from scientific progress. At the turn of the twentieth century, some Westerners asked whether humans were all that special and whether the technology transforming their lives might be the means by which the human species, among so many others, might become extinct. Between religion and science, which would provide the answers to these existential questions?
That MIT’s founders were able to write in such glowing phrases in the midst of the world’s first technological war—the Civil War—is a tribute to how the nation outside of the South experienced that conflict. The postmillennialism of Christians outside the Confederacy meant that the repeating carbines and the Gatling guns that generated hundreds of deaths every day of the war were merely tools for a national purification on the eve of the millennium.3 In the long run, however, postmillennialism would not endure, and after the Southern adoption of dispensational premillennialism, pessimism about human nature would be more influential on futurist fantasies than the millennial hopes of prior generations of Americans.
The reaction of white Southerners to the results of the Civil War presaged the emergence of scientific apocalypticism, based on evolutionary racism, by the late nineteenth century. Reconstruction under Congress briefly saw black Southerners voting and running for office; African Americans in the South shared the millennial perspective of Northerners until virulent and violent racism shattered the promise of a better life.4 White Southerners never wavered in their conviction that theirs had been the true holy war, even in defeat. They predicted that black Southerners would simply become extinct, unable to handle life without the civilizing bonds of slavery, especially when competing against white Southerners.5 When that prophecy failed, white Southerners then recast the Civil War as a “lost cause”—worthy but doomed.
In this tale, white Southerners fought for states’ rights, not for slavery, and the war was a tragic disagreement between brothers. “Lost Cause” ideology brokered reconciliation between white Northerners and white Southerners at the cost of black civil rights. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) enshrined that understanding in a celebrated film that portrayed black politicians and soldiers as threatening to white civilization. It was a vision that resonated with Western and Northern urbanites gripped by xenophobia during the second wave of immigration in 1880–1917.
Evolutionary theory, especially in its neo-Lamarckian form, seemed to verify white Western superiority, but Western fears about nonwhite nations overtaking them also revealed their inner conflict: what if sheer numbers took away that presumed advantage?6 As the United States rapidly industrialized, some observers cast that too as evidence of evolutionary success.7 At the turn of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt warned Americans that weakness could also come from within, from a failure to live “the strenuous life.”8 In that case, what if technology turned against its creators?9
Even still Americans rushed headlong into the technological age, enjoying a flurry of inventions that changed how ordinary people lived: the telegraph, the telephone, the light bulb, and the automobile. It was an age when Westerners saw in science the potential to answer all of life’s major questions and in technology the potential for a better world.10 Writers who expressed apprehension that such technological advances might prove to be perilous retained their faith in science because, as the historian James Gilbert explains, science had the best “chance, as many Americans believed, for governing the racing engine of technology and braking the excessive speed of industrial change.”11 While those initially questioning the link between technology and progress tended to be British or European, some Americans also articulated unease over technological developments. That American inventors and entrepreneurs were responsible for introducing many of these technological changes seemed to indicate that Americans might also be culpable for any disasters.
The earliest instances of scientific apocalyptic fiction came from British and European writers; the majority expressed the conviction that the West represented the apex of civilization even as they fretted over humanity’s future. As the United States became more powerful, militarily and economically, the amount of scientific apocalypticism issuing from American writers also grew. A relationship between apocalyptic beliefs and hegemonic world power is evident in scientific apocalypticism but not in dispensational premillennialism; Americans were writing an abundance of premillennial apocalyptic fiction and nonfiction by the late nineteenth century, and it would be hard to argue that any other Western nation, including England, produced more. The early scientific apocalyptic fears about technology, racial displacement, and natural disasters were anxieties that were common to most Western countries but that may have seemed more relevant to Britons as they worried about maintaining their country’s ascendancy.12 Thomas Disch, a science fiction writer who writes on the history of the genre, may be a bit bombastic in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998) when he addresses the early British dominance of science fiction, contending that “Americans were too busy building the future to bother imagining it.”13 Nevertheless, the increasing anxiety over technology that appeared in the late nineteenth century was sometimes aimed at Americans.
The French writer Jules Verne, father of the “scientific romance” (or science fiction in contemporary language), alluded to such worries in at least two of his novels.14 Verne started his career as a playwright who also penned short stories and articles on scientific themes. His first success—Five Weeks in a Balloon—came in 1863 and was a best-selling novel in France and around the world. In this novel, Verne illustrates how Americans were perceived to be particularly adept, albeit reckless, at mechanical invention. One of the primary characters suggests that American mechanical genius could be humanity’s undoing. While passing over the United States in a hot air balloon, he muses that “by dint of inventing machinery, men will end in being eaten up by it! I have always fancied that the end of the earth will be when some enormous boiler, heated to three thousand millions of atmospheric pressure, shall explode and blow up our Globe!” And, as one of his companions quips, the Americans “are great boiler-makers!”15
Around the World in 80 Days (1873) reiterates this idea of Americans as reckless mechanics. As the main characters attempt to traverse the globe in mere months, they find various obstacles in their way. For instance, when a broken bridge threatens to slow their progress, an engineer proposes to cross it by going really fast: “He told stories about engineers leaping their trains over rivers without bridges, by putting on full steam.” One character, Passepartout, “thought the experiment proposed a little too American.”16 Later in the novel, as the main characters are on a steamer from Singapore to Hong Kong, Passepartout, upon inspecting the engine, declares, “‘The valves are not sufficiently charged!’ … ‘We are not going. Oh, these English! If this was an American craft, we should blow up, perhaps, but we should at all events go faster!’”17
In contrast to the snark of Verne’s characters, a dime novel published in the United States called The Steam Man of the Prairies in 1868 exemplifies the positive feelings Americans themselves had toward industrialization. The author, Edward Ellis, was a prolific writer whose hundreds of books include boys’ adventures, broad histories, and textbooks. The plucky hero of The Steam Man is a boy who builds a mechanical man powered by a steam engine to which he attaches a wagon and uses to tour the West, hunting buffalo and scaring Native Americans. More boys’ adventure novel than science fiction, Ellis’s book depicts the steam man as being a triumph of the inventiveness of one average American boy from St. Louis. The narrator describes the steam man without a hint of trepidation: “It worked splendidly. The black smoke puffed rapidly from the top of the hat, and the machinery worked so smoothly that there was scarcely a click heard. The huge spiked feet came lightly to the ground, and were lifted but a short distance from it, and their long sweep and rapid movement showed unmistakably that the steam man was going at a pace which might well defy anything that had yet swept the prairies.”18
The ingenuity of the steam man was part and parcel of an optimism that predicted science would soon discover proof of life after death.19
