On September 14th, 1869, tens of thousands of Americans crowded into streets across the country to celebrate the centennial of German polymath, Alexander Von Humboldt’s birth. Portraits of Humboldt were draped off buildings next to American flags, an estimated 25,000 speeches were delivered, and cities were doused in music, banquets, and jubilee until long past nightfall. In some cities, this continued for three days.
This bust of von Humboldt is still in Central Park today.
Boston held multiple celebrations, one being attended by the Mayor, both of the state’s Senators, and the Governor. While speaking in Buffalo, former President, Millard Fillmore, gleefully recalled the story of a conversation he had with Humboldt. Syracuse, NY held a mile-long parade attended by 15,000 people. The celebrations united the still recovering country, as even Memphis, an economic center of the American Confederacy only 3 years earlier, was also taken by the celebration of Humboldt, a man dedicated to the eradication of slavery.
In New York City, a bust of Humboldt was unveiled under a hanging oil portrait of the explorer. Surrounding the event were large banners which read:
“ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, he lives not for an age, but for all time…
The Aristotle of a new era”
Yet in 2019, when you Google “Alexander Vo,” Humboldt is the third suggestion after Alexander Volkanovski (an Australian MMA fighter), and Alexander Volkov (a Russian MMA fighter).
Humboldt’s dramatic descent into obscurity was yet another casualty of World War 1. In 1917, as American soldiers went to battle German soldiers in Europe, American civilians went to battle German civilians at home. German Americans were harassed, beaten, publicly humiliated, and even murdered by their non-German neighbors. Anti-German sentiments continued to intensify as copies of Alexander Von Humboldt’s masterwork, Kosmos, were burnt en masse. The following generation of students had Humboldt’s role in the progress of biology, geography, mathematics, medicine, meteorology, botany, philanthropy, philosophy and politics wiped from their history curriculum.
Americans did the same thing with the remaining German literature at the start of the second World War, and decades after the final chunk of the Berlin wall fell, American students such as myself were offered no mention of Humboldt’s story in school, even as we were taught about species, places, and phenomena that he discovered. The book burning continued, at least symbolically, as last year, President Donald Trump told his country to disregard the climate report his administration’s scientists released. The report highlighted the apocalyptic effects of global climate change, a phenomenon that Humboldt was the first to predict.
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Alexander Von Humboldt didn’t need to become an American icon. In May of 1804, he was 34 years old, and had just completed a five-year expedition across the top half of western South America, a region almost completely unknown to Europeans at the time. Reports of his adventures in exotic jungles and discoveries of entire species had made their way back to Europe making Humboldt one the most famous people on Earth. His status was expected to skyrocket even more once he got back to Europe with his shipload of specimens that would hold the modern day novelty of martian bones.
“How I long to be in Paris!” Humboldt confessed to a colleague while in Cuba during the Spring of 1804. His fatigue was justified because he and his companion, Aimé Bonpland had already done so much. They nearly summited Chimborazo, which was believed at the time to be the tallest mountain in the world. When they turned around at 19,286 feet because of severe altitude sickness, the two had gone higher than anyone else in history, including those who had flown in balloons. They had traversed an estimated 6,000 miles on foot, horseback and canoe through areas populated by predators, the occasional hostile indigenous tribe, and disease.
An 1859 portrait of von Humboldt by Julius Schrader
Yet, in the midst of his exhaustion, Alexander Von Humboldt chose not to travel to France to meet with European academics and dignitaries, but instead pressed onward to Philadelphia. He made this extra trip at great risk to himself, his crew, and his findings. There was a British Naval Blockade between Cuba and the U.S and he’d have to sail through the Bahama Straits, one of the most dangerous stretches of sea in the western hemisphere during hurricane season. Humboldt, a man who had already faced ceaseless peril in the jungles and mountains of South America, would later write of the storms he sailed through on his way to Philadelphia, “I [had] never been so concerned about my death.”
Why risk himself, his crew, and his science when he had already gathered more data than any other scientific explorer of his era? In Philadelphia, there were no trees to discover, no soil content to measure, or unseen birds left to draw. From Cuba, Humboldt wrote to fellow scientist and current US President, Thomas Jefferson, that “for moral reasons..I could not resist seeing the United States and enjoying the consoling aspects of a people who understand the precious gift of liberty.”
At the time, Cuba was occupied by the Spanish. Spanish colonies did have slavery, but their slavery laws were often labeled as more humane and compassionate than America’s because spanish slaves could get married, and purchase their own freedom. While many neo-progressives of the time applauded Spain’s treatment of slaves, Humboldt found the practices pathetically insufficient, labeling their additional liberties as “illusory.” Humboldt also wrote of the slavery he witnessed in Cuba, “These planes are watered with the sweat of the African slave! Rural life loses its appeal when it is inseparable from the misery of our species.”
Humboldt’s hatred for the institution of slavery put pressure on his relationship with President Jefferson, who at the time was considered somewhat of a moderate on Slavery. He had supported ending the slave trade his whole career, but was never for the complete emancipation of slaves, and owned slaves himself. Out of fear of damaging their relationship, as well as to reward his positive contributions to democracy and liberty, Humboldt elected to not lobby the President towards abolition. Instead, he vented to others, like William Thornton of the American Philosophical Society (of which Jefferson was a prominent member), to whom he referred to slavery as “abominable” and as “a disgrace.”
Humboldt’s in-person interactions with Jefferson were limited to discussion on the territory gained in the Louisiana Purchase and the scientific discoveries Humboldt made in South America.
His passivity likely haunted him. For the rest of his life, Humboldt became increasingly dedicated to the cause of abolition, culminating in the 1856 Presidential election where he formally endorsed John Fremont, the abolitionist opponent to James Buchanan.
Abolitionism was just one aspect of Humboldt’s progressive philosophy. Exploration has often been bound to colonial conquest and domination, but Humboldt’s explorations instead emphasized growth for the development of all humanity. He believed (unpopularly) that the benefits of growth should be shared equally amongst all people, including indigenous and black people. He wrote, “A nation’s wealth is just like an individual’s –only the accessory to our happiness. Before being free, we must be just, and without justice there can be no lasting prosperity.”
Again, Humboldt’s insights remain relevant. Today, we measure the quality of our economy by growth, by GDP, and by output. We don’t measure in terms of wages, educational access, health, or by happiness. Who or how many reap the benefits of our growth is immaterial, because our wealth isn’t accessory to our happiness, but accessory to our status.
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A map by Alexander von Humboldt and engraver George Aikman illustrating the distribution of plant species at different elevations in the Americas. Courtesy Geographicus Rare Antique Maps & Wikimedia Commons.
In addition to Humboldt’s concern for the general health of humanity was his concern for the health of the environment. Many consider Humboldt to be the founder of ecology, as well as the first person to make note of man-made climate change. While in Venezuela in 1800, he was the first to discover the macro-environmental effects of anthropomorphic deforestation, writing about how when forests are cleared, the ecosystem loses the cooling effects of trees, causing warming. This observation would later evolve into the now widely-accepted notion that deforestation causes the loss of necessary carbon-sinks, causing an excess of greenhouse gasses, exacerbating global warming. Most revolutionary for the time however, was the basic idea that humans were significant enough to affect the climate, an idea that became central to his overarching world-view.
In 2019, neither the President nor the Senate is willing to accept the science Humboldt established 120 years ago.
We’ve all been living in a masochistic experiment of Humboldt’s darkest predictions. He pleaded for concern over climate change’s unforeseeable impacts on “future generations.” The world’s most powerful nations and industries have ignored his warnings since he put them in writing, and now over 1.7 million children die a year because of pollution, and the time between now and when something can be done to minimize this growing suffering is shrinking.
It isn’t scientific skepticism that drives our inaction, but a remorseless craving for growth at all costs. Humboldt foresaw this too. Much like how his opponents cited “prosperity” to justify their dehumanization of blacks, today’s Republican Party has cited “pro-business” philosophies to justify their destruction of our shared resources, our well-being, and our prospects of future survival.
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Being the polymath he was, historians have struggled in labeling Alexander Von Humboldt. He’s been granted the title of explorer, geographer, naturalist, philosopher, philanthropist, educator, activist, author, meteorologist, among others. However, his best fitting moniker is as a universalist. In five separate volumes spanning 1845 to shortly after his death in 1862, Humboldt released Kosmos. The books were enormous, constructing a conclusion to his lifetime of observations and hypotheses. The volumes focused primarily on discoveries he made in the Americas from 1799 to 1805, but also upon his 6 months of exploration of the Russian interior of Asia that he embarked on at age 60.
In Kosmos, Humboldt argued that the earth, the universe, and everything was a single system. Biology was dependent on geology, geology was dependent on meteorology, meteorology was dependent upon climate, climate was dependant on society (as shown with deforestation in Venezuela), and so on. Centrally, Humboldt claimed, nothing happens in isolation. In the introduction of volume one, Humboldt writes:
“The most important aim of all physical science is this: to recognize unity in diversity, to comprehend all the single aspects as revealed by the discoveries of the last epochs, to judge single phenomena separately without surrendering their bulk, and to grasp Nature’s essence under the cover of outer appearances.”
Scientists viewed this theory as revolutionary from the strictly physical standpoint, but it bore equal philosophical significance. If the universe operates as a single, inter-connected system, the magnitude of which dwarves the petty prejudices of conflicting factions, then humanity must view itself as a mean, rather than the end to the function of that system, upon which it is completely reliant. Humboldt told a species at odds with itself, that they were not the center of the universe. This idea shrunk humanity, bringing it closer together.
His promotion of symbiosis rejects isolationism. Again, the Republican Party took Humboldt’s theme, and pursued the opposing philosophy with disastrous results. Last year, President Trump unleashed tariffs on foreign trade with the intention of stoking intra-national trade. Like most economists predicted, it resulted in massive financial loses, forcing him to give $12 billion in subsidies to the American Farmers he pushed out of the global market. Even more recently Trump withdrew aid from the Central American countries whose extreme poverty and lack of support had already resulted in a mass exodus to the US Border. An exodus that even without this self-induced stimulation, Trump has labeled a “national emergency.”
Putting “America First” assumed cooperation had nothing to offer the United States, and just as predicted in Kosmos, isolation has stifled the global “unity in diversity” that Humboldt wrote about.
Inherent in our collective smallness is not just a moral obligation to treat each other as equals, but a pragmatic one. According to Humboldt, no one group is superior to another, thus for society to operate at full capacity within the universal system, everyone must be included and valued. This is why he couldn’t separate his naturalism from his humanism, and it’s why he came to America. “For moral reasons” Humboldt said to Thomas Jefferson, he needed to risk his science to see America, a country whose newborn, although inconsistent, yearning for freedom, liberty and equality he viewed as the potential moral savior of humanity. The United States, to him, held a central philosophy crucial to optimizing the species’ role within the function of the system it is only a small part of.
For decades, the universalist used his status in effort to abolish what he saw as one of the final barriers to the United States realizing its potential. In 1859, in an interview with the New York Times shortly before his death, Humboldt said “I am half American; that is, my aspirations are all with you; but I don’t like the present position of your politics. The influence of Slavery is increasing, I fear. So too is the mistaken view of Negro inferiority.”
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Alexander Von Humboldt aimed to minimize the role of evil in his America, and it’s time we renew his role in ours. The United States has always had a fascination with explorers and exploration. It’s the method by which we relatively recently discovered the land upon which we based the most powerful civilization in history. However the bulk of explorers who “discovered” this hemisphere, primarily Columbus, were violent, despotic, rapist, tyrannical monsters. Rightfully, we are trending towards a refusal to celebrate these individuals, but with each explorer we stop celebrating, we celebrate our exploratory history less.
Celebrating exploration, especially geographic exploration, is important because it connects us with a time in which we didn’t know everything. There are no more continents, forests, jungles, or oceans left to discover, and there haven’t been for generations. We have been granted that luxury by the risks explorers took in order to help us understand the world we live in, and that’s why Alexander Von Humboldt deserves his day. A day in which school children learn about science and the benevolence of discovery; a day in which we acknowledge and grieve our devastating history of native genocide, and racial imperialism, but also a day where we celebrate Alexander Von Humboldt, an American icon who didn’t sacrifice his humanity for his ambition.
We’ve done this before. Remember September 14th, 1869, when the United States erupted in Celebration for Humboldt’s 100th birthday; remember the celebrations in former slave-state Tennessee; remember the former Presidents who fawned over his legacy; but most importantly, remember a wagon in Philadelphia that paraded through Fairmont Park during one of the many celebratory processions this day. The wagon was ornate, and held representatives of various racial groups, including Caucasian-American, Black, Native-American, Caucasian-European and East Asian people. To many at the time, this was Humboldt’s prevailing legacy: an embrace of each other.
Today, the United States finds itself falling back into demented habits of white supremacy and isolation. On September 14th, 2019, I hope to see the sentiment of the Philadelphia wagon replicated in a country-wide embrace of the man it is in our national DNA to celebrate.