England reveals his unquestioning acceptance of nineteenth-century American capitalism and technology. Morgan, who had worked in a munitions factory where he “learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery,”38 introduces that same technology to medieval England, seeing his magical teleportation as an opportunity to form the ultimate modern society under his leadership.
Morgan is proud of the new society he creates in old England: “Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the typewriter, the sewing machine and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor.”39 But despite Morgan’s attempts to undermine the social structure of medieval England, attacking the clergy (for its superstition) as well as the aristocracy and the monarchy (for their undeserved privilege), the people he saw as no more than savages resist him. At the end of the novel, he barricades himself in his old headquarters at Camelot with a loyal follower and powerful guns so he can destroy “civilization.”40 And in fact, Morgan does not merely destroy his factories and defend himself against the angry knights; he extinguishes them. His description of the battle is apocalyptic in its dimensions: “The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand.… Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated.… Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.”41
Though Twain appeared to subscribe to Darwinism, unlike many of his contemporaries in the United States, he had little faith that evolution necessarily meant human progress. Hank Morgan laments at one point that “all that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.”42 According to Twain’s novel, capitalism and technology do not make better humans, and, indeed, they could prove to be the undoing of civilization. Connecticut Yankee was an early American example of the types of fears—human unimportance in the face of long evolutionary history and the potential for technological disasters—that would come to characterize much scientific apocalypticism after World War II.
Some American writers, such as the American Populist Ignatius Donnelly, thought the apparent end of the world could bring about a utopia, an idea that mirrored the premillennialist belief in a final judgment and destruction of the world followed by a millennium of peace.43 Donnelly was among a minority of Americans who did not see unending progress in America’s future. Immigration, urbanization, and the rise of corporations and factories seemed to be undermining the American way of life during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Industrial capitalism, according to American Populists, sought to dislodge rural, small-town America founded on traditional values, replacing it with impersonal relationships with large corporate monopolies bent on profit and privileges for elites.44
Donnelly was part of the Populist movement of the 1890s that grew out of the grassroots action of American farmers in the previous decade. In the South, sharecropping had trapped black and white small farmers in a cycle of debt and dependence on large landowners. Railroads in the West frustrated farmers, who had no control over how much it cost to bring their crops to market. Collective action promised to bring financial relief, but as farmers in the West and South joined up, they set their sights on a thorough reworking of American society by nationalizing the railroads and other utilities, a progressive tax, and term limits for the highest offices in the land.
Donnelly’s 1890 book Caesar’s Column anticipates the revolutionary platform that he wrote for the Populist Party two years later. The fictional work depicted an American society so riddled with corruption that it begged for destruction.45 The book references the “yellow peril” and is anti-Semitic as Jews make up a large part of the ruling oligarchy that has so little regard for the underclass.46 Nevertheless, racial displacement is only a minor part of the novel. The utter destruction of civilization to root out the corruption of the ruling class is the main action of the novel. God has a firm place in this novel even as the characters decide to bring about an apocalypse, but God’s plan for the world limits their actions. The narrator Gabriel believes that “while God permits man to wreck himself, he denies him the power to destroy the world,” a belief that premillennialists would come to endorse in the twentieth century.47 Theism did not, however, preclude evolutionary belief, and Gabriel asserts that man’s evolution from “brute” to “savage” to civilized proves that God was at work in the development of humanity.48 Gabriel finds hope in evolution, saying, “Even though civilization should commit suicide, the earth would still remain—and with it some remnant of mankind; and out of the uniformity of universal misery a race might again arise worthy of the splendid heritage God has bestowed upon us.”49
The revolution that results from the masses’ discontent with the Oligarchy has apocalyptic dimensions—a war with airships that drop bombs and rids the Earth of three-fourths of its population; so destructive is the war that the narrator says, “It was the very efflorescence of the art of war—the culmination of the evolution of destruction—the perfect flower of ten thousand years of battle and blood.”50 Maximilian tells his comrades that it was “God’s way of wiping off the blackboard.”51 Though not strictly a work of scientific apocalypticism because of its concentration on socialism, Donnelly’s work is remarkable in combining fears over technology (in the depiction of airships helping conduct the war) with worries about racial displacement. Caesar’s Column is also noteworthy for presenting the idea that humans could bring about an apocalypse to allow humans to start over, much like the Flood did in the biblical book of Genesis. The theme of humans purposefully causing that amount of destruction would recur in the scientific apocalyptic.
These initial works of the scientific apocalyptic emphasized racial displacement and limited technological destruction. By the end of the nineteenth century, these hints of eschatology became fully vocalized apocalypses from a natural disaster, without any aid from God. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, advancements in cosmology led scientists to theorize about the probable fates of the Earth, sun, and universe. As human time encompassed more space, science writers distinguished between the end of the world as in the end of the human species and the end of the world as in the destruction of the Earth. The incidence of one did not necessarily mean the occurrence of the other, and both might happen at the same time.
With apocalyptic anxiety including the fate of the entire world, writers began to grasp the idea of a “human community.” Not even Darwinism accomplished that; too easily was the struggle of an individual species mapped onto a supposed struggle between races. That all of humanity might be wiped out through a natural occurrence or because of human malfeasance was an intellectual watershed in recognizing the connectedness of all humans.
New understandings in cosmology helped develop that awareness. Though Darwin’s opponent, William Thomson, had helped discourage support for natural selection for religious reasons, he had casually proposed a naturalistic ending for the world in 1852 with the observation that the dissipation of energy means the Earth would be cold and uninhabitable at some future point. The world might exist for a long time, ending only when the sun failed to provide the necessary heat for life. Darwin found this image unsettling, but Thomson did not think that cold ending would ever happen.52 Thomson and his followers used thermodynamics to push against Darwin’s naturalistic account of how humans originated.53
Where Thomson refused to go, others also hesitated to tread. Evolution and entropy dually posed a new universe bounded in time during which irreversible processes produced life, planetary bodies, and the stars. Reversibility had been the hallmark of Newton’s mechanical universe, and the finality of extinction, whether solar or species, was a direct blow to that system.54 The radical aspects of entropy did not immediately present themselves. Entropy resonated
