Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
revive it. In just a few months, he succeeded in doubling the society's mem-
bership. He added, “the Berkeley crowd seems to have wanted the society
for personal use. I want it to awaken and keep alive an interest in seismol-
ogy.”
52
though he failed to meet his goal of one thousand members, he had
soon raised the number from 143 to four hundred, where it remained until
the late 1920s.
Branner was, in his own estimation, a child of an oral culture. He had
spent his early years on a tennessee farm in the 1850s. He had little access
to topics as a boy, and instead delighted in the stories told by slaves. In
1921 he published a collection of these “How and Why Stories,” transcribed
in full dialect. In a preface he explained that it “seemed best to write them
down as nearly as possible in the spirit and language in which they were told
me without concerning myself with inconsistencies of which the narrators
themselves were not aware.”
53
As a product of the antebellum South and a
critic of Reconstruction, Branner was also adept at casting suspicion on the
federal government and positioning himself as a defender of the people.
More than any other California seismologist of his era, he had a politician's
instincts. At the time of the 1906 earthquake, his rhetorical skills were on
display in a conflict with the director of the US Geological Survey, Charles
Walcott. Walcott was “a skilled scientist-politico who was wont to breakfast
with a congressman, a senator, or a President.”
54
Walcott informed Branner
that the USGS planned to take over the survey of Arkansas coal fields (which
Branner had led in the 1890s), and forbade him from publishing anything
on the topic. In a series of letters to
Science,
Branner framed Walcott's move
as an “invasion” by the federal government of the province of a state survey:
the issue was “not a question of geology, but a question of the administra-
tion of a public bureau.”
55
Branner styled himself as a representative of “the
people of Arkansas” against an expansionist federal office. He went so far
as to accuse the USGS of being a trust. “trusts and trust methods are in the
air,” he declared, but so are “protest, rebellion and resentment against these
high-handed methods.”
56
Branner's dispute with Walcott would return to
haunt him after he took over the leadership of the SSA.
Branner was convinced from the start that the society would need to en-
list a large number of cooperative observers. Perhaps he was swayed by his
first experience with a seismoscope, a year after the Charleston earthquake
of 1886. the journal in which he had intended to record tremors ended up
with the title “troubles with a Seismo, by J.C.B., 1887-8.”
57
In 1909 he ar-
gued that locating faults could not be accomplished instrumentally, at least
not for a “young” organization with limited funds. there was, however,
