Bowman, Isaiah

(b. Waterloo, Ontario, 26 December 1878; d. Baltimore, Maryland, 6 January 1950)

geography.

Bowman was the third of eight children of Samuel Cressman Bowman, a farmer of moderate means, whose father had been a schoolteacher and farmer. The family moved to Michigan eight weeks after Isaiah was born. Bowman began teaching in country schools at the age of seventeen, continuing his own education during the summers. He attended Ferris Institute at Big Rapids, Michigan, and later the State Normal School at Ypsilanti, where he was inspired by Mark Jefferson’s approach to general geographical problems through physical geography. With Jefferson’s encouragement, Bowman went to Harvard to study under William Morris Davis and was awarded the B.S. in 1905. He served as an instructor in the geology department at Yale until he earned the Ph.D. from that university in 1909 and became an assistant professor. The study of physiography, which Davis did so much to advance, shaped Bowman’s interests for many years. His work in this field culminated in Forest Physiography (1911). In this large textbook on landforms, Bowman presented the first comprehensive account of the relief, climate, soils, and vegetation of the United States.

Despite the lasting contribution made by Forest Physiography and his extensive work on such problems as water supply and oil-well wastes, Bowman displayed his principal geographical accomplishments in South American and frontier studies. He participated in two Yale expeditions to South America in 1907 and 1911, and in 1913 he returned to South America as leader of an expedition sponsored by the American Geographical Society. The results of these journeys are described in The Andes of Southern Peru (1916), Desert Trails of Atacama (1924), and several papers. After Bowman became director of the American Geographical Society in 1915, he encouraged other studies on South America and initiated the very important project to map Hispanic America on a scale of 1:1,000,000 to meet the standards of the International Millionth Map.

When he took over the leadership of the American Geographical Society, Bowman began to convert an amateur organization into an institution of geographical scholarship. He saw a clear need for intensive yet wide-ranging research for the professionalization of geography. He expanded and remodeled the Society’s Bulletin into the quarterly Geographical Review and initiated publication of monographs. During World War I, the government used the facilities of the Society, and as a member of the American delegation to the peace conference in 1918–1919, Bowman advised on the establishment of postwar boundaries. During the twenty years he directed the Society, he investigated modern frontier areas around the world, demonstrating that the “passing of the American frontier” around 1890, noted by F. J. Turner and others, had been much less rapid and complete than usually presumed. In Bowman’s view, historians had overemphasized the Census Bureau’s decision in 1890 to abandon mapping a frontier line. The line was discarded because isolated bodies of settlement destroyed its meaning, not because the frontier had been settled or because pioneer conditions had disappeared. He carried out fieldwork in Garfield County, Montana, in 1930, and the following year published The Pioneer Fringe, in which he developed his idea that under pioneer conditions man had his most direct confrontation with nature. He pointed out how little scientific study of the pioneer fringe had been undertaken, and suggested that this study in particular could contribute to the development of political and social policies. He recognized that in modern pioneering in an industrial and commercial world, economic law is as vital a factor as any in the natural environment.

In 1931 Bowman was president of the Association of American Geographers; from 1931 to 1934 he served as president of the International Geographical Union. He was chairman of the National Research Council from 1933 to 1935, and when President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Science Advisory Board in July 1933, it was at Bowman’s suggestion. In 1935 Bowman was appointed president of The Johns Hopkins University. His active participation in public affairs increased after this change. A small but significant part of his publications continued to be devoted to geography. During 1943 he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In August 1944 he took a prominent part in the World Security Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, and in the spring of 1945 he participated in the implementation of plans creating the United Nations. On his retirement from the presidency of Johns Hopkins University in December 1948, the department of geography was renamed the Isaiah Bowman School of Geography. In 1949 he accepted the position of consultant to the Economic Cooperation Administration.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. A complete list of Bowman’s published and unpublished books and articles accompanies the memorial by George F. Carter (see below). His most important books are Forest Physiography (New York, 1911); The Andes of Southern Peru (New York, 1916); The New World: Problems in Political Geography (Yonkers, N.Y., 1921), with supplements in 1923 and 1924; Desert Trails of Atacama, American Geographical Society spec. pub. no. 5 (New York, 1924); The Pioneer Fringe, ibid., no. 13 (New York, 1931); and Geography in Relation to the Social Sciences (New York, 1934). A sample of his late geographical thought appeared as “Settlement by the Modern Pioneer,” in Griffith Taylor, ed., Geography in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1951), ch. 11. Bowman’s records of his important governmental activities, deposited at The Johns Hopkins University, are to remain sealed until 1975.

II. Secondary Literature. Works on Bowman are George F. Carter, in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 40 (Dec. 1950), 338–350; and Gladys M. Wrigley, “Isaiah Bowman,” in The Geographical Review, 41 (Jan. 1951), 7–65, the most complete and informative biography.

Bert Hansen