My current book project concerns America in the 1890s, particularly the religion and spirituality of that era, and with a focus on the amazing transitional year of 1893. The key event from which so much of that work proceeds is the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in that year, and other concomitant events such as the World’s Parliament of Religions. Both events were strongly future-oriented, in trying to offer the world patterns of how things could or should be improved in light of technology and human progress.
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Utopias, Predictions, and Scientific Fantasies
As I have developed that study, I am repeatedly struck by how much of what I am finding, and of the resources I am using, falls into the general category of science fiction, or if you prefer, of futurology and utopian speculation. I am comfortable with this literary side, as I always try to integrate literary and genre study into my writing of history (and I am also a very long-standing SF fan), but the sheer volume of material in the present case is just astonishing. Futurology, broadly defined, was a primary way in which people of that era debated weighty ideas, and some of the speculations crossed the line into ideas that we would likely describe as occult rather than scientific. This is a large part of what the mass audience was reading in the 1890s, and how could it fail to shape their thinking to real world affairs? Americans in the 1890s were well accustomed to hearing projections of their national future, and most had high expectations of what might be achieved. If you want to understand the Progressive era in the early twentieth century, then look to these texts for the visions of what people hoped would happen, and more particularly, to understand their nightmares of the bad things that could happen if society did not intervene effectively, and rapidly. That is particularly true in understanding the fate of America’s fast-growing cities and industrial regions.
Also critical to understanding the power of such predictions was the evolutionism that became such a dominant theoretical approach in the era. Whether people were reading Darwin directly or not, and whatever their level of education, a great many people accepted visions of growth and progress in which the human race itself might change and evolve – or, in the worst scenarios, might suffer a catastrophic racial decline. Thise understandings condition both the visions of future racial progress, and the nightmares of the eugenic movement.
All these factors provided an essential background to understanding the religious history of the age, besides so much else. To my surprise, such futuristic speculations are surfacing prominently in each and every of the chapters of my book as I construct them.
In my next couple of posts, I will be discussing these futuristic/science fiction themes, and to suggest how they apply to the critical themes of the age – to new attitudes to empire, to gender politics, to urban crisis and urban reform, and especially to the emerging spiritualities focused on healing, such as the New Thought movement.
In this era more than any, if you are not reading the science fiction and fantasy literature of the time, you are missing a very large portion of the story, and probably its heart.
Today, I will be describing the booming future/utopian genre as it emerged during the later nineteenth century.
Creating Science Fiction
I won’t go into any great detail here as there is a useful listing of dates and authors in the Wikipedia entry on the history of science fiction. The great nineteenth century pioneer was France’s Jules Verne, who cast a very large shadow. Americans enthusiastically followed the new fashion, and from the 1860s they were producing their own abundant stories about interplanetary travel, cyborgs and robots, flying machines, death rays, time travel and teleportation, and all the standard clichés. Very few of the authors are remembered today, except by specialist scholars, although some well-respected figures of the time did make their contributions. Edward Everett Hale’s The Brick Moon offered a pioneering description of an artificial satellite.
“Hard” science fiction received a mighty boost in the mid-1890s from the work of astronomer Percival Lowell, who vastly popularized the idea of an inhabited Mars. (This is the subject of an important new book by David Baron, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America). In the 1870s, the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli had observed what he believed to be “channels” (canali) on Mars. In 1893, Lowell dedicated himself to studying the planet, and he reported his findings in a. number of books including his Mars (1895). Lowell wrote not about “channels” but rather about “canals” which suggested very conscious engineering, and he left no doubt that he was imagining full scale alien civilizations on that planet. Many contemporaries took note, including H G Wells, and in 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “A Princess of Mars” began his massively successful series of stories set on “Barsoom.”
Just on a sidenote, Percival Lowell always presented himself as a serious objective scientist. Well maybe, but it is worth pointing out that his other work from this time suggested other and more mystical or esoteric interests. In 1894, he published his Occult Japan, or the Way of the Gods.
The science fiction boom continued with the Journey to Mars the Wonderful World: Its Beauty and Splendor; Its Mighty Races and Kingdoms; Its Final Doom, published by Gustavus W. Pope in 1894. This might well have been an inspiration for Burroughs. In 1895, Pope published his Journey to Venus the Primeval World; Its Wonderful Creations and Gigantic Monsters.
It’s About Time
Americans explored visionary accounts of travel in time as well as space. The famous British contribution here was H G Wells’ The Time Machine, from 1895, but Americans had already made vital contributions long before that point.
Edward Everett Hale was apparently the first author ever to imagine a time traveler who makes a minor intervention in a past society, by which he causes incalculable effects in alternate timelines – of what we call the Butterfly Effect. His “Hands Off” (1881) describes a humane time traveler who decides to save the Biblical Joseph from his captivity with the Midianites. He succeeds, and everyone lives happily ever after, but in this world, Joseph did not build the granaries that would save Egypt from famine. Egypt collapses under the onslaught of the evil Canaanite/Phoenician cities with their dreadful religion of human sacrifice, Molochism. Over the next millennium, the Molochites conquer the known world, and Carthage sacks Rome. The wars continue until the human race is virtually destroyed. If only the time traveler had not driven off the vicious dog that was guarding Joseph…
Some influential books of the era used time travel as a vehicle for debating quite daring ideas. In 1889, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court depicted a modern-day American of the 1880s transported back to sixth century Britain, where he wins power by introducing devices of his own time. Among other things, his innovations allow knights to fight from bicycles rather than horses. At first sight, the book seems to be a rollicking comedy, but it is actually a nightmarish exploration of the imposition of modern technologies and values on “primitive” and less scientifically-oriented societies, where the cultural clash provokes savage resistance. Twain’s book depicts the American hero suppressing a Native insurgency which is explicitly religious in nature, directed as it is by the (medieval) Catholic church. That conflict produces appalling levels of violence, as the Crusading rebels are slaughtered by the modern technologies of firearms and electrified wire, which causes a near-genocide. In the climactic scene, the hero is surrounded by tens of thousands of rotting corpses, victims of an abject failure to impose American progress and civilization through imperial intervention.
Connecticut Yankee is one of the greatest texts of American anti-imperialism, and it is very useful indeed for anyone trying to teach the history of American views of empire.
Writing Backward
The 1880s and 1890s were a time of deep social crisis when people very seriously wondered if American society could survive in anything like its present form. Would it be replaced by a ruthless oligarchy of the super-rich? Would there be a socialist revolution? Or would society evolve in a humane way to some better order? Many books debated this issue, and they virtually all used the utopian/SF format, using the device of time travel.
The pioneering text was John Macnie’s The Diothas; or, A Far Look Ahead (1883) which began the soon-to-be very influential idea of a modern person transported into a far future age, and describing the wonderful changes that had occurred in the interim. We often call it the “Sleeper Wakes” genre. Macnie imagines a world of the 96th century, when New York has become Nuiorc. Macnie is far too conservative in his predictions, and so many of the fanciful innovations he portrays have come to pass much earlier, including global communication systems and computers, together with computer graphics. But The Diothas matters far less for what it said than for what it inspired. Macnie was a friend of Edward Bellamy, who in 1888 published his own book on similar themes, raising serious questions about when influence shades into plagiarism.
Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) imagined a man from the present day who awakes in the year 2000, among friendly Boston citizens who recount the history of the intervening century. The horrors of nineteenth century society inspired such moral outrage that public consciousness was transformed, and a comprehensive new socialist order was created. The great change required no bloody revolution, but rather followed inevitably from the trends of the 1880s, namely the unleashing of infinite productive capacity, and the inexorable trend to efficient monopoly capitalism. All that was required was to place these powers in the hands of an omnipotent state, and a Utopian society duly resulted from a kind of social evolution. In modern terms, Bellamy was superb at world building, and his book gained power from being such a convenient near future, rather than thousands of years ahead. Looking Backward enjoyed phenomenal success, becoming the best-selling American novel of the century, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Bellamy’s book inspired mass social movements, with numerous clubs organizing across the country, aspiring to promote its visions.
Building American Futures
Wikipedia has an impressive catalog of the multiple books and articles designed to echo Bellamy or to contest his ideas. The list includes forty-plus titles, although astonishingly, it omits by far the best known anti-Bellamy work, which was William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890). Most of those imitators used device of portraying future developments retroactively from the stance of some coming era, such as the year 2000.
The early 1890s constituted a golden age for American visionary literature and Utopian speculation, although authors differed widely on the kind of future history they imagined. Most imagined a world of collective ownership and state planning, an egalitarian society marked by the elimination of poverty and injustice, achieved through the exploitation of advanced technology. They usually focused on urban visions, describing how radical reimaginings of city planning and architecture might contribute to these ambitious social goals. Like Bellamy, these world-building efforts extrapolated recent American achievements in communication to portray what we might describe as versions of mass television use and even the Internet.
Representing themes of both technology and state socialism is the Earth Revisited (1893) of Byron Alden Brooks, who describes an American of 1892 waking in the Brooklyn of 1992. Beyond reforming American society, this future world is engaging in colossal terraforming projects to improve the human condition: the Sahara Desert is now immensely productive farmland. And yes, this future society is contacting intelligent Martians.
Castello Holford’s Aristopia (1895) offered a surprising alternate history of early New World settlement, culminating in the triumph of a state socialist Utopia. This is incidentally cited as the first book-length alternate history ever published in English (Hale’s “Hands Off” precedes it, but that was a short story).
In his pioneering science fiction work A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), John Jacob Astor IV did not address the common Utopian themes of social organization, but he followed Bellamy in imagining the world of 2000, and the astonishing technologies at its disposal. (Astor himself succumbed to one aspect of that modern technology when he perished on the Titanic). In his imperial vision, Astor imagines a near-future American empire that incorporates most of the New World, besides the extensive African territories purchased from failing European powers. These triumphant advances merely form the prelude to the American empire’s march through the solar system.
Even the distinguished novelist William Dean Howells ventured into the Utopian in his A Traveler From Altruria (1894), although he was technically describing a fictitious egalitarian island society rather than postulating a whole future America. While not explicitly a work of imaginative fiction, entrepreneur King C. Gillette offered a thorough and optimistic socialist vision based on the triumph of a benevolent monopolistic corporation in his The Human Drift (1894). Gillette was likewise fascinated by visions of new technologically-oriented cities, in this case describing communities of tens of million inhabitants. (Gillette was better known for the shaving enterprise that bears his name).
These were only the better-known products of the time. Other Utopian entries included the more conservative-oriented Sub-Coelum: A Sky-Built Human World (1893) by Addison Peal Russell. One book I do like, mainly for the title, is the imagined portrait of America in the future year of 1925 in Bradford C. Peck’s book The World a Department Store (1900). More seriously, it is a thoughtful construction of an economy built on cooperative principles, and it is an effective expression of Social Gospel ideas. (By way of context, In His Steps had appeared in 1896). It does not take too much effort to track down dozens of other efforts, but many of these exist only in the catalogs of bibliographers, and quite a few survive only in odd copies in out of the way libraries. Here, I will just be talking about those that achieved any kind of impact.
In terms of how these books reached a general public, I note one critical name here, which is that of Boston’s Arena publishing company. This was the source for some of the key utopian works including Aristopia and Earth Revisited, as well as the science fiction of Gustavus Pope, and others to which I shall return. Arena was actually a big name in the publishing world of the era, in occult and progressive/radical causes in general as well as cutting edge literature, and the firm’s founder Benjamin O. Flower was a celebrated muckraking journalist. He was also a key figure in Spiritualism and the American Psychical Society.
Feminist Futures
Naturally, given the activism of the era, feminist writers created their own range of utopias, whether located in the future or in some contemporary hollow earth society. American examples included Mizora (1890) by Mary E. Bradley Lane, and Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance (1893) by “Two Women of the West” that is Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Robinson Merchant (this also appeared from Arena). Normally such accounts depict self-sufficient female societies where men either occupy an inferior role, or else are wholly absent, so that reproduction takes place by parthenogenesis. Unveiling a Parallel occupies an odd and rather impressive place in this literature as it is so radical in terms of the ideas if confronts, including a degree of sexual freedom that is very unusual in the writings of the era. Of course, most of the “standard” utopias that I have discussed here at least have something to say about women’s changing role, even if it is not their focus.
Limiting my discussion of such feminist works is that some of the best known examples just stand outside my time-frame, or else were not written by Americans. It was an English writer who published New Amazonia in 1889. The most significant American contribution to the genre is Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was certainly a key literary figure of the 1890s, and her classic story The Yellow Wallpaper appeared in 1892. However, Herland did not appear until 1915, and is a little late for my purposes.
Future Nightmares.
Some authors extrapolated from current trends to imagine very grim circumstances, dystopias at their worst. In his Caesar’s Column (1890), Populist champion Ignatius Donnelly told the history of the twentieth century as a series of clashes between the tyrannical capitalist oligarchy and the rebels who challenge it. Ultimately, the resistance triumphs, but the book includes near-pornographic levels of mass violence, and the “column” of the title describes the thousands of corpses heaped in New York’s Union Square, and entombed in concrete. Like Bellamy, Donnelly achieved a stunning bestseller, with a reported 250,000 copies sold. If Bellamy inspired Americans to construct radical new social orders founded on equality and social justice, Donnelly warned them starkly what might happen if they did not do so.
Donnelly, by the way, had a great gift for writing books that seriously grabbed public attention, He is if anything even better known for his 1882 blockbuster Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, which is the progenitor of basically all later lost continent stories, and should be seen as a distant ancestor of the modern work of Graham Hancock on lost civilizations. Like Caesar’s Column, Atlantis represented Donnelly’s genius for world-building, although applied to the remote past rather than to the near future.
Less successful than Donnelly in commercial terms, but nonetheless insightful, was Robert W. Chambers, in his The King in Yellow (1895), which became a cherished fantasy classic. One story in that collection, “The Repairer of Reputations,” follows Bellamy in writing a future history from the standpoint of 1920, but he sees the coming America as an aristocratic military society on somewhat Habsburg lines. Only thus could society have suppressed the challenges of unruly mobs and radicals that were so apparent in the mid-1890s.
I will return to this theme of Utopias and visionary futures in my next post, focusing on how they affected religious perceptions.
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