Existential Threats. Lisa Vox
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 with Victorian Christian ideas about the inevitability of decay and the need for moral progress. Figures ranging from Frederick Engels, the late nineteenth-century German philosopher, and John Tyndall, a physicist contemporary with Thomson, were reluctant to accept the second law of thermodynamics, seeing it as too bound up with creationism and conservative values.55 Tyndall, though a physicist, was so uncomfortable with the second law’s potential for confirming creationist accounts of the world that he avoided publishing or speaking publicly about the topic. He also thought about ways that heat could be restored to the sun, as through planetary collisions.56 Such resistance to the second law among Western materialists endured well into the twentieth century, as seen in the writings of Svante Arrhenius in the 1910s and J. B. S. Haldane in the 1930s.57
It was only when applied to the question of English resources that ripples of a negative and materialistic reading of entropy first surfaced.58 A British philosopher, William Stanley Jevons, evoked the heat death when he asked readers to imagine the coal reserves of England as empty as a cleaned coal bin. The hearths of England, when that day comes, “will be then suddenly extinguished, and cold and darkness will be left to reign over a depopulated country.”59 But Jevons only drew that apocalyptic picture to provoke a controversy he could then resolve. Even when England’s coal supply is exhausted, as Jevons relates, England will be able to obtain coal from more resource-rich countries like the United States. He saw no need to be pessimistic, because England had managed to find fuel all over the world and used it to spread civilization.60
While Jevons merely flirted with apocalypticism, other Victorians embraced the idea of entropy as metaphor for decline. Charles Dickens played with entropic themes in novels like Little Dorrit (1857) to conjure a vision of Britain in decline.61 Robert Louis Stevenson, a popular novelist at the time, used his engineering background to explore irreversibility as an inherent quality of energy processes, represented in the details surrounding the transformation of Jekyll into Hyde in his famous 1886 book.62 The American historian Henry Adams, who trained in England, detected a “universal truth” in entropy that “order was the dream of man.”63 For him, the second law was a general truth that could explain human history.
Though entropy as metaphor captivated Victorians, it made literal appearances in British and European speculative fiction as well. The founder of the British scientific romance, H. G. Wells, illustrated the heat death of the universe in an 1893 essay of “the last men” living deep underground as Earth grows colder and colder.64 Similarly, his novel The Time Machine in 1895 described a chilly end for the world. The time traveler of the novel goes thousands of millions of years into the future where he discovers the sun has become large and red, and the Earth’s rotation has ended.65 He travels forward thirty million more years to find the Earth cold and dark; the sun has died. The silence is horrifying: “All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”66
Perhaps because it did not present an imminent threat,