Indians in the United States, were inferior.20 It was the young boy’s innate qualities that imparted the mechanical genius that allowed him to bully Native Americans. But just as fears over the destructive potential of technology accompanied technological advancement, so did worries over the future of Western civilization accompany brash imperialism and social Darwinism.
In the late nineteenth century, the murky terminology of race intertwined with the scientific terminology of species to create an apocalyptic based on the theory of natural selection. Novelists, speculating on the implications of natural selection for human history, wrote stories of racial or species displacement. The scientific apocalyptic as articulated by these writers was relatively narrow: they told of the discovery of “lost races” that threatened the existence of Homo sapiens, expressed fear of the “yellow peril,” and relayed the message that Western civilization was doomed. Prior to World War II, scientific apocalyptic works of nonfiction were not as common as similar works of fiction. After Romantic-era poets turned their attention away from the “last man” theme, fictional explorations of a naturalistic end of the world next popped up in utopian/dystopian stories and science fiction.21 In these early forms of speculative literature, the first examples of scientific apocalypticism are found.
Racism, imperialism, and Darwinism combined to create an apocalyptic form that did not strictly describe “the end of the world.”22 Darwinism seemed to explain the economic and military power of the West, but those who expressed doubts about Western primacy also found evidence in one interpretation of natural selection that another race might replace Anglo-Saxons. To Americans who identified themselves as Anglo-Saxons, the threat of replacement felt no less apocalyptic simply because it did not involve the destruction of all of humanity, evinced in the language of “yellow peril.” The apocalyptic dimension of natural selection meant not only that one race might supplant another but also that a sentient species outside of Homo sapiens, destined for greatness, might conquer humans.23
An Englishman first considered this possibility in 1871. Edward Bulwer-Lytton published The Coming Race, which explored the idea of “racial displacement” that many believed was contained in Darwin’s theory.24 The Coming Race had an American narrator who describes the United States as “that glorious American Republic, in which Europe enviously seeks its model and tremblingly foresees its doom.”25 Bulwer-Lytton meant to satirize current trends, including Darwinism, materialism, and women’s rights.26 The story mocked American optimism about the future, suggesting Western civilization is neither as strong nor as enduring as the narrator seems to believe. The narrator speaks of the “magnificent future that smiled upon mankind—when the flag of freedom should float over an entire continent, and two hundred millions of intelligent citizens, accustomed from infancy to the daily use of revolvers, should supply to a cowering universe the doctrine of the Patriot Monroe.”27
The narrator’s discovery of a heretofore-unknown society of humans who have evolved very different physical abilities (due to their mastery of a power akin to electricity called “Vril”) shakes his faith in American progress. The finding inspires a fantasy in which the narrator becomes absolute ruler of the “Vril-ya” (his name for the subterranean peoples he discovered), and he attempts to bring the “blessings” of American institutions to the people of the underworld.28 Despite the narrator’s origins from what he felt was the most advanced civilization on Earth, he becomes convinced that the Vril-ya are superior in power and would eventually climb to the surface to “destroy and replace our existent varieties of man.”29 Though he escapes from the Vril-ya and returns to the surface, the book ends ominously, suggesting that it is only a matter of time before the Vril-ya ascend to the surface and conquer the world.
Perhaps tellingly, the narrator refers to the Vril-ya not as another species, but as another race. The narrator’s encounter with this powerful “race” of human beings suggested the apocalyptic possibilities of Darwin’s theory. Westerners, in spite of their conviction of their own superiority, could be displaced as indifferently as they had dislodged others in ascending the evolutionary ladder. Another possible development Bulwer-Lytton may have been hinting at was the future of Westerners as an unrecognizable species, if it continued down the path of modernization.
While Bulwer-Lytton demonstrated the anxieties attendant with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, other novelists and writers with similar anxieties did not resort to imagining a fictional race of beings conquering Western society. As immigration from China increased, some white Americans became persuaded that Western civilization was under siege from Asia. Americans blamed immigrants from Japan and China for outbreaks of plague in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a discourse surrounding the eradication of Japanese beetles migrating into American agriculture during the 1920s helped further dehumanize the Japanese.30 Americans were not alone in their racist alarm; Europeans, from their experience colonizing China and India and contending with Japan’s growing imperialist ambitions by the late nineteenth century, also believed that Asia endangered Western civilization.31
The so-called yellow peril of the Chinese (and, later, the Japanese) had apocalyptic dimensions, and its proponents used explicit evolutionary language to describe it. The American author Jack London wrote in a 1904 essay that Anglo-Saxons had essential characteristics that other races could never hope to attain: “soul stuff … is the product of an evolution, which goes back to the raw beginnings of the race. Our soul stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first chance comer. The Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can thrill to short Saxon words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics.”32 Even if Anglo-Saxons had special “soul stuff,” the Chinese and Japanese could still find another evolutionary advantage and conquer the world through their overwhelming numbers.
Pierton W. Dooner, an Arizona newspaper editor, wrote The Last Days of the Republic in 1880, two years before Congress passed a ban on Chinese immigration, in order to demonstrate how Asia threatened to overwhelm United States. Dooner is up-front about his belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy. The eventual war that breaks out between the Chinese and the Americans has to be apocalyptic because, in Dooner’s conception, the Americans were “a people unlike the Asiatics in everything; a people who, having never felt the arm of despotism, would submit to nothing in the way of oppression or political injustice for any considerable length of time.”33 The Americans, on the other hand, learn quickly that though they had considered the Chinese as beneath them, the Chinese are excellent soldiers, “executing all the evolutions of a difficult military drill and the manual of arms with an ease and regularity unsurpassed by even a body of veteran soldiers.”34 Dooner expresses his dismay at the situation of American politics in 1880, suggesting that by allowing Chinese immigration and valuing commercial interests above all else, the American government allowed a “fifth column” inside its borders, unwittingly aiding the destruction of the United States.35 In the end, the Chinese replace Anglo-Saxons as the dominant power on Earth. The U.S. defeat occurs in a maudlin passage: “as she sank, engulfed, she carried with her the prestige of a race; for in America the representatives of the one race of man, which in its relation to the family of men, had borne upon its crest the emblem of sovereign power since the dawn of history, saw now the ancestral diadem plucked from its proud repose, to shed its luster upon an alien crown.”36
Americans tended to view the “yellow peril” with apocalyptic-level anxiety—it meant no less than the end of modern civilization. However, in regard to technological growth, Americans on the whole remained optimistic prior to World War II in comparison to the British and Europeans. One notable exception was the American satirist and novelist Mark Twain, who expressed his doubts about modern industrial life in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
Hank Morgan, the “Connecticut Yankee,” is the champion of modern industrial America. He sees himself cut from the same cloth as those he terms the “creators of this world—after God—Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.”37 His first-person tale
