book, the Martians are an “older” species than humans, living on “an aged and decrepit world,” and thus have “the advantage of ages of evolution, which for us [humans] are yet in the future.”74 Serviss, unlike Wells, used religious imagery to describe the crisis on Earth. Upon seeing a Martian, the narrator suggests that “the sensations of one who had stood face to face with Satan, when he was driven from the battlements of heaven by the words of his fellow archangels, and had beheld him transformed from Lucifer, the Son of the Morning, into the Prince of Night and Hell, might now have been unlike those which we now experienced.”75 The expedition succeeds in routing the Martians, creating a great flood that drowns most of the enemy.
However blustering Serviss’s nationalism might have been, his conviction that humanity’s salvation lay with God-blessed American ingenuity was hardly unusual, as the example of Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 book shows. Serviss, an astronomer and popular science writer, showcases American optimism about science and technology in this era. Serviss’s book is extraordinary in envisioning humanity itself creating an apocalypse on another world, perhaps revealing how effortless it was for an American in 1898, living in a country on the cusp of global power, to be optimistic about humanity’s future.
By the time of Serviss’s book, English observers agreed that U.S. destiny was to overtake its once mother country, England. If British and European observers found American culture crude and its ladies lacking in physical strength and attractiveness as Sir Lepel Griffin (a colonial administrator) opined in 1884, they envied American economic and technological success by the end of the nineteenth century.76 William Thomas Stead, a journalist and an Americanophile, told Britons in 1901 they had a choice “to merge the existence of the British Empire in the United States of the English-speaking World … [or accept] our reduction to the status of an English-speaking Belgium.”77
Before the British had to bear that burden, however, fiction writers in the West conjectured that humanity might do something to wipe itself out. The possibilities for a human-caused end of the world appeared numerous. For instance, the English writer John Mills in his 1897 story, “The Aerial Brick Field,” imagined an inventor and entrepreneur finding a way to package part of the atmosphere into a solid brick. The inventor eventually realizes that his actions are causing destructive floods and concludes, “Had I continued making the bricks on the scale I planned, you will readily see that in no great length of time the air would have become so thin that no one could have breathed with comfort, and thus the human race would have been slowly exterminated.”78
Other scientists suggested that dependence on natural resources might lead to humanity’s doom. After the deadly earthquake along the New Madrid fault in Missouri in 1895, some theorized that the extraction of minerals had caused it.79 This prompted dismay that the removal of resources like oil from the Earth might destabilize the crust and cause it to collapse.80 In 1897, William Thomson returned to apocalyptic speculation when he gave a scientific paper at a Toronto conference in which he suggested that it was possible to burn enough coal to deplete all of the oxygen in the atmosphere within four hundred to five hundred years.81
Of course that would only happen if humans didn’t run out of coal first. Though Jevons hadn’t thought that an impending threat, another English writer, George C. Wallis, wrote a story in 1901 titled “The Last Days of Earth,” which visualizes the end of the world through a slow freezing. The Earth’s resources, which could have permitted humanity to continue its existence, have all been depleted: “Coal had long since been exhausted, along with peat and wood and all inflammable oils and gases; no turbine could work from frozen seas, no air wheels revolve in an atmosphere but slightly stirred by a faded sun.”82 Some humans flee to other planets, leaving a dead Earth but preserving a remnant of humanity.83 This plotline becomes commonplace in the twentieth-century American scientific apocalyptic.
Not only the British speculated along these lines. During the same time period, the Serbian-born American inventor Nikola Tesla offered novel theories as to how the world could end accidentally as well as purposefully. He suggested that the atmosphere could catch fire: “And who can tell with certitude that periodical cessations of organic life on the globe might not be caused by ignition of the air and destruction of its life-sustaining qualities, accidentally or as a consequence of some accumulative change?”84 Tesla, whose reputation as a mad scientist has grown throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (some blame an experiment of his for the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia), claimed that he could destroy the Earth on his own.85 He reportedly said he could cleave the Earth in two if he could only “obtain perfect mechanical resonance of the earth” by sending vibrations into the ground and accelerating them through dynamite.86 The modern American attribution of an apocalyptic ability to Tesla illustrates both the fear and awe that would later develop in the United States regarding scientific attempts to control nature, as with the bomb.87
Tesla’s boasting had more to do with mastering nature than with generating a doomsday. In general, Americans were not quite ready to engage in the kind of apocalyptic speculation that the British enjoyed, even by the turn of the century. John Ames Mitchell, an editor at Life, offered The Last American (1902) as a vision of the end of the United States by 1990 due to internal corruption in the Donnelly mold. A Persian on an archaeological expedition to the old United States, where no humans any longer live, observes, “They were a sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race, given body and soul to the gathering of riches. Their chiefest passion was to buy and sell.”88 Unlike Donnelly, however, Mitchell was much more pessimistic; the avarice of the “Mehrikans” results in the complete eradication of the nation: “And their greed, at last, resulted in this war. By means of one-sided laws of their own making they secured themselves a lion’s share of all profits from the world’s commerce. This checked the prosperity of other nations, until at last the leading powers of Europe combined in self-defence against this all-absorbing greed.”89
Despite the moral misgivings of Mitchell, Nathaniel Shaler, an American geologist at Harvard from 1868 until 1906, claimed that science could allow humanity to escape possible threats to its existence. His nonfiction work Man and the Earth (1905) was a contemplation of the future of natural resources. He believed that mankind “is by his intellectual quality exempted from most of the agents that destroy organic groups.”90 While natural resources might be in danger of exhaustion in the future, Shaler was confident that science would be able to revitalize the fertility of worn-out soil and be able to tap into other sources of energy like wind and water when coal and oil are exhausted.91 Addressing the growing fears of environmental degradation that proto-environmentalists like John Muir disseminated, Shaler asserted that nations would embrace the idea of preserving areas of their countryside.92 There were limits to his concern for nature, however. As a neo-Lamarckian evolutionist, he admitted that the progress of humanity might result in the extinction of other species.93 Still, Shaler did not think this should deter humanity from ascending to its destiny, although he argued that humans should strive to preserve some mammals from extinction for scientific study.94 Man and the Earth’s survey of the possible obstacles to human growth concluded with this statement: “There is no reason to forecast the end of this new order until the sun goes out, or the under-earth ceases to renew to the theatre of life.” And that, according to Shaler, is “as remote in the future as the dawn of life is in the past.”95
Like Shaler most Americans continued to express faith that science would solve any emerging problems through World War I. In the two decades before the Great War, Progressive reformers in the United States undertook a reordering of society based on the belief that science could address the ills resulting from rapid urbanization and industrialization. While fear of revolution from below, as Donnelly depicted, motivated some, most reformers were white, middle-class Protestants who believed society could improve with the help of modern social science. On the state and federal level, Progressives pushed for wide-ranging legislation from child labor laws to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906.
