<P> Other important figures in American politics who participated in the Enlightenment were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson . </P> <P> The Darwinian models of evolution and natural selection exerted considerable influence in the late 19th century . Society seemed to be evolving ever upward, a belief that was shattered by World War I . </P> <P> "History is past politics and politics present history" was the motto of the first generation of American political scientists, 1882 - 1900 . The motto had been coined by the Oxford professor Edward Augustus Freeman, and was enshrined on the wall of the seminar room at Johns Hopkins University where the first large - scale training of America and political scientists began . The founding professors of the field included Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, John Burgess and William Dunning at Columbia, Woodrow Wilson at Princeton, and Albert Bushnell Hart at Harvard . Their graduate seminars had a thick historical cast, which typically reflected their experience in German University seminars . However, succeeding generations of scholars progressively cut back on the history and deliberate fashion . The second generation wanted to model itself on the physical sciences . </P> <P> In the Progressive Era in the United States (1890s - 1920s), political science became not only a prestigious university curriculum but also an applied science that was welcomed as a way to apply expertise to the problems of governance . Among the most prominent applied political scientists were Woodrow Wilson, Charles A. Beard, and Charles E. Merriam . Many cities and states set up research bureaus to apply the latest results . </P>

Who said that political science is a progressive science