Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [769]
The New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, under the presidency (after 1869) of Richard Morris Hunt, similarly sought to winnow out those it considered unprofessional and to impose order and standards on practitioners. It recruited only trained architects—often from well-to-do families able to pay for their education—while rejecting older craftsmen who had worked their way up from the ranks of carpenters and masons. The group thus denied membership to John Kellum, perhaps the most employed architect of the day, on the ground that he was merely an unskilled draftsman. Indeed Kellum’s very popularity counted against him: the new men found him too “commercial,” too willing to defer to the wishes of his prosperous clients, too reluctant to improve his employers’ tastes by bringing to bear the authority of his professional credentials.
In the 1870s “regular” doctors made another effort to impose their methods and approaches on the practice of medicine. The New York Medico-Legal Society prepared a bill in 1872 authorizing the County Medical Society to license all physicians, thus allowing the American Medical Association’s allopathic physicians to define their homeopathic rivals as quacks, effectively putting them out of business. The bill passed, but, heeding widespread opposition, Governor Hoffman vetoed it, arguing that only the marketplace should regulate medical practice. A compromise measure passed in 1874, but physicians remained dissatisfied. In the meantime their public-oriented colleagues organized separately: Dr. Edward H. Janes, the city’s sanitary inspector from 1866 until his death in 1893, helped found the American Public Health Association in 1872.
New Yorkers and Brooklynites were particularly prominent in the movement to professionalize civil engineering, as so many leading practitioners were graduates of the area’s many public works projects. Faced with a flood of self-proclaimed engineers in the late 1860s, promoters pushed to create a “proper association, admission to which should only be possible to accomplished and competent men.” In 1867 they established the American Society of Qvil Engineers (ASCE). J. P. Kirkwood and Julius Adams, the engineers of Brooklyn’s sewer system, served as the ASCE’s first president and vicepresident, respectively, and Alfred W. Craven, John B. Jervis, and other Croton veterans became prominent members. Indeed seven of the first eight presidents were either permanent employees of New York City or did consulting work for it. The organization established its permanent home in Manhattan, holding meetings and social functions in offices at the Chamber of Commerce Building, and started regular publication of a professional journal in 1872.
The ASCE thrived, boasting 212 members by 1871. Participation was restricted to men who had been actively employed for five or more years in a supervisory capacity, though less experience was acceptable for those who had completed a college course of study. Before the war New York’s engineers had trained on the job or in apprenticeships; mastery of the fundamentals of math, physics, and mechanics had been deemed unnecessary to solving most technical problems. In 1864, however, Thomas Egleston founded Columbia’s School of Mines, which, despite its name, pioneered broad-based scientific education for engineers as well as geologists, and in 1869 the school began offering four-year courses in civil engineering. Mechanical engineers too, most of whom had emerged from machine