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CHAPTER 2

RACE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE APOCALYPSE

Darwin changed the way humans thought of themselves in the same era that the word “technology” took on a new meaning. Until World War I, most Americans were not familiar with the term “technology” as we use it—to mean the mechanical objects produced by scientific knowledge and engineering techniques.¹ In an 1864 plan for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the first notable uses of that term in the United States, its founders described the new school as dedicated to “industrial science,” a place they hoped would spread “the elevating influences of a generous scientific culture.”² Technology came to be seen as inseparable 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 The technological prowess of the West proved to many Westerners that less technological societies, such as the American Indians in the United States, were inferior.²⁰ It was the young boy’s innate qualities that imparted the mechanical genius that allowed him to bully Native Americans. But just as fears over the destructive potential of technology accompanied technological advancement, so did worries over the future of Western civilization accompany brash imperialism and social Darwinism.

In the late nineteenth century, the murky terminology of race intertwined with the scientific terminology of species to create an apocalyptic based on the theory of natural selection. Novelists, speculating on the implications of natural selection for human history, wrote stories of racial or species displacement. The scientific apocalyptic as articulated by these writers was relatively narrow: they told of the discovery of “lost races” that threatened the existence of Homo sapiens, expressed fear of the “yellow peril,” and relayed the message that Western civilization was doomed. Prior to World War II, scientific apocalyptic works of nonfiction were not as common as similar works of fiction. After Romantic-era poets turned their attention away from the “last man” theme, fictional explorations of a naturalistic end of the world next popped up in utopian/dystopian stories and science fiction.²¹ In these early forms of speculative literature, the first examples of scientific apocalypticism are found.

Racism, imperialism, and Darwinism combined to create an apocalyptic form that did not strictly describe “the end of the world.”²² Darwinism seemed to explain the economic and military power of the West, but those who expressed doubts about Western primacy also found evidence in one interpretation of natural selection that another race might replace Anglo-Saxons. To Americans who identified themselves as Anglo-Saxons, the threat of replacement felt no less apocalyptic simply because it did not involve the destruction of all of humanity, evinced in the language of “yellow peril.” The apocalyptic dimension of natural selection meant not only that one race might supplant another but also that a sentient species outside of Homo sapiens, destined for greatness, might conquer humans.²³

An Englishman first considered this possibility in 1871. Edward Bulwer-Lytton published The Coming Race, which explored the idea of “racial displacement” that many believed was contained in Darwin’s theory.²⁴ The Coming Race had an American narrator who describes the United States as “that glorious American Republic, in which Europe enviously seeks its model and tremblingly foresees its doom.”²⁵ Bulwer-Lytton meant to satirize current trends, including Darwinism, materialism, and women’s rights.²⁶ The story mocked American optimism about the future, suggesting Western civilization is neither as strong nor as enduring as the narrator seems to believe. The narrator speaks of the “magnificent future that smiled upon mankind—when the flag of freedom should float over an entire continent, and two hundred millions of intelligent citizens, accustomed from infancy to the daily use of revolvers, should supply to a cowering universe the doctrine of the Patriot Monroe.”²⁷

The narrator’s discovery of a heretofore-unknown society of humans who have evolved very different physical abilities (due to their mastery of a power akin to electricity called “Vril”) shakes his faith in American progress. The finding inspires a fantasy in which the narrator becomes absolute ruler of the “Vril-ya” (his name for the subterranean peoples he discovered), and he attempts to bring the “blessings” of American institutions to the people of the underworld.²⁸ Despite the narrator’s origins from what he felt was the most advanced civilization on Earth, he becomes convinced that the Vril-ya are superior in power and would eventually climb to the surface to “destroy and replace our existent varieties of man.”²⁹ Though he escapes from the Vril-ya and returns to the surface, the book ends ominously, suggesting that it is only a matter of time before the Vril-ya ascend to the surface and conquer the world.

Perhaps tellingly, the narrator refers to the Vril-ya not as another species, but as another race. The narrator’s encounter with this powerful “race” of human beings suggested the apocalyptic possibilities of Darwin’s theory. Westerners, in spite of their conviction of their own superiority, could be displaced as indifferently as they had dislodged others in ascending the evolutionary ladder. Another possible development Bulwer-Lytton may have been hinting at was the future of Westerners as an unrecognizable species, if it continued down the path of modernization.

While Bulwer-Lytton demonstrated the anxieties attendant with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, other novelists and writers with similar anxieties did not resort to imagining a fictional race of beings conquering Western society. As immigration from China increased, some white Americans became persuaded that Western civilization was under siege from Asia. Americans blamed immigrants from Japan and China for outbreaks of plague in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a discourse surrounding the eradication of Japanese beetles migrating into American agriculture during the 1920s helped further dehumanize the Japanese.³⁰ Americans were not alone in their racist alarm; Europeans, from their experience colonizing China and India and contending with Japan’s growing imperialist ambitions by the late nineteenth century, also believed that Asia endangered Western civilization.³¹

The so-called yellow peril of the Chinese (and, later, the Japanese) had apocalyptic dimensions, and its proponents used explicit evolutionary language to describe it. The American author Jack London wrote in a 1904 essay that Anglo-Saxons had essential characteristics that other races could never hope to attain: “soul stuff … is the product of an evolution, which goes back to the raw beginnings of the race. Our soul stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first chance comer. The Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can thrill to short Saxon words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics.”³² Even if Anglo-Saxons had special “soul stuff,” the Chinese and Japanese could still find another evolutionary advantage and conquer the world through their overwhelming numbers.

Pierton W. Dooner, an Arizona newspaper editor, wrote The Last Days of the Republic in 1880, two years before Congress passed a ban on Chinese immigration, in order to demonstrate how Asia threatened to overwhelm United States. Dooner is up-front about his belief in Anglo-Saxon supremacy. The eventual war that breaks out between the Chinese and the Americans has to be apocalyptic because, in Dooner’s conception, the Americans were “a people unlike the Asiatics in everything; a people who, having never felt the arm of despotism, would submit to nothing in the way of oppression or political injustice for any considerable length of time.”³³ The Americans, on the other hand, learn quickly that though they had considered the Chinese as beneath them, the Chinese are excellent soldiers, “executing all the evolutions of a difficult military drill and the manual of arms with an ease and regularity unsurpassed by even a body of veteran soldiers.”³⁴ Dooner expresses his dismay at the situation of American politics in 1880, suggesting that by allowing Chinese immigration and valuing commercial interests above all else, the American government allowed a “fifth column” inside its borders, unwittingly aiding the destruction of the United States.³⁵ In the end, the Chinese replace Anglo-Saxons as the dominant power on Earth. The U.S. defeat occurs in a maudlin passage: “as she sank, engulfed, she carried with her the prestige of a race; for in America the representatives of the one race of man, which in its relation to the family of men, had borne upon its crest the emblem of sovereign power since the dawn of history, saw now the ancestral diadem plucked from its proud repose, to shed its luster upon an alien crown.”³⁶

Americans tended to view the “yellow peril” with apocalyptic-level anxiety—it meant no less than the end of modern civilization. However, in regard to technological growth, Americans on the whole remained optimistic prior to World War II in comparison to the British and Europeans. One notable exception was the American satirist and novelist Mark Twain, who expressed his doubts about modern industrial life in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

Hank Morgan, the “Connecticut Yankee,” is the champion of modern industrial America. He sees himself cut from the same cloth as those he terms the “creators of this world—after God—Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.”³⁷ His first-person tale of the events that transpire upon his mysterious transportation from Connecticut to sixth-century 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 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, the heat death of the universe didn’t capture the Western apocalyptic imagination to the extent that species replacement did. Darwinism may have inspired the scientific apocalyptic because it could cut both ways. There was no obvious way out of entropy without God. Natural selection, however, held out the hope that Westerners could overcome “races” or even aliens that posed a challenge. After 1945, the prospects of humankind surviving long enough to freeze to death were grim, but species replacement remained a powerful apocalyptic concept.

The long journey of the time machine indicated how insignificant a single human’s life is, given the vast time scale involved. The invocation of cosmological time showed how Wells was a master of raising a reader’s apocalyptic expectations only to dash them. The heat death was so far in the future that it hardly presented an immediate threat. However chilling his description of the end of the world, Wells allowed his time traveler to return home in comfort. Wells did tackle an imminent End through cosmology in “The Star” (1897). The story centers on humans who experience the passage of a rogue planet through the solar system. Its trajectory unexpectedly takes it so close to Earth that earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions roil the surface. Though the reader is denied a fiery ending, Wells uses the ending to make another point about human insignificance, this time given the expanse of space: from the perspective of Mars, hardly anything seemed to have happened.⁶⁷

In 1894, Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer, summoned immense time spans and stretches of space in Omega: The Last Days of the World. Omega exploited the apocalyptic aspects of entropy, but Flammarion was unable to present such a bleak future without reservation. A Catholic who had lost his faith, Flammarion became a spiritualist who believed that science and metaphysics could be joined; he was not unique in this interest, as Western contemporaries like the American philosopher William James and the English novelist Arthur Conan Doyle also explored ideas such as psychic and postdeath communication during the same time period. Flammarion portrays the End as occurring ten million years into the future through the disappearance of water and the advance of cold until only two survivors remain. In a supernatural ending, the two last humans, Omegar and Eva, are magically transported to Jupiter (where other humans before them had migrated) to live out their lives. In his epilogue, Flammarion discusses the end of the solar system with the death of the sun, “and one after another the stars, each one of which is a sun, a solar system, shared the same fate; yet the universe continued to exist as it does today.”⁶⁸

As an astronomer, Flammarion may have found it easier than others to differentiate among the ends of Earth, humanity, and other worlds, but he still couldn’t abide the perishing of humanity. He concocted a scheme for its continuing existence: Omega’s narrator notes, “The conscious existence of mankind had attained an ideal state. Mankind had passed by transmigration through the worlds to a new life with God, and freed from the burden of matter, soared with a progress in endless light.”⁶⁹

Just as scientists like Flammarion broadened their concerns about the future of humanity to consider how a natural event could affect the entire planet, so did science inspire writers to turn their attention to the universe at large. In the late nineteenth century, observations of Mars and its canals, which were first spied by an Italian priest in 1876, inspired ruminations on the possibility of life on other planets. Wells in The War of the Worlds was one of the first novelists to grapple with the eschatological possibilities of first contact.

Wells’s instructor at the Normal School of Science in London during the 1880s was T. H. Huxley (Darwin’s so-called bulldog), and Huxley no doubt instructed Wells in evolutionary theory.⁷⁰ Wells used the lessons he learned in The War of the Worlds (1898). The Martians have an advantage over humans, having evolved streamlined bodies and developed powerful weapons. When he leaves an inn that had served as his refuge from the aliens, the narrator compares himself to “a rat leaving its hiding place—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God.”⁷¹ God has no place in this apocalypse, and bacteria defeat the aliens: “But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle.… But there are no bacteria in Mars.”⁷² Though humanity survives this attack, the narrator muses on the inevitable end of the world, and the knowledge of life on other planets allows him to distinguish between the end of the Earth and the end of humanity: “when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.”⁷³

An American, seemingly unsatisfied with the ambivalent ending of Wells’s War of the Worlds—after all, the Martians could find a way to resist the bacteria and return—wrote an “unauthorized” sequel, published also in 1898. In Garrett P. Serviss’s work, the Americans prove to be the salvation of mankind as Thomas Edison discovers how to duplicate the power of the Martians and builds a spaceship. The world, having come together in the wake of the Martian attack, mounts an assault against the Martians on their home world. In Serviss’s 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.

Progressivism had a dark side: paternalistic ideas about racial uplift made reformers insensitive to the realities of life for immigrants and the poor. In the opening decades of the 1900s, a eugenics movement cropped up, and it lasted until World War II, with a majority of states passing compulsory sterilization laws aimed at people with disabilities, mental illness, and criminal records, which indirectly targeted minorities and the indigent.⁹⁶ Sponsors of moral reforms like the “white slavery” law of 1910 and Prohibition in 1919 sought social control, betraying that hidden beneath the American faith in progress was the dread of usurpation.

In contrast to Americans who still expressed faith in a technological future, British fiction writers only became more pessimistic as the science fiction writer and critic Brian Aldiss notes.⁹⁷ England’s famous mystery writer Arthur Conan Doyle offered up a narrative of the entire end of the world in a 1913 novel. Flammarion had proposed in Omega that a comet passing close to the Earth might result in the death of humanity. This idea inspired Doyle’s The Poison Belt. Its plot concerns the Earth passing through the tail of a comet, resulting in everyone on Earth, except for a group of friends of an incredibly prescient professor, taking on the appearance of death. The group, having survived passing through the “poison belt” because of a supply of oxygen, emerges from Professor Challenger’s house and believes that everyone else has died. Though the death of humanity has appeared to be painless—the poison has the effect of laughing gas—Challenger confesses to his friends that he “could sympathize with the person who took the view that the horror lay in the idea of surviving when all that is learned, famous, and exalted had passed away.”⁹⁸ The professor is optimistic that evolution would ensure the survival of life on Earth, saying, in spite of the calamity, “you would see some few million years hence—a mere passing moment in the enormous flux of the ages—the whole world teeming once more with the animal and human life which will spring from this tiny root” (the amoeba).⁹⁹ In the end, everyone wakes up, having experienced a condition the professor names “catalepsy.”¹⁰⁰

Despite this exit strategy, this novel’s suggestion that a natural disaster could kill all of humanity—and at any moment—is an important development in how humanity saw nature, a theme that would come to dominate scientific apocalypticism during the last half of the twentieth century. The Poison Belt implied that nature could be indiscriminate in its effects. Aldiss, discussing Doyle’s ending, observes, “After the 1914–18 war, such meek reversions to the prosaic would no longer be possible [for British writers].”¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, in comparison to American visions of the future at the same time, Doyle’s image of a comet potentially affecting everyone on Earth—with no recourse to technological solutions—is much bleaker and anticipates the direction that science fiction would take first in Great Britain and later in the United States after 1945.

Aldiss says of the differences between the British scientific romance and American science fiction in the first half of the twentieth century that “much of the scientific romance had been sturdily dark in tone, just as a robust optimism dominated scientifiction [an American term used prior to “science fiction”]. In part, the marked contrast is attributable to different life-experience in Britain and the United States.”¹⁰² World War I couldn’t even the differences between the tones of speculative fiction in the United States, Britain, and Europe. As Aldiss notes, Britain had many more casualties in World War I, and afterward “economic decline in the one country was counterbalanced by economic ascendancy in the other.”¹⁰³ The late nineteenth-century predictions of Verne and Bulwer-Lytton of growing American power seemed to be coming true.

The American recovery after the Civil War had misled world observers. If Europeans had paid closer attention to the casualties in the world’s first “great war fought with the tools and weapons of the Industrial Revolution,” maybe they would not have rushed enthusiastically to the front lines in 1914.¹⁰⁴ World War I proved that modern technology had permanently changed the rules of warfare. The glory of heroism had always been available to soldiers who could prove themselves through hand-to-hand combat. Tanks, machine guns, poison gases, and submarines delivered mechanized, impersonal slaughter. At least ten million soldiers died, while over twenty million suffered battle wounds out of the sixty-five million who fought in that war.¹⁰⁵ President Woodrow Wilson hoped American participation would result in a “peace without victory,” but the carnage blinded the victors with rage, and they merely humored Wilson at Versailles in 1919.

Even as Wilson failed to sell the American public on the League of Nations—the only part of his vision of a workable peace that survived negotiations—American science fiction writers retained their confidence in a U.S.-led future after World War I. The American intellectual historian Henry F. May suggests that the war undermined the notion of progress, one of several dominating doctrines in the United States prior to the war, for American intellectuals.¹⁰⁶ This decline of faith in progress occurred even before Americans entered the war in 1917, as they watched Europe descend into a madness that contradicted the progressive nature of history and the essentially good nature of man.¹⁰⁷ Elsewhere, May notes of the postwar period that “American writers had often been discontented yet there was something new in the discontent of the twenties. There was more of it, it was louder and sometimes more weepingly expressed, and it was noticed, and sometimes resented, by the optimistic majority.”¹⁰⁸

Intellectuals like H. L. Mencken and “Lost Generation” authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald represented the rejection of optimism that May describes. The American expatriate poet T. S. Eliot captured the tenor of the period in poems like “The Waste Land” (1922) and “The Hollow Men” (1925). The final line of the latter poem—“This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”—may have been an entropic-inspired commentary on spiritual emptiness, but after 1945, Americans seized upon it as a prophecy of a society in existential crisis from man-made perils. The postmillennialism that had allowed Americans to see the brutal conflagration of the Civil War through to its end was a casualty of natural selection as well as of German higher criticism of the Bible; after World Wars I and II, liberal Christians tended to be amillennialists, viewing the millennium as a spiritual truth rather than a literal one.

American scientists in popular works on the future of humanity at times approached the pessimism of British and European scientists after World War I, even though, as Aldiss argues, science fiction in the United States remained more optimistic until the 1930s.¹⁰⁹ The view that humanity could be displaced depending on the future course of its evolution was central to Stanton Arthur Coblentz’s work The Decline of Man (1925). A journalist and poet, Coblentz used evolutionary theory and language to describe what he saw as the social ills that would fell humankind. He alluded to the implications of Darwinism for the future of humanity, discussing the future in the context of the extinction of other species such as the dinosaurs. Examining the particular aspects of these species that may have made them “unfit” for survival, he concluded that the very same problems plague man.¹¹⁰

While Coblentz did mention environmental causes of extinction such as climate changes, deforestation, and epidemics, he did not discuss them in any detail. For Coblentz, the social situation of humans would determine whether they could respond and adapt to any such changes.¹¹¹ He recommended birth control for the poorer classes and eugenics to direct the evolution of humanity so that it could survive.¹¹² In his view, such remedies were vital because, unlike in the past, “it is no longer one race and one civilization that is threatened; it is all races and the civilization of all men.”¹¹³ His analysis was a mix of the racial fears of writers like Dooner and the worries over species displacement of Wells and Serviss, showing the connection between the two. The species, for Coblentz, could not survive without making sure “inferior” races did not reproduce.

The implication of evolution that humanity could be replaced was in direct conflict with the Christian belief that humanity is central to God’s plan for the universe. After World War II, science fiction writers in particular would struggle with the idea that humans were not special. For instance, aliens would either resemble humans or reject Earthlings for being especially destructive toward their planet. In the 1920s, however, speculative fiction in the United States remained on the whole positive in nature, even as nonfiction writers like Coblentz were grappling with the negative ramifications of evolutionary theory. The man who coined the term science fiction, Hugo Gernsback, founded the first magazine dedicated to speculative fiction called Amazing Stories in 1926. Gernsback, an immigrant who came to the United States and became enamored of the American parable of the Edisonian inventor, wanted to publish fiction that would educate readers about science.¹¹⁴ Gernsback had so much faith in the ability of fiction to communicate scientific and technological ideas that he proposed “science fiction writers should be able to take out provisional patents on the devices they predicted in their stories.”¹¹⁵

Gernsback’s faith in technology led him to announce as editorial policy in 1931 that his magazine would not publish stories in which machines subjugated humans or in which scientists used their power to conquer the world.¹¹⁶ This policy implies that such stories were being written and submitted, though rejected by Gernsback, who had a powerful influence on the development of the science fiction genre in the United States. Despite Gernsback’s power, several works of fiction by both science fiction and mainstream writers appeared in the 1930s that projected current trends into the future and saw disaster. The Great Depression of the thirties may have tempered the optimism of science fiction of prior decades; these works resembled the scientific romances of H. G. Wells rather than the preceding American pulp science fiction.

Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, writers who collaborated on six books, described a near encounter with human extinction in When Worlds Collide (1932). The League of the Last Days is the name of the group of scientists who determines that two planets are heading toward Earth and that the larger one will smash into Earth. The reaction of the characters to the threat of destruction is similar to the reaction of later atomic-age characters to the threat of nuclear war. One wealthy character becomes enraptured at the news: “Delicious, isn’t it, to think of the end of all this? I feel stimulated, don’t you? All of it—going to pieces! I feel like saying, ‘Thank God!’ I was sick of it. Everyone was. Civilization’s a wretched parody. Evidently there was a just and judging God, after all.”¹¹⁷ Others also conclude that it must be the work of God, punishing humanity for its sins, or proof that humanity is so insignificant as to mean nothing in the larger natural processes of the world, themes that would recur in post-1945 American science fiction.¹¹⁸

The Earth does not escape destruction, but humans discover that the second planet that passes very close to Earth is capable of supporting life, and a small remnant of humanity is sent there to carry on the species. The survivors decide that they must create a better civilization, saying, “When I recollect the filth of our cities, the greed of individuals and of nations, the savagery of war, the horrors of pauperism permitted to exist side by side with luxury and wealth, our selfishness, hates, diseases, filth—all the hideousness we called civilization—I cannot regret that the world which was afflicted by us is flying in fragments, utterly incapable of rehabilitation, about the sun.”¹¹⁹ In this way the End by natural means leads to a secular millennium, mirroring Christ’s Second Coming and the Final Judgment, followed by an era of peace.¹²⁰

Not only science fiction authors expressed anxiety in the 1930s over what the future held. Stephen Vincent Benét, an American poet and author, published a short story in 1937 and a poem in 1938 that imagined wars so devastating that they decimate the human race. Benét’s short story “The Place of the Gods,” in the Saturday Evening Post (later republished as “By the Waters of Babylon”), presaged later apocalyptic fiction about humans eking out primitive existences after a nuclear war. The title of the story refers to the ruins of New York City, which the main character visits on a quest to prove his manhood. As he climbs through the remains of “the place of the gods,” he thinks to himself: “When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the Destruction.”¹²¹

Though the story ends on an optimistic note with the narrator declaring, “We must build again,” Benét followed up the story with a poem the following year in the New Yorker.¹²² “Nightmare for Future Reference” looked forward to a third world war—“the one between us and them.”¹²³ The poem describes the second year of the war when the birthrate decreases precipitously; as a result, women all over the world destroy the centers of government, and the war ends. Nevertheless, children do not start being born again, and the narrator in the poem concludes, “Well, we had a long run. That’s something.”¹²⁴ Though not strictly grounded in science, Benét’s anticipation of wars so catastrophic captured the feeling that technology had advanced to the degree that humanity might not be able to withstand any further conflicts.

While promoters of science in the United States only gradually questioned the idea of progress, at the core of Christian premillennialism was the idea that no real progress was possible because sin had doomed the world. In the late nineteenth century, the new notion of progress as the accumulation of knowledge sanctioned rapid urbanization and industrialization. Evangelicals not only rejected the possibility of social progress but also pegged limits to the knowledge humans could attain on their own. For disillusioned Americans who didn’t see a progressive narrative shaping their own lives, the alternative narrative of dispensational premillennialism may have made more sense.¹²⁵

The growth of dispensationalism occurred during the same time that the white South returned to power after the war. The racist terror in scientific apocalypticism was largely lacking in Bible prophecy, but so was the participation of African American evangelicals. Premillennialism was attractive to black evangelicals in a way that differed from white evangelicals. Premillennialism fit easily into the tradition of seeing the end of racial injustice as part of God’s promise for a new world. Yet premillennialism could also excuse inaction on civil rights. That tension between anticipating the End while still working for betterment in the present was evident among white dispensationalists in other ways, but the white architects of dispensational premillennialism most often just ignored black evangelicals on theological matters.¹²⁶ White Southerners and Midwesterners’ ecumenical approach to Bible prophecy may have helped heal the sectional divisions within Protestantism that the war created, but it did nothing to further racial relations.

As white conservative evangelicals exchanged dispensationalist ideas in the late 1800s, they also debated whether science could inform their interpretations of Bible prophecy. A congregational minister, E. P. Goodwin, at an 1886 prophecy conference in Chicago, condemned modernists who tried to temper biblical accounts of miracles, creation, and the end of the world with scientific conclusions: “The only question for us is, what do these authorities—these books of God’s revealed will teach? No matter whether we can understand or explain, or harmonize their teachings with our view of things or not. They give us what God says, and we believe them because of that, and not because of our ability to explain or expound them.”¹²⁷ In addition to believing that the Bible should be read as a God-inspired, infallible source, Goodwin criticized the notion that events in the Bible must be compatible with known physical laws: “With Him nothing is impossible, and the resources of omnipotence are as ample now as when they availed, however unphilosophically, or in contravention of natural law, to create a universe out of nothing, and make the original man out of the dust of the earth.”¹²⁸ At the same conference, a Baptist minister, J. D. Herr, tackled the subject of a naturalistic end of the world, seizing on the uncertainty of how the world might end without God as a weakness: “Scientists have attempted to demonstrate the peculiar methods by which the present world is to be destroyed, together with the heavenly bodies beyond us. Yet no theory has ever been promulged receiving a hearty and unhesitating approval from intelligent thinkers.… In the Bible alone do we find the sure word of prophecy.”¹²⁹ American premillennialists in the late nineteenth century, like Goodwin and Herr, were not interested in using scientific data to bolster the Bible; in their opinion, science was only being used to undermine it.

This concern continued into the twentieth century, particularly when conservative evangelicals responded to modernist attacks on their theology. A Baptist minister, Isaac M. Haldeman, in a response to a 1917 essay by the modernist theologian (and Social Gospel promoter) Shailer Mathews, made it clear that a belief in premillennialism was essential for true-believing Christians: “the Second Coming as recorded in the New Testament is so bound up with every fundamental doctrine, every sublime promise and practical exhortation, that it is impossible to read them in that connection without being impelled to accept and confess them.”¹³⁰ James M. Gray at the Moody Bible Institute in 1922 responded to the liberal Presbyterian Harry Emerson Fosdick, a faculty member at Union Seminary, saying Fosdick’s “conception of his text is purely naturalistic, or rationalistic, if you prefer. The supernatural is excluded from his vision entirely.”¹³¹ In another essay, he criticized Fosdick for believing that “the revelation in the Bible must now be qualified by modern philosophy, by the evolutionary hypothesis, and by comparative religion.”¹³²

In spite of the attempt of some conservatives to protect a literal interpretation of the Bible by eschewing the use of science, other evangelicals used scientific data to explain events in the Bible, especially when not responding to modernist theology.¹³³ George M. Marsden observes that “dispensationalist thought was characterized by a dual emphasis on the supernatural and the scientific. Supernaturalism was a conscious and conspicuous organizing principle. Underlying dispensationalist thought, however, was an almost equally important set of ideas concerning how to look at things scientifically.”¹³⁴ As Brendan Pietsch has shown, dispensationalists promoted the use of scientific techniques, such as taxonomy, to explain common objections to a literal and infallible interpretation of the Bible. One such criticism was that modern Christians should obey the Mosaic laws, even ones that counter modern culture, such as strictures against eating particular animals. Dispensationalists explained that in their interpretation, those laws applied only to the dispensation, or age, of ancient Israel. Christians lived in the age where God judged individuals according to their faith in Jesus Christ. (Historically Calvinists stressed the uncertainty of salvation, but in practicality American Calvinists have watered down the doctrine of predestination in favor of a more democratic vision of God.) This approach differed from what modernists were doing; far from using science to suggest that the Bible was untrue or metaphorical in parts, conservative evangelicals used science to show the Bible was consistent with itself as well as how an event that seemed unlikely could occur.

Dispensationalism may have encouraged a scientific approach in particular, but other premillennial evangelicals were similarly open to scientific revelation. Seventh-day Adventism (SDA), the evangelical denomination that grew out of the Baptist William Miller’s failed end-of-the-world prophecies in 1843 and 1844, endorsed a premillennialist view of Bible prophecy, but one that held events predicted in the prophetic books of the Bible had been taking place since the first appearance of those prophecies. This historicist approach was more problematic than the futurist approach of dispensationalists, who located prophetic events as taking place right before the Second Coming. From the example of the historicist SDAs, dispensationalists learned the cautionary tale of setting specific dates.¹³⁵

Dispensationalists could constantly shift their apocalyptic expectations according to current events, whereas the Adventist approach lent itself to the danger of failed prophecy by fixing prophetic events in the past. In practice Adventists and dispensationalists often sounded similar when it came to interpreting current events, but Adventist beliefs, like the necessity of a Saturday Sabbath, could be anti-ecumenical in emphasis.¹³⁶ The authority that the SDAs gave to the visions and writings of Ellen G. White, the nineteenth-century leader who had helped shape the denomination after the failed predictions of 1844, guaranteed that fundamentalists would view SDAs with suspicion.¹³⁷ Fundamentalist Christians rejected modern-day miracles and saw Christians who believed in prophetic visions, speaking in tongues, and faith healing as misguided at best and doing the work of Satan at worst.

Adventism only remained a minority among both evangelicals and premillennialists with dispensationalism quickly outpacing it in popularity. Dispensationalists may have been unique in their fixation on engineering methods, but in general conservative evangelicals were less hostile to science than modernist theologians of the day charged. Asa Oscar Tait, a Seventh-day Adventist who edited the periodical Signs of the Times, took a position similar to other conservative evangelicals dismayed by the modernist trend among Protestants in Heralds of the Morning (1899): “It is the boast of men to-day that ‘this age has outgrown many of the things taught in the Bible,’ and they call it an indication of great intellectual advancement.”¹³⁸

Tait, like other SDAs, did not believe that God had blessed the United States as a country.¹³⁹ God had chosen the church itself as His representative, and as early as the 1850s, SDAs even argued that God would destroy America because it was the beast described in Revelation 13.¹⁴⁰ Likewise, Tait departed from many of his premillennialist colleagues in his willingness to see American industrial activity as displeasing to God. The way humans treated their environment indicated that the End was near: “The departing of earth’s vigor of youth, and the infirmities of age creeping over her, are thus pointed out as among the unmistakable tokens of her approaching dissolution.”¹⁴¹ In Tait’s account, humans had abused the Earth’s natural resources and were now even struggling to grow food.¹⁴² As a result, humanity would receive the punishment it deserved: “And our earth itself is groaning because of ‘the transgressions thereof’ that is ‘heavy upon it.’ The pollutions of mankind, their transgression of physical law, their failure to observe the most thoroughly demonstrated principles of sanitary science, creates a soil for the growth of the germs of decay and pestilence.”¹⁴³ Much more than other premillennialists of his time, Tait was willing to echo the beliefs of scientific apocalypticists that it was possible humans might not merely commit spiritual transgressions but crimes against the physical world as well. In the future, however, dispensationalists would adopt positions similar to Tait, first by incorporating scientific apocalypticism and then by becoming more ambivalent toward the United States.

Other conservative evangelicals were no less friendly to science but used science in the older tradition of natural philosophy. Science could add to the understanding of the Bible, but its findings would never trump biblical scripture. The Methodist theologian Luther T. Townsend’s 1913 overview of the possible ends of the world exemplifies this disposition. He believed that science affirmed the biblical account of the End, saying “scientific specialists are no less pronounced in what they say of a destructive ending of physical things than are the utterances and warnings of Bible revelation.”¹⁴⁴ Townsend concluded that between Peter’s and John’s prophecies (in 2 Peter and Revelation, respectively) the way the world will end, according to the Bible, is through fire: “the sun, moon, stars, the heavens and earth as now constituted shall be dissolved by some destructive agency and then vanish like smoke after a fire has done its work of devastation though the material may be transmuted into other forms.”¹⁴⁵ In like manner, scientists not only predict that the natural world will come to an end at some point but also admit that the extinction of a species is final, Townsend asserted. On Townsend’s view, these were the various ways scientists had speculated the End might come: through drought; through freezing (because of the dying of the sun); through the Earth’s collision with a comet, another planet, or the sun; by passing through the tail of a comet (which could contaminate the Earth’s atmosphere); or through an explosion emanating from the interior of the Earth.¹⁴⁶

When Townsend parsed through the various theories, he rejected all of the above except for the theories that contained an element of fire: “the coming deluge will be one of fire caused by cometic, planetic, or solar collisions, or by eruptions from the interior of the earth itself.”¹⁴⁷ Science, used in that manner, strengthens biblical prophecy for Townsend: “prepare, for you are on the brink of a hell of fire, is the stern command that science is repeating.”¹⁴⁸ Still, Townsend thought that God would use nature to bring about the End.¹⁴⁹ Consistent with the attempt to reconcile the Bible with scientific conclusions, Townsend averred that “no scientist will question the statement that nature holds in reserve many intonings that could be heard world-wide among the unfoldings of the last things and that under the command of God could thrill into ecstasy, or into terror every human being on earth and even start into motion every particle of matter builded into the earth.”¹⁵⁰

Townsend wrote as the Christian fundamentalist movement consolidated around a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915, with American and British ministers as contributors. Amid fears of modernism gone amuck in American churches, the authors sought to emphasize the one principle they believed fundamental to Protestant Christianity: a literal and infallible Bible, which included literal interpretations of miracles, a Virgin birth, Christ’s death as a sacrifice that could grant salvation to those who accepted it, and finally Christ’s resurrection. The original fundamentalist movement was broad in its denominational scope, but increasingly the label itself became associated with conservative Baptists and Presbyterians in the United States in particular, though Methodists, Anglicans, and Lutherans helped write the movement’s foundational essays. Fundamentalism remained a fringe movement in Britain, and many conservative heirs to the Wesleyan tradition became involved in the emerging Pentecostal movement.¹⁵¹ In the United States, however, all remained under the banner of conservative evangelicalism, which tended to include dispensational premillennial beliefs.

Cyrus Scofield helped unite these conservative evangelicals through his annotated version of the King James Bible, which was published in 1909 and revised in 1917. Scofield was a follower of James Brookes, whose St. Louis ministry inspired John Nelson Darby’s praise in 1872. The Scofield Bible’s annotations included commentary based on Darby’s system, and it was instrumental in spreading dispensationalist ideas. Most people who bought the Scofield Bible did so because of its reputation for instructing its readers in how to conduct their own textual analysis. The Scofield edition of the Bible likely helped spread dispensational premillennialism as well as the democratic approach toward analyzing biblical text.¹⁵²

Scofield’s second edition in 1917 in particular stoked apocalyptic fervor in the United States. Events during the war dovetailed dispensationalist interpretations. The publication of the Balfour Declaration (1917), a letter written by Britain’s Foreign Secretary that said Britain wanted to see the formation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, excited dispensationalists who believed the Jewish people would reestablish Israel. The Russian Revolution prompted fears in the United States in general over the spread of radicalism, but for dispensationalists who identified Russia as Gog, the transition of Gog into a godless adversary merely energized apocalyptic expectation.

By the time of the war, the British largely associated dispensational premillennialism with the Plymouth Brethren, whose separatism doomed dispensationalism to a minority viewpoint in the isles. The project of exploring Bible prophecy along Darby’s lines was left to Americans. A strong tradition of revivalism in the United States may have made a difference in the fate of American dispensationalism, which offered the same binary outlook of good versus evil as popular revivalists did. An American Calvinist preoccupation with the classification and delineation of theological viewpoints also left its mark on dispensationalism, as fundamentalists embraced the doctrine.¹⁵³

A 1918 book on dispensational premillennialism by the Baptist pastor Clarence Larkin, with its famous diagrams explaining dispensationalism, is an example of this desire to systematize and logically order prophetic ideas. A businessman, Larkin had no difficulty imagining that science and a rational thought process could support biblical accounts of creation and the End. Larkin told his readers that “the ‘Word of God’ and the ‘Works of God’ must harmonize. There can be no conflict between the Bible and Science.”¹⁵⁴ In discussing the creation of the world, he analyzed the astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace’s 1796 “nebular hypothesis” that “the sun, planets and moons of our Solar System were once one vast spherical mass of nebulous of gaseous matter, out of which they have developed.”¹⁵⁵ Though Laplace himself saw a creator deity as needless in the order of the universe, Larkin had no trouble marrying his Christianity and Laplace’s ideas and concluding that Laplace’s theory is likely and explains, for instance, the nearly circular orbits of the planets.

Unlike mainstream and liberal Protestants who were making their peace with evolution, Larkin believed that any science that contradicted the Bible must itself be wrong. Combined with an older Christian belief that nature could be read like scripture to find Truth, Larkin’s conclusion that Laplace had insight to offer was unexceptional.¹⁵⁶ According to Larkin, Genesis does not allow for an interpretation of God working through evolution. For instance, the repeated phrase of a species being created “after his kind” suggests that God created separate species. Larkin insisted that there are no “intermediate links” in the fossil record of the development of animals and plants nor evidence of any clear ongoing evolutionary processes; the same is true for humans.¹⁵⁷ On this last point, conservative evangelicals would demur in the future, seeking instead to explain such evidence rather than deny its existence.

Larkin’s willingness to consider scientific arguments in his biblical analysis also appeared in his discussion of the apocalypse but was less profound than in his discussion of creation. He was willing to attribute some of the plagues described to natural causes. The blast of the third trumpet in Revelation 8:10–11 “sounds a ‘great burning star,’ called ‘Wormwood’” and may very well be in the form of a meteor “that in exploding will fill the atmosphere with ‘noxious gases,’ that will be absorbed by the rivers and fountains of water, and poison them, so as to cause the death of all who drink of them.”¹⁵⁸ He repeated the correlation of natural events with Bible prophecy when alluding to Peter’s prophecy that “the Heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”¹⁵⁹ Larkin argued that Peter used the Greek word “cosmos,” which suggested that not the Earth but the atmosphere will burn up: “the intense heat will cause the gases in the atmosphere to explode, which the Apostle describes as the ‘heavens (the atmosphere) passing away with a great noise.’”¹⁶⁰

Similar to scientific apocalypticists who supposed it was possible for humans to colonize other planets, Larkin even speculated that God intended for humanity to inhabit other planets: “it seems clear from the presence of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, that God intended the human race to populate the earth, and when it became too thickly populated, to use the surplus population to colonize other spheres.”¹⁶¹ That argument embodies the way conservative evangelicals could support national scientific and technological enterprises within a literalist biblical framework. Larkin’s speculation about space travel, however, would remain unusual among conservative evangelicals who never dreamed on a cosmological time scale, despite seeing God as infinite. While bound to a strict understanding of the Earth as being six thousand years old, the sophistication of other scientific arguments in Bible prophecy grew during the twentieth century.

Bible prophecy writers would also spend more time detailing social and cultural trends within the United States that they felt threatened the moral fabric of society. World War I had the effect of making premillennialists pay attention to their surrounding culture. They had never held out hope for civilization, seeing it as destined for destruction, and this was no less true when Europeans rushed off to war in 1914. When premillennialists had to defend themselves against charges of being unpatriotic, they responded by transforming themselves from pacifists into supporters of the war effort. The war against Germany became a conflict between Christian civilization and German rationalism. By the end of the war, premillennialists had committed themselves to protecting the United States as a Christian society, and their denunciations of modernism came to encompass cultural trends that belied the United States as a God-fearing nation.¹⁶² Premillennialism became the most important guiding force within fundamentalism after this shift in emphasis.¹⁶³

Fundamentalists’ new preoccupation with saving civilization may have encouraged them to rescue America by promoting anti-evolution laws during the 1920s in states like Tennessee, Florida, and Oklahoma.¹⁶⁴ The ensuing controversy in Dayton, Tennessee, featured William Jennings Bryan as representative for the prosecution pitted against Clarence Darrow, the defense lawyer for John Scopes. Scopes coached football and occasionally taught biology, and city leaders roped him into saying he had broken a law banning instruction in human evolution in public classrooms. Their plan was to take up an offer from the American Civil Liberties Union to defend any teacher who violated such a law. The trial, held in a jovial atmosphere, turned serious when Bryan and Darrow faced off.

In popular culture like the film Inherit the Wind (1960), the older Bryan appears the loser in the debate with a Darrow at his peak.¹⁶⁵ In fact, partisanship predicted reactions to that episode during the trial. Fundamentalists celebrated Bryan’s testimony as an unambiguous victory, while liberals extolled Darrow for unmasking Bryan as an ignoramus.¹⁶⁶ Media sympathetic to Darrow fostered the stereotype of fundamentalist Christians as antiscience, even though Bryan himself was only nominally a fundamentalist. The disappointment to fundamentalists was the unexpected refusal of scientists believed to be anti-evolution to testify on behalf of the prosecution. The one scientist, George McCready Price, whom Bryan invoked as supporting his views, was absent and had his credentials credibly attacked. Darrow pointed out that Price, a Canadian-born Seventh-day Adventist, had neither produced reputable scholarship nor attained a degree in science.

Coverage of the trial did not compel fundamentalists to go into hiding. As Matthew Sutton explains, Scopes “had little to do with the trajectory of fundamentalism proper at all.”¹⁶⁷ The trial furnished a convenient caricature of fundamentalists to their opponents, but conservative evangelicals, including fundamentalists, continued to tackle political questions of the day. The 1920s and 1930s raised the specters of Communism and a Catholic president for conservative evangelicals, and they linked atheism to the former and the Antichrist to the latter. Their belief that Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency resembled the dictatorship of the Antichrist led to fervent opposition to the New Deal and pleas to vote Republican.¹⁶⁸ Political failures, as with the repeal of Prohibition, easily fit into their prophetic belief that the world would only grow more sinful prior to the Rapture.

Like other Americans, conservative evangelicals still had faith in science, however. The Scopes trial suggested that the scientific establishment had sold out to evolution, but conservative evangelicals still respected scientific discoveries as a tool for biblical exegesis.¹⁶⁹ Science and societal ills were not yet identical in their minds, and Scopes deterred no one from using science to support apocalyptic theories. In the 1930s, one such evangelical, Charles G. Trumball, the Presbyterian editor of Sunday School Times, reported on his notion that sunspots, the discovery of a possible new planet that was affecting the orbit of Uranus, and meteor showers were fulfilling the prediction that “the powers of heaven shall be shaken” prior to the Second Coming in Luke 21.¹⁷⁰ For Trumbull and other Bible prophecy practitioners, the signs of the End were manifestations of known physical phenomena instead of mysterious supernatural events.

By this point, religious professionals were not the only ones publishing science-infused Bible prophecy. A Presbyterian lawyer from Illinois, Nathan Grier Moore, demonstrated the populist appeal of using science to explain Bible prophecy. Moore’s Man and His Manor (1934) analyzed potential ways the world could end from the perspective of science, and it attempted to reconcile science and religion in the area of end-times speculation. Moore offered a layman’s account of scientific conclusions about humanity’s and the Earth’s pasts as well as the likely future of both. Like scientific apocalypticists in Britain and Europe, Moore conceded that the end of life on Earth and the destruction of the world may occur separately or together, but, he asserted, “ultimately humanity will disappear.”¹⁷¹

Moore believed that the biblical account of the End was compatible with science: “on a scientific, as on a scriptural basis, the picture by St. Peter may describe it [the end of the world]. It deals rather with the fact than the method, but it is there assumed that it will be ‘burned with fervent heat.’ If so the last remnant of availing life, and the last world of matter, may break up together in a cataclysm of fire.”¹⁷² Moore’s invocation of the description of global fire in 2 Peter presaged the repeated use of that passage by premillennialists after World War II when applying science to biblical passages describing the apocalypse.¹⁷³

A similar desire to incorporate technological advances and scientific knowledge into descriptions of the apocalypse was also present in premillennial fiction during the 1930s. Another American layperson, Eleanor De Forest, published Armageddon: A Tale of the Antichrist in 1938. Her novel found a home at William B. Eerdmans’s publishing company, founded in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after Eerdmans immigrated to the United States from Holland. Eerdmans was known at the time for its Calvinist publications. De Forest’s work foreshadowed future themes in Bible prophecy novels. The distinction that scientific apocalypticists made between the end of the world and the end of humanity informed her version of the Christian End. A character, in describing the End, says, “There will be profound changes in this earth as when the new heavens and new earth of Revelation materialize, but never total destruction.”¹⁷⁴

De Forest’s novel centers in part on two scientists (a Russian and an American) who vie for the development of “the cathode ray,” described as “a terrible war weapon for aircraft use.”¹⁷⁵ Just as after 1945 premillennialists would compare the effects of atomic weaponry to biblical passages that indicate destruction by fire, the fictional cathode ray’s effects resemble, according to the scientist that developed it, a prophetic passage in Zechariah: “And this shall be the plague wherewith the Lord shall smite all the people that have fought against Jerusalem, their flesh shall consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume away in their holes and their tongues shall consume away in their mouths.”¹⁷⁶ When the cathode ray is used in the novel, an observer exclaims: “There’s nothing left but skeletons—grinning, horrible skeletons! The others are going the same way. The flesh scabs, dries, falls off and disappears.”¹⁷⁷ Though the cathode ray gun was a silly conception, the adoption of science fictional language indicates De Forest’s desire to place prophecy on a scientific footing. Far from God’s judgment being a supernatural event, humans could create the means by which God metes out punishment in De Forest’s novel.

De Forest is a notable exception in a field that white men mostly pioneered and dominated. Pentecostals and charismatics tended to be more inclusionary in practice than other evangelicals, taking the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ to its logical conclusion. The Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson spent the 1920s and 1930s warning her radio audience that doomsday was near, while also daring to hold integrated revivals, but she had no female counterparts in the older evangelical sects. McPherson personified the differences between Pentecostals and other evangelicals who believed women had no business preaching and who eschewed interracial cooperation. Though fundamentalists and Pentecostals could form an alliance regarding the evils of evolution or the necessity of salvation through Christ, the Pentecostal practices of faith healing and speaking in tongues resulted in doctrinal differences within dispensational premillennialism.¹⁷⁸

The most common formulation of dispensationalist premillennialism describes miracles as gifts that ended on the Day of Pentecost when Christ’s apostles experienced a communion with the Holy Spirit, resulting in their speaking in tongues. Such miracles will only reappear during the Tribulation period in this interpretation. For Pentecostals and charismatics, speaking in tongues and faith healings were part of the spiritual life of modern believers, and that experience in the Holy Spirit was a necessary precondition for being Raptured.¹⁷⁹ The rivalry among evangelical sects, evident in competing versions of dispensationalism, did not make a major appearance in general works of Bible prophecy until the new millennium.

Early Pentecostalism did not have a Scofield or Larkin of its own to popularize a Pentecostal version of dispensationalism; this may be because the movement in its infancy focused on differentiating itself from other evangelicals. The centrality of healings and glossolalia in charismatic faith may have also led to an emphasis of the supernatural over the scientific. Early Pentecostals believed prophesying the future was a spiritual gift that believers enjoyed, although many modern Pentecostals argue that prophesying is best understood as testifying to the power of the Lord. Access to prophecy via the Holy Spirit may have dampened enthusiasm for poring over the Bible for new insights in the light of modern science.¹⁸⁰

Despite the incorporation of science and man-made weapons into their visions of the End, most conservative evangelicals, including Pentecostals, maintained an emphasis on the supernatural throughout this period, albeit sometimes combining discussion of the two. The fundamentalist founder of the Sword of the Lord, John R. Rice, in Bible Lessons on the Book of Revelation (1943), discussed natural phenomena alongside the supernatural. He expounded on the potentially apocalyptic effects of natural phenomena like comets and meteors, seeing the effects of a meteor crash in the description of Revelation 8:10–11: “scientific men have long known that if a great meteor should fall to earth it might kill many thousands of people, if in a populated section, and that the gases and chemicals might poison millions.”¹⁸¹ For Rice, even though God may work through natural phenomena, he certainly did not have to follow the laws of nature. Rice argued that Revelation 21:23–24 suggests “when the heavens pass away at the time when the earth is burned over (II Pet. 3:10, 12) that the sun will be done away with.”¹⁸² The Earth would continue, with Jesus Christ providing it the light it needs, in Rice’s interpretation.

The wartime context probably affected Rice’s pessimism very little, but World War II transformed scientific apocalypticism. The technological advances of the nineteenth century initially had inspired great optimism about the future among Westerners. The prominence of the English in directing scientific apocalypticism during this period suggested, however, that perceived threats to the national ascendancy of such a major power could seem apocalyptic. As Americans gained national power, they too began fearing what having such power and such technological expertise could mean. The world wars forced the United States to assume a greater role in world affairs. While World War I had induced apocalyptic fears—with some observers referring to World War I as “Armageddon” to evoke the new destructiveness of warfare—World War II proved to be the war that confirmed the idea that next time a war would mean an apocalypse. Because of Americans’ technological prowess, they could likely help cause it. Americans who pulled at this pessimistic strand unraveled the blanket trust in a technological age by the twenty-first century.

Unlike after World War II, one overriding apocalyptic concern did not dominate the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leading up to 1945. After 1945 the nuclear bomb focused the attention of both scientific and Christian apocalypticists. In this earlier period, scientific apocalypticists expressed a variety of anxieties over race, technology, and natural disasters. Evolution provided a link for these different concerns; perceived racial groups within humanity and humanity itself were destined for extinction whether by their own obsolescence, their own technology, or a natural cause, like the death of the sun. In articulating these threats, scientific apocalypticists defined the end of the world in a new way. Some of these writers considered unambiguously how the Christian apocalypse might fit into their scheme of the End, while others implicitly incorporated ideas like humanity deserving judgment through destruction. Compared to later in the twentieth century, however, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the scientific apocalyptic was less likely to borrow religious imagery to describe the End. Science popularizers’ concentration on the implications of evolution created a distinctive apocalyptic apart from premillennialism. When scientific apocalypticists proposed that humans could cause their own destruction, their formulations of the End became more similar to premillennialists. The idea of humanity causing its own death, however, was at odds with the optimistic idea that humanity could endure with technological help. The bomb ushered in the ideas that would resolve that tension. That humanity was in danger from itself pervaded post-1945 apocalyptic literature.

Christian apocalypticists on both sides of the Atlantic also did not display one overriding anxiety about the world; after 1945, for them, too, the bomb and the Cold War dominated their literature. In this earlier period, premillennialists were concerned with defending themselves against modernist interpretations of the Bible and promoting a politics in harmony with their beliefs. Modernists tended to see Christ’s Second Coming as metaphorical rather than literal, and for many conservative evangelicals, defense of dispensational premillennialism was just part of defending their faith. While modernists may have tempered their beliefs and their interpretations in accordance with what was scientifically plausible, conservative evangelicals used science in quite the opposite way: to show just how believable and possible biblical events were, especially in relation to the book of Revelation. Meanwhile, scientists constructed boundaries that excluded God and the Bible from professional work. When conservative evangelicals relied on science to explain the Bible, that practice took on the appearance of attacking science itself. This trend became more pronounced after 1945. The dual focus of scientific and religious apocalypticists on the bomb after the war meant that it became harder for scientific apocalypticists to pretend they were drawing their portraits of the End in isolation from religion.