color system on the definitions of color provided in the Century Dictionary, from which he dutifully copied down the descriptions of each of his five central colors as specified by Peirce. (He also got his terms “hue,” “value,” and “chroma” from Peirce.) Whenever he required basic definitions of spectral hues, he continued to refer to Peirce’s Dictionary entries. He moreover developed (and patented) his own photometer and color- mixing devices to ensure that the colors that he picked were as instrumentally accurate as possible. But Munsell’s was not a theory based in the physics of light perception. Rather, as he put it in a brochure for the Munsell system (ca. 1910), “the Great Underlying Principle of the Munsell System is that the human race is born with eyes, which, when normal, see all the color of the universe, hence any training in color one receives must necessarily be mental.”42 In formulating his theory, Munsell visited Charles R. Cross, then the head of the physics department at MIT, who praised Munsell for his work in “establish[ing] the idea of color based on something fixed,” but who insisted that the project was “a matter of psychology . . . rather than physics”— that is, more a matter of subjective, mental experience of color than of the objective measurement of something like wavelength.43 Amos Dolbeare, chair of the Department of Astronomy and Physics at Tufts College, put the matter to Munsell even more directly. “The wavelengths of the physicist are unserviceable for the artist and business man,” declared Dolbeare. “Color is an ancestral and racial experience, not based on the spectrum.”44

death, his system was continually recalibrated, often to include new, brighter colors— an advantage of his system that Munsell himself had acknowledged and promoted. For that matter, the “Lemon Yellow” against which Hamly found his Munsell coordinates was not the original “Lemon Yellow” that had sent Ridgway into an existential tailspin. Throughout the 1900s, Ridgway worked on an improved system of color standards, eventually releasing a new edition of Color Standards and Color Nomenclature in 1912 with over a thousand color chips. If the words for colors seemed definite, their essential nature was indelibly fleeting. 42. “The Munsell Color System,” Wadsworth and Howland, n.d. (early twentieth century), folio box 40, Denman Waldo Ross Papers (HUAM.Records.2006.16), Harvard Art Museums Archives and Special Collections, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter abbreviated as DWR). 43. Munsell, color diary, May 14, 1900, HML. 44. Munsell, color diary, Nov. 27, 1900, HML.

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As an “ancestral” and “racial” experience, color was subjective, an idea that Munsell credited to Rood. Munsell had attended the MNAS in 1875. Founded in 1872, the MNAS was a college dedicated to training future art educators. It was a product of reform impulses, having been established by the Massachusetts State legislature in 1872 in order to fill the need for art teachers produced by the 1870 Act Relating to Free Instruction in Drawing, a piece of legislation that made art education compulsory in Massachusetts public schools.45 Color was an important part of the program, but as Munsell recalled, the curriculum was based on Brewster’s theories of red, yellow, and blue primaries, which mixed in proportions of three, five, and eight to make white.46 Attempting to paint a “balanced” painting using these proportions, Munsell recalled, always yielded “foxy” results— paintings that were too warm in color. Fortunately, in 1879 he discovered Ogden Rood’s newly published monograph Modern Chromatics. In a chapter on “the Colour Theory of Young and Helmholtz” Rood explained that while Brewster was “justly celebrated for his many and brilliant optical discoveries” and his theory of primaries could be found in “all except the most recent text books on physics,” it was nevertheless “not . . . difficult to show that it is quite without foundation.”47 Instead of red, yellow, and blue fundamental colors, Rood instructed, the true primaries were red, green, and violet, in accordance with the psychophysical theory of Young, Maxwell, and Helmholtz. The disharmony of Munsell’s painting, in other words, was not the fault of the painter but the fault of a flawed formula based on unsound science. “It is hardly to be wondered,” Munsell concluded, “that my respect for those who had taught the old blunder fell near to the zero point.”48 45. On the drawing act of 1870, see Paul E. Bolin, “The Drawing Act of 1870: Industrial Mandate or Democratic Maneuver?,” in Framing the Past: Essays on Art Education, ed. Donald Soucy and Mary Ann Stankiewicz (Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 1990), 59– 68; Paul E. Bolin, “Bordering the Familiar: Drawing Education Legislation in the Northeastern United States, 1871–1876,” Studies in Art Education 45, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 101– 16. See also Frederick M. Logan, The Growth of Art in American Schools (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955); JoAnne Marie Mancini, Pre-modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 46. Walter Smith— Munsell’s teacher at the MNAS, first director of the school, champion of the drawing act, and head of art education in Massachusetts— devoted a portion of his Art Education to Brewster’s theory. See Walter Smith, Art Education, Scholastic and Industrial (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873), 182. 47. Rood, Modern Chromatics, 108–9. 48. Albert Henry Munsell, “Color and an Eye to Discern It” (with discussion), Eastern Art and Manual Training Teachers’ Association: Proceedings of Meeting Held at Baltimore, Maryland, May 14–15, 1912 3 (1912): 110–11.

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In addition to the psychophysical color theories that Munsell found in Modern Chromatics, Rood had also given a quick gloss on what he called the “constants of color”— those invariant qualitative aspects of color such as hue, chroma, and luminosity— that provided a possible way of imagining a three- dimensional arrangement of colors. For such an arrangement, Rood proposed a “color- cone”— really, two cones linked at the base— in which spectral colors girdled the wide equatorial region, gradually darkening and lightening as they moved toward opposite vertices, at the respective tips of which they gave way to pure black and pure white. This double cone adequately described the gamut and appearance of spectral colors of different luminosities. However, Rood cautioned his readers against attempting to physically construct a color system according to his specifications, since the pigments available with which to paint such a model could not come close to the spectral colors that it was supposed to represent. Ignoring Rood’s warning but heeding his theory, Munsell fabricated his own color solid— a tiny double tetrahedron with red, green, and blue pigments at the corners, which graded to white and black at either of the points opposite the joined bases. “Twirled between the thumb and forefinger,” he recalled, “this model caused the three colors to melt into a tolerable grey.”49 The color tetrahedron that Munsell made was like a small, three- dimensional color wheel. Because “[t]he eye is determined upon approximate balance of these red, green and purple- blue elements,” Munsell speculated, “[t]his condition of normal balance is the source of visual contentment.”50 As he wrote in the 1907 edition of A Color Notation, “All our ideas of color harmony are based upon this fundamental relation.”51 This convinced him that it would be possible to model color in three dimensions— a project that he pursued for the rest of his life.

The Value of ProgreSS Precise as they were, Ridgway’s, Bradley and Pillsbury’s, and Munsell’s systems were not intended just for a specialized audience of professional color scientists. Ridgway thought that his system could be employed by amateurs: naturalists and painters alike who simply wanted to specify their col-

49. Albert Henry Munsell, “A Measured Training of the Color Sense,” Education 29, no. 6 (Feb. 1909): 361. 50. Munsell, “Color and an Eye to Discern It,” 4. 51. Albert Henry Munsell, A Color Notation, 2nd ed. (Boston: George Ellis, 1907), 51.

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ors with greater precision. Bradley’s system was so “simple and easy of acquirement,” as an enthusiastic reviewer put it, that “it should be brought into every home.” Children would, of course, learn from it, but the reviewer pointed out that “in helping to amuse them with it, parents themselves will find themselves interested and instructed on a subject which was almost ignored in their own youthful days.”52 Munsell, too, likewise envisioned his “color grammar” as a popular reform: ideally to be taught to children but also to be known and used by adults. Once a student learned and internalized his color system, Munsell insisted, “there will be no occasion to revert to vegetables, animals, minerals, or the ever- varying hues of sea and sky to express his color sensations.”53 The Munsell system, claimed its creator, reflected perfectly the psychological reality of color and thereby allowed its users to speak of their own internal sensations with all the authority of scientific certainty. Like Ladd-Franklin, then, Munsell and his peers had the reformer’s instinct not simply for pragmatic but also for moral amelioration. The point of Ridgway’s, Bradley and Pillsbury’s, and Munsell’s nomenclatural calisthenics was not simply to arrive at the most scientifically correct or precise system for assigning names to colors. The point was to fashion a good system— one that was true and ingenuous and that did not mislead its users. Unscientific color terms, wrote Munsell, were not only “inaccurate: they are inappropriate.”54 In contrast, his system was both accurate and appropriate: scientifically veracious and morally acceptable. This was the root of semantically minded objections to color systems based on ephemeral or indefinite materials or, worse yet, on pure fancy. Such terms had their basis in nothing of permanence, nothing that was consistently real; they were all artifice. At best, colloquial color terms were guilty of faulty logic (e.g., in equating the variable colors of general objects like oranges and crushed strawberries with terms for specific colors); at worst, they appeared to revel in the literal non- sense of their designations (what possible visual sensation could truly deserve the label “elephant’s breath”?). Indeed, for exacting nomenclatural reformers, even the solar spectrum— the most obvious natural basis for dividing color sensations into logically identifiable chunks— was insuf-

52. “A System of Color Study,” Art Amateur: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Art in the Household 35, no. 7 (Dec. 1896): 156. 53. Munsell, Color Notation (2nd ed.), 55. 54. Ibid., 10.

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ficiently rigorous. For Munsell, as for Ladd-Franklin, color language had to match color perception as a matter not simply of verity but of value. Unlike Ladd-Franklin’s theory, however, the value that precise, colloquial color terms conferred could be put in terms not just of scientific rectitude but of values related to commercial and industrial production: efficiency, thrift, reliability. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the manufacturing advantages of precise nomenclature were discussed most enthusiastically by those closely involved with the production of pigments, papers, and colored products. For Bradley and Pillsbury— concerned with developing colored papers and learning tools for commercial and pedagogical purposes— a color system based on definite nomenclature had obvious applications. Imagine, Pillsbury mused, that “a firm dealing in large quantities of coloured material” wanted to manufacture a new color. “By the old method,” Pillsbury explained, “they must find something as nearly like what is desired as possible, and then dictate the variations that are to be made.” Equipped with colored disks printed in Bradley’s carefully calibrated R, O, Y, G, B, and V colors, however, the firm could simply compose the desired color on its color wheel and then send the formula to its manufacturer, “who also has a set of the disks, and he ‘sets up the colour’ and then reproduces it in the material desired.”55 By the same token, if a salesperson were in doubt about what a customer wanted, he or she could simply “tak[e] him to the colour wheel and ascertai[n] what the desired colour is,” and then send the information either to the shop floor or to the manufacturer. Rather than relying on comparisons with colored objects to compose a novel prospective color, that is, Bradley and Pillsbury’s system dispensed with the need for particular colored objects in favor of precise terms for colors. “What a saving of confusion in the use of color names is thus gained,” exclaimed Pillsbury, “we are hardly able to realize.”56 Munsell, likewise, emphasized a similar sort of “savings of confusion” in publicizing his own system. In the first chapter of his 1905 manual A Color Notation, he recounted for his readers a vivid tableau: Robert Louis Stevenson, living on Samoa, attempting to order furnishings for his home from a correspondent in London. Describing a wallpaper pattern he desired for his workroom, Stevenson fumbled for words, writing, “I should rather like to see some patterns of unglossy— well, I’ll be hanged if I can describe this 55. Pillsbury, “Scheme of Colour Standards,” 392. 56. Pillsbury, “New Color Scheme,” 114.

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red. It’s not Turkish, and it’s not Roman, and it’s not Indian; but it seems to partake of the last two, and yet it can’t be either of them, because it ought to be able to go with vermillion. Ah, what a tangled web we weave!”57 “Where could be found,” Munsell asked his readers, “a more delightful cry for some rational way to describe color?” Stevenson’s loss of words, Munsell explained, was not his fault; rather, it was the fault of language itself. “The incongruous and bizarre nature of our present color names,” wrote Munsell, “must appear to any thoughtful person.” He continued, “Baby blue, peacock blue, Nile green, apple green, lemon yellow, straw yellow, rose pink, heliotrope, royal purple, Magenta, Solferino, plum, and automobile are popular terms, conveying different ideas to different persons and utterly failing to define colors. The terms used for a single hue, such as pea green, sea green, olive green, grass green, sage green, evergreen, invisible green, are not to be trusted in ordering a piece of cloth. They invite mistakes and disappointment.”58 Munsell’s system, in contrast, provided a means of avoiding disappointment by eschewing the “incongruous” and “bizarre” in favor of the rational and explicable. Through Munsell’s system, colors could be defined exactly and communicated with great accuracy. Indeed, in 1902 Munsell met with Edward Filene, owner of a prosperous chain of department stores, who told Munsell that “retailers want a standard [color] system fixed at all times” in order to estimate the fading of garments and to ensure that buyers got exactly the colors they wanted.59 At the turn of the century, Munsell’s system was a means of restoring the “trust” that had been squandered by the nomenclatural excesses of the past three decades. No longer did manufacturers (and consumers) “weave a web,” as Stevenson had put it, when trying to describe their perceptions; with Munsell’s system they could state their sensations of color with simplicity, accuracy, and forthrightness. Color nomenclaturists allied their products with values conducive to industrial production. Their color vocabularies were a means of treating vision as a resource to be conserved against an uncertain future. As Bradley wrote in his 1895 book, Elementary Color, for instance, he hoped that the facts of color conveyed through “the system here outlined” would be “the initial step in gathering together such facts regarding color effects as will form a fund of knowledge little dreamed of at the present day.”60 Indeed, Brad-

57. Munsell, Color Notation (1st ed.), 7. 58. Ibid., 10 (emphasis added). 59. Munsell, color diary, Apr. 9, 1901, and Apr. 26, 1902, HML. 60. Milton Bradley, Elementary Color (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Co., 1895), 8.

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ley struck a somewhat- apocalyptic tone, lamenting that “geometrical forms have already been so definitely analyzed by the science of mathematics that if destroyed to- day these solids and surfaces could be reconstructed at any future time from written or printed directions. But suppose all material samples of color to be lost, it would be impossible by the ordinary system of color nomenclature to even approximately restore a single one from written or verbal descriptions.”61 Faced with the fantastic possibility of a cataclysmic and rather- inexplicable loss of all colors— a chromatic stock- market crash— the need to accurately define and communicate colors through text that could preserve the means to restore colors at will attained a high priority.

ConCluSion: lab, field, and faCTory Ladd-Franklin was not the only psychologist to challenge Munsell’s results. In 1911 Robert Yerkes— then a psychologist at Harvard— visited Munsell in his studio, bearing a copy of George Trumbull Ladd and Robert Woodworth’s Elements of Physiological Psychology.62 Yerkes acknowledged the practical benefits of Munsell’s system but questioned how well it stood up to new paradigms in the psychological and physiological understanding of vision— specifically, the growing recognition among psychologists (as outlined by Ladd and Woodworth and, for that matter, by Ladd-Franklin) that there were four, rather than three, “stable” colors and that the retina appeared to be functionally divided into different “zones” of vision. The sensing human was not a “balanced” organism at all but rather a recklessly gerrymandered one. Munsell responded simply that his system was “constructed by balance— and whatever disturbs this balance would be called warm or cool excess.” The Munsell system, that is, had been calibrated to provide a neutral sensation, and therefore, a neutral sensation was proof of its scientific viability.63 The color system was, in effect, a proof of itself. This was precisely the sort of “immorality” that Ladd-Franklin had raged against in propagating her own color theory: a deliberate ignorance of facts that contradicted pet systems; a blithe adherence to one’s own approaches

61. Ibid., 6. 62. George Trumbull Ladd was not related to Christine Ladd-Franklin; however, Robert Woodworth was her colleague in the psychology department at Columbia and shared her interest in color perception. See, e.g., his “Color Sense in Different Races of Mankind.” 63. Munsell, color diary, Sept. 26, 1911, HML (emphasis in original).

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in the face of evidence to the contrary. Indeed, the same criticism of Munsell could be launched against others. Bradley clung to outmoded spectral standards. Ridgway seemed not to have any sense of color science at all: “If he only had the color triangle before him!!!” Ladd-Franklin jeered, reading Ridgway’s book.64 And yet, perhaps ironically, even as Ladd-Franklin and Yerkes criticized Munsell and his fellow color nomenclaturists for their failure to model color space properly, they and their peers nevertheless increasingly relied on standardized color tools for doing work on color perception. Bradley’s papers in particular became a staple of the psychology laboratories which American colleges began funding with increasing frequency beginning in the 1890s. Edward Titchener, a tireless booster of early twentieth- century American psychology, listed Bradley’s papers as among the desiderata of any wellappointed psychology laboratory and put the price of a set of spectrum colors at a reasonable fifty cents.65 In his famous study of “the dancing mouse” Yerkes employed Bradley’s orange and blue papers to test the color perceptions of his terpsichorean subjects.66 Ladd-Franklin, likewise, turned to Bradley’s papers in conducting her experiments to define the precise values of her unitary colors. Peering through a hood at the Columbia psychology lab (on “bright days between 10 and 4”) her subjects beheld spinning color wheels outfitted with sections of color cut from Bradley’s “Spectrum Standard” series of papers.67 She amassed a small collection of his “color tops” and in her files kept a copy of his pamphlet “Fun, Physics, and Psychology in Color,” which explained color mixing in terms of trichromatic theory.68 In naturalism as well, Ridgway’s standards flourished. Amateur birder Frank L. Burns, in a monograph on flickers (a type of woodpecker), employed Ridgway’s terminology with a gusto, writing of the “broccoli brown”

64. Ladd-Franklin, untitled note, n.d., box 58, folder: R. Ridgway, CLF. 65. Edward Bradford Titchener, “The Equipment of a Psychological Laboratory,” American Journal of Psychology 11, no. 2 (Jan. 1900): 257–58. 66. Robert Mearns Yerkes, The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 133. Asking whether “the dancing mouse [is] able to discriminate colors as we do,” Yerkes covered one small box with blue paper and another one with orange paper and hid food under the orange one. Switching the boxes as the mice perambulated allowed him to see whether they judged the location of the food by color or by memory; the Bradley papers allowed his results to be reproducible to his peers. The dancing mice, Yerkes decided, were color- blind. 67. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 59, folder: Color, CLF. 68. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes, n.d., box 54, folder: Reprint of “Fun, Physics and Psychology in Color,” by Bradley, CLF. See also Milton Bradley’s pamphlet, Fun, Physics, and Psychology in Color (Springfield, MA: Milton Bradley Co., ca. 1896).

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wings of adult male flickers and the “scarlet vermilion, dragon’s blood or brick- red, posteriorly fading to a rusty brown or burnt umber,” feathers of juvenile females.69 Similarly, Gerrit S. Miller, an assistant curator of mammals at the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum, identified the markings of the “adult female” great lizard cuckoo as “[h]air- brown on the back and head, fading to broccoli- brown on the neck, the feathers everywhere glossed with sage green.”70 Indeed, Miller found use for Ridgway’s color names in his work with mammals as well as birds: a new species of rabbit was “a fine grizzle of reddish brown,” which Miller qualified as “intermediate between the wood brown and russet of Ridgway”;71 while a species of bat (Chiloycteris mexicana) found in San Blas, Tepic, Mexico, had a back of “uniform brown, most closely resembling the broccoli- brown of Ridgway, but darker and with a mixture of both hair- brown and drab [with] [u]nder parts wood- brown, much lighter than Ridgway’s Plate III, fig. 1.”72 By the turn of the century, Ridgway’s color names found use among mammologists, entomologists, and mycologists as well as his core constituency of ornithologists.73 Peirce, of course, had earlier turned to Ridgway’s 1886 No-

69. Frank L. Burns, “A Monograph of the Flicker (Colaptes auratus),” Wilson Bulletin 12, no. 2 (Apr. 1900): 70– 71. Interestingly, Burns devoted a portion of his monograph to speculation about the different common names of the flicker— naming conventions that he described as “Descriptive, Onomato- poetic, [and] Misnomers” (5). Descriptive names captured something about the creature’s manner or bearing; for example, among residents of Cape Cod the bird was known as the “fiddler,” possibly because of “the peculiar sew- saw motions indulged in by the males while courting the females during the early spring months” (6). Onomatopoetic terms were imitations of the bird’s calls, such as “claype,” as the bird was known in western New York (5). Misnomers were simply misidentifications of the flicker with other birds’ names— for example, “golden winged woodcock,” which the flicker was not, except when observed by some of the less discerning residents of Iowa (7). The term “flicker” itself Burns noted, might be either descriptive of the “the peculiar twinkling or flickering of the bright shafts when the wings open and close in flight” or else onomatopoetic, deriving from the “wicher” sound of the bird’s song (6). In general, Burns was opposed to naming creatures after their putative human discoverers, finding “the servitude of the prefixed personal name” to be inferior to “[n]ames descriptive of form, flight, plumage, notes, habits, habitat, characteristics, etc., or of onomatopoetic origin,” as long as the latter were “short and catchy”— as apt a summary of the problems of naming as any in the color literature (4). 70. Gerrit S. Miller Jr., “Some Abnormal Color Markings,” Auk 14, no. 3 (July 1897): 277; Gerrit S. Miller Jr., “The Ground Cuckoo of Andros Island,” Auk 11, no. 2 (Apr. 1894): 164. 71. Gerrit S. Miller Jr., “Descriptions of Six New American Rabbits,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 51, no. 2 (Apr.–Sept. 1899): 383 and n. 6. 72. Gerrit S. Miller Jr., “Twenty New American Bats,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 54, no. 2 (May–Sept. 1902): 402. 73. After Miller’s work with bats, Samuel N. Rhodes, of Portland, Oregon, was an early adopter of Ridgway’s nomenclature for use in describing mammals; see Samuel N. Rhoads,

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menclature of Colors for Naturalists when researching his definitions of colors for the Century Dictionary (see chapter 2). Was it the great accuracy or consistency of these color systems that made them an asset to psychologists? Not especially. In addition to her ridicule of Ridgway, Ladd-Franklin complained that many of Bradley’s papers were insufficiently saturated to be called “spectrum” standards and remarked that even commercial blotting and tissue papers were more vibrant than Bradley’s green. Moreover, when she set Bradley’s blue papers in motion on a spinning disk, “a haze of cloud seemed to spread before them, which made them appear different from the other colors.” As a result, she had to compensate with other colors, such that “some of the reddish blues in the blue series had not only no physical red stimulus in them, but a rather large portion of green”— a complete mismatch with theoretical prediction.74 Nor did Munsell fare much better. Making consistent color standards was difficult work. In 1905 Munsell showed his color system to Arthur Howland, president of Wadsworth and Howland, a printing and pigment supply manufacturer, and the two men contracted to produce a line of Munsell materials— crayons, watercolors, drawing papers, and, of course, color spheres. Although Munsell taught Otto Anderson, the shop foreman at Wadsworth and Howland, “how to balance any color with its opposite . . . and so detect leaning to warmth and coolness,” the work of ensuring that the colors produced in Wadsworth and Howland’s Malden, Massachusetts, factory matched the colors spelled out in his system fell principally to Munsell.75 After finding that a box of “faulty crayons” had slipped out of the factory undetected, he fumed to the factory manager that “each new batch “must be O.K. by me to save misunderstandings.”76 At the same time, the need to produce a steady supply of colors occasionally called for cutting corners. On April 20, 1908, Munsell recorded that he tested the “fifth sample of Munsell yellow (worst yet!). . . . I again criticize it as failing to imi“Contributions to a Revision of the North American Beavers, Otters and Fishers,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 19, no. 3 (1898): 417–39. For an early example of Ridgway’s system in use in entomology— particularly to describe butterflies— see, e.g., James A. G. Rehn, “A Contribution to the Knowledge of the Acrididæ (Orthoptera) of Costa Rica,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 57 (1905): 400–454; and other articles from the period by Rehn. For an early example of Ridgway’s use in mycology, see Charles H. Peck, “New Species of Fungi,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 22, no. 5 (May 15, 1895): 198–211. Ridgway was, nevertheless, still most popular among ornithologists. 74. Ladd-Franklin, untitled notes (color experiments), n.d., box 59, folder: Color, CLF. 75. Munsell, color diary, May 29, 1911, HML. 76. Munsell, color diary, Mar. 15, 1910, HML.

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tate the value hue and chroma of the first enamels.” Three days later, Wadsworth and Howland sent another try at the yellow, which Munsell tested, then accepted— although, he noted, the color was still too red.77 Nor was it the imprimatur of science that made these systems acceptable. Ladd-Franklin’s private taunts of Ridgway would not have shocked the ornithologist. While generally lauding Ridgway’s efforts, Joel Asaph Allen, whom Ridgway had some years earlier recommended for a position as ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, was measured in his appraisal of Ridgway’s color system, giving credit to Ridgway for taking on a “difficult task requiring . . . skill as a colorist, combined with critical knowledge of the requirements of descriptive ornithology,” but concluding that the color section of the book “fails by far, from the nature of the subject, to clear away all the difficulties, since the names of colors in current use are in many cases both vague and variable.”78 In 1909 Ridgway himself denounced his 1886 edition as “manifestly seriously defective in the inadequate number of colors represented, their unscientific arrangement, and the bad method of their reproduction.”79 He revealed that he had been working for years on a revised edition; indeed, the Smithsonian had attempted to recruit Rood to helm the project and had consulted with Bradley on techniques for standardizing. It wasn’t until 1912, though, that Ridgway released a volume devoted exclusively to color names entitled Color Standards and Color Nomenclature.80 As for Munsell, in March 1900 he wrote to Rood, asking for “scientific authority” and wondering “what could be claimed” for his color system.81 Was it scientific? Did it gibe with the understanding of vision espoused by Munsell’s scientific peers? Rood wrote back to advise that Munsell ought not to call his sphere “scientific,” recommending instead that Munsell claim that his system “practically represents a scientific arrangement of colors”— although, Rood assured his interlocutor, he had “no doubt whatever of its 77. Munsell, color diary, Apr. 29, 1908, HML. 78. Joel Asaph Allen, review of A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists, by Robert Ridgway, Auk 4, no. 2 (Apr. 1887): 153. 79. Robert Ridgway and H. B. Kaeding, “Correspondence,” Condor 11, no. 6 (Nov.–Dec. 1909): 210–11. 80. Robert Ridgway, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (Washington: printed by author, 1912). Correspondence between Rood, Ridgway, Bradley, and various figures at the Smithsonian (including Richard Rathbun, Fredrick True, and Samuel Langley) can be found in box 19, folders 15 and 16, SI Office of the Secretary Correspondence, 1866–1906 (SIA RU 31), Smithsonian Institution Archives. 81. Munsell, color diary, Nov. 10, 1900, HML.

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value to the teacher and the artist.”82 In one sense, this was clearly intended to be a tepid endorsement: the “value” to the teacher and artist was not the same as the “value” conferred by science (a small punishment, perhaps, for ignoring Rood’s injunction against trying to physically model a threedimensional color system). And yet, if Munsell’s color system was not quite science— was not quite veridical, did not quite capture in formal terms the full character of color itself— it nevertheless was useful and good. The “values” of the teacher and artist— and, for that matter, the commercial manufacturer— were those of precision, clarity, and impersonal administration. They were, that is, precisely the values that Munsell and his peers wished to see instilled across the entirety of their society. If the particularities of Ridgway’s, Bradley’s, and Munsell’s systems did not precisely match scientific theory, they were well matched to the needs of the society that had created them. “Art may tell small lies,” Munsell reasoned in his diary, “for the sake of a larger truth.”83 82. Ibid. 83. Munsell, color diary, Apr. 29, 1908, HML.

C h a pte r S e v e n

THE LOGICAL AND THE GENETIC Bodies, Work, and Formal Color Notations

The Lesson Denman Ross was a Harvard art professor; color system author; and sometimes- rival, sometimes- friend of Alfred Munsell’s. Between 1898 and Munsell’s death in 1918, he and Munsell collaborated closely and argued bitterly over their color systems. They fought over the meaning of color. They fought over the bases of color harmony. They fought over the nature and demands of a good color system and the proper ways to notate and describe colors. For all their differences, though, the men had two things in common. Both had a commitment to formal austerity in their color systems— to the stark systematization of the pure essence of visual sensation, distilled from the vagaries of individual observers, the obfuscations of colloquial language, and the interference of social meaning. And both had a conviction that it was necessary to train children from an early age in how to see color in this way: singly, universally, and scientifically. So it was that one morning in 1912, Laurena Skinner, an elementary school teacher in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, entered her classroom intent on commencing a series of lessons on the science of color based on Ross’s system. She had each of her students draw nine circles on a piece of paper but found her students to be listless, “as if weary of it all.” It was hard to lead such a group of “tired little brains” in an academic analysis of color, so she decided on a different activity. One of the students was from “the south,” and she asked him to define “plantation.” This he did quite more easily than

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he spoke about colors. From his definition, she began to tell a story and had her students mix shades of red, white, and black paint to fill in the circles as she talked. The story began on a plantation owned by “Mr. White.” He was the first circle in the series and the students painted him as white as the paper. He greeted the students and took them to his “mansion on the hill” to meet his family. His baby daughter’s cheek was such a “delicate color” that the students called her “High Light.” She was the second circle— colored in with just the faintest tint of red within the white. Her bashful older sister blushed when introduced, so she was simply “Light,” the third circle. The fourth circle was a young girl who was visiting; her cheeks wore a “ruddy glow,” so she was “Low Light.” “Most beautiful of all” was the girls’ mother. She was “Normal,” or “Standard Tone” or “Middle Color”— an optically pleasing pink. The sixth circle was a young man who had been out horseback riding; he was “High Dark” and so required “some black with the red.” The “young superintendent of the estate,” used to working outside under the sun, was the next circle: “Dark.” He “apologized for his appearance” but the children said they liked him. “Old Mammy Sue (the girls said she was such a ‘dear’)” was the eighth circle (Low Dark): “only a bit of color showed as the blood rushed under her dark skin.” And the final circle was “Uncle Ned”; “no one could be darker than he,” and therefore he was “Black.”1 In Ross’s formal, disembodied system of color notation, Skinner had found a whole cast of embodied subjects, handily labeled and arranged to synchronize their chromatic appearance with their social standing. At the top was Mr. White, the owner and patriarch: untouched and untouchable but ubiquitous— a standard against which all others could be measured. Next, his female relatives and their friend— akin to Mr. White but attenuated, imperfect, yet pleasing. Following the young women were active young men: a young gentleman, out riding; and the plantation overseer, made dark by his work outdoors and yet still close enough to Mr. White to be embarrassed by his darkness. Mr. White’s domestic worker was close to the bottom of the hierarchy of colors— too dark to be mistaken for one of Mr. White’s family but accepting of her position and therefore affectionately tolerated. She was superordinate only to Uncle Ned— old enough to have been born into slavery, now a kindly if unproductive member of the plantation 1. Laurena Skinner, “The Information Window” (letter to the editors), School Arts Magazine 12, no. 1 (Sept. 1912): 69.

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economy of color. That this simple story about color was also a complicated narrative of race, class, gender, agency, work, and the order of American capitalism at the turn of the century seems plain. The way in which apparently anodyne formalisms for color could come to encode such a story, however, requires explanation. Formal systems of color terminology like those produced by Ross, Munsell, Bradley, and their peers relied on the idea that color could be abstracted from everyday life. Red no longer referred simply to “the color of apples, or blood”; it referred to a point in a system, from which other points could be referenced. Yellow was no longer “the color of buttercups” but a color that was a specific numerical distance from red. White and black weren’t the colors of snow or swans or the night sky but zero- points on color scales. Color was everywhere and could be read into anything with equal perspicacity. But for all the abstraction that ostensibly underpinned formal systems of color, they still demanded viewers capable of decoding them. Such viewers were not hypothetical entities but embodied humans: real people with specific physiological and psychological subjectivities, as well as (in the case of Ross, Munsell, Bradley, and their American peers) specific social, cultural, and legal relationships to other humans that suited them to particular labors of seeing color in the early twentieth- century United States. Systems of color were therefore not simply denotations of color experience. They also implied generalizable arguments about human nature and the proper order of human societies. In the first instance, these arguments might seem merely hypothetical. Munsell and Ross spent a good deal of time disagreeing about how to think about the paradigmatic observer of color: whether, as Ross felt, the observer was an ideal fiction or whether, as Munsell felt, the observer was a conglomeration of physiological processes. When it came to teaching color to children, these arguments hardened into disputes over the nature of the developing human as a product of evolutionary and racial enculturation. Some educators favored structured, “logical” approaches (like Munsell’s and Ross’s), while others favored the freer, “genetic” approaches (in which children were free to explore for themselves). In both cases, however, training the color sense of the developing child always hinged on a racialized juxtaposition between savagery and civilization; the ideal observer of color was always the white, male observer of color. This training of a civilized color sense, moreover, could be leveraged to define explicitly racialized bodies, as when eugenicists Gertrude and Charles Davenport

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applied the systems of grade- school color pedagogy to the eugenic problem of defining human beings against the legal and social questions of race “mixing.”2 There were many ways, of course, to think about color systems. The observers who both constituted such systems and were constituted by such systems at the turn of the century in the United States were no more natural to the history of perception than were the systems of color that they supported. Rather, Ross, Munsell, Bradley, and their many competitors all envisioned subtly different types of viewer- decoders interacting with— and validating— their color systems. They therefore imagined subtly different models of what human beings were like, what the normal observer should be, and how, therefore, human beings ought to function in relation to one another.

The Body aT Work Ross’s and Munsell’s systems were related in a genealogical sense but diverged sharply as to the kind of viewer they described. The final user of Ross’s system, as envisioned by Ross, was disembodied, immaterial— one not unlike the notional Mr. White, who subordinated the physical substance of color to an experience of pure mentation: a body comprehending, feeling, and in control of himself but also invisible and untouchable. For Munsell, in contrast, the user of his color system was a laboring body— a physiological being in need of work and training in order to become used- to and useful- for seeing color. Munsell’s and Ross’s paths first crossed sometime in 1890, possibly through their mutual friendship with Joseph Lindon Smith, a New Hampshire–based painter known for his work documenting the excavation of the pyramids at

2. On studies of race in general and the construction of whiteness in particular, see esp. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, new ed. (London: Verso, 2007); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). On other connections between race and color, see also Baker, From Savage to Negro; Osagie Obasogie, Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books, 2013); Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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Figure 9 Notation by Denman Ross. (Miscellaneous notes, ca. 1891, box 113, Denman Waldo Ross Papers, Harvard Art Museums Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.)

Giza, in Egypt.3 The two men went sketching together at the Isles of Shoals, an artist colony in New Hampshire, and later, in 1892, they traveled to Venice, where the pair seem to have walked around making sketches and talking about color schemes. On an earlier visit to Venice— likely in 1891— Ross had carefully noted color schemes that he had come upon as he examined Venetian art and architecture, including a “scale of value” running from white to black, with orange, red, and blue at different points of intersection: 1 white 2 orange & white 3 claret cobalt? And white 4 orange 5 claret & orange 6 cobalt 7 black

In another space in his notebook, he simply sketched the diagram that appears in figure 9. As they meandered around Venice a year later, Munsell recalled, he and Ross revisited the topic of color systems, “talk[ing] over a systematic color scheme for painters, so as to determine mentally on some sequence before 3. On Ross and Munsell, see esp. Marie Ann Frank, Denman Ross and American Design Theory (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011), esp. 89– 101.

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Figure 10 From Ross, Painter’s Palette, 2.

laying the palette.”4 Ross’s work on formal color palettes galvanized and shaped Munsell’s own chromatic formalisms, although the two men quickly diverged on the precise meaning of their color systems with respect to corporeal viewers. The system that Ross developed took colors to have an essentially geometrical relationship to one another. Although he used the language of musical notation— intervals and tones, for instance— to describe the relations of colors in his system, the basis of his reckoning of color had little to do with physical vibrations and more to do with an ideal, mathematical phenomenology of color.5 To begin with, Ross proposed that all color relations— that is, the organization of all “tones”— were governed by two basic principles: “value” and “color.” “Value” was the degree of lightness or blackness in a color, which Ross conceived of as a ninefold scale of grays which he notated as “white (Wt), High Light (HLt), Light (Lt), Low Light (LLt), Middle (M), High Dark (HD), Dark (D), Low Dark (LD), [and] Black (Blk).”6 Each of the grays could contrast with one another to produce thirty- six sets of contrasts, as shown in figure 10. 4. Munsell, color diary, n.d. (1891), HML. 5. Compare with other systems which brought music and color into explicit dialogue, e.g., Kerry Brougher et al., Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005). 6. Ross sets out his system in The Painter’s Palette: A Theory of Tone Relations, an Instrument of Expression (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), esp. 1–4.

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Figure 11 From Ross, Painter’s Palette, 3.

“Colors,” similarly, could be divided into twelve categories, according to the “spectrum band,” which Ross labeled “V, VR, R, RO, O, OY, Y, YG, G, GB, B, BV” (Ross didn’t specify why he elected to omit “purple” from his list of notations). These colors contrasted with one another “at the interval of the seventh”— that is, any two colors seven increments away from one another would mix to produce one of the nine “values” (fig. 11). On the basis of these scales, Ross proposed that any color could be named according to its value, color, and “intensity,” a quality that Ross declined to define except to note that when a color was called “Low Light Blue, three quarters (LLtB ¾),” it meant that the color was “Blue in the Value of Low Light, three- quarters intensity.”7 If more than a little bit byzantine, Ross’s system became an accepted part of the teaching of design and painting within Harvard’s Fine Arts Division, in which Ross began teaching after 1890.8 Indeed, in 1904 the School Arts Book— a Boston- based journal of art education edited by Henry T. Bailey, a colleague of both Bradley’s and Munsell’s— offered an effusive assessment of Ross’s approach to art education: “[n]ot often does one find the most thorough and scholarly instruction, enriched by the finest obtainable example of artistic achievement, given by a man whose theories are embodied in his own works, and whose charming personality is a perpetual inspiration to nobler living.”9 If Ross’s “personality” was central to Bailey’s appraisal of his system, and

7. Ibid., 17. 8. Marie Ann Frank, “Denman Ross and the Theory of Pure Design,” American Art, Fall 2008, 73–89. 9. Henry Turner Bailey, Editor’s Notes, School Arts Book, Mar. 1904, 336.

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his own works “embodied” his theory, it is nevertheless the case that Ross encoded a singularly ambivalent relationship with embodied and individual human viewers in his system. Ross, as art historian Marie Frank points out, demanded that “art remain a product of the mind” and “not simply a sensory pleasure.”10 His system was one keyed to a human being of pure mentation and was based on imagining acts of perception as ethereal and pure geometric functions rather than embodied in flesh. This did not mean that Ross ignored his contemporaries’ interest in the intersections between the sensual, the cerebral, and the scientific; indeed, quite the opposite— Ross read Rood’s Modern Chromatics with interest and badgered psychologists (and fellow Harvard professors) William James and Hugo Munsterberg about the possible applications that their research on perception might have in the field of design (James quipped that Ross was “saved from being a pedant only by having real feeling”).11 But for Ross, a tremendous gulf distinguished the worlds of that which could be felt with the body and that which could be realized in the mind. As he explained in an undated and unpublished manuscript entitled “Vision and Touch”: “The solid realities of nature, life and art, the objects, people and things including ourselves we never see except as reflections of color in light. As reflections we touch them, handle them, and measure them but we never see them. What we touch we never see. What we see we never touch. As perfumes are intangible so are colors as we see them.”12 (He also included— but eventually redacted— his conviction that “among the solid realities that we touch but never see are the pigments we use in the practice of painting. The painter never sees the materials that he uses.”)13 In this stringent appraisal of the relations of sensation to cognition, then, Ross didn’t so much reject the centrality of the embodied physiology of the viewer as draw a sharp line between objective reality and subjective experience. Indeed, Ross was suspicious of the general amenability of all physical and mental sensations— not just vision— to the metrical tools of science. He wondered in his notes, for instance: “if hunger is merely the feeling of hunger, how can it be measured accurately?”14

10. Frank, “Denman Ross and the Theory of Pure Design,” 74. 11. Quoted in Frank, Denman Ross and American Design Theory, 114. 12. Ross, “Vision and Touch,” n.d., box 39, DWR. 13. Ibid. 14. Ross, notes on article “The Feeling of Hunger,” n.d., box 29, DWR.

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Given Ross’s ultimately disembodied vision of perceptual reality, one might reasonably presume that observers were therefore islands unto themselves— trapped within their own perceptual versions of Plato’s cave. Indeed, in an early draft of his 1912 monograph On Drawing and Painting, Ross declared, “I am no more than a point in space and this is true of everybody”— a startling pronouncement to those who took the corporeality of their personhood seriously.15 The way out of the solipsism of individual mentation, it seemed to Ross, came from mathematics— and particularly mathematics as explained in the work of Henri Poincaré, whose 1905 monograph La valeur de la science (The value of science) Ross interpreted to mean, “what we call objective reality is in the last analysis what is common to many thinking beings and could be common to all. This common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws.”16 This mathematical “harmony”— expressed in terms of regularity and rhythm— governed not only aesthetic experience but also the most fundamental physiological processes. In an undated note Ross wrote, “I go to walk. I don’t think of it but I am taking equal steps in corresponding and equal measures of time. . . . My eating is governed by a quite regularly recurring hunger due to a regularly recurring exhaustion of physical energy. . . . All these rhythms I have described,— of pulsations in the circulation of the blood, of breathing, of walking, and other activities, of eating, go on as the main rhythms of a still greater one, of alternating between consciousness and unconsciousness.”17 The physiological rhythms of everyday existence, that is, harmonized with the rhythms of the physical universe; and the experience of color was part and parcel of this universal rhythm. During a studio visit in 1898, Ross found Munsell struggling to devise a formal mechanism for analyzing the color scheme of a painting (possibly Munsell’s War Cloud, which Munsell painted at the Shoals and mentions having shown to Ross in 1898). For Ross, the problem presented by Munsell’s painting seems to have been how to “to pass from white to black through all possible colors; keeping the colors in their natural relationship, as shown in

15. Ross, typescript of On Drawing and Painting, n.d. (ca. 1911), box Q, DWR. This verbiage does not appear in the published manuscript (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912). 16. Ross, typescript of On Drawing and Painting. This verbiage does not appear in the published manuscript, but Ross included it in Painter’s Palette, 41; and in Experiments in Painting (New York: Century Association, 1923). 17. Ross, untitled (“mss. 4–2”), n.d., box 39, DWR.

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Figure 12 Ross’s sketch of a color spiral, possibly Munsell’s War Cloud. (Color spiral notes, Jan. 10, 1898, boxes U/V and T, Denman Waldo Ross Papers, Harvard Art Museums Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.)

the spectrum” (fig. 12).18 Thinking about his own system of colors— cycles of spectral colors intersecting with cycles of neutral values— Ross envisioned mapping Munsell’s painting as a spiral, with spectral colors as radii diverging at fixed angles from the center of the spiral. The points at which the radii crossed the line of the spiral, Ross proposed, indicated the harmonious mixture of a given spectral color and white or black. The solution evidently impressed Munsell, and he set to work applying Ross’s two- dimensional model to Rood’s three chromatic dimensions. Munsell’s initial formulation of his system owed much to Ross’s preoccupation with geometric idealism. “There is no other form than a sphere upon the surface of which [a color chart] can be spread,” wrote Munsell in 1900, as he refined his color system.19 In a subsequent discussion with Jay 18. Ross, color spiral notes, Jan. 10, 1898, boxes U/V and T, DWR. 19. Albert Munsell, Color Sphere and Mount, US Patents 640, 792, filed Apr. 14, 1899, and issued Jan. 9, 1900.

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Hambidge, an art educator and friend of Ross’s who published extensively on the “golden ratio” found both in Greek architecture and in various natural forms, Munsell marveled at the fact that the “ratios in Botany, Conchology and Crystals” all suggested “Platonic solids [that] inscribe and excribe a sphere.” Such were the “advantages,” Munsell concluded, “of a circle as a point of departure.”20 In his notes for the physical realization of his “color sphere”— which he patented in 1901— Munsell reveled in the ideal form of color that the sphere represented: the sphere was to be conceived of as “built up of an infinite number of parallel superposed color circles.” 21 Different color relations could “be traced through the substance of the sphere— by means of sections, segments, sectors, spherical triangles, chords, radii or other elements of the sphere.”22 In his final patent, Munsell’s color sphere appears as a globe, traversed with angular lines from pole to pole. As with Ross’s system, any one of these spirals traced a sequence of colors between black and white— say, from white, to light red, to less- light orange, to bright yellow, to darker green, to even darker blue, to very dark purple, to black— and the precise colors discovered therein were, Munsell asserted, necessarily aesthetically pleasing. The color sphere, he noted privately, was an apt demonstration of Hegel’s notion of “the free and adequate embodiment of an idea— in a form peculiarly appropriate to the idea itself.”23 Insofar as it was the “embodiment” of an idea, however— one rendered into tangible, physical form (and patented, even!)— Munsell’s system along with its underlying assumptions about viewership parted ways with Ross’s. The color sphere, Munsell explained in his patent application, was intended to present “a sequence of colors as they exist in nature and to present to the eye an orderly arrangement of colors in a great variety of sequences”— indeed, ultimately, in an infinite variety of sequences.24 It was this intersection of the living eye with nature that validated the orderly arrangement of Munsell’s system. His system, that is, was not, precisely, ideal but was instead “logical” in the sense that Ladd-Franklin or Peirce might use the term. It was designed to continually reiterate the living truth of color to precisely those observers who could make sense of that truth. To coordinate the numerical values of color as a lived experience with the

20. Munsell, color diary, n.d. (1899), HML. 21. Munsell, color diary, n.d. (p. 9 of typescript), HML. 22. Munsell, color diary, n.d. (1899), HML. 23. Munsell, color diary, n.d. (1900), HML. 24. Munsell, Color Sphere and Mount, US Patents 640, 792 (emphasis added).

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ideal geometry of the color sphere, Munsell sat a collection of observers— including himself, his wife, Ector, and various visitors to his studio— in front of a variety of technologies designed to analyze the constituent parts of subjective color sensations and render them into systems of numbers. With the careful twiddling of a set of dials, for instance, a photometer of Munsell’s devising would display a numerical measurement of its user’s sense of the brightness of any color, independent from its hue and chroma. A separate device could be used to measure its users’ sense of chroma, or colorimetric saturation, through an ingeniously rigged set of spinning color wheels. Those same color wheels, meanwhile, could be used to measure the relative positions of Munsell’s five primary colors, the better to establish equal perceptual distance between each point in the color sphere. Working with observers, however, was not the same as theorizing an ideal system of color relations, since observers could disagree with Munsell’s color values in ways that pure geometrical solids could not. On May 27, 1901, for instance, Charles Prichard, Munsell’s lawyer, examined the color sphere in Munsell’s studio and objected that the yellow that Munsell had used was “not the accepted type,” calling it “brown” rather than yellow. And indeed, for “middle yellow” Munsell had used a pigment called “raw sienna,” which ranged in hue from a mustard to a sort of light shoe- leather color.25 Similarly, when Munsell asked Rood for advice, the aging scientist was critical of the “purple and violet” sections of Munsell’s sphere, saying that Munsell’s choices were “all off.”26 And for his part, Ross complained for years that Munsell’s values were “inaccurate,” expressing his preferences for a more “purple red” and “find[ing] the yellow- green too dark.”27 Faced with the recalcitrance of living bodies, Munsell primary tactic was simply to argue his subjects into accepting his interpretation of their color sensations. In response to Prichard’s protests, Munsell fished out his copy of the Century Dictionary, where he pointed his lawyer to Peirce’s definition of brown as “a dark or dusky color leaning towards redness or yellowness”— a clear enough indication that “brownish” was still within the yellow family. When Prichard persisted, arguing that Munsell had to “give good reason for displacing [the] popular notion” of yellow, Munsell treated him to a comprehensive reiteration of his color theory until Prichard relented, admitting that it was “logical that a middle yellow should unite equal degrees of 25. Munsell, color diary, May 27, 1901, HML. 26. Munsell, color diary, May 17, 1901, HML. 27. Munsell, color diary, May 20, 1900, HML.

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light and dark.”28 Munsell similarly met Rood’s objection by pressuring the elderly scientist to recant his criticism. Facing Munsell’s vigorous defense of his color sphere, Rood allowed that the “angular distribution” of colors around the sphere was correct and admitted that he “[could] not say that the colors are misnamed.”29 (Ross held out for the longest period of time— though by the end of Munsell’s life, Ross appears to have accepted Munsell’s sphere, its divisions, and his color choices, and after Munsell’s death, Ross incorporated aspects of his theories into his Painter’s Palette.)30 More disturbingly for Munsell’s conception of a uniform color space was the fact that when he normalized his measurements of the hue, value, and chroma experiences of his observers, he discovered that they were unevenly distributed. A color like yellow had a much greater value at its highest chroma, or color intensity, than did a color like blue: thus, their extremes were located at opposite points along the vertical axis of the color solid. The red sector of the color solid, meanwhile, which had the greatest extreme of chroma, projected twice as far from the center of the sphere as the least chromatically intense color, a bluish green. Yellow projected nearly as far as red, but its complement, purple- blue, did not. The color sphere was less of an ideal solid than a tuberous spheroid— “an irregular shape, with mountains and valleys, corresponding to the inequalities of pigments.”31 Munsell recognized that he had put the cart before the horse in specifying the ideal topography of color space before he knew the “facts” of vision.32 As his friend B. I. Gilman remarked, the “geographer describes the facts of any country, and the monarch decrees its subdivision and government, but watershed described the flow of water.”33 This did not invalidate the concept of the color sphere, however. Within the asymmetrical color solid, Munsell insisted, the symmetrical color sphere still existed. It was simply obscured by the “enormous mountains” of vivid color that projected from its surface. If one were to position the lumpy color spheroid “in a turning lathe and tur[n] [it] down until the color maxima are removed, thus producing a color solid no larger than the chroma of its weakest pigment,” Munsell reasoned, one would produce the original color sphere, albeit one that displayed considerably less vivid colors around its 28. Munsell, color diary, May 27, 1901, HML (emphasis in original). 29. Munsell, color diary, May 17, 1901, HML. 30. Frank, Denman Ross and American Design Theory, 101. 31. Munsell, Color Notation (1st ed.), 52. 32. Munsell, color diary, n.d. (1902), HML. 33. Munsell, color diary, Apr. 2, 1901, HML.

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Figure 13 Within the uneven highs and lows of the color “tree” sat Munsell’s color sphere. (Munsell, A Color Notation [1907], 23)

equator (fig. 13).34 These less vivid colors Munsell called “middle colors,” and he made them the central point of his color theory. Rather than concentrating on the bright colors that had attracted his peers (such as Bradley), Munsell thought of the middle colors as the basis of all balanced color sensations, and thereafter, he thought of the color sphere as a “chromatic tuning fork,” a baseline from which all other sensations could be calculated.35 Indeed, once one understood the ways in which the ideal viewer was not unlike the color sphere itself, color balance worked as a matter of physiological fact. It was possible to see the ways in which viewers had to be trained to see in order to accommodate their own physiologies. Just as the color sphere was an example of ideal order contained within an irregular space, so too did observers contain a regular color sense that only needed to be trained into conformity with Munsell’s system. The labor of becoming such an observer was in part the responsibility of the creator of the system and in part the work of the observer. 34. Munsell, Color Notation (1st ed.), 73. 35. Ibid., 10.

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CoLors ThaT shriek and sWear Of greatest concern to Munsell and his peers in color pedagogy was the question of how children learned about colors. To Munsell, it was necessary to train children early in his “logical” system, which placed “middle colors” in a central position. Bright colors were violent, overly sensual, “savage,” dangerous. They needed to be held back from children until the child had acquired the skills to contain and control them. To others among Munsell’s peers, however, it was the very savagery of color that a child had to experience in order to develop the self- possession and good taste that would mark him (or her) as having a mastery over color. Training the color sense required a “genetic” approach that allowed children to experience savagery on the way to civilization. Partisans of the “logical” might differ from partisans of the “genetic,” but both expressed the need for color education as a concern with the developing child’s body, not just as a matter of cultivating taste in the abstract but as part of an implicitly racialized distinction between savagery and civilization. If Munsell disagreed with Ross about the fundamental constitution of the observer of color, he nevertheless agreed that balance and harmony were a desired and, indeed, necessary part of the human sensorium. The eye, thought Munsell, was an organ in a constant state of flux between balance and upset in its color- sensing capacities. Each of the retina’s three primary color receptors— red, green, and blue— strove to maintain parity with the others. Bright colors could potentially overload these receptors, “fatiguing” the eye and throwing the whole color- sensing apparatus off- balance. In a state of nature, such a condition of unbalance was unlikely to occur. The eye had developed in order to apprehend a chromatic environment dominated by “middle” hues, which easily maintained the balance of the ocular system. “Nature, who would seem to be the source of our notions of color harmony,” Munsell wrote in the second (1907) edition of A Color Notation, “rarely repeats herself, yet is endlessly balancing inequalities of hue, value, and chroma by compensations of quantity.”36 True, the natural world might present small surges of intense color— for instance, bright- yellow buttercups or red poppies— but, Munsell pointed out, “Their sunlit points give pleasure because they are surrounded and balanced by blue ether and wide green fields. Were these conditions reversed, so that the flowers appeared as 36. Munsell, Color Notation (2nd ed.), 60.

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little spots of blue or green in great fields of blazing red, orange, and yellow, our pained eyes would be shut in disgust.”37 The built environment of the turn of the century, on the other hand, showed no such restraint. If nature provided abundant instances of color balance, for Munsell the “gaudy chromo [i.e., chromolithograph] and flaming bill- board” provided the opposite— a state in which “the balance of color is rendered impossible.”38 Misunderstanding the true nature of the relationships between colors led to a dissonance between mental perception and physical stimulus. This dissonance, in turn, could lead to more than just an unpleasant viewing experience or discomfort in the eyes. “There are color groups,” Munsell wrote, “which, acting through the eye, can convey pleasure or pain to the mind.”39 He warned his readers that “[t]o range at random in the immense field of color sensations, without plan or definite aim in view, only courts fatigue of the retina and a chaotic state of mind.”40 Attempting to navigate the modern visual sensorium unaided was bad for one’s health, both physically and mentally. Munsell’s system offered nothing less than visual prophylaxis: “balance— retinal ease— freedom from strain and fatigue,” he jotted in his notes.41 Children, in Munsell’s view, were especially vulnerable to the strain of the modern visual environment. For Munsell, therefore, any scientific color training had to begin with children and would necessarily consist of a steady strengthening of the color sense, beginning with his middle colors and working gradually and methodically toward a mastery of stronger and stronger colors. This was the message that Munsell endeavored to convey on the afternoon of May 16, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland, when he presented a lecture on his system to the annual meeting of the Eastern Art and Manual Training Teachers’ Association. “Beginners should avoid Strong Color,” Munsell announced to his assembled audience of teachers. “Extreme red, yellow, and blue are discordant. (They ‘shriek’ and ‘swear.’)” And yet, he continued, “there are some who claim that the child craves them, and must have them to produce a thrill.” This might be true, allowed Munsell, but just because children wanted bright colors, it did not mean they should have them.

37. Ibid. 38. Munsell, Color Notation (1st ed.), 78. 39. Ibid., 70. 40. Ibid., 30. 41. Munsell, color diary, Nov. 27, 1906, HML.

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“For,” he explained, “so also does [the child] crave candies, matches, and the carving- knife. Like the blazing bill- board and the circus wagon, they may be suffered out- of- doors; but such boisterous sounds and color sprees are unfit for the school- room.”42 Rather than allow their students simply to muddle through the perils of bright colors by themselves, Munsell insisted that a “systematic discipline of the color sense is necessary for most children.”43 His system— one based on logical order and the empirical study of color physiology— could provide the basis of this discipline. “Discipline of the color sense,” to Munsell and his audience, meant more than simply learning about and thinking about colors. It meant training the bodies of children to become physically compliant with the visual regimens of the modern world. Far from being a stable property of lived experience, for Munsell and his like- minded colleagues, the “true” experience of color was precarious and fluid. As Anson Cross, one of Munsell’s fellow professors at the Massachusetts Normal Art School put it, the “average man” was “blind” to color— not in terms of “actual perception” but in the ability to make sense of the stimuli bombarding him from without.44 The only cure for this condition, Cross suggested, was a careful extraction of the cognitive weeds that stood between common sense and bodily experience. For Munsell, the “innocent eye” of ideal vision was not so much innocent as hopelessly naive: “the eye is the most easily ‘fooled’ of all our senses,” he remarked. “Color impressions are so fleeting . . . that one must have a fixed point of departure to determine his bearings in the sea of color.”45 What was needed to fix the point of departure was strong training in the logic of color systems, the better to adapt the body to seeing correctly. Nor were concerns with the malleability of the senses limited to educators. Author Theodore Dreiser wrote breathlessly of his discovery, through the works of psychologist Elmer Gates, that “the senses can be educated to a much higher degree of accuracy” than had ever been previously experienced— an exciting development not least of all “[b]ecause the senses are the instruments of observation by which we get images of objects, and the investigator who can see color- differences and hear sound- differences and feel touch- differences more minutely than another will be able to detect physical differences in objects not before detected and so increase the

42. Munsell, Color Notation (1st ed.), 60–61. 43. Ibid., 26. 44. Anson K. Cross, Color Study: A Manual for Teachers and Students (Boston: Ginn, 1895), 2. 45. Munsell, “Color and an Eye to Discern It,” 115.

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sum of human knowledge.”46 Gates, for his part, described the experimental results of a period he spent “giving certain animals an extraordinary and excessive training in one mental faculty.” “During five or six months, for five or six hours each day,” he wrote, “I trained dogs in discriminating colors. The result was that upon examining the occipital areas of their brains I found a far greater number of brain- cells than any animal of like breed ever possessed.”47 When applied to children rather than canines, similar regimens of training the color sense would yield individuals who were not just psychologically but physiologically better suited to seeing bright colors without injury. As an advertisement for the Munsell Color System in the American School Board Journal instructed teachers: “Red— Yellow— Blue are not the primary colors. But we have always been taught to believe this. Strong red, yellow and blue pigments are beyond a child’s control. These violent colors set up at the outset a false notion of color relation.”48 Still, there was hope: the Munsell Color System offered to teach color not based on bright red, yellow, and blue primary colors but on Munsell’s “middle” colors— the foundations of a measured system that would demonstrate appropriate color relations to children. “These colors,” Munsell’s advertisement advised, “should be used in the form of crayons, water colors, atlases of charts, sphere, etc.” This was, after all, “the only method of teaching color scientifically.”49 With Munsell’s guidance, children could be trained early on in proper modes of vision, replacing the “screaming” yellows, “violent” reds, and “indistinct” blues of conventional education with Munsell’s own carefully calibrated “middle” hues, as determined by rigorous scientific research. The point was subtle but clear: as important as it was to pay attention to the identity of primary colors, it was equally as important to consider the effects that color intensity had on developing bodies and minds. Given the proof of the validity of his system, and the indisputable body 46. Theodore Dreiser, “The Training of the Senses,” unpublished manuscript, n.d., folder 12433, Theodore Dreiser Papers (Ms. Coll. 30), Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 47. Elmer Gates, The Relations and Development of the Mind and Brain (New York: Theosophical Society, 1904), 9. 48. See, e.g., advertisement for “Munsell Color System,” Journal of Education, Jan. 21, 1915, 56; or advertisement for “Munsell Color System,” in American School Board Journal 47, no. 6 (June 1914): 60. Munsell cribbed this exact wording from a talk that he gave to “supervisors of art and manual training,” at MIT in November 1908, subsequently published as “A Measured Training of the Color Sense.” 49. Advertisement for “Munsell Color System.”

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of evidence upon which it was based, it seemed preposterous to Munsell that anyone could fail to see his system as the one best way of developing the organs of physiological aesthetics in young children. Nevertheless, he complained to his audience in Baltimore, “education seems unable to take this hint of color balance.”50 The gaudy colors of common pedagogical tools for elementary education (manufactured, among other places, in Bradley’s Springfield factory) “started the child at his most impressionable age with false notions and a crude disregard of balance,” Munsell complained.51 Moreover, while some teachers took care to teach their students about the importance of his middle colors, others taught the logical basis of his system but then went ahead and let their students use bright colors anyway— a subversion of the very physiological principles upon which his system was based. In light of this mixed compliance, Munsell accused his audience of apostasy. “Perhaps you reject the verdict of science,” he taunted. “You say a colorist is born, not educated, and that any reference to science is a waste of time.” The question “What measures underlie the art of pleasing color[?]” he scolded, was “sometimes met with a blank look of incredulity.” But why should this be the case? If pleasing color derived from chromatic harmony, and chromatic harmony from balance, then that balance should in turn be measurable— and if measurable, then those measurements should “be standardized by scientific methods or they will . . . vary from day to day, according to the mental and physical poise of the individual.” Now, he chided the assembled teachers, “perhaps you think this too exact and formal as an approach to color study.” Indeed, perhaps, “the thought arise[s] that this scientific structure unfits it for a child.”52 Nevertheless, if one considered the training of the other senses, an unmeasured approach to color seemed manifestly absurd: “We do not shout in an infant’s ear, or give it strong food, or handle it with violence. And, in later education, loud sounds are not the basis of musical training, nor savage feats the door to graceful demeanor.”53 “Only in color does such savagery exist,” he concluded to his audience in Baltimore. “Education aims at control of the body and the mind, and it is high time to apply logical methods in the training of the eye.”54 The discussion period following the talk yielded decidedly mixed re-

50. Munsell, “Color and an Eye to Discern It,” 13. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 13.

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sponses. Royal Farnum, a former student of Munsell’s and the director of art education for New York State, could barely contain his enthusiasm. “I am so optimistic about this so- called Munsell color theory,” he declared, “that I feel like the man who went into the restaurant without a cent in his pocket and ordered a dozen blue points and a pint of ale, knowing that he would find a pearl to pay for it at the end.”55 For Farnum, Munsell’s system offered unprecedented access to a deep, epistemological truth: “I believe we have not taught color, for the simple reason that we have not known it. . . . There is no doubt but that a false color theory should give way to a true color theory, and then I feel we will be able to teach it.”56 Similarly, James Frederick Hopkins, director of the School of Art and Design at the Maryland Institute, lauded Munsell as the living embodiment of a newer, truer form of perception. “Here is a man who sees color,” Hopkins exclaimed. “Wouldn’t you like to study in his studio and say, ‘By Jove! I have done that thing?’”57 Others, however, were not so certain. R. K. Piez of the Oswego Normal School grumbled that “theory is something which the scientist has ‘put over’ the colorist.” He assured the assembly that “[c]hildren don’t start out with theories and don’t start out with systems”— “children are empiricists, they are not scientists.”58 For Piez, a child’s first imperative was to learn about the stuff of color: about pigment, how pigment was applied to paper, how mixing different pigments made different colors. From this activity, children could eventually come to learn different theories of color, but these theories did not precede practice. Indeed, Piez was skeptical about the injurious effects of bright colors on young eyes: “I don’t find that [children] reject the violent colors or are in any way tainted by them; I don’t find that they are in any way injured by them.”59 As for training the eye, Piez remarked that “the eye is just an optical instrument, and we might as well talk about developing the lenses from the microscope as developing the eye.”60 For Piez, Munsell’s proposal represented a flawed assessment of child cognition and children’s physiology. Langdon Thompson, a drawing teacher from New Jersey, agreed, noting that “the work of any mind must be practical” before it was theoretical: “We must begin to form some sort of order and arrange55. Ibid. (discussion), 16. 56. Ibid. (discussion), 17. 57. Ibid. (discussion), 24. 58. Ibid. (discussion), 19. 59. Ibid. (discussion), 19–20. 60. Ibid. (discussion), 20.

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ment (which is nothing more than theory) when we begin to practice.”61 And for her part, though Emma Church, principal of the normal school at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, felt that Munsell’s system was assuredly “scientifically color true,” she questioned whether his precisely defined color relations would truly allow the development of fine and even affective relationships with color. Was not the human experience of color sensations inherently, even advantageously, fluid and vague?62 Despite the aspersions that Munsell cast on their commitment to science, then, for his interlocutors in Baltimore the problem wasn’t with science per se. True, some educators in the United States certainly sided with the architecture critic Russell Sturgis, who had written to the president of Columbia University in 1902, cautioning that “a manual art has nothing to do with the thoughts which are expressible in words; by it [i.e., art] thoughts are expressed wholly otherwise.” Indeed, for Sturgis, any art education, scientific or otherwise, could do “nothing but injury” to the careers of budding artists.63 But among the educators who were unsure about Munsell’s color theory in Baltimore, science was an integral part of education— not to be banished or distrusted but rather to be leveraged for better education, better students, and (in turn) a better society. Church’s mission at the Chicago normal school, after all, was to “acquaint [prospective teachers] with the principles of scientific education,” which included not only “principles of design, composition and color, [and] applied design” but also “physiology [and] psychology.”64 The question with which these educators struggled was how Munsell’s theoretical model— even if realized in material form— conformed not only to physiology and psychology but also to extant scientific understandings of developmental physiology and psychology, construed in this instance as a physical correlate to cultural advancement (see chapter 4). Even as Munsell was conceptualizing his system, Thompson had written in 1896 that the challenge of education was to get “the rising generation to know right, to

61. Ibid. (discussion), 23. 62. Ibid. 63. Russell Sturgis, “The Study of Art: Its Proper Place in a University Course,” New York Times, July 5, 1902, BR15. 64. Jeannette Buckley, “Normal Art Schools,” in Art Education in the Public Schools of the United States: A Symposium Prepared under the Auspices of the American Committee of the Third International Congress for the Development of Drawing and Art Teaching, London, August, 1908, ed. James Parton Haney (New York: American Art Annual, 1908), 333.

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feel right, and to do right”— a collusion of knowledge, sensation, and morality that could come only from systematic study that was attentive to what he presumed to be the biological facts of human development. “It seems to be agreed,” wrote Thompson, “that the child, at least in a general way, passes through the same stages of evolution that the race passed through.” In other words, in their own physiological, mental, and aesthetic development, children (construed as normatively white, and male) recapitulated the march from savagery to civilization that was the story of their own society. It would not do, therefore, to attempt to teach a scientific system of color like Munsell’s to a child who was still in the “savage, barbarous, or semi- barbarous stage” of development.65 This argument was echoed in various instantiations throughout the twentieth century by the child study movement introduced by G. Stanley Hall, which emphasized, among other things, that models of education such as Munsell’s, which exposed children to abstract reasoning early on, were not, in fact, scientifically astute forms of childhood pedagogy. For Hall and his followers, children’s apprehension of the world around them stemmed directly from their physical development, which itself recapitulated the social and evolutionary development of human beings. This, in turn, insinuated that the best pedagogical strategy was to let children’s interests guide their choices of educational topics— lest one stunt the children’s development and hinder them from becoming morally upright, productive members of society. As Frederick Burk, one of Hall’s followers, noted, “the child who is most the child, as a child, will be most the man, as a man.”66 Children were unprepared for dealing with color in scientific terms until much later than Munsell proposed. Hall and his followers pronounced on a variety of subjects, from the proper teaching of geography to the development of instincts of love and home. For art educators, the recapitulation of “primitive” forms of development offered a path to understanding the ways in which children’s sensations and perceptions changed over time. In his 1902 article “The Genetic versus the Logical Order in Drawing,” for instance, Burk— president of the State Normal School in San Francisco— argued that art education should

65. Langdon Thompson, “Art in the Schoolroom, Through Decoration and Works of Art,” in Proceedings and Addresses of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the National Education Association, Buffalo 1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1896): 681. 66. Frederick Burk, “The Genetic versus the Logical Order in Drawing,” Pedagogical Seminary 9 (1902): 321. Hall was the editor of this journal.

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be firmly grounded in the evolutionary physicality of the student. “Dispositions,” wrote Burk, “tempers, traits of character, instincts, emotions, love, music, art, faith, and even the religious impulses, whose roots perhaps reach back into countless ranks of ancestry are nonetheless indications of physiological states of the organism at a given moment.”67 As such, education ought to follow the “genetic” interest of the child rather than the “logical” order imposed by adults. Because of “interest shown to be generic and deeply rooted in hereditary tendencies in all probability,” children didn’t naturally want to start drawing by using simple geometric shapes.68 Children preferred prelinguistic, prelogical— indeed, prehistoric— forms of mark- making such as scribbling or enacting nonrepresentational or performative scenes on paper (drawing a bird, for instance, as a line, such that the act of drawing the line symbolized the bird’s flight). And they should be allowed to pursue these endeavors, Burk argued, lest attempts to stifle such efforts adversely affect “health and preservation” and cause “injury to immature forms of development.”69 Writing specifically on color sensation a decade later, Amy Eliza Tanner hewed to a similar line of reasoning: “In [his or her appreciation of color] the child follows, in the main, the race development: bright or gaudy colors before delicate ones, and the utilitarian value of objects before the aesthetic.”70 For those in Munsell’s audience in 1912 who were uncomfortable with his system, then, the problem was not that Munsell’s system was too scientific. The problem was that he had incorrectly apprehended the means to a commonly held end. Both Munsell and his opponents were concerned with the “ancestral and racial” development of the color sense and had gone looking for it in the physiology of the developing child. And both Munsell and his opponents were concerned with the ways in which physiology and aesthetics were interlinked, on a deep level, with a notional natural history of racial development. Indeed, if one could see a certain antimodernism in Munsell’s 67. Ibid., 307–8. Indeed, Burk was so committedly corporeal that even when moved to class certain habits of drawing as “psychological,” he immediately qualified his categorization, noting that these inaccuracies “may be classified as psychological, not, however, with the implication that they have no physiologically causal dependence” (316). Thompson would have been aware of Burk’s work, if not through general interest then through a 1908 art educators’ conference in England for which he was on the coordinating committee. See Haney, Art Education in the Public Schools of the United States, 109. 68. Burk, “Genetic versus Logical,” 307. 69. Ibid., 306. 70. Amy Eliza Tanner, The Child: His Thinking, Feeling, and Doing (New York: Rand, McNally, 1904), 469.

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conviction that human vision was calibrated to view the natural world and not one of garish billboards and electric signs, this was nevertheless a nostalgia, not for primitivism, but for an authentic experience of civilization, coded in terms of white virtue.71 The only thing they disagreed on was the precise means by which to surpass dark savagery en route to enlightened (white) civilization. For Munsell, the child was a tabula rasa: a blank slate— or, more accurately, a white slate— that had to be trained in order to avoid a tendency toward atavism in the face of sensual, modern colors that shrieked and swore. According to his opponents, however, children had to be allowed to shriek (if not swear) and to seek out the primitive impulses that they would learn to supersede. Under Munsell’s system, some teachers complained, students could not even paint “buttercups in the first three grades.”72 For these teachers, the problem was not, as Munsell had put it, that color education was characterized by savagery. In fact, it was precisely the reverse. In putting theory before sensation— in attempting to cultivate an image in children’s minds of “measured” color sensations before children even knew what to measure— Munsell’s system did not allow savagery enough, on the way to civilization. Munsell left Baltimore after his talk on a 5:00 train, evidently pleased with his presentation. In subsequent weeks he was preoccupied with administrative matters. He was about to release a new “color atlas,” a definitive guide to his color system, with each alphanumeric designation attached to a particular shade. He had recently been informed that a law passed in 1896 potentially invalidated his claim to royalties accrued from Massachusetts schools’ purchases of Munsell items because of his position at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. A steady trickle of curious teachers and school administrators filtered through his studio. At the same time, Henry Bailey, who had been initially receptive to his system, had, in 1909, turned hostile, claiming that Munsell “was wrong in assuming that a child’s brain is already developed to a point where it is susceptible to subtle color,” an argument that Munsell dismissed out of hand, writing to Bailey that “to put yourself in touch with progress— you certainly need to heed my friendly warning [i.e., to accept the Munsell system].”73 Bailey did not heed Mun-

71. For a comprehensive description of antimodernism in turn- of- the- century America, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 72. Munsell, color diary, Mar. 15, 1909, 252, HML. 73. Munsell, color diary, Sept. 20, 1909, HML.

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sell’s warning and in 1912 penned a sharply worded editorial urging a “return to strong color.”74 The next year Bailey was back at Munsell’s studio. Evidently, Munsell’s talk had convinced influential people within the Eastern Arts and Manual Training Teachers’ Association, because Bailey said he was willing to vouch for the Munsell system in the School Arts Book since the system was widely accepted by their membership. But his recommendation came with a word of admonishment. “[Bailey] [t]hinks I have acted as if I only was right, and all others are wrong,” noted Munsell in his journal, “but he will not let me treat him so.” This said, Munsell noted that Bailey had “never doubted that I was scientifically right— and had established the standard— but had not adapted it to long established habits of color thought.”75 Those habits of thought were not simply those about color— they were habits of thought about how human beings related to each other and to the world around them.

The eugeniCisTs As he traveled back up the Eastern Seaboard from Baltimore to Boston, Munsell’s train whisked him past the location of another project in the formalization of habits of thought about color and human bodies: in this instance, the “quantitative determination” of the colors of different types of human skin.76 For Gertrude and Charles Davenport— founders of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, eleven miles across Long Island Sound from New Haven, Connecticut— the problem of race mixing in America was a pressing one for scientists and society alike. Different races, believed the Davenports, had different aptitudes for a wide variety of social and civic activities alike— from thrift and civic organization to military leadership, love of music, and tendency to go to sea. It was their job as geneticists to collect information on these attributes and to anticipate how qualities of different races might spread through society. Geneticists of the early twentieth century saw many morphological features of humans as relevant markers of race— stature, hair color and consistency, skull shape and skull volume among them— but for the Davenports, the primary and most visible indicator of race was skin color.

74. Munsell, color diary, Oct. 30, 1912, HML. 75. Munsell, color diary, Mar. 7, 1913, HML. 76. Charles Benedict Davenport, Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1913).

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The Davenports were leaders in the burgeoning field of American eugenics: an endeavor to apply principles of selective breeding to human populations for the betterment of the nation’s “stock” of healthy, productive, morally upstanding citizens. As Charles put it, eugenics was “the method of cure of ills; the method of prevention of incidence; and the method of strengthening resistance.”77 The purpose of studying skin color was to determine how races “mixed”— in order to better understand the perils and possibilities of “amalgamating” notional races of people. On the one hand, the Davenports saw the “[m]ain problem” of their work as identifying “the capacity for the negro to carry on a white man’s civilization,” a question that in its very articulation predicted an unpromising answer.78 At the same time, heritable characteristics could be altered over time. As the Davenports explained, “it is supposed that, in . . . successive matings with white, not only skin color but also the form of the hair and the mental traits approach those of the white.”79 This was a desirable outcome, and one that indicated the fundamental aim of eugenics: to make better, more moral, more productive citizens, it was necessary to know how races mixed. If the Davenports’ was not the same problem of logic that preoccupied Ross and of genetics that preoccupied Munsell, in its concern with color as an indicator of both social hierarchy and human development it was a cognate endeavor. As with color pedagogy, in the Davenports’ formulation eugenics was a matter of locking subjective human characteristics— in this instance, race as a colorimetric quantity— into a formal vocabulary. And as with color science, this formal vocabulary yielded a new way of imagining human beings both as individual subjects and as related in society. Indeed, as with the study of color, so too eugenics was, as Charles wrote, a kindred science with “medicine and physiology, . . . education and mental measurement, . . . governmental administration [and] anthropology and ethnology,” among other fields.80 Moreover, insofar as it was the case that eugenics followed color science into the exploration of pedagogy and mental life, it is perhaps unsurprising that it was in an educational device for teaching color 77. Davenport, n.d., 1910, diary, box 18, Charles Benedict Davenport Papers (Mss.B.D27), American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter abbreviated as CBD). 78. Davenport to Steggerda, Mar. 26, 1927, box 133, folder: Steggerda, Morris, 1926 (Apr.– Sept.), CBD. 79. C. Davenport, Heredity of Skin Color, 28. 80. Charles Davenport, “Notes Explanatory to the Yearbook Abstract,” n.d., box 71, folder: “The Establishment of the Eugenic Record Office,” CBD.

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to elementary school children— Milton Bradley’s color top— that Charles found his ideal way of measuring color. The point of measuring skin color, wrote Charles, was to determine an individual’s standing in society “optically, socially, and politically.” 81 In societies in which people of different notional races reproduced, reasoned the Davenports, it was common to find well- developed vocabularies that coded individual, family, and community racial genealogy in terms of skin color. The problem for scientists, as the Davenports saw it, was that terms used in colloquial and scientific apprehensions of skin color alike provided a “poor means of expressing degrees and quality of skin pigment.” Rather than relying on the loose correlation of optical terms like “pale,” “dark,” “olive,” and “black” to notionally hereditary terms like “white,” “mulatto,” “octoroon,” and “negro,” the Davenports wished to express race in terms of a purely quantitative measure of skin color. This would allow scientists, as they put it, to “determine the standard of color” of “negro” and “mulatto”— and thereby to set laws governing the reproduction and rights of different races of human beings on firmly scientific ground.82 Gertrude and Charles met at Radcliffe College in 1894 when Gertrude was a student doing postgraduate work in biology and Charles was an instructor. Gertrude was by all accounts a brilliant student with an interest in human demography; Charles was among an early generation of scientists— including Karl Pearson and Francis Galton— who endeavored to apply mathematical precision to rules of biological reproduction through the study of heritability (or “genetics” as it would come to be called).83 After Harvard, the Davenports spent five years at the University of Chicago, from which institutional base they persuaded the Carnegie Institution of Washington to underwrite a state- of- the- art facility for the study of genetics. In 1904 Charles assumed the directorship of the new Station for Experimental Evo81. C. Davenport, Heredity of Skin Color, 10, 28. 82. Ibid., 10. 83. On eugenics in the United States and the Davenports in particular, see, e.g., E. Carleton MacDowell, “Charles Benedict Davenport, 1866– 1944: A Study of Conflicting Influences,” Bios 17, no. 1 (1946): 2–50; Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), esp. 48–106; Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 2003); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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lution at Cold Spring Harbor. The station was an early success, producing noteworthy work on heritability in canaries and chickens. In 1910 the Davenports wrangled a further fortune from E. H. Harriman— widow of a railroad magnate— which they used to found the Eugenics Record Office, a clearinghouse for work in human genetics. In that time, the Davenports had moved from inheritance in poultry to questions of human genetics. Their studies initially focused on easily visualized morphology: first eye color (1907); then hair color (1908); and finally, in 1910, skin pigmentation.84 Of their work on the heritability of pigmentation, Charles wrote, “[i]f we have hitherto made little progress in eugenics it is because there has been little precise knowledge as to the result of any mating.”85 In the study of the heritability of skin color, a definite, formal measurement of color would be critical. The Davenports undertook their studies of skin color in three major phases. In their first study in 1910, they worked with researchers in the southern United States, compiling genealogical tables and coordinating those tables with the skin colors of parents and children. Working in the South, however, involved what the Davenports glossed as “social complications”— namely, the fact that interracial sexual relationships were prohibited by law. To evade this inconvenience— which the Davenports feared would skew accurate reporting of parentage— they staged their next study in Bermuda and Jamaica, dispatching Eugenics Record Office field- worker Florence Danielson to the islands armed with questionnaires and color tops. (Charles also worked with a small number of people in the United States for this study: mainly newborn infants in Richmond, Virginia; New York City; and Louisiana.) Finally, in 1926 the Davenports embarked on an extensive study on race mixing in Jamaica with a student, Morris Steggerda, which began with skin color and moved to a panoply of characteristics: from occupation, talents, temperament, musical ability, and love of “odd or weird things” to predilections for “money making,” “spending,” “being in the public eye,” “sea life,” “use of alcohol,” “philosophy,” and “religion.”86

84. Gertrude C. Davenport and Charles B. Davenport, “Heredity of Eye-Color in Man,” Science 26, no. 670 (Nov. 1, 1907): 589– 92; Gertrude C. Davenport and Charles B. Davenport, “Heredity of Hair Color in Man,” American Naturalist 43, no. 508 (1909): 193–211; Gertrude C. Davenport and Charles B. Davenport, “Heredity of Skin Pigmentation in Man,” American Naturalist 44, no. 527 (1910): 641–72. 85. Charles B. Davenport, “Department of Experimental Evolution,” in Carnegie Institution of Washington, Year Book No. 7, 1908 (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1909), 90. 86. Davenport to Steggerda, Mar. 26, 1927, box 133, folder: Steggerda, Morris, 1925– 1926 (Jan.–Mar.), CBD.

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To determine the ways in which skin color— and therefore traits in general— passed from parents to children, the Davenports employed a number of tools. First were the questionnaires with which the Davenports’ volunteers canvassed communities, requesting information about family history and genealogy and making careful notes of their subjects’ mannerisms, demeanor, social status, moral temperament, and apparent intelligence. When researching the heritability of skin color in “typical Caucasians” in 1910, they also asked their interlocutors to describe their own and family members’ skin colors as “blond, brunette, intermediate, yellowish- white, olive- yellow, dark yellow- brown (dark olive), copper colored, chocolate, sooty black, full black, three fourths black, one half black, one fourth black.” “I willingly grant,” the Davenports noted, “that the terms are poor means of expressing degrees and quality of skin pigment.”87 Nevertheless, they felt that “blond and brunette,” anyway, were well enough understood terms to be used by their interlocutors and that “intermediate” “would be freely used in doubtful cases.” The fact that the survey results showed some evident confusion in reporting of skin tone (the study perhaps said more about how people thought about terms for skin color than color itself) did not prevent the Davenports from using those data in compiling genealogical tables showing the heredity of different combinations of skin colors. When it came to establishing the colors of non-“Caucasians,” however, the Davenports did not trust their interlocutors’ understandings of their own pigmentation and sought a standard that could be more tightly controlled by researchers. The classification of color was a question that anthropologists had addressed before, and by 1910 the Davenports had several options readily available for classifying the colors of human skin. In 1864 French physician and anthropologist Paul Broca announced his “Tableau chromatique des yeux, de la peau et des cheveux” (Color chart of eyes, skin, and hair).88 Working with a technician from Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s Gobelins works, Broca had composed a chart of thirty- four numbered skin colors so subtle that it seemed to some observers that there was no gradation between the different labeled colors at all. Published in Broca’s Instructions générales pour les recherces anthropologiques (1865), and later repro-

87. G. Davenport and C. Davenport, “Heredity of Skin Pigmentation in Man,” 643. 88. Paul Broca, “Tableau chromatique des yeux, de la peau et des cheveux,” Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris 5, no. 1 (1864): 767– 73; Paul Broca, “Tableau chromatique de la chevelure et de la peau,” Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris 5, no. 1 (1864): 138–40.

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duced in the influential British field guide Notes and Queries on Anthropology (1874), Broca’s standards provided a common language for anthropologists who wished to classify skin colors. In 1905 Felix von Luschan, director of the Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnographic Museum), improved somewhat upon Broca’s standards, publishing a series of thirty- six graded and labeled rectangles of opaque glass for use in classifying skin color. These blocks— carefully numbered like Broca’s standards but more durable and impervious to fading— similarly provided a range of colors against which anthropologists could typify skin color and race. Beyond these specifically anthropometric color standards, moreover, the Davenports were also aware of Ridgway’s book of color standards, and they even considered making color charts of their own using commercial paints.89 Tables of colors such as Broca’s and von Luschan’s were easy to use and provided a quick means of indicating color with relative precision to anyone who was equipped with their own copy of the color chart. They did, however, come with disadvantages. For one thing, paper color sets such Broca’s tended to discolor over time, and the papers were liable to becoming damaged and dirty. Broca’s color sets gradually fell out of chromatic synchronization with one another after his death. Sets like von Luschan’s, meanwhile, were bulky and difficult to transport (and, similarly, were irreproducible after his death). As for Ridgway’s standards, as Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office, wrote in 1915, his “book of standard colors is ideal for the laboratory” but did not work so well in the field.90 Most important of all was that such tables did not shed light on the question that most interested the Davenports: the precise, numerical degree to which skin color changed when races “mixed.” Rather than rely on the judgment of their interlocutors, or Broca’s papers or von Luschan’s blocks or Ridgway’s color book, the Davenports chose to use Milton Bradley’s color top to collect data on the color of people whom they didn’t classify as Caucasian. The top was, as the Davenports put it, “a little device for expressing color quantitatively” (fig. 14).91 The Davenports’ measurements of color with Bradley’s color top worked much like any other measurement with a Bradley mixing wheel. As Charles explained: “disks of standard black, red, yellow, and white are arranged

89. See, e.g., Davenport to Ridgway, Aug. 26, 1910, box 83, folder: Ridgway, Robert, CBD. 90. Laughlin to Stratton, Aug. 6, 1915, box 13, folder IPC 1901– 1922, National Bureau of Standards Papers (RG 167), National Archives Building, Baltimore, MD. 91. C. Davenport, Heredity of Skin Color, 2.

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Figure 14 Assembling a color top for the measurement of skin color. (Sullivan, Essentials of Anthropometry, 22)

[on the top] so that varying portions of each are exposed as sectors of the whole circle. When the top is spun the colors blend. By varying the proportions of the sectors (with a small dissecting forceps) the color of the blend is altered.”92 The individual whose skin was to be measured would present a portion of her arm not usually touched by the sun. “The arm was placed on the table by a good light and a Bradley color top was spun close to the arm and the disks adjusted until they matched, when spun, the color of the skin.”93 The process was tedious, but when complete, the exposed percentages of color on the color top could be translated into a numerical representation. The color of “slightly tanned ‘white’ skin”— Charles’s own— was N 8

Y 9

R 50

W 53

The method had unparalleled accuracy— “in good light the proportions N 55, R 40, W 5 can readily be distinguished from N 53, R 42, W 5,” Charles wrote— and it was a technique readily transferable across field and laboratory as long as light was good.94 “Most practical of all,” as one commenta92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 3.

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tor later remarked, the color top “raises no resentment in the subject, for it never brings home to him, as the von Luschan scale invariably does, that his color is being matched against a European or white standard.”95 The color top allowed the tester who had mastered color as an abstract, alphanumerical system (a thoroughly “modern,” rather than a “savage,” apprehension of color) to observe without being herself observed. Significantly, however, the Davenports did not advise using all the colors in the extensive set of Bradley’s colored papers. Rather, the Davenports insisted that “human skin color is obtained by mixing black (N), yellow (Y), red (R), and white (W)”96— a selection of colors that, unsurprisingly, mapped onto the Davenports’ understanding of the four basic races of humankind.97 These racial classifications, for the Davenports, reflected morphological differences in skin pigmentation, and the colors on the top cemented these differences as facts. Selecting these colors and these colors alone therefore collapsed racial typography, biology, and colorimetry into one convenient semiotic package that made racial classifications visible, measurable, and biologically real. Thus, as the Davenports explained in 1910, the “first constituent” was the measurement of the color black, or “melanic pigment.” The color black on the color wheel, that is, stood for the social and political classification of “black” skin pigmentation. The second constituent— the yellow component— the Davenports thought was likely “due to a lipochromic pigment so wide- spread in mammals and found in the human hair and iris.” This yellow pigment was revealed, especially in people of Asian descent, as the black pigment dwindled. The red constituent was “chiefly that of haemoglobin”— blood beneath the skin. The white, meanwhile, was the default color of human beings, in the Davenports’ estimation; it represented light “reflected from the opaque skin”— the ideal state from which variations in human morphology deviated.98 Such a reading of color terms as signifiers for human typology was by no means obvious or uncontroversial to the Davenports’ contemporaries. For example, von Luschan (with whom Charles Davenport corresponded warmly) viewed the whole concept of color as a metonym for race as deeply suspect. “There is no more a yellow race, as there is a red one,” he wrote in 95. H. A. Bowman, “The Color-Top Method of Estimating Skin Pigmentation,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 14, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1930): 59. 96. G. Davenport and C. Davenport, “Heredity of Skin Pigmentation in Man,” 643. 97. Steggerda to Davenport, Feb. 5, 1927, box 133, folder: Steggerda, Morris, 1926 (Apr.– Sept.), CBD. 98. G. Davenport and C. Davenport, “Heredity of Skin Pigmentation in Man,” 664.

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undated notes. “We are accustomed to call redskins the American Indians but we know now that they are not really red. . . . And [just] so the races of Earlier Asia are not more yellow than the Italians or the inhabitants of Southern France.”99 Similarly, at an address given during the 1911 “Universal Races Conference” in London, von Luschan insisted that “colour of skin and hair is only the effect of environment. . . . Fairness is nothing else but a lack of pigment.”100 The designer of a widely used skin color identification system, that is, insisted that skin color had nothing to do, really, with the true science of human beings. For the Davenports, however, the advantage of the color top was not simply that it was more accurate than von Luschan’s or Broca’s systems, or that it made for more malleable subjects. Rather, the very educational toy that made children into better observers of color could be used to make scientists into better observers of race, and the people whose skin they measured into more clearly racialized types. The same sort of color instruction, that is, in which Munsell wished children to be trained could be used to train a generation of geneticists in how to “see” race. Race and racial categories, of course, weren’t immediately visible as ratios of notionally basic skin colors whirled on a color top. But by mapping race onto color in a metrical fashion, the Davenports endeavored to exploit the same pedagogical function as did Munsell and Bradley— while at the same time replicating the racial argument of the supporters of a “genetic” view of color perception. That is to say, they assumed that the people against whose arms they spun the color top would not be able to understand the analytical breakdown of the spinning colors, since they were not perceptually sophisticated enough to understand color in this manner. Perhaps needless to say, despite the fantasies of the researchers conducting the test, they very much evaluated their subjects against a “white” standard, not only in the sense that white was a default skin tone (one that semiotically mapped also onto ideas of purity, cleanliness, moral fitness, and other qualities that the Davenports valued) but also insofar as instructors were taught to see color in a “logical” or analytic way— a manner that, the Davenports felt, was largely the aptitude of “white” people. When Charles Davenport wrote about measuring variations of the de-

99. Quoted in John David Smith, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Felix von Luschan, and Racial Reform at the Fin de Siècle,” Amerikastudien / American Studies 47, no. 1 (2002): 25– 26. 100. Felix von Luschan, “Anthropological View of Race,” in Papers on Inter-racial Problems, ed. G. Spiller (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1911), 14.

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gree of “N” in a family, then, he wasn’t simply talking about different degrees of the color black. “N” was a metric of race— as when, in his diary of January 1912, he worked on the problem of “Evidence of N. blood.101 “N” here stood not simply for the color “black,” of course, but for “negro”— a semiotic link between sensation, perception, race, and social hierarchy. Similarly, when the Davenports measured the skin color of a child whose mother’s father was “half Indian,” they discovered that the child was “much more red” than others they had measured; again, “more” redness stood as a metric of the degree to which the child was “more” Indian than others. This semiotic trick, in turn, provided a way of quantifying race as a percentage of the constituent colors of skin. The degree of N as measured by the color top suggested to the Davenports numerical thresholds for defining racial whiteness and blackness. An individual showing less than 12 percent N when their skin was measured with the top could be classed as “white,” thought the Davenports.102 A “mulatto” was an individual characterized by an N of 26–40 percent.103 Those with a percentage of N greater than 40 percent were definitively “Negroes”— and, indeed, the Davenports felt that differences in N and R components among their test subjects suggested “that our negroes fall into two biotypes differing in the thickness of the skin; for the thicker the skin the more the red capillaries are obscured and the greater the depth of the black pigment.”104 That the Davenports could distinguish between different types of “their” Negroes through colorimetry was precisely a function of the fact that they defined race through color measurement. As they remarked upon the conclusion of their 1912 study in the Caribbean, their measurements of 125 families “immediately explain[ed] all of the observed gradations of skin pigment.”105 Measurements made with the color top in turn enabled the assumption that laws governing conduct between races could be administrated through the measurement of skin color. As Charles noted, places where races mixed typically had well- defined if ad hoc classifications for people of different skin colors. These classifications, in the United States, applied especially to legal definitions of race. For instance, as Charles explained, “in Jamaica, as

101. Davenport, diary, Jan. 25, 1912, box 18, CBD. 102. C. Davenport, Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses, 29. 103. Ibid., 27. 104. Ibid., 10. 105. C. Davenport, “Department of Experimental Evolution,” 91.

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in some of our Southern States, after a certain dilution with white blood the descendant of an African becomes white by law.”106 This, in turn, determined political rights, insofar as, for example, “in Florida a white man may not legally marry a mulatto, a quadroon, or an octoroon, but may marry the daughter of a white man and an octoroon.” These were, Charles admitted, social distinctions. But his studies of how races mixed, (optically) answered the pressing question of “what biological basis have these social distinctions?” Using the color top, the answer was simple. “It follows from our studies,” he wrote, “that persons of African descent whose skin color contains 10 per cent or less of black pigment will, if mated with a like person, produce only white skinned children— i.e. with less than 12 per cent of black in the skin.” For example, if a “man of wealth with blue eyes and white skin” has children with “a woman with blue eyes and ‘walnut’ skin (say 15 to 20 per cent N),” their children would “pass for white in any country.” Thus, wrote Charles, did his studies “justify the legal limitation as far as skin color goes.”107

ConCLusion: The reTurn of Mr. WhiTe That Charles Davenport’s exemplary white man— the one who could elevate his kin to the privileged status of whiteness— was a “man of wealth” is no surprise. Even if wealth and maleness would not, precisely, show up on a colorimetric analysis of race, it was nevertheless an ever- present aspect of the decoding and reencoding of color standards. The “man of wealth” in Davenport’s example was precisely “Mr. White” in Laurena Skinner’s pedagogy— the ideal individual around whom social and colorimetric structure alike were arranged; the cornerstone of civilization; the origin point for measuring color order and social order. In some ways, of course, this vision of color as a literal metric of racial and therefore cultural hierarchy ignored the notions of culture that Boas and his students elevated to near- hegemonic status in American anthropology during the same period in which the Davenports were conducting their measurements. The Davenports were well aware of Boas’s work. In a 1924 lecture, Charles mentioned Boas by name, arguing that Boas’s notions of culture and race ran counter to the express facts of the mental development 106. C. Davenport, Heredity of Skin Color, 29. 107. Ibid.

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of races.108 Boas, in return, was critical of the Davenports’ method, writing to Charles personally to say that Charles and Gertrude’s “The Mental Capacity of Races” failed to sufficiently account for skin color as a determiner of social status and therefore stood on shaky ground. That is, the Davenports didn’t recognize skin color as a social fact, over and above a simply colorimetric one.109 Nevertheless, the Davenports and Boas were, in many ways, committed to a similar project of understanding human variation through the collection of empirical data— albeit with very different beginning assumptions and end goals. They were by all evidence warm friends. The Davenports sent seeds to the Boases for their garden; Boas expressed fond hope that he would see Charles at an upcoming meeting of the Committee on Statistics of Variation. The scientists traded books and articles on race, mental life, and demography. Indeed, Boas wrote Charles in 1913 asking for help in “work[ing] up” some of his immigration data, specifically requesting the use of one or two of Cold Spring Harbor’s “computers” (i.e., people, mainly women, who did the labor of mathematical calculation).110 He layered on the flattery, writing that the Davenports’ work on “indians” and “half- bloods” was important to the field. More to the point, in an unexpected way the Davenports’ work can be seen as a somewhat- occult instantiation of one of the critical tenets of Boas’s theory: the idea that culture— particularly manifested as language— was constitutive of the real. Systems of color were ways of understanding the world. Formalized, standard color systems demanded observers that could decode them. While there was variation in how different observers might be imagined for different systems of color, all of them ultimately turned on a vision of an actual observer (whether self- possessed and transcendent; laboring and immanent; or some other variation) who would be ideally suited to their use. In application, moreover, users had to be trained in these particular ways of seeing— and therefore trained in the social actuality that the ostensibly purified color system suggested. It was this mapping and learning, finally, that made the Davenports confident that they could encode race— and, therefore, users of color systems— as a matter of colorimetric data.

108. Davenport, lecture: “Do Races Differ in Mental Capacity?,” 1924, box 25, folder: Lecture: Do Races Differ in Mental Capacity?, CBD. 109. Boas to Davenport, Apr. 3, 1929, box 5, folder: Boas, Franz, #2, CBD. 110. Boas to Davenport, Jan. 25, 1913, box 5, folder: Boas, Franz, #1, CBD.

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Ultimately, the Davenports’ particular vision of the formal relationship between color measurement and race failed. While anthropologists and geneticists in subsequent decades continued to follow the Davenports in using Bradley’s color top for the measurement of skin color, the Davenports’ conclusions about the precise, numerical attributes of race and heritability were questionable even to their more loyal peers. It was by no means so clear that race and skin color could be so easily boiled down to four basic elements, or translated so directly into optical referents and genetic diagrams. Indeed, in the midst of surveying the skin colors of the students of Mico University College in Jamaica for the Davenports’ 1926 study on race mixing, the Davenports’ assistant Steggerda wrote to say that he had “a plan worked out whereby I can better determine the color of the Mico men. It is to get the opinions of the staff here at Mico. The colored people have a good knowledge in regard to another man’s color.”111 The opinions of the subjects of investigation themselves, that is, were more reliable according to Steggerda than the top— a tacit recognition of the socially conventional character of race, over and above any objective, colorimetric certainty of categorization by skin color. Charles and Steggerda published Race Crossing in Jamaica in 1929 to widespread negative criticism.112 (Charles sent a copy to Boas; Boas was unimpressed.) In 1935 the Carnegie Institution reviewed the work of Cold Spring Harbor and, in 1939, pulled its funding. Nevertheless, if the Davenports’ genetics work was, as historian Daniel Kevles writes, plagued by a certain “shallow carelessness,” the connection that the work of the Eugenics Record Office made between color systems and human bodies was an adequate and accurate reflection of the uses of color science in modern American society.113 Ross’s system, too, was a failed project that was plagued by shallow carelessness; he didn’t much care to theorize or standardize color for those beyond his Harvard classes. He didn’t say much of utility for the work of making color or making bodies. The idealized observer in his system was either already extant or unattainable, never a possible aspiration. Munsell’s color grammar, however, became the backbone of a wide array of color standardization projects through its uptake into national systems of color formalism like the US National Bureau of 111. Steggerda to Davenport, Feb. 28, 1927, box 133, folder: Steggerda, Morris, 1926 (Apr.– Sept.), CBD. 112. Among the better- known criticisms of Race Crossing is William Earnest Castle’s “Race Mixture and Physical Disharmonies,” Science 71, no. 1850 (1930): 603–6. Davenport replied in “Some Criticisms of ‘Race Crossing in Jamaica,’” Science 72, no. 1872 (1930): 501– 2. 113. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 52.

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Standards. If it did not provide the everyday color vocabulary he expected, or achieve the pedagogical ubiquity that he hoped, it nevertheless became a means of training specialist administrators in seeing everything from the color of blood and meat, to the color of French fries, to the color of postal uniforms. In this way, standardized color vocabularies, public training of the color sense, and eugenic measures of skin color were of a piece— a means of sculpting the American population into a form amenable to a very particular vision of a progressive, modern society.

C o n C l us i o n

TALKING ABOUT COLOR

In 1973 two Danish anthropologists, Rolf Kuschel and Torben Monberg, traveled to Mungiki, or Bellona Island, a small, verdant ellipse of coralline limestone in the southern Pacific Ocean. Their goal was to study the relationship between language and color perception among the island’s residents— a population numbering roughly eight hundred speakers of a language that the researchers called “Bellonese,” whose civilization had remained, as Kuschel and Monberg put it, “relatively untouched by European culture until approximately 1938 when the tenets of Christianity were introduced.”1 For several months, the anthropologists worked with a group of twenty- five adult informants, both men and women, presenting them with a number of different tasks designed to get to the root of their cognitive appreciation of color. In their research, Kuschel and Monberg made use of a “Munsell Array”— a standardized set of 329 cardboard squares used in psychometric research, each printed with a different color carefully calibrated by the Munsell Color Company. Using the chips as representations of color, they asked their informants to perform a number of tasks. They placed the chips facedown on a cot, showing only their gray- cardboard backs, and asked their informants to flip the chips over one by one and name their colors in Bellonese. They asked their informants to group the colored chips into sets of like colors. And they arranged the color chips on a board in rough spectral order beneath a sheet 1. Rolf Kuschel and Torben Monberg, “‘We Don’t Talk Much about Colour Here’: A Study of Colour Semantics on Bellona Island,” Man 9, no. 2 (June 1974): 214.

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of acetate and asked their subjects to draw lines in grease pencil on the acetate showing where one color category ended and another began. Although Kuschel and Monberg found their informants to be “very conscientious in trying to fulfil [the] task in a way satisfactory to both themselves and to us,” it was difficult for the anthropologists to compose a coherent picture of Bellonese color terminology.2 For one thing, it was clear that their informants found the tests to be bewildering and tedious. The task of categorizing hundreds of color chips, reported Kuschel and Monberg, “was as difficult, meaningless, and tiring to the Bellonese as it probably is to most of us.”3 (The people tasked with sorting and naming colors grumbled that “white men always play like children.”)4 For another thing, their informants often found it difficult to understand that the colors of the color chips were supposed to be abstract representations of the colors of everyday objects and thought that Kuschel and Monberg wanted them to come up with individual abstract names for the hundreds of colored squares. This yielded an unusually “‘messy’ picture of [color] terms,” in which different observers used the same word or words for very different colors.5 Finally, toward the end of the study, the anthropologists realized something that, upon reflection, their interlocutors had been trying to tell them all along. The language spoken on Mungiki contained many categories for naming and ordering objects and sensations, but color was not among them. As one informant explained, “We do not have many colours; only three. . . . And that’s all!”6 Color, that is, was largely inconsequential to the people on the island as a perceptual, lexical, and philosophical category. It was not that the anthropologists’ interlocutors couldn’t see color— all had been given color blindness tests to ensure that their vision was not anomalous. Rather, the exercise of naming abstract colors was so alien on Mungiki as to be nonsensical. Therefore, the anthropologists concluded, tools such as standardized color arrays and color blindness tests didn’t yield the data that they were supposed to. Color simply didn’t have that kind of meaning on the island. As one of the members of the group explained, “we don’t talk much about color here.”

2. Ibid., 238. 3. Ibid., 239. 4. Ibid., 238. 5. Ibid., 218. 6. Ibid.

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Unlike the people of Mungiki, Americans in the decades surrounding the turn of the century talked about color constantly. They ruminated on whether colors were properly physical or psychological. They created new philosophies to explain relationships between mind and matter using the sensation of color. They passed laws to administrate color vision, and they placed color at the center of their visions of what culture and civilization were like. They bickered over the number and type of primary colors, and they worried about the consistency of sensations of color for different viewers. They developed technologies for testing and reproducing color sensations across observers and installed these systems at their highest levels of government. Although these discussions took place across many areas of endeavor— painting, medicine, industrial production, and elementary education, among others— they amounted to a “new field” of investigation: a “color science” that fused the study of color perception with political, ideological, and aesthetic visions of what American society could be like. Central to this emerging science was an idea of aesthesis— sensation— as collective, or “corporate” as Peirce had put it: not just the private concern of the individual, but a physiological and cognitive act to be administered bureaucratically, by teams of experts closely allied with large social institutions. Against the unpredictability of living in a fast- changing, pluralistic society, in which even the real itself seemed unstable, color scientists (largely middle class, white, male, and Christian) espoused a vision of society in which professionals such as themselves undertook to monitor and judge the sensations of their fellow citizens, for the good of all. This enterprise guaranteed a shared sense of the real based not on individual reason and common sense but on science— a flexible term denoting a common, impersonal, and morally sturdy practice of making sense (literally) of the real. In this way, color science— in all of its physical, psychological, anthropological, physiological, pedagogical, eugenic, and aesthetic manifestations— was not just a new way of thinking about color. It was a new way of understanding how human communities, especially the fractious communities of self- consciously modernizing nations like the United States of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ought to understand the good, the right, the just, the beautiful, and the real. Neither color itself nor the diverse communities that made up the American polity of the turn of the century yielded easily to the practitioners of the “new field.” As Rood and Peirce both found out, the protean character of color that made it such a good thing with which to think also made it

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a slippery subject— vital and pulsing with light and life but also impossibly wily and difficult to apprehend. Perhaps needless to say, even as Rood’s work helped to inaugurate a new era of art- making, Modern Chromatics itself did little to “prevent ordinary persons, critics, and even painters, from talking and writing about colour in a loose, inaccurate and not always rational manner.”7 In a similar way, despite his best intentions, Peirce’s color science did not inaugurate a sweeping, synoptic approach to science beginning with a semiotic query of the color sense. As with many others, their projects remained incomplete and yet, like so many other areas of color science, laid the groundwork for entirely new laws, theories, and understandings of society vis-à- vis modern America. By the early 1920s, Jeffries’s campaign to bring the testing and control of color blindness firmly under the purview of experts backed by the full power of the government had derailed, as state and federal regulators reached compromises with rail unions and rail companies. Rather than requiring strict adherence to Holmgren’s test, administered by physicianscientists and backed by strong government oversight, by the middle of the twentieth century, federal law required only that rail workers should have “the ability to recognize and distinguish between the colors of signals”— leaving the mode of testing up to rail corporations. At the same time, Holmgren’s test itself increasingly fell out of use, faced with competition by subtler and easier- to- administer diagnostics such as the “Ishihara,” or pseudo- isochromatic, test, in which collections of tiny circles of different, commonly confused colors revealed (or obscured) alphanumerical shapes. Designed by Japanese ophthalmologist Shinobu Ishihara in 1917, the test was portable, easy to administer, and fast, taking only one to five minutes to render a verdict, as opposed to the five to thirty minutes required of the Holmgren test. Although in 1941, the US Army Air Forces still used Holmgren’s test in conjunction with Ishihara’s test, by 1948 it was uncontroversial to state that “pseudo- isochromatic charts with vanishing, reversible and hidden digits have definitely superseded the old Holmgren wool- test.”8 Despite these particular deviations from Jeffries’s plan, however, by the early twentieth century, color blindness testing was de rigueur for an increasing variety of professions: not simply work on locomotives and steamships but also in steel manufacturing, heavy industry, medicine, and even 7. Rood, Modern Chromatics, v–vi. 8. Elsie Murray, “Mass-Testing of Color Vision: A Simplified and Accelerated Technique,” American Journal of Psychology 61, no. 3 (July 1948): 370.

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accounting.9 In his 1914 Drift and Mastery, Walter Lippmann held up work on color blindness as an example of the type of scientific “mastery” over the human condition that human beings were to assert against the “drift” of the modern world.10 Thus, even as their specific techniques slipped into obscurity, Jeffries’s and Holmgren’s ideal of a normalized color vision for all became a more or less accepted fact of modern life. Indeed, in May 1935, the American Weekly, a popular newspaper supplement, published a series of full color reproductions of the Ishihara tests, along with the caption “Are you Color Blind? This will Tell You.” Some members of the scientific community chaffed, complaining that the publication of the tests in a popular journal reduced the test “from the level of a scientific instrument . . . to the status of a parlor diversion, on par with the crossword puzzle, or ‘Ask me another.’”11 But the publication of the Ishihara test in a colloquial popular insert can be seen in quite another light: not as a blow to science but as a legitimation of the idea that scientific tests (even if not under the direct control of scientists) ought to administrate color vision as a matter of everyday life, and even as everyday entertainment. As with color acuity tests, so too with the theoretical frameworks around color and culture. For much of the twentieth century, Boas’s relativism dominated American anthropology, linguistics, and psychology, with color terms often held as one of the paradigmatic ways in which language could shape the real. This position started to shift in the 1950s as psychologists such as Eric Lenneberg at Harvard University and linguists such as Noam Chomsky at MIT began to formulate the notion of a “universal grammar”: the theory that language is determined by particular neurophysical features of the brain and, therefore, not so much shaped by culture but rather “hardwired” into the neurophysiology of the brain. Against this backdrop, in 1969, anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay published Basic Color Terms—a groundbreaking study of the ways in which human beings acquire words to describe abstract color sensations. Drawing from interviews with subjects representing twenty language groups, as well as previously reported data from another seventy- eight languages, Berlin and Kay concluded that all languages added color terms in seven distinct and invariable 9. Emily C. Davis, “A New Color-Blindness Test,” Science News Letter, June 21, 1941, 390, 391, 397. 10. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: M. Kennerley, 1914), 273. 11. Elsie Murray, “The Ishihara Test for Color-Blindness: A Point in Ethics,” American Journal of Psychology 47, no. 3 (July 1935): 511–13.

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“stages”— first, black and white; then red; then yellow or green; then yellow and green; then blue; then brown— until the most advanced languages, such as those spoken by advanced industrial civilizations, added orange, purple, gray, and pink. Basic Color Terms reintroduced the idea that human social phenomena (like language) might be sorted into strata determined by neurophysiology, sparking new investigations into the nature of color and culture (Kuschel and Monberg’s expedition to Bellona Island among them). This turn— or return— to the physical locus of color sensations and words for color issues from the same soil as did Ladd-Franklin’s color science. If Ladd-Franklin was wrong about the precise physical nature of the color molecule, she correctly identified both the pressing problem at the core of midcentury color science and its solution: how, precisely, to align reported feelings, physical stimuli, and physiological features of the feeling, sensing, believing organism. Her “evolutionary” theory, with its distinctive “stages” of perception, provided one answer: perception was not an issue simply of mind and matter but a complicated interweaving of signaling processes that rooted the real in a blurred distinction between subjects and objects rather than a strict separation. It was a theory with a politics particular to an era in which subjective realignments (in terms of questions of race and culture; in terms of shifting gender norms; in terms of de facto and de jure inclusion and exclusion within and outside different forms of community) were issues of pressing concern. Her vision of the utility of color as an entity which at once defies stability but thrives in structure continues to serve as a substrate for mind/ brain research. From aphasia research to studies of memory, color terms stand in for the workings of cells themselves.12 Moreover, in their popular text Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind neurobiologist V. S. Ramachandran and journalist Sandra Blakeslee ruminate on the possibility that neuroscientific research might invalidate the existence of God (or Gods). Their solution to this sticky question is to argue by analogy: “consider the fact that most animals don’t have the receptors or neural machinery for color vision. Only a privileged few do, yet would 12. See, e.g., J. P. Mohr, W. C. Watters, and G. W. Duncan, “Thalamic Hemorrhage and Aphasia,” Brain and Language 2, nos. 1– 2 (Jan. 1, 1975): 3–17; David N. Levine, “Prosopagnosia and Visual Object Agnosia: A Behavioral Study,” Brain and Language 5, no. 3 (May 1, 1978): 348; Paul M. Wortman and Leonard D. Greenberg, “Coding, Recoding and Decoding of Hierarchical Information in Long-Term Memory,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 10, no. 3 (June 1, 1971): 234–43.

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you want to conclude from this that color wasn’t real?” Certainly not, they decide.13 Color is real, pragmatically and physiologically— and, therefore, so too are the conveyances of moral properties, including divine presence itself. The fact that this renewed interest in color naming as an ethnolinguistic phenomenon relied on standardized sets of colors such as Munsell’s was, moreover, ironic, if only because of the relative failure of his and his peers’ efforts to reform vernacular English color vocabularies. Projects such as those of Bradley, Munsell, and Ridgway neither especially reassured everyday Americans of their own modernity vis-à- vis “semi- civilized” peoples nor led people to place a greater stock in the veracity of their own basic sensations, nor, perhaps needless to say, did individuals begin to speak with greater clarity about color. Indeed, of all the attempts at thinking about color names here described, Ridgway’s— ridiculed by Hallock and Gordon as conflating objects with sensations; laughed at by Ladd-Franklin for being an affront to scientific reason— was the most successful, at least in terms of common use. Ridgway persisted in using vague, colloquial nomenclatures for color, insisting in 1912 that “an expression of opinion . . . from many naturalists and others” indicated a strong preference for evocative color names over more abstract conventions.14 And while admitting that Ridgway, in his 1912 edition, used “very colorful language” (a curious recursion calling attention to the slipperiness of sensory terms), Daniel Lewis, senior curator of science and technology at the Huntington Museum of Art, noted in 2008 that “[e]veryone from stamp collectors to naturalists to chemists refers to ‘Ridgway colors’ to identify specific shades.”15 As Aloys John Maerz and Morris Rea Paul, authors of the 1930 Dictionary of Color, commented in the preface to their work, “[i]t is true that our present language of color is, to a certain extent, composed of words that are somewhat meaningless in themselves as color terms. This refers to such words as ‘folly,’ ‘Westminster,’ and ‘elephant’s breath’; they are lacking entirely in descriptive color value, yet their continued use earns them a place among the accepted color terms that cus13. Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1998), 185. Stanley Finger likewise treats color vision as a central window into consciousness in his Origins of Neuroscience, 96–107. 14. Ridgway, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, 10– 11. 15. Traude Gomez-Rhine, “In Living Color: A Conversation with the Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology,” Huntington Frontiers, Fall/Winter 2008, 7.

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tom has decreed should compose our vocabulary.”16 Rather than taking science (physics, physiology, psychology) as their guiding principle— the warrant that would overpower the arbitrariness of individual perception; overturn the vagaries of commerce, decoration, and artifice; and elevate the primitive underpinnings of civilized sensation— Maerz and Paul turned instead to “custom” to justify their selection of color terms. Custom might well be substituted in this sense for “culture”— that is, the conventional constraints on color names imposed by the needs of a community. For those who studied color in turn- of- the- century America, among the most apparent needs of the community were institutions to guide the shape of color research and the policies and programs that emerged from it. Created by order of Congress in 1901, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) was a federal agency charged with comparing, constructing, testing, calibrating, and safeguarding “the standards used in scientific engineering, manufacturing, commerce, and educational institutions.”17 In 1914 the bureau’s director, Samuel Wesley Stratton, appeared before Congress to request “seventy five hundred dollars” for “developing color standards.” “The passage of certain laws in the States,” he explained, “regarding the coloring of butter, [and] the fact that cottonseed oil and turpentine and other products are sold in accordance with the grade by color, makes it necessary to establish color standards and methods of making them.”18 More than simply a standards- setting institution, however, the NBS, according to Lyman Gage, then Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, was an organ of “moral” fortitude as well. “We are the victims of looseness in our methods,” he told Congress, “of too much looseness in our Ideas; of too much of that sort of spirit, born out of our rapid development, perhaps, of a disregard or a lack of comprehension of the binding sanction of accuracy in every relation of life.”19 Standards— for produce, for steel, for color itself— would be a salve for this moral disorder. It was exactly this sort of “looseness” in everyday color perception and

16. Aloys John Maerz and Morris Rea Paul, A Dictionary of Color (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1930), v (emphasis added). 17. Act of March 3, 1901, 15 U.S.C. 271–278h (1901). 18. US Senate, Statements before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations on H.R. 10523: An Act Making Appropriations to Provide for the Expenses of the Government, of the District of Columbia for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1915, and for Other Purposes (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1915), 61. 19. Lyman Gage quoted in David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 75.

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notation that the Munsell system had originally been crafted to counteract. Although Albert Munsell himself had little luck in attracting government interest in his system, in 1924 his son, A. O. E. Munsell, founded the Munsell Research Laboratory and moved the Munsell Color Company to Baltimore to be closer to Johns Hopkins University and the NBS. While the Munsell Color Company devoted itself to maintaining Munsell’s standard papers and charts (the color sphere as part of Munsell’s educational enterprise having been abandoned), the Munsell Research Laboratory served essentially as a funding arm for color science, providing grants for scientists at the NBS to execute research projects, not least of all those involving Munsell’s colors.20 Moreover, in addition to funds and materials, the Munsell Research Laboratory and the NBS shared personnel: Irwin Priest, the NBS’s director of colorimetry, advised A. E. O. Munsell on the setup of the Munsell Research Laboratory; and Deane B. Judd, a physicist originally in the employ of the Munsell Color Company, left in 1927 to work for the NBS and subsequently served as a trustee of the Munsell Foundation. Dorothy Nickerson, who originally worked as A. E. O. Munsell’s assistant, went on to work at the US Department of Agriculture setting color standards for hay and meat.21 Eugene C. Crittenden, a “physical standards expert” at the NBS, remembered the colorimetric work on the Munsell system as among the most “important” of the bureau’s “studies . . . on systems of nomenclature and classification of colors.”22 These material and intellectual trades in turn fed back into the Munsell system’s acceptance as both a government and an industrial standard. Nickerson remarked, The Munsell company, particularly during the period of research activity, had developed a certain amount of consulting business, chiefly in relation to the preparation of standard colors. Thus there were prepared the Flagghaemoglobinometer, and the meat- grading scales for the Department of Agriculture, . . . the preparation of a color chart for use in advisory work by the Clothing Information Bureau of the Filene Company in Boston. . . . 20. Dorothy Nickerson, “History of the Munsell Color System and Its Scientific Application,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 30, no. 12 (Dec. 1, 1940): 582. 21. Dorothy Nickerson, “History of the Munsell Color System, Company, and Foundation, II: Its Scientific Application,” Color Research and Application 1, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 76. 22. E. C. Crittenden, “Early Work in Applied Optics at the National Bureau of Standards,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 41, no. 6 (1951): 375; W. R. Brode, “E. C. Crittenden, Physical Standards Expert,” Science 124, no. 3215 (Aug. 10, 1956): 255– 56.

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Standards for soap colors, for scales to measure detergent power, to measure smoke deposits— all such problems, and many more, were handled during the 1921–1930 period.23

Indeed, in 1915 Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office, wrote to the NBS to request “a simple and definite standard for measuring skin color in man.”24 The office had no immediate solution but suggested that Cold Spring Harbor send a representative to Washington to speak with the colorimetry division of the NBS. The expansion of professional and institutional foundations for color research did not stop with the Munsell Color Company or the NBS.25 Founded during World War I by American textile manufacturers cut off from their German sources of synthetic dyes, the Color Association of the United States invented the business of color forecasting for textile manufacturers, issuing yearly cards displaying desirable colors in order that the “confusion that has existed in trying to match well- known shades may be done away with.” The New York Times estimated that the colors on the color cards would “represent 75 per cent. of the color consumption.”26 In 1916 scientists working for Eastman Kodak founded the Optical Society of America, which similarly served as a centralizing organ for the many interdisciplinary studies of light being produced by American researchers. The society convened its first Committee on Colorimetry in 1919, for the purpose of “remedying” the “extremely unsatisfactory condition” of the “nomenclature and standards of color science.”27 On the basis of work done, in part, by scientists like Priest at the NBS, the committee attempted to simultaneously standardize color terminology and to define those colors in terms of objective stimuli. “That the result cannot be final as regards to either nomenclature or standards,” suggested Leonard T. Troland, the committee’s chair, “is a natural consequence of the pioneer character of the effort.”28 In a subsequent report entitled The Present Status of Visual Science, Troland further called for new 23. Nickerson, “History of the Munsell Color System, Company, and Foundation, II,” 75. 24. Laughlin to Stratton, Sept. 8, 1915, box 13, folder IPC 1901–1922, National Bureau of Standards Papers. 25. Sean Johnston, A History of Light and Colour Measurement: Science in the Shadows (Bristol, UK: Institute of Physics, 2001). 26. “Standard Color Card: Has 106 Shades for Use by Textile and Allied Trades,” New York Times, June 7, 1915, 13. See also Margaret Hayden Rorke, “The Work of the Textile Color Card Association,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 21, no. 10 (1931): 651–53. 27. Troland, “Report of Committee on Colorimetry for 1920– 1921,” 530. 28. Ibid.

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measurements of the red, green, and blue sensitivity curves in the eye of a “normal” observer.29 Ultimately, the administration of color perception by tightly organized committees wasn’t merely a national endeavor. In 1913 America joined France, Britain, Germany, Holland, and Switzerland in the Commission internationale de l’éclairage (International Commission on Illumination [CIE]), an international consortium which took as its mandate the definition of standards of lighting among its member countries. Among the difficult questions that the CIE wrestled with over the next two decades was the production of a “standard” observer of color— a fictitious human that could stand for all “normal” human observers in matters of colorimetry. After World War I sidelined German influence in the CIE, this research, as one delegate remembered, was a largely Anglophone affair, marked by an “almost patriotic fervor” on the part of American delegates in support of work by the Optical Society of America and the NBS.30 Pursuing standards set in American and British laboratories, the CIE met in Cambridge, England, in 1931 to establish a mathematical framework from which to define an international standard observer of color. Rather than employing hue, value, and chroma coordinates as had Munsell, the CIE relied on ostensibly more malleable “tristimulus” values: models of the red, green, and blue retinal primary colors that mixed to produce more complicated colors. These values were initially derived by John Guild and W. David Wright in England using specialized devices that allowed experimental subjects to match test colors with measured red, green, and blue control primaries projected onto a dark background in a postage- stampsized field of view.31 On the basis of these data, Guild and Wright felt able to produce models of trichromatic color space that simulated a standard, “normal,” observer of color. The test groups were small— Guild’s data were based on seven test subjects, Wright’s on ten— and constraints on the de29. Leonard Thompson Troland, The Present Status of Visual Science (Washington: National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, 1922), esp. 86– 89. 30. W. David Wright, “The Historical and Experimental Background to the 1931 CIE System of Colorimetry,” in Colorimetry: Understanding the CIE System, ed. János Schanda (Vienna: Commission internationale de l’éclairage; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Interscience, 2007), 19. 31. For a detailed explanation of the techniques and technologies used in defining the standard observer, see John Guild, “A Trichromatic Colorimeter Suitable for Standardisation Work,” Transactions of the Optical Society 27, no. 2 (1925): 106– 29; J. Perry, “The Guild Trichromatic Colorimeter,” Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists 43, no. 5 (May 1, 1927): 159–61. See also W. David Wright, “A Re- determination of the Trichromatic Coefficients of the Spectral Colours,” Transactions of the Optical Society of London 30 (1928– 29), 141– 64.

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vices limited their ability to map the full gamut of human color vision. Irwin Priest, a member of the American delegation to the CIE, strenuously favored a different set of wavelengths to be specified as primary colors than those used by Guild and Wright. Nevertheless, these technical objections were more than overcome by the utility of trichromatic coordinates as scientific and industrial standards— another compromise between art and truth, but one with farther- reaching implications. The CIE convention simultaneously provided specific color standards and a general, abstract structure through which to imagine all color perception as part of a mathematically integrated system— one with application to science and industry alike. Expressed as a function of wavelength, tristimulus values could be extended to extant color systems such as Munsell’s. Indeed, at present writing, the groundwork laid by the 1931 CIE convention is a critical part of color definition for computer screens, digital rendering, and desktop publishing, with tristimulus values converted to numerical representations of the red, blue, and green illuminants used in computer displays (typically either as percentages of each color or as numbers between 0 and 255).32 As Deane B. Judd of the NBS (and, formerly, the Munsell Color Company) put it, the CIE convention made the “properties of the standard observer conveniently available.”33 In one sense, then, the creation of the standard observer solved the problem of individual perceptual subjectivity that confounded turn- of- thecentury color researchers. At once singular and ubiquitous, the “standard observer” preserved many of the salient properties of individual, human observers of color but adapted them to a society of mass culture, impersonal administration, and bureaucratization of the senses. This standard observer was, in practice, a set of mathematical functions designed to normalize the perceptual idiosyncrasies of actual human observers. But on a more ideological level, it was also a vision of industrial humankind working together— if not quite seeing eye to eye, then at least matching color to color. In an address in 1927, American scientist and CIE president E. P. Hyde remarked that the CIE ought to be “a university of enlightenment in all that pertains to the science of lighting, a publicity department for the propaga-

32. See, e.g., Roy Hall, Illumination and Color in Computer Generated Imagery (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989), 56. 33. Deane B. Judd, “The 1931 I.C.I. Standard Observer and Coordinate System for Colorimetry,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 23 (Oct. 1933): 360 (Judd uses the abbreviation I.C.I. for “International Commission on Illumination,” instead of the more common CIE).

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tion of correct lighting principles, a sales bureau of ideas and methods of correct lighting practice. And it should be an important link in the chain of international conventions which promote lasting good- will and amity among the peoples of the earth.”34 The CIE standard observer was not just a model of color space. It was a model of human interactions, based upon a shared idea of corporate politics, economics, and aesthetics. The CIE standard observer did not conclude discussions about color. Color continues to occupy a central, if perhaps subtler, place in notions of the ways in which orders of perception and social order intersect. Art historian Jonathan Crary, for instance, introduces his study on epistemes of vision in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the note that the “formalization and diffusion of computer- generated imagery” represent a “transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective.” He goes on to note that “emergent technologies of image production are becoming the dominant modes of visualization according to which primary social processes and institutions function” and, indeed, that “they are intertwined with the needs of global information industries and with the expanding requirements of medical, military and police hierarchies.”35 Reflecting the ways in which Crary’s concerns play out in everyday life, film critic Anthony Lane, reviewing the visually cacophonous, digitally enhanced 2005 movie Speed Racer, derided the “achingly blue skies, customized deserts, fantastical mountains, and everything . . . daubed in lollipop hues” as amounting to nothing more nor less than “Pop fascism.” In the “rainbow of velocity” conjured by digital imaging technologies— colors rendered into numbers on the basis of CIE coordinates— Lane saw a spectacle designed to at once gratify and subdue the sensations of its audiences. Yes, Lane wrote, the movie was for children, and “a four- year- old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck,” and “[t]rue, our [adult] eyeballs will slowly, but never completely recover, but what,” Lane wondered, “of our souls?”36

34. E. P. Hyde, “Presidential Address,” in Brief Report of the Bellagio Meeting, 31 August–3 September, 1927 . . . (London: Gaylard and Sons, 1927), 11. 35. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 1–2. 36. Anthony Lane, “Around the Bend,” New Yorker, May 12, 2008. Lane’s sentiment is not, of course, a new one. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer explore a similar socio- aesthetic concern with the possibility of mass culture after fascism in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Lane, however, explicitly ties his concern to child development, which has a rich resonance with the neuroscience of cognition, which is underwritten by no small amount of research on color vision.

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Lane framed his criticism as a joke, but what, indeed, of our souls? The technologies employed in contemporary visual mediascapes do not emerge sui generis from the housings of computers.37 They do not represent at root a novel form of digital sociality. Rather, they are the inheritors of more than a century of debate about what is real, what is true, what a modern, industrial society ought to be like, and what human perception is like. They are the material substrates of a republic of color. 37. See, e.g., Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing of this book has been possible only with the deep magnanimity of a great many people. Much of what became the final text of this book took shape in the energizing environment of the University of Chicago’s Department of History and the Fishbein Center for the History of Medicine. My colleagues have supported this project in countless ways, from reading drafts to offering inspiration, commiseration, and humor in equal measure and with impeccable timing. I am especially grateful to Bob Richards, Emilio Kourí, Adrian Johns, Alison Winter, Ramón Gutiérrez, Mauricio Tenorio, Paul Cheney, and Emily Lynn Osborne for their encouragement and invaluable advice in matters of writing, teaching, and scholarly life. At a manuscript workshop in December 2017, Bob Richards, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Leora Auslander, Kathleen Belew, Isabel Gabel, Joel Isaac, Adrian Johns, Amy Lippert, Joseph Masco, and James Sparrow pored over the book’s chapters with keen eyes, open minds, and sharp pens. Jon Levy, Mauricio Tenorio, and Amy Dru Stanley read portions of the manuscript and commented critically and generously. For their advice, support, and good humor, I thank my history colleagues Clifford Ando, Mark Bradley, Matthew Briones, Jane Dailey, Lorraine Daston, Brodwyn Fischer, Eleonor Gilburd, Alice Goff, Jan Goldstein, Adam Green, James Hevia, Faith Hillis, Tom Holt, Destin Jenkins, David Nirenberg, Ada Palmer, Kenneth Pomeranz, Johanna Ransmeier, and Tara Zahra. No less generative has been the wider community at Chicago, whose members provided input and wisdom on matters specific and general. Ju-

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dith Farquhar’s guidance, acumen, and erudition have been central to my work since I arrived at Chicago. Karl Matlin has been a mentor, friend, and fellow explorer of the natural, historical, and natural- historical worlds. Special thanks for kindness, support, and intellectual provocations are due to Shadi Barsch-Zimmer, Nima Bassiri, Patrick Crowley, James Evans, Itamar Francez, Andreas Glaeser, John Goldsmith, Joel Isaac, Jason Maclean, Joseph Masco, Benjamin Morgan, Eugene Raikhel, Na’ama Rokem, Haun Saussy, and Jesse Soodalter. A year at the Franke Institute for the Humanities brought the many loose ends of this book together. Thank you to Franke faculty fellows James Chandler, James Conant, Daniel Desormeaux, Ghenwa Hayek, Robert Kendrick, Wei-Cheng Lin, Sarah Nooter, and Yuri Tsivian; and graduate fellows Rebecca Crisafulli, Andrew Inchiosa, Thomas Kelly, Branden Kosch, Daniela Licandro, and Adhira Mangalagiri. The students with whom I have worked at Chicago have been extraordinary readers, critics, and interlocutors. Thank you especially to Adam Baim, Eleanor Jane Bush, Lily Huang, Nicholas Jaeger, Caine Jordan, Topher Kindell, Marshall Kramer, Sophie Reichert, Robert Suits, and Emily Webster for their boundless energy, smart criticisms, and unflagging enthusiasm. Katy Spehar was a dedicated research assistant, as was Colin Garon, whose research on the history of anthropology took on a life of its own, to the great benefit of this book. History and Fishbein staff Joanne Berens, Cyndee Breshock, Beth Calderon, David Goodwine, and Sonja Rusnak weave the tangled threads of university administration into a basket— or a safety net— in which scholarship can flourish. I am grateful and astounded by their efforts. The contributions of colleagues beyond Chicago have been no less central to the shaping of this book. Joanna Radin and Robert Brain read the full text in draft form and made the wintery journey to Chicago, arriving at the manuscript workshop bristling with incisive questions, keen suggestions, and plentiful ideas. I’m grateful for their energies, intellect, and commitment. Nicholas Gaskill’s detailed reading of the manuscript and astute insights left traces through every chapter. Conversations on the history of color with Reggie Blazyck, Marie Frank, Fiona Greenland, Laura Kalba, Carolyn Kane, and Daniel Lewis have sharpened my thinking about color and culture, technology and language, and society and politics. Emily Gephart read countless drafts and offered unsparing comments, as well as plentiful musings on painting, color, feathers, and nature. Thinking through aspects of Humboldt, Henry, and nineteenth- century science with John Tresch shaped the early chapters of the book. On matters of science, history, writing, living, and all points in between, Carin Berkowitz, Anna Bon-

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nell Freidin, Henry Cowles, Stephanie Dick, Jean-Baptiste Fleury, Philippe Fontaine, Jann Giraud, Diana Harper, Mary Kuhn, Lisa Messeri, Natasha Myers, Ahmed Ragab, Chitra Ramalingam, Sarah Rich, Mindy Schwartz, David Sepkowski, David Roth Singerman, Jesse Soodalter, Laura Stark, Rebecca Woods, Anya Zilberstein, and Daniel Zolli have offered advice, encouragement, and comity. Sophia Roosth and Alma Steingart have been good to think with, and even better to collaborate with, and be friends with. In moments blue and bright, Demetra Kasimis was generous with her brilliance, her creativity and her boundless talent for writing, editing, laughing, and adventuring. Work on this project began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where David Jones was a tireless reader, bountiful source of good advice, and unstinting supplier of subtle but profound suggestions; I continue to benefit from his mentorship. Stefan Helmreich’s waves of surprising suggestions have made this book resonate where it might have clunked; our continued collaboration— along with Sophia Roosth, Natasha Myers, and Rufus Helmreich— on projects at the limits of scholarship have kept me sharp and kept my felt- tipped pen moving. I am indebted to Christopher Capozzola not only for his scholarship and his sense of humor but also for the ways in which he encouraged me to keep the humanity of my subjects in constant focus. Caroline Jones’s unsparing barrage of margin notes forced me to tie my ideas to the empirical bedrock that underwrites good history, even as she encouraged me to shoot for the moon. I am indebted to the many ways in which David Kaiser, Vincent Lepinay, Harriet Ritvo, and Craig Wilder patiently discussed early ideas and chapter drafts that would become this book. In addition to Chicago and MIT, this book took shape through a number of institutions and their infrastructures, from a period of incubation at the École normale supérieure de Cachan, to workshops at Yale and the German Historical Institute, to papers read at meetings of the History of Science Society, the Society for Social Studies of Science, and the American Studies Association. Grants and fellowship support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society supported the writing of this book; I am grateful to my colleagues at these institutions. Thank you to the librarians and archivists at the Adler Planetarium, American Foundation for the Blind, Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, Bibliothèques du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Breslau ethnologische Museum, Century Association Archives Foundation, Commission internationale de l’éclairage Central bureau, Co-

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lumbia University, Cornell University, Field Museum, Franklin Institute, Hagley Museum, Harvard University, Institute for American Thought, Massachusetts College of Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mobilier national et manufactures nationales, New York Public Library, Nordiska museets arkiv, Philadelphia College of Surgeons, Princeton University, Smithsonian Institution, Stevens Institute, United States National Archives, University of Chicago, University of Oregon, and University of Pennsylvania, whose guidance through labyrinthine collections of archived treasures made this research possible. At the University of Chicago Press, Karen Darling provided early encouragement and enduring support as this project wended its way to completion. She and her editorial team— Susannah Engstrom, Caterina MacLean, and Pamela Burton, among many other talented people— shepherded this book from manuscript to bound pages with grace, ease, and steady hands. Greatest thanks to them for their tireless work. Friends like Patrick Callery, William Cotton, Rose Dergan, Ian Stell, and Christine Zehner predate history itself; their presence is always felt and just as frequently missed. In Chicago, Joannie and John have been a steady source of invigorating conversations to nourish the soul, and pawpaws to nourish the body. To Rebekah, Dan, Willa, and Hazel; Suzanne, Chicu, and Mira; Lorna, Barton, Bernice, Eileen, and Maggie; Romy, Damien, and Zach; Jason, Maryam, Reese, Tiah; Abe, Stephanie, Ariela, and Sam— thank you for the countless excursions, and exciting afternoons. To my family is owed the deepest gratitude. My parents— Mom, Dad, Loretta, and Joe— have been the source of endless encouragement, strength, suggestions, and laughter, to say nothing of reading uncounted paragraphs and listening to a steady stream of ideas- in- formation; in ways both great and small, this book would not exist without them. As for my brothers— Matt, Jason, and Joey— I’m grateful to have a bunch of them, and especially glad they’re so much fun. Jennefer’s support and enthusiasm have been part of this project from the beginning. And Maude and Apollonia make the world a brighter, better, and more colorful place in which to live. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. accidental colors, traditional chromatic theories, 2, 31–32 Agler, David W., 167 Alabama, color blindness testing, 104, 106 alcohol argument, color blindness, 129, 130 Alexander, Stephen, 1–2, 34 Allen, Grant, 126, 128, 131 Allport, W. H., 127–28 American Ethnological Society, 121 American Indians, language-color perception studies, 115–17, 123–26, 133–35 American Naturalist, 183 American Ophthalmological Society, 93–94 American Watercolor Society, 47 American Weekly, 245 aniline dyes, 180–83 Appleton, William H., 47 Arlt, Carl Ferdinand von, 93 Art Amateur, 179 Arthur, Chester, 104 artist colors, variability problem. See entries on naming

assimilation process, Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152 astrophotometric experiments, 55–56, 70–74 Atlas of the Munsell Color System (Munsell), 17 A. T. Stewart’s, isabel parable, 80–81 Bache, Alexander Dallas, 70 Bailey, Henry T., 209, 226–27 Baird, Spencer, 186 balance, in Munsell’s color system, 217– 18, 221 Baldwin, James Mark, 166 Barnard, A. P., 39–40 Basic Color Terms (Berlin and Kay), 245–46 Bastian, Adolf, 137 Beer, Thomas, 181–82 bees, color perception, 126 Behrendt, Karl Hermann, 134–35 Bellona Island, language-color perception study, 241–42 Bergson, Henri, 25–26 Berlin, Brent, 245–46

300

index

Berliner Tageblatt, 137 Berlin Physical Society, 36 Bezold, William von, 73n50 Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, 11 Bierstadt, Albert, 47 Bierstadt, Edward, 25n7, 47 Bishop, Mary, 90, 95 Bitterroot Salish, 115n1 black (color): as abstract point in system, 205; in American Indian vocabularies, 123, 124; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; classroom plantation story, 204; Davenports’ skin color studies, 232–34, 235–37; Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, 154; Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152, 154; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 163; Munsell’s sphere model, 213; Peirce’s theory, 65; Rivers’s Inuit studies, 147; Ross’s systems, 207, 208–9, 211–12; in Syme’s atlas, 17 Blackfoot, color perception, 126 Blake, Lucien Ira, 127, 128–29 Blakeslee, Sandra, 246–47 blue (color): in American Indian vocabularies, 123, 124, 125; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; Boas’s studies, 135, 136, 138n72; Bradley’s spectrum series, 189–90; in color blindness diagnostics, 97–100, 102; Dalton’s colorblindness theory, 89; eye nerve function theories, 49; Geiger’s evolution argument, 123; Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, 150, 151; Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152, 153; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 157, 161–62, 163, 171, 172; Munsell’s logical system, 190–91, 213, 215, 217–20; Peirce’s theory, 65, 72–74, 77; Rivers’s Inuit studies, 147; Rood’s experiments and instructions, 35, 51–52; Ross’s painter’s palette

system, 207, 209; standardization problem, 183; in Syme’s atlas, 17; traditional chromatic theories, 28–29, 30 Boas, Franz, 25, 85, 114, 118, 134–45, 148, 237–38, plate 6 Bonnat, Léon, 23 Boring, Edward, 167 Boston Daily Advertiser, 105 Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 105 Bradley, Milton, 177–78, 185, 188–90, 231– 32, plate 8, plate 11 Brewster, David, 28–29, 31, 39, 49–50, 192 brightness: in color education debate, 217; Hering’s opponent colors theory, 153–54; in Munsell’s logical system, 214, 217–21; Peirce’s theory, 55–56, 72–74 Brinton, Daniel Garrison, 119–20, 134–35 Broca, Paul, 231–32 brown (color): in American Indian vocabularies, 124, 125; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; Holmgren’s color blindness testing, 99–100; Munsell’s sphere model, 214; Rood’s polarized light experiments, 52 Brown Decades, The (Mumford), 84, 182n19 Bruner, Frank G., 129 Buck-Morss, Susan, 7 Buddha, biographical color dramatization, 181 Burdon-Sanderson, J. S., 159 Burk, Frederick, 224–25 Burnett, Swann M., 127 Burney, Frances, 89 Burns, Sarah, 130 California, color blindness testing, 104, 105–6 canine senses, Gates’s training experiments, 220 capitalism models, changes, 14–15 carboxylate rosaniline, in Ladd-Franklin’s theory, 159

index Carlisle Indian Industrial School, color blindness testing, 127 Carnegie Foundation, 229, 239 cat demonstration, Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 163, plate 7 Century Club, 46, 47, 55, 75, 83 Century Dictionary, 74–75, 80, 84, 119, 191, 214 chemistry, 33, 35, 55–65 Chevreul, Michel-Eugène, 31, 231 Cheyenne, color blindness testing, 127 Chicago Academy of Fine Art, 223 Chicago Daily Tribune, 106, 107 Chicago Stock Exchange, 26 child development, color education arguments, 217, 223–25 China, color blindness testing, 128 Chipp, Herschel, 24 chloroform-induced color hallucination, Rood’s, 40 Chomsky, Noam, 245 chroma: Munsell’s logical system, 84, 190– 93, 214, 215, 217; Peirce’s color definitions, 76–77; Rood’s color-cone theory, 193 Chromatics (Field), 29–32 Church, Emma, 223 Church, Frederick Edwin, 47, 48 CIE (International Commission on Illumination), 21, 251–53 civilization arguments: Boas’s, 139–42; color blindness, 19, 128–30; in color education, 217, 224–26; and common sense philosophy, 9–10; in eugenics field, 227–28; language elements, 134–35, 245–46; Rivers’s, 146. See also culture studies, color words Civil War, US, 43–44, 127 coal tar chemistry, colors, 180–83 Coast and Geodetic Survey, US, 60–61, 74 cognitive capacity, in culture arguments, 119–20, 130–32, 141–42 Cole, Thomas, 48

301

College of New Jersey/Princeton University, 33–34 Color and Culture (Gage), 117 Color Association of the United States, 250 color blindness: civilization arguments, 19, 128–30; Columbian Exposition demonstration, 86–87; cultural perspectives, 102–4; disease perspective, 128–30; gender differences, 127, 128; Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, 151; historic recognition of, 88–92; LaddFranklin’s evolutionary theory, 157, 170, 173; racial differences, 127–29; treatment oddities, 90 Color-Blindness (Jeffries), 111 color blindness testing: compromises about, 244–45; diagnostics development, 94–102, 133, plate 5; Jeffries’s advocacy, 87–88, 102; procedural modifications, 108–9; regulation efforts, 104–5; resistance to, 105–10; for school children, 127; as scientific medicine, 87, 92–93, 110–11 Color Notation, A (Munsell), 176, 193 color science, history overview: challenges for understanding, 6–7; institutionalization of, 20–21, 248–53; before Rood’s Chromatics, 27–32; routes of investigation listed, 2–3; scholarly approaches to, 3–5; societal context, 13–15; societal visions, 243–45; subjective-objective complexity, 21–22, 246–47. See also common sense philosophy; naming of colors, standardizing efforts; Peirce, Charles Sanders; red (color); and other specific topics color-sensitive molecule. See entries on Ladd-Franklin color terminology. See naming of colors, standardizing efforts Colour and Colour Theories (Ladd-Franklin), 173

302

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Columbia College/University, 45–46 Columbian Exposition, 84, 85–86, 112–14 Columbia University/College, 142–43, 166 commercial colors. See entries on naming Commission internationale de l’éclairage (CIE), 21, 251–53 Committee on Colorimetry, 21, 250–51 common sense philosophy: challenges to, 10–12; chromatics as, 27–28; overview, 7–10; pragmatism comparison, 78–79; and psychophysics, 39–40, 43 community: in Peirce’s theory, 18–19, 78–83; and scientific expertise, 15, 44–45, 110–13 computer imagery, 252, 253 cone cells, 150–51, 156 confusion colors, Holmgren’s color blindness testing, 99–101 Connecticut, color blindness testing, 104, 105, 106–7 contrast colors, traditional chromatic theories, 28–29 Cranach, Lucas, 36 Crania Americana (Morton), 121n16 Crary, Jonathan, 253 Creeks, vision testing, 129 Crittenden, Eugene C., 249 Cross, Anson, 177, 219 Cross, Charles R., 191 culture studies: Boas’s polar explorations, 137–39; relativism arguments, 139–45 culture studies, color words: American Indians, 115–17, 123–26, 133–34; civilization arguments, 118–19, 121– 23, 128–31, 140–41; classification arguments, 133–35, 140–41; color blindness data, 127–29; evolution arguments, 122–23, 126; historical context, 119–21; philological theories, 122–23; representation

assumption, 132–34; scholarly expectations, 117 Curie, Marie, 172 Dalton, John, 89–90 Danielson, Florence, 230 “Dark,” in classroom plantation story, 204. See also black (color); observer models; palette system, Ross’s Darwin, Charles, 46 Davenport, Charles and Gertrude (and their skin color studies): background, 229–30; Boas relationship, 145, 237–38; with Bradley’s spinning top, plate 11; methodology, 205–6, 230–36, plate 11; skepticism about, 235–36, 238–39; social purposes, 227–29, 236–37 Davidson, Thomas, 82–83 DeBeck, David, 127, 128 Decorator and Furnisher, 179 Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, 109 Detroit Lancet, 104, 111 Dibble, Leroy, 51, 129 Dictionary of Color (Maerz and Paul), 247–48 Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (Baldwin), 166 Dillingham Commission, 143 disease arguments, color blindness, 128–30 dissimilation process, Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152 distinction component, in knowing, 60, 65 Dix, Morgan, 46 dog senses, Gates’s training experiments, 220 Dolbeare, Amos, 191 Donders, Franciscus, 166 double-cone theory, Rood’s, 193 Dove, Heinrich Wilhelm, 35, 36, 39, 40–41 Draper, John William, 44–45 Dreiser, Theodore, 219

index Drift and Mastery (Lippman), 245 Durand, Asher B., 47, 48 Durand-Reul galleries, 23n1, 24 Durmuş, Deniz, 167 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 166–67 education, color. See teaching approaches, color education Eells, M., 125 Eiffel red, 180 Etching Club, Rood exhibit, 23n1 ether, in traditional chromatics, 27 ethics-science relationship, LaddFranklin’s perspective, 19, 167–73 Eugenics Records Office, 230, 250. See also Davenport, Charles and Gertrude (and their skin color studies) European studies/travels: Boas’s, 135– 36; Jeffries’s, 93; Ladd-Franklin’s, 156; Munsell’s, 207–8; Peirce’s, 55; O. Rood’s, 35–41; R. Rood’s, 23–24; Ross’s, 207–8 evolution theory, Darwin’s (Rood’s support), 46. See also civilization arguments; culture studies, color words; and entries on Ladd-Franklin Experimentalists club, 167–68, 170, 172 “fairy world” comment, Rood’s, 52–53 Farnum, Royal, 222 fatigue/pain arguments, color brightness, 217–18, 222 Fechner, Gustave, 38, 71–72 Fee, John, 103–4 feelings element, phanerochemistry, 78– 80 Field, George, 29–32, 48 Fielde, Adele, 128 Finlay, Victoria, 117 firstness, in semiotic theory, 65, 66–68 Fisch, Max, 75 Flathead Nation, 115n1 Fort Missoula, Montana, 115

303

foveal night blindness, 156, 167 Fox, Lawrence Webster, 126–27, 129, 131 Frank, Marie, 210 Franklin, William Studdards, 127, 128–29 Frey, F. G., 110 Funk, Isaac, 83 Funk and Wagnall’s Dictionary, 188 Furumoto, Laurel, 149, 167 Gage, John, 117 Gage, Lyman, 248 Gallatin, Albert, 121n16 Garfield, James, 115n1 Gaskill, Nicholas, 4n7, 9n21 Gates, Elmer, 219–20 Gatschet, Albert S., 123–24 Geiger, Lazarus, 122–23 genetic vs. logical approaches, color education, 217. See also teaching approaches, color education geography and culture, Boas’s studies, 137–39 geometric relationships, in Ross’s system, 208–9, 211–13 George III, 89 Gibbs, George, 123 Gilman, B. I., 215 Girard, A. C., 124, 125 Gladstone, William, 122 glassy essence metaphor, 81–82 God: in natural philosophy, 34, 35; neuroscientific research, 246–47; in theory development, 34, 35, 41 Goethe, Joannes Wolfgang von, 5, 37–38, 39 Goff, John, 125 Good Health, 129–30 Gordon, Reginald, 188 Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad Company, 109 Gray, Asa, 46 gray/grey (color): in American Indian vocabularies, 124; Berlin and Kay’s

304

index

gray/grey (color) (continued) language studies, 246; LaddFranklin’s evolutionary theory, 163, 171; Rood’s polarized light experiments, 52; Ross’s painter’s palette system, 208–9 Green (Pastoureau), 117 green (color): in American Indian vocabularies, 123, 124, 125; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; in Boas’s studies, 135, 136, 138n72; Bradley’s spectrum series, 189–90; eye nerve function theories, 49; Geiger’s evolution argument, 122; Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, 150, 151; Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152, 153; Holmgren’s color blindness testing, 97–100; institutional standardization efforts, 251– 52; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 157, 161, 171, 172; Munsell’s logical systems, 190–91, 213, 215, 217–18; Peirce’s theory, 60, 64, 65, 72–74, 76, 77; Rivers’s Inuit studies, 147; Rood’s experiments and instructions, 35, 42, 51–52, 192; Ross’s painter’s palette system, 209; solar eclipse experiences, 1–2; standardization problem, 183; traditional chromatic theory, 28 grey. See gray/grey (color) Guild, John, 251–52 habits: in Peirce’s star magnitude experiments, 74; in semiotic theory, 67–68 Haggerty, M. E., 171n66 Hall, G. Stanley, 224–25 Hallock, William, 188 Hambidge, Jay, 212–13 Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Helmholtz), 49 hand example, in semiotic theory, 66–67 Harlan, John Marshall, 120 Harlow, W. B., 102–3, 108

harmony principle: in color pedagogy, 217–18; traditional chromatic theories, 29–32 Harper’s magazine, 106 Harriman, E. H., 230 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 180–81 Harvard Observatory, 70 Harvard University, 60, 209 Haskell Institute, 127 Hays, Isaac, 90, 95 Heesen, Remco, 49n86 Hegel, 213 Helmholtz, Herman von: and Holmgren’s color blind testing, 91, 95–96; and Rood, 36 Helmholtz, Herman von (his color theory): and Brewster’s theories, 38– 39; Hering’s disagreement with, 150, 151–54; and Ladd-Franklin, 156, 159–60, 165, 169–70; methodology for, 150; and microanatomical observations of retina, 150–51; and Peirce’s astrophotometry work, 71–72; Peirce’s criticisms of, 63–64; physiological optics, 38–39, 49–50 Henderson, Lawrence, 176 Henry, Joseph: Bache fund, 70; on color blindness, 90; and common sense philosophy, 7–8, 11; explanation of colors, 27; on God’s role, 33–34; and Müller’s theory, 39; and Rood’s theory, 43; solar eclipse experiences, 1–2, 9, 43 Hering, Ewald, 150, 151–54, 159–60, 169, 171, plates 1–2 Hidatsa, color words, 124, 133–34 “High Dark,” in classroom plantation story, 204. See also observer models; palette system, Ross’s “High Light,” in classroom plantation story, 204. See also observer models; palette system, Ross’s Holmes, George Frederick, 45n72 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 111

index Holmes, William H., 131 Holmgren, Alarik Frithiof, 91–92, 95– 99, 111–12. See also entries on color blindness Hopkins, Edward, 25 Hopkins, James Frederick, 222 horopter problem, 155–56 Huddart, Joseph, 88 hue: Munsell’s color system, 84, 190–93, 217, 220; in Peirce’s color definitions, 76; Rood’s color-cone theory, 193 hundred bottles, chemistry, 61 Hyde, E. P., 252–53 icon, in semiotic theory, 66–67 idealism vs. materialism philosophy, psychophysics’ role, 36–37 immigration, assimilation concerns, 120, 143–44 impressionism, 23n1, 24, 53, plate 3 index, in semiotic theory, 66–67 industrialization, growth, 13–14 Instructions for Research Relative to . . . (Gibbs), 123 intensity: Munsell’s system, 220; Ross’s system, 209, 215. See also brightness International Commission on Illumination (CIE), 21, 251–53 Inuits, color perception studies, 137–39, 146–47, 170–71 Iroquois, color argument, 131 isabel parable, 80–82 Ishihara, Shinobu, 244–45 Jamaica, 230, 236–37, 239 James, William, 56, 83, 210 Jastrow, Joseph, 84, 86–87, 112–13 Jeffries, Benjamin Joy: background, 93; Columbian Exposition demonstration, 86–87, 112–13; on culture, 119; scientific medicine advocacy, 92– 93, 110–11. See also entries on color blindness

305

Jeffries, John, 93 Jekyll, Gertrude, 181 J. Lloyd and Company, 100 Johns Hopkins University, 74, 155–56, 166 Journal of the American Medical Association, 108 Joy, Charles, 46 Judd, Deane B., 167, 249, 252 judgment, in Peirce’s theory, 66, 75 Judy magazine, 183 Kansas, color blindness legislation, 104 Karsten, Gustav, 136 Kay, Paul, 245–46 Kekerken Island, Boas’s studies, 138–39 Kellogg, John Harvey, 129–30 Kevles, Daniel, 239 Kiefer, Geraldine Wojno, 23n1 King, Francis, 181 Klamaths, color vocabulary, 123–24 Kloppenberg, James, 37 Koehler, Sylvester Rosa, 95 König, Arthur, 151, 156, 167 Krakowitzer, Marie, 139, 143 Kremer, Richard L., 37, 49n86 Kuschel, Rolf, 241–42 Ladd-Franklin, Christine: background and education, 155–57; beliefs about science, 148–50; gender barriers, 155, 166–68, 172–73; Munsell discussions on Atlantic voyage, 176– 77; and Peirce, 58, 80, 82; review of Rivers’s Inuit studies, 146, 147–48 Ladd-Franklin, Christine (her color theory): evolution of light molecule, 157–58, 162–64; influence, 165–66, 173–75; language’s functions, 161– 63, 171–72; logic’s role, 159–61, 165, 168–69; overview, 19, 84, 147–48, 246, plate 7; reception of, 161, 164– 65, 177; role of Helmholtz-Hering disagreement, 150, 156–57; significance of science attitudes, 148–

306

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Ladd-Franklin, Christine (her color theory) (continued) 50, 168–69; supporting evidence, 158–59 Ladies’ Repository, 180 La Farge, John, 26 Lagerlunda rail accident, 91–92, 110 Landscape (Rood), 47 Lane, Anthony, 253–54 Langley, Samuel, 83 language: civilization arguments, 134–35, 245–46; as investigative tool, 15–17; Ladd-Franklin color theory, 161–63, 171–72; as mirror of physiology, 147–48. See also culture studies, color words Laughlin, Harry, 231, 250 Lawrence Scientific School, 60 laws and habits, Peirce’s theory, 67–68 Lenneberg, Eric, 245 Lenoir, Timothy, 51 Lewis, Charlton T., 45 Lewis, Daniel, 247 Lewis, Lily (later Rood), 23n1 Library of Useful Knowledge, 39n56 Liebig, Justus von, 35, 61 light: European studies, 37–38, 40–41; eye nerve function theories, 49–50; Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 157; Peirce’s theory, 57; psychophysics theory, 43; in Rood’s Modern Chromatics, 48–49; traditional chromatics theory, 27–28 “Light,” in classroom plantation story, 204. See also observer models; palette system, Ross’s Lippman, Walter, 245 Livingston, James, 15 logical vs. genetic approaches, color education, 217. See also teaching approaches, color education Long, John Davis, 105 Los Angeles Times, 102

Lotos Club, Twain’s speech, 132 “Low Dark,” in classroom plantation story, 204. See also observer models; palette system, Ross’s “Low Light,” in classroom plantation story, 204. See also observer models; palette system, Ross’s luminosity: Munsell’s color grammar, 84; Peirce’s color definitions, 76–77; Rood’s experiments and theory, 50, 51–52, 193. See also light Maerz, Aloys John, 247–48 Magnus, Heinrich Gustav, 35, 36 Magnus, Hugo (his color study), 115–17, 123–26, 132–33 Makahs, color vocabulary, 124 Marengo, Baptiste, 115 Marquette, scientist gatherings, 176–77 Marsh, James, 10 Massachusetts: art education, 177, 192; color blindness testing, 94, 104, 105, 110; royalties legislation, 226 materialism vs. idealism philosophy, psychophysics’ role, 36–37 mathematics, in color theory, 34, 211, 213–14 matter and mind, common sense philosophy, 8 Matthews, Washington, 124–25 mauve (color), 4, 77, 181–83. See also purple (color) Mauve Decade, The (Beer), 181–82 Maxwell, James Clerk, 49 McCulloh, Richard Sears, 29n17, 45, 46n73 Mead, Margaret, 142–43 meaning questions, Peirce’s, 56, 59–60, 63–64 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 81 Meyer, Alfred, 47 Michigan, color blindness testing, 109 microscopy studies, Rood’s, 33, 35 “Middle Color,” in classroom plantation story, 204. See also observer models; palette system, Ross’s

index middle hues. See Munsell, Albert Henry (and his color system) Millikan, Robert, 34n34 Mills, Sarah Hunt, 60 mind and matter, common sense philosophy, 8 mixing of colors: models of primary colors, plates 1–2; pigments vs. light, 39, 49, 51–52 MNAS (Massachusetts Normal Art School), 177, 192 Modern Chromatics (Rood): author’s purpose in writing, 26; color perception problem, 50–51; criticisms of music analogies, 48–49; influence of, 24–26, 210, 244; instructions to painters, 51–53; ocular physiology in, 47–48; painters’ appreciation of, 24; reviews of, 57, 74. See also Rood, Ogden Modocs, color vocabulary, 123 Monberg, Torben, 241–42 Monet, Claude, 23n1, 24 Monthly Stethoscope, 90 Mooney, Edward Ludlow, 33n31 morality-science relationship, LaddFranklin’s perspective, 19, 167–73 Moran, Thomas, 26 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 119 Morrill Act, 44 Morton, Samuel, 121n16 Müller, George Elias, 156 Müller, Johannes, 38, 39, 49 Mumford, Lewis, 84, 182n19 Mungiki, in language-color perception study, 241–42 Munsell, Albert Henry (and his color system): education arguments, 217, 218–24; influence of, 226–27, 239–40; and Ladd-Franklin, 176– 78; observer model, 205–6, 213–14, 216, 219; overview, plates 9–10; and Peirce’s Dictionary, 84; psychophysical approach, 17, 190–93; and

307

Ross, 203, 206–8, 211–12; sphere model, 212–16 Munsell, A. O. E., 249 Munsell Array, in language-color perception study, 241–42 Munsell Color Company, 84, 183, 184, 220, 249–50 Munsell Research Laboratory, 249 Munsterberg, Hugo, 210 Murray, Elise, 173 musical notation, in Ross’s painter’s palette system, 208–9 music comparisons, 29–31, 48–49, 53–54, 64, 158 naming of colors, natural world tradition, 16–17 naming of colors, standardizing efforts: abstractness assumption, 205; Bradley’s spectral approach, 185, 188–90; common usage implications, 247–48; as modernization anxiety, 20; Munsell’s psychophysical approach, 17, 185, 190–92; Ridgway’s approach, 185–88; variability problem, 177–85. See also language naming tests, color blindness, 95–96, 108 Nation, The, 63 National Academy of Sciences, 44 National Bureau of Standards, 21, 248–49, 251 natural law of awareness, Magnus’s, 126 natural realism. See common sense philosophy Nature, 167 N. D. Whitney, 100 nerve functions: in anatomical observations, 150–51; in psychophysics, 38– 39, 42, 49–50 neuroscientific research, conclusion problem, 246–47 New Standard Dictionary, 188 Newton, Isaac, 5, 27–28, 37–38

308

index

New York, color blindness legislation, 104, 107 New York Central Railroad, 104–5 New York Evening Journal, 164 New York Sun, 107 New York Times, 23n1, 90–91, 103, 128, 165– 66, 180, 250 Nez Perce, color vocabulary, 124, 125 Nickerson, Dorothy, 249–50 night blindness, foveal, 156, 167 Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists (Ridgway), 76, 179–80, 186–88, plate 4 Noyes, Henry, 95 objectivity of color. See color science, history overview; Munsell, Henry Albert (and his color system); Munsell Array; Munsell Color Company; psychophysics; red (color); and specific topics observer models: CIE’s standardization, 251–53; in Munsell’s system, 205–6, 213–14, 216; in Ross’s systems, 205–6, 209–11; and schoolchildren training, 205–6; social implications, 238 ocular physiology: in color blindness diagnostics, 97–99; European studies, 37–41; in Helmholtz’s trichromatic curves, 49–50; Rood’s experiments, 42–43, 50; and Rood’s instructions to painters, 51–52; in Rood’s Modern Chromatics, 48; and traditional chromatic theories, 31–32 Ohio, color blindness legislation, 104 Oliver, Charles, 101–2 Om färgblindheten (Holmgren), 92 “On Alternating Sounds” (Boas), 134, 140 On Drawing and Painting (Ross), 211 opponent colors theory, Hering’s, 150, 151–54 Optical Society of America, 21, 250, 251 “Optics in Modern Art” (Rood), 47

orange (color): in American Indian vocabularies, 124, 125; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; Bradley’s spectrum series, 189–90; Holmgren’s color blindness testing, 99– 100; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 157, 161, 163, 171; Munsell’s sphere model, 213; Ross’s painter’s palette system, 207, 209; traditional chromatic theories, 28 organized intelligence idea, 44–45 Otis, Laura, 38n53 Otter, Chris, 10 Pah Utes, color vocabulary, 124 pain/fatigue arguments, color brightness, 217–18, 222 Painter’s Palette (Ross), 215 palette system, Ross’s, 207–9 Palmer, George, 88–89 Pastoureau, Michel, 117 Paul, Morris Rea, 247–48 Peirce, Benjamin, 60, 70, 74 Peirce, Charles Henry, 61 Peirce, Charles Sanders: background, 60– 61; characterized, 82–83; criticism of opponent colors theory, 154; on culture, 119; European travels, 55; influence, 83–84, 244; and LaddFranklin, 155, 166, 168–69; and Munsell’s color system, 191; positions at institutions, 74; Rood relationship, 55, 56–57, 76, 80, 83 Peirce, Charles Sanders (his theories): chemistry, 55–64; community’s role, 78–83; definitions writing, 75–78, 80, 83, plate 4; logic’s role, 168; overview, 18–19; phanerochemistry’s role, 68–70, 78–80; pragmatism philosophy, 55–59, 68; protoplasm elements, 78–80; semiotic process, 64–68; star magnitude experiments, 70–74 Peirce, Charlotte Elizabeth, 61

index Pennsylvania, schoolroom plantation story, 203–4 Pennsylvania Railroad, 101, 104, 109 Perkin, William, 182n20 phanerochemistry, Peirce’s theory, 68–69, 78–80 Phantoms in the Brain (Ramachandran and Blakeslee), 246–47 Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, 104 Philadelphia Medical Times, 109 Philippines, color blindness testing, 129 philological approach, color perception, 121–22 photometric experiments, 50, 55–56, 70–72 Photometric Researches (Peirce), 70 phrenology, 11, 12 Piez, R. K., 222 pigments vs. light, mixing of colors, 39, 49, 51–52 Pillsbury, John, 183, 185, 189 pink (color): Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; Peirce’s color definitions, 77; solar eclipse experiences, 2, 43 Pissarro, Camille, 23n1 plantation story, schoolroom exercise, 203–4, 237. See also observer models; palette system, Ross’s Poincaré, Henri, 211 polar explorations, Boas’s, 137–39, plate 6 polarized light, Rood’s experiments, 52 population statistics, 14 pragmatism, 18, 55–59, 68, 81, 84. See also phanerochemistry, Peirce’s theory Present Status of Visual Science, The (Troland), 250–51 Prichard, Charles, 214–15 Priest, Irwin, 249, 250, 252 primary colors: eye nerve function theories, 49; Field’s music comparison, 30; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 161–62; mixing models, plates 1–2; Munsell’s logical sys-

309

tem, 220; in pedagogy debate, 217; Rood’s rejection of Brewster’s theory, 192; traditional chromatic theories, 28–30. See also specific colors Princeton Review, 12 Princeton University/College of New Jersey, 33–34 Principles of Chemistry (Stöckhardt), 61 proprietary vs. corporate capitalism models, 14–15 protoplasm theory, Peirce’s, 78–79 Prussian blue, Peirce’s theory, 61–62, 64– 65, 77 psychophysics: European early work, 36–37, 38–41; expectations of, 11– 12, 62; Peirce’s criticisms, 62–64, 72; Rood’s color disk experiments, 42–43; and star magnitude experiments, 71–72. See also ocular physiology Pupin, M. I., 34n34 Purkinje effect, 156, 166–67 purple (color): in American Indian vocabularies, 124, 125; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; in color blindness diagnostics, 97– 100; Geiger’s evolution argument, 123; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 160, 161–62, 163, 171; as modernity expression, 4; Munsell’s sphere model, 213, 214, 215; Peirce’s color definitions, 77, plate 4; in Ridgway’s Nomenclature, plate 4; Rood’s chloroform experience, 40; in Rood’s natural philosophy, 35; in Syme’s atlas, 16; traditional chromatic theories, 28, 30n19. See also violet (color) Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 23 Race Crossing in Jamaica (Davenport), 239 racial characterizations. See civilization arguments; culture studies, color words; Davenport, Charles

310

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racial characterizations (continued) and Gertrude (and their skin color studies) Radcliffe College, 229 Railroad Age, 106 railroad workers, color perception, 87–88, 91–92, 101, 103–8, 127–28 Railway Surgeon magazine, 88 rainbow colors, traditional chromatic theories, 27–28 Ramachandran, V. S., 246–47 Ramon y Cajal, Santiago, 159 Ransom, Joseph, 89 Reading Railroad, 107 “real, the,” challenge of, 17–18 red (color): as abstract point in system, 205; in American Indian vocabularies, 124, 125; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; Boas’s argument, 140–41; Bradley’s spectrum series, 189–90; in civilization/culture arguments, 131–32; classroom plantation story, 204; Dalton’s colorblindness theory, 89–90; Davenports’ skin color studies, 232–35; eye nerve function theories, 49; Geiger’s evolution argument, 122; Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, 150, 151, 153–54; Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152, 153–54; Holmgren’s color blindness testing, 97–100; institutional standardization efforts, 251–52; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 157–58, 160, 161–62, 163, 171, 172; Munsell’s logical system, 190–91, 213, 215, 217–20; Rivers’s Inuit studies, 147; Rood’s experiments and instructions, 35, 42–43, 51–52, 192; Ross’s painter’s palette system, 207, 209; solar eclipse experiences, 1–2; standardization problem, 180–81; traditional chromatic theories, 27, 28–29, 30

red (color), in Peirce’s theory: brightness phenomenon, 72–74; color definitions, 75–76, 77, 78; semiotic theory, 65, 66, 67 Reid, Thomas, 16 representational fidelity, color studies, 6–7 Researches on Color Blindness . . . (Wilson), 90 retina, anatomical observations, 150–51 Reymond du Bois, Emil, 36 Ridgway, Robert, 76, 177, 179–80, 182–83, 185–88, 191n41, 231, 247, plate 4 Rivers, W. H. R., 146–47 Robinson, Samuel, 115, 125 rod cells, 150–51, 156 Rogers, Fairman, 70 Rogers, William Barton, 35, 102 Rood, Helen, 34, 36, 41, 44 Rood, Mathilde, 42 Rood, Ogden: background, 32–33; Civil War impact on, 43–44, 45–46; criticism of opponent colors theory, 154; dictionary assignment, 83; disk-spinning experiments, 42–43; education, 33–36, 40–41; on impressionism, 24–25; influence of, 18, 25– 26, 53–54, 243–44; isabel parable, 80–81; on mathematics’ limitations, 34; on mechanical vibrations, 42; and Munsell’s color system, 192–93, 215; painting interests, 35–36, 40, 47, 53–54, plate 3; Peirce relationship, 55, 56–57, 76, 80, 83; on role of language, 16; on visual observation’s role, 34–35. See also Modern Chromatics (Rood) Rood, Roland, 23–25, 53–54 Ross, Denman: influence of, 239; and Munsell, 203, 206–8, 211–12, 214, 215; observer model, 205–6, 209–11; painter’s palette system, 207–9; on sensation, 210

index Rumkorff coil experiments, 46 Ruskin, John, 47 Salish Nation, 115n1 Sanford, E. C., 167 Sanford’s Ginger Company, 103 Sapir, Edward, 144–45 saturation, in Munsell’s color system, 190–93 Schaffer, Simon, 38n49, 142 Schoenfield’s, 179 School Arts Book (Bailey), 209, 227 schoolroom training, color lessons. See teaching approaches, color education Schrödinger, Erwin, 173 Schultze, Max, 150–51 Science, 102–3, 108, 167 science, Civil War impact, 44–45, 111. See also psychophysics; and specific entries on color blindness and LaddFranklin Scripture, Edward, 161–62 secondary colors, 28–29, 49 secondness, in semiotic theory, 65–67 semiotics, Peirce’s theory, 18–19, 56, 63–68 sensation, overview: in common sense philosophy, 7–9, 11; psychophysics’ cultural challenge, 11–13; subjective-objective complexity, 21– 22; transcendentalism’s arguments, 10–11. See also blue (color); ocular physiology; Peirce, Charles Sanders; Peirce, Charles Sanders (his theories); Rood, Ogden; teaching approaches, color education; and specific topics sensory thresholds, Boas’s studies, 137n71 Serviss, Garrett P., 164 Shakespeare, 81 Shoshones, color vocabulary, 124–25, 133–34

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sign explanations, in Peirce’s theory, 63–68 similar colors, Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 160 Sioux, color blindness, 127 skin color studies. See Davenport, Charles and Gertrude (and their skin color studies) Skinner, Laurena, 203–4 Skomisch, color vocabulary, 124 Smith, Benjamin Eli, 84 Smith, Joseph Lindon, 206–7 Smith, Walter, 192n46 Smithsonian Institution, 33n29, 60, 83, 123, 186. See also Ridgway, Robert social class, classroom plantation story, 204–5. See also civilization arguments; culture studies, color words solar eclipse experiences, color phenomenon, 1–2, 9, 43 sound blindness concept, Boas’s, 134 spectroscope experiments, Rood’s, 40 spectrum series, Bradley’s, 185, 188–90, plate 8 Spencer, Herbert, 130 Spencer, H. S., 124, 125 sphere model, Munsell’s, 212–16 spiral mapping approach, Ross’s proposal, 211–13 Standard Dictionary, 83 star magnitude experiments, Peirce’s, 70–74 Station for Experimental Evolution, 229– 30 Steggerda, Morris, 230, 239 Stevens, LeConte, 165 Stewart, Dugald, 8–9 St. Louis Exposition, 129 Stöckhardt, Julius Adolph, 61 Stocking, George, 142 Stratton, Samuel Wesley, 248 Strong, George Templeton, 46 Studies on Homer (Gladstone), 122

312

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Sturgis, Russell, 223 subjectivity of color. See color science, history overview; culture studies, color words; green (color); and specific topics Sullivan, Louis, 26 Supreme Court ruling, vision regulation, 106 Sweden, Lagerlunda rail accident, 91–92, 110 Sylvester, James, 166 symbol, in semiotic theory, 66–67 Syme, Patrick, 16–17, 187 Tanner, Amy Eliza, 225 teaching approaches, color education: child development arguments, 217, 223–25; Munsell’s logical system, 217–22, 226–27; plantation story, 203–4; practicality-based arguments, 222–23 technological advances, color naming variability, 180–83 tetrahedron, Munsell’s, 193 Theory of Color (von Bezold), 95 thirdness, in semiotic theory, 66–67 Thompson, Frank, 101 Thompson, Langdon, 222–24 Thompson, William, 101, 104 Thompson’s stick, color blindness testing, 101, 109, 127 thought question, Peirce’s, 56, 61–62. See also pragmatism Thursday Club, Jeffries’s speech, 102 Titchener, Edward B., 167–68 tobacco argument, color blindness, 129–30 tones, in Ross’s painter’s palette system, 208–9 Townsend, Charles, 53 Townsend, George, 109–10 transcendentalism, 10–11 transient colors, traditional chromatic theories, 2, 31–32

Treatise on Optics (Brewster), 31 trichromatic theory, Helmholtz’s. See Helmholtz, Herman von; Helmholtz, Herman von (his color theory) tristimulus values, CIE’s color standardization work, 251–52 Troland, Leonard, 21, 250–51 Troy University, 41–44 Turbervile, Dawbeney, 88 Twain, Mark, 132, 182n19 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 119 Umatillas, color vocabulary, 124 unilateral color blindness, 151 unitary names, in Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 157–58, 162, 171 United States Sanitary Commission, 44 universal grammar theory, 245 University of Chicago, 229 urbanization, growth significance, 13–14 value: in Munsell’s color balance argument, 217–18; in Ross’s painter’s palette system, 208–9 Vincent, Marvin, 41, 43 violet (color): in American Indian vocabularies, 124; Bradley’s spectrum series, 189–90; color blindness testing, 97–99, 128; eye nerve function theories, 49; in Henry’s chromatics, 27; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 161; Munsell’s logical system, 190–91, 214; Peirce’s definitions, 76, 77; Rood’s experiments and instructions, 42, 52, 192; Ross’s painter’s palette system, 209; standardization problem, 181. See also purple (color) Virchow, Rudolf, 137, 138 visual culture, expansion significance, 178–79 Vleck, John Monroe van, 41

index

313

von Bezold, Wilhelm, 95 von Luschan, Felix, 231, 234–35

Wright, W. David, 251–52 Wundt, Wilhelm, 62, 64

Wagnalls, Adam, 83 War Cloud (Munsell), 211 Warner, Charles Dudley, 182n19 Wasserman, Gerald S., 174 water, Boas’s color studies, 136, 138, 141 Welby, Victoria, 68 Welke, Barbara, 103 Welsh, Emmet, 109 Werner’s Notation of Color (Syme), 187 Whistler, James McNeil, 181–82 white (color): as abstract point in system, 205; in American Indian vocabularies, 124; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; in Boas’s cultural studies, 138n72, 140; classroom plantation story, 204; Davenports’ skin color studies, 232–37; Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, 151; Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152; as idealized observer model, 205–6, 237; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 157–58, 163, 172; Munsell’s sphere model, 213; Rivers’s Inuit studies, 147; Rood’s polarized light experiments, 52; in Ross’s systems, 207, 211–12; traditional chromatic theories, 28–29, 30, 37 Whorf, Lee, 144–45 Williams, Raymond, 17–18, 117n4 Wilson, George, 90 Winsor and Newton, 179 Wolcott, Oliver, 123 Wood and Garden (Jekyll), 181 Woodworth, Robert S., 129 World Magazine, 164 worsted test, color blindness, 99–102, 127, 133, 135, plate 5

yarns, color blindness testing, 99–102, 127, 133, 135, plate 5 yellow (color): as abstract point in system, 205; in American Indian vocabularies, 123, 124, 125; Berlin and Kay’s language studies, 246; Boas’s language argument, 135; Bradley’s spectrum series, 189–90; in color blindness diagnostics, 97–99, 102; Davenports’ skin color studies, 232– 35; eye nerve function theories, 49; Geiger’s evolution argument, 122; Helmholtz’s trichromatic theory, 151, 153; Hering’s opponent colors theory, 152, 153; Ladd-Franklin’s evolutionary theory, 157–58, 160, 161, 163, 171; Munsell’s logical system, 190–91, 213, 214–15, 217–20; Peirce’s definitions, 76, 77; in psychophysics theory, 43; Ridgway’s naming system, 187; Rivers’s Inuit studies, 147; Rood’s experiments and instructions, 35, 42, 51–52; Ross’s painter’s palette system, 209; solar eclipse experiences, 1–2; in Syme’s atlas, 16–17; traditional chromatic theories, 28–29, 30 Yerkes, Robert, 20, 167 Youmans, Edward, 130n48 Young, Thomas, 49, 89 Young-Helmholtz theory, color blindness testing, 96–97 Zöllner astrophotometers, 70–71 zone theory, color perception, 158, 174