Albert Edward Wiggam

              Figure

Albert Edward Wiggam


An Estimate of Albert Edward Wiggam
by GLENN FRANK, Editor of Century Magazine
THE four most interesting men I know are H. G. WELLS, LINCOLN STEFFENS, JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON, and ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM.

Wells writes sentences that suggest a hundred times more than they say; Steffens is blessed with an almost divine sympathy that enables him to understand a baron as well as a bolshevik and vice versa; Robinson is that rarest of rare persons—a radiant cynic, a man whose cynicism leaves you eager about life rather than disillusioned with it; Wiggam, although he has written less than Wells or Steffens or Robinson, has in goodly measure all the qualities that enable these three men to turn an evening's conversation into an exhilarating adventure.

Wiggam's peculiar value to American life is that he knows how to come out on the steps of the laboratory and tell us, who are waiting in the crowd outside, just what the scientists are doing inside.  And he can tell us in language that we can understand.  He is equally at home with a Vermont farmer and a Viennese scientist.  He knows the language of both, and the favorite indoor sport of his life is to stand between the two and interpret one to the other.


He Knows His Subject
First of all, he knows what he is talking about.  He has not spent his life in a laboratory.  If he had, he would probably write

An Acknowledged Masterpiece
 and talk in a jawbreaking technical language that we ordinary mortals could no more understand readily than we can work a cross-word puzzle without resorting to the dictionary.  He talks and writes in the simple, vigorous English of the average intelligent American.  But he has made himself intimately familiar with the results that have come out of the fascinating investigations in the living sciences of biology, psychology, and anthropology—those sciences which, whether we realize it or not, have to do with the very practical problems of our health, our happiness, our success, and the future of our children.  His library is a vast collection, not of the popular books on science which the rest of us buy and read, but of the thin little pamphlets, reports, and technical journals in which the great scientists and investigators have set down the important results of their work.  And he knows an enormous number of the great scientists personally.  They know him and trust him and put their results at his disposal.



He Talks in the Language of the People
But there are other men who know as much about science as Wiggam does.  The point is that he knows, as few men of this generation know, how to put these results into the living language of the people.

H. L. Mencken, Baltimore's breaker of heads, has called Wiggam's book The New Decalogue of Science an exhibit of Methodism in a laboratory apron.  In thus flinging an intended slur at Wiggam, Mr. Mencken has hit upon the one thing that makes Wiggam one of the most useful living Americans.  I call Mr. Mencken's attention to the following fact:

Until recently we have had evangelists who have had unusual gifts of exhortation, but who unfortunately have had nothing to say; and we have had scientists who have had unusually important things to say to us, but who have not taken the trouble to say them in a way that would capture our attention or that we could understand even if we listened to them.



He Creates an Evangelism of Scholarship
At this point Wiggam burst upon the American public with a happy way of talking science that made him, almost over night, one of the most widely discussed writers of our time.  And Wiggam's success is due to exactly the thing that Mr. Mencken pokes fun at.  Wiggam is a strange combination of evangelist and scholar.  He is a sort of cross between Einstein and Billy Sunday.  He has created something that neither evangelists nor scholars had thought possible.  He has created an evangelism of scholarship.

I have seen what is perhaps the hardest boiled audience in America hang as breathlessly on his discussion of the laws of heredity as they would on the hair-raising recital of a war correspondent or Conan Doyle's recital of Sherlock Holmes' supreme adventure.

I wish every politician in America could spend a month just talking with Wiggam.  We might then get a political leadership that would regard the unborn as part of its constituency, even if the unborn count for little at the polls on election day.



He Wrote The New Decalogue of Science
For ten long years I kept at Wiggam to give up lecturing as a profession and to begin writing.  A wholly unjustified modesty regarding his own abilities made him delay the change unduly.  Finally, a conspiracy of effort between Mrs. Wiggam and myself resulted in his writing a brief paper for The Century Magazine under the title of The New Decalogue of Science.  I am sure I am understanding the case when I say that this brief paper created a greater stir in both America and Europe than any magazine article that has been published in the last twenty-five years.  I was delighted, of course, when the outstanding scientists of America and Europe wrote to me in extravagant praise of the paper.  But I was even more pleased when a little later the Bobbs-Merrill Publishing Company induced Mr. Wiggam to expand the paper into a book of the same title which straightway became a best-seller.  And recently another book of his, The Fruit of the Family Tree, comes from the same press with even more flattering comments from scientists and reviewers than greeted the Decalogue.

It is an easy matter for a facile writer to write a best seller at which all the scholars will laugh.  It is easy for a man who knows to write a book which all the scholars will praise and no one else will read.  To write a book, as Wiggam has, that the Man in the Laboratory goes out of his way to praise and the Man in the street buys by the thousands is something new under the sun.

Now that I have succeeded in weaning Wiggam from lecturing as a profession and have seen him leap into success as a writer, I am equally interested in seeing him do a limited amount of lecturing in places where his personality will be added to his pen in giving a new vision to men and women who can in turn bring a new influence into the thought and action of our public life.  And I congratulate, in advance, the few places in which the limited time he has for such work permits him to lecture.


Mr. Wiggam's Latest Effort






Subjects of Mr. Wiggam's Lectures

What Is Civilization Doing to Progress?
Along the lines of The New Decalogue of Science.

Heredity and Human Progress
Along the lines of The Fruit of the Family Tree.  Part of this lecture illustrated with slides.  Committee must furnish lantern.

The Nursery of Genius—It's Origins and Responsibilities
A biologist looking into the future with suggestions for making it safer and happier.




Comments on Mr. Wiggam's Books

From the New York Sun, Saturday, February 28th, 1925—(From a criticism by Edward Alsworth Ross of the University of Wisconsin).
Galton, the founder of eugenics, hoped to see it sweep the world like a new religion, and here is Mr. Wiggam, equipped with learning, fervor, imagination and a sparkling literary style, who is doing a lot to realize Galton's dream.  His New Decalogue of Science came out two years ago and proved a best seller—a fact as creditable to the public as the success of Robinson's Mind in the Making.  Now Mr. Wiggam comes again with another book quite as eloquent and witty, but a deal more cautious and factual.
Blessed with a dynamic mind and a gift of vivid, lucid, stirring statement, he is an ideal broadcaster of the findings of the more or less inarticulate biologists.  Why should one read fiction for a pastime when Mr. Wiggam can make the reports from the scientific laboratories so thrilling?  His posing of puzzles—as in cousin mariage, twin resemblance, and inheritance of disease—and then the flashing upon the stumped reader of the solution found by the experimenters and the observers of the last twenty years holds a fascination of a Sherlock Holmes story.



Some Comments on The Fruit of the Family Tree
Prof. Conklin.  Princeton University: Better than the Decalogue.

Prof. H. M. Parshley, Biologist, Smith College: May it sell like Papini!

Frank Parker Stockbridge, New York World: Wiggam can upset more of a man's old notions without making him mad than any man in America.



Some Comments on The New Decalogue of Science
Frankling H. Giddings, Columbia University: The most important contribution to popular education made in America in fifty years.

W. R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, London: Both valuable and timely.  The Churches especially need to be reminded that the revelation of Divine truth which has come to our age is mainly through natural science and that each new discovery brings with it new moral obligations.


Laurance Stallings, New York “World:”
An astounding product of a single mind.

Edward Murray East, Biologist, Harvard University: Wiggam has the soul of an artist and the mental attitude of a man of science.  The New Decalogue is a great message.

Raymond Pearl, Biologist, Johns Hopkins University: Its biology is absolutely sound and in addition it is plain common sense.

E. G. Conklin, Biologist, Princeton University: It will tell appealingly to the man in the street.

Daniel B. Leary, Psychologist, University of Buffalo: Mr. Wiggam is teacher as well as scientist and bridges with genius the gap between the man of science and the man in the street.



—**Owing to the very great drains upon Mr. Wiggam's time and strength he is unable to accept social engagements or requests for short addresses outside of those directly booked by the Bureau.




The Affiliated Lecture Bureaus
BOSTON PITTSBURG CLEVELAND CHICAGO ATLANTA DALLAS PORTLAND CALGARY, (ALTA.)