Remaking the New World: race, landscape, and eugenics in post-apocalyptic America

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Content Olivas 1

REMAKING THE NEW WORLD: RACE, LANDSCAPE, AND EUGENICS
IN POST-APOCALYPTIC AMERICA

By
Meghan Boyle Olivas

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2015

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Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3
INTRODUCTION 5

CHAPTER 1 37
Remaking the Man-of-the Woods:
The Dawn of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier in American Literature

CHAPTER 2 86
A Bio-politics of Necessity: Eugenic Fantasies in Post-Apocalyptic America

CHAPTER 3 122
A Man among the Ruins: W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” and
Post-Apocalyptic Humanity

CHAPTER 4 159
Regenerating American Community in Post-Apocalyptic Suburbia

CHAPTER 5 208
The “Weird Spell” of the Empty City:
Reimagining America in Post-Apocalyptic Films of the Atomic Age

EPILOGUE: 2015 244

WORKS CITED 250

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing a dissertation can be an isolating affair, but this project would not have been
possible without the constant support of my faculty advisors, colleagues, friends, and family. I
would like to express my special gratitude to all of my committee members: Leo Braudy, John
Carlos Rowe, and Steven J. Ross. Leo’s constant support and encouragement were indispensable
as I navigated the unknown waters of the dissertation project, and his ideas and questions helped
me explore new directions in my research. John’s attention to the ways in which I balanced my
attention to both canonical and non-canonical works offered me new ways of seeing my project,
and his unwavering support of me as a graduate student gave me confidence when I most needed
it. Steve counseled me as I put my last chapters together, and his comments on my final draft
guide me as I revise my manuscript for publication. I had the pleasure to work with three
excellent writers, and the comments and critiques I received from each member of my committee
have made be both a better scholar and writer. Thank you!
I would also like to extend a special thanks to the many faculty and administrators who
helped me along the way. A big thanks to Flora Ruiz who made sure I followed all of the
necessary protocols of the department and the graduate school, and who was always available to
answer my questions. Thank you also to Michelle Gordon and Bill Handley for all your
questions and comments on my work, and for your early support of my project. I am grateful to
have received two dissertation fellowships and a summer fellowship from the English
department, as well as a Teresa Wilson Fellowship that was enabled by the generous outreach of
Dean Steven Lamy who realized that without funding for childcare I would not be able to
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continue my work over the summer months. Thank you to all who worked to get me funding
when I needed it. Without such support I doubt I would be writing this now.
My colleagues have offered me unending support and I am indebted to your wit, humor,
and thoughtful advice. Thank you especially to Matthew Carrillo-Vincent, Gino Conti, April
Davidauskis, Penny Geng, Brett Gordon, Genevieve Kaplan, and Arunima Paul. I have been
grateful to share this experience with such kind and intelligent colleagues.
To my friends and family: Thank you! You have stuck with me through the long haul and
I am eternally grateful. Thank you to Pat and Suzy Boyle, John Rude, Penelope Longbottom, Al
and Sheila Olivas, Devin Boyle, Ryan and Amy Long, Daniel Skrocki, and to Ryan, Cassidy,
and Dashiell Olivas, whose unconditional love and support have made all the difference.
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INTRODUCTION

In Parable of the Sower (1993) Octavia Butler depicts a dystopian Los Angeles that is in
the process of apocalyptic disintegration. The old world order has collapsed, not as the result of
an instantaneous nuclear attack or giant earthquake, but because social and economic divisions
between people have become too great to sustain. Butler reveals a world undone by capitalist
greed and social paranoia, a place where corporations and governments increasingly value profit
over people, and where the “haves” choose to wall themselves in rather than to fight for a more
equitable world. This is not a sensational or dramatic apocalypse. As Lauren Olamina, Butler’s
young protagonist, notes, “I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos that
would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit” (123).
The state of Lauren’s world is frightening: civic infrastructures no longer function,
unemployment is widespread, income disparity is high, and as a result, rape, murder, arson, and
robbery are so rampant that no one braves the streets unarmed. Yet Butler’s dystopian world is
meant to instruct not entertain. Setting her novel in the year 2024, Butler suggests that if things
go on as usual the United States will soon devolve into the desolate and dangerous place she
imagines in her novel. In some places things already have.
In Parable change is happening. While at first Lauren Olamina and her family can rely
on the security of their gated community, her father soon vanishes when traveling outside to
work, and his disappearance is followed closely by an attack that leaves Lauren’s small
neighborhood in ruins. This instant of violence exemplifies the state of Olamina’s world:
“Everything was chaos. People running, screaming, shooting. The gate had been destroyed. Our
attackers had driven an ancient truck through it” (153). There are no longer any walls that can
keep out the needy; no borders that can separate Lauren from the squatters, the junkies, and the
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violent hordes of the malnourished. In fact, because of her “hyperempathy syndrome,” even
Lauren’s body is an insufficient shield against outsiders; she remains unavoidably connected to
others. With her home burned to the ground and her family and friends either dead or
disappeared, Lauren must find a new way to survive outside the borders of her enclosure. The
moment of apocalyptic upheaval that has brought her world to pieces has created an undeniable
urgency to change.
Directing her readers to imagine a comprehensive transformation, Butler emphasizes the
catastrophic consequences of geographic and economic segregation, and stresses the importance
of collectivity. In this post-apocalyptic world Lauren cannot survive alone; she must build new
social networks, and eventually, new communities with the other survivors she encounters. As
she encounters potential allies on the road northward, she writes this vital realization in her
journal:
Embrace diversity.
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.
-EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING (196)
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Her words speak to her own predicament and to the subdivided and fortified California landscape
that she passes through. Walling others out is not an option; such separations cannot be
sustained. As Butler explains, this is a critical realization for Lauren, who must learn “to value
community. . . . She cannot agree with her father or other adults when they close their eyes in
fear and hope to wait for the return of the good old days. But she can see that the people around
her could not sustain themselves if they did not find ways to work together” (Interview 340).
Lauren joins with two refugees from her neighborhood and they soon meet others on the road
north. Their numbers continue to grow and eventually, this group that differs in age, race,
gender, and experience, becomes “something brand new” that Olamina calls “Earthseed” (224).
The idea of Earthseed continues to drive Lauren forward, away from the ruins of Los Angeles
and towards the dream of a better reality.
Butler’s Parable illustrates how apocalyptic narrative can be useful both for exposing
current well-trod roads to destruction and for creating a space for imagining creative change.
Rather than merely situate her characters in this dystopian future to offer a cogent critique of
present problems—a strategy employed in classical dystopias like George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949) and Yevgeny Zamatin’s We (1921)—Butler’s dystopic future acts as a stage
for the formation of a new society. It is not only dystopian but post-apocalyptic, a world whose
deterioration acts as a sign of possibility and a demand for change. In the California wastelands
Lauren traverses, change is no longer impending or optional: it requires unprecedented
adaptation if one is to survive.
Butler’s post-apocalyptic landscape is not unfamiliar to anyone acquainted with twentieth
and twenty-first century American popular culture. Her ruinous city of the future with its
desperate masses—refugees from a former world that must now fight for their existence—has
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become a common feature of sci-fi blockbusters, television series, and speculative fiction. In the
last decade alone there have been over a hundred apocalyptic films and television series
produced in the U.S. and many have attracted exceptionally large audiences.
1
The appearance of
the post-apocalyptic landscape in novels is vast; from socially radical texts like Butler’s Parable
of the Sower, to socially conservative survivalist novels like John Wesley Rawles’s Patriots
series, to Cormac McCarthy’s best-selling The Road, post-apocalyptic America seems to be a
place that readers and audiences want to visit.
What drives this attraction to apocalypse? Some have argued that the ubiquity of
apocalyptic narratives is a sign of our current “chic bleak” sensibility and attraction to “the
glamor of decay.”
2
Considering the proliferation of dystopian films and novels after WWII, it
would seem that there has clearly been “a dystopian turn.” Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini
trace this trend towards darkness arguing that even though “the oppositional culture of the late
1960s and 1970s occasioned a revival of distinctly eutopian writing,” by the 1980s “this utopian
tendency came to an abrupt end” and was replaced with “the fashionable temptation to despair”
(2). While there may be some truth to this assessment, as Butler’s Parable indicates, there is a
significant utopian quality to many dystopian works. This seemingly contradictory tendency to
position our most utopian social yearnings within narratives of death and destruction is one
element that compels the current study of secular apocalyptic narratives in America.

1
For one list of apocalyptic film see “Post-Apocalyptic films” by PostApocalypticA.com on Imdb:
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls057268917/. While this list includes films produced internationally, it demonstrates the
vast number of post-apocalyptic films produced in the U.S. and indicates that in recent years such production has
accelerated. Television has seen a similar trend with recent shows like The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, and
Revolution. AMC’s post-apocalyptic zombie series, The Walking Dead, just opened its fifth season with record-
setting ratings. “Nielsen estimates that an average audience of 17.3 million watched Sunday’s premiere, besting the
show’s previous high — 16.11 million for its fourth-season premiere a year ago — by more than 1 million”
(Variety).
2
I take the term “chic bleak” from Bruce Franklin’s “Chic Bleak in Fantasy Fiction,” The Saturday Review, 1972. In
Ecology of Fear Mike Davis surveys a growing body of disaster film centered on L.A., arguing that “the decay of
the city’s old glamor has been inverted by the entertainment industry into a new glamor of decay” (278).
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Though preceded by, and contemporaneous with, a longer tradition of religious
apocalyptic narrative, these texts do not follow a Biblical apocalyptic storyline; nor is the
apocalyptic event that is represented divinely ordained.
3
These are not tales of Noah’s Ark, the
Second coming of Christ, or the battle of Armageddon, as depicted in Revelation. Although they
may critique man’s avarice, sin, or egotism, and although they may invoke God directly within
their storylines, secular apocalyptic narratives do not offer otherworldly dénouements to the fall
of civilization. Rather, they work within the realm of the real, and they require the shaping hands
of mankind; they are plausible even for those without faith. The (secular) apocalyptic is thus a
genre of narrative—in both film and fiction—in which the end of the world is a central
mechanism, but in which the apocalyptic scenario does not conform to the expectations of any
traditional religious text. Apocalyptic texts feature worlds transformed by a catastrophic event.
Sometimes this event is featured in the text itself and sometimes it acts as a critical moment in
the text’s pre-history—making for an exploration of a post-apocalyptic reality. Whether through
plague, environmental collapse, economic collapse, zombie-infestation, or nuclear war, this end
is so all-encompassing that it affects nearly if not all of mankind.
As Parable of the Sower indicates, this ending offers myriad conceptual possibilities.
With Butler’s focus on the consequences of economic and social collapse, it represents a
tradition of secular apocalyptic fiction in the U.S. that demonstrates how certain large social,
economic, governmental, and ideological systems lead to the deterioration of the nation, its
citizens, and its communities. Butler’s novel is also an emblematic example from over a century
of apocalyptic texts that have used a focus on human survival to demonstrate the arbitrariness of
social hierarchies, and in the process, to imagine an America that is more equitable, more

3
There is a whole strain of fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic texts that depict Revelation literally, as well as
many evangelical groups that promote faith in millennialism. A primary example of this tradition in fiction can be
seen in the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.
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meritocratic, and more socially inclusive. The crisis of apocalypse is a community-building
mechanism; it requires people to come together in unexpected and unprecedented ways.
While a radical text like Butler’s reveals this impulse by focusing on the consequences of
social divisions and on the benefits of building a more socially inclusive community, even more
socially conservative versions of secular apocalyptic narrative have routinely demonstrated this
imperative. One example of this trend can be found in James Wesley Rawles Patriots post-
apocalyptic survival series. Rawles, a former military officer, devout Christian, and conservative
libertarian, has written a series of best-selling post-apocalyptic survivalist novels including
Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse (1995), and most recently, Liberators: A
Novel of the Coming Global Collapse (2014). As part of his survivalist philosophy Rawles
asserts that “Racism ignores Reason. People should be judged as individuals. Anyone that makes
blanket statements about other races is ignorant that there are both good and bad individuals in
all groups. I have accepted The Great Commission with sincerity. ‘Go forth into all nations”
means exactly that: all nations’ (Survivalblog.com).
4

This radical revision of America’s racial community has not always been the tendency of
apocalyptic narrative in America. As I will show through my analysis of earlier texts like Jack
London’s “The Scarlet Plague” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, secular apocalyptic
narrative emerged as part of a master narrative of Anglo-American racial destiny that pervaded
American consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century. Gilman and London and many of
their contemporaries idealized Whiteness as an integral factor in the nation’s evolution,
promoting eugenic control and equating racial contamination with national degeneration. This

4
Rawles also promotes inter-religious affiliation. In a 2009 interview he claimed: “I generally recommend that
people pick religious people for neighbors because they’re going to be the most law-abiding and trustworthy in a
crisis, because they’re God-fearing. If I had a Bahai as a next-door neighbor, I’d feel much safer than someone who
was a Marilyn Manson fan.”
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early tradition participated in the denigration of urban spaces and the pathologization of
communities of color.
However this strong racialist footing would instigate a tradition of counter-visions. By
examining the evolution of the secular apocalyptic genre in the United States, from its
emergence in the early years of the twentieth century to its explosion in the early decades of the
Cold War, I will illustrate how the genre has provided a forum for articulating competing ideas
about America’s ideal racial community throughout the twentieth century. It has proved to be an
ideal form—not just for reifying traditional notions of national destiny—but for revising the
norms of American community and for promoting new coalitions that might ensure national
stability and human survival. As I hope to demonstrate, after World War I writers like W.E.B.
Du Bois began to renovate the apocalyptic genre by challenging the premises of differing racial
destinies posited by eugenic and racialist science, instead putting increased emphasis on the
category of the human. The emphasis on the survival of humanity, rather than on the survival of
any one race, became a central tenet of post-war atomic fiction and film, motivating writers to re-
evaluate social assumptions. Eventually the post-apocalyptic text would become a primary
cultural mechanism for envisioning racial change—normalizing integrated communities at a time
when many could not conceive of a peaceful way out of America’s segregated landscape.

Critical Context
This project has been shaped by the insights of American cultural and literary studies, as
well as critical theory, especially critical race theory, SF and utopian studies, Afrofuturism, eco-
criticism, and Cold War literary and cultural criticism. A fundamental point of departure is the
premise that popular film and literature both reflect and shape social ideology. As I examine
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how apocalyptic narrative has participated in discourses of nation, community, race, and the
American landscape, I am indebted to Michel Foucault’s articulation of discourse as “a
technology of power,” as well as to Richard Slotkin’s studies into the history and significance of
American mythologies.
5
I follow critics of American cultural studies like Gail Bederman who
place a profound importance on understanding the significance of popular narratives. As
Bederman contends, “Every society is known by the fictions that it keeps. . . . The issue is not
whether a society tells fictions to itself and others, but which fictions it calls true, which false,
which art, which entertainment” (xi).
I assume, like Bederman, that “the ideas and practices compromising any discourse will
be multiple, inconsistent, and contradictory,” and I likewise seek to “interrogate these
inconsistencies” in an effort to reveal how discourses can be challenged, deconstructed, and
transformed (24). In this way I seek to uncover new ground in the study of apocalyptic narrative
in the U.S. by assuming that the traditional or dominant narratives of America as the New
World—as the place of post-apocalyptic paradise—have always encountered opposing positions
that American settler society was the source of apocalypse. Thus, in examining apocalyptic
narrative in the twentieth century I contrast White supremacist visions of apocalypse and racial
destiny with racially transformative visions of the nation’s future, illustrating the ways in which
apocalyptic narrative has long been a space for competing discourses of an ideal national
community in America.
Because my project is chiefly concerned with how discourses of American race and
community have been communicated through apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic texts, I depart
from critics like Frank Kermode who examine eschatological texts more broadly within the
context of Western modernism and post-modernism. By arguing that apocalyptic fictions fulfill a

5
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, 12.
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need for those living in the modern or post-modern moment, much of this criticism usefully
draws attention to the genre as something more than mere entertainment. For example, in his
seminal The Sense of an Ending, Kermode posits that eschatological narratives help us to
maintain a sense of order in a world that is perceived as increasingly chaotic. He argues that
since man is born in medias res, he needs “concord fictions,” “fictions of beginnings and fictions
of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with
meaning” (190).
6
Eric Rabkin offers a similar assessment in The End of the World, writing that
“The modern popular literature of the end of the world continues humanity’s permanent
questioning of its place and its permanent quest for a reason to exist” (vii). This conviction that
apocalyptic fictions provide meaning—or at least, help us confront meaninglessness—in a
secular world has been a popular refrain within studies of post-modernism. Similarly, the current
ubiquity of post-apocalyptic fiction has been characterized as a sign of the experience of living in
an era characterized by a general crisis in belief, a suspicion towards master narratives, and a loss
of stable identity and agency.
In the wake of timeworn beliefs lies potential, as Parable suggests, yet many who have
viewed the presence of apocalyptic fictions within the context of postmodernism have tended
towards arguments that are generally pessimistic. Critics have argued that apocalyptic fictions
help postmodern citizens articulate their disillusionment with the possibility of radical change.
In Post-Apocalyptic Culture Teresa Heffernan writes, “The present world is portrayed as
exhausted, but there is no better world that replaces it—these narratives refuse to offer up a new
beginning or any hope of rebirth or renewal; the end is instead senseless and arbitrary”

6
Kermode’s argument pertains to the novel more generally as well as to apocalyptic fiction. He writes “It is not that
we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our
fictive powers” (Kermode 64)

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(Heffernan 5). Similarly, James Berger has argued that we feel that we live in a time in which
“the conclusive catastrophe has already occurred” (xiii), and Christopher Sharrett has asserted
that much postmodern art indicates that we feel as though we are at the “end-of-history” because
we see ourselves as “beyond transformation” (5)
More in line with the present study are those who refute such cynical claims and
champion the conceptual power of apocalyptic texts by viewing them within the context of
utopian and dystopian writing, or speculative fiction more broadly, genres that have been
celebrated for their ability to estrange the present and promote alternative ways of seeing the
world. Drawing on the works of theorists like Fredric Jameson, Ernst Bloch, and Darko Suvin,
scholarship on speculative fiction has generally asserted “that by imagining strange worlds we
come to see our own conditions of life in a new and potentially revolutionary perspective”
(Parrinder 4).
7
By creating new worlds, speculative fiction—whether utopian or dystopian—
promotes new ways of perceiving large social systems. As Ruth Levitas and Lucy Sargisson
assert, the dystopia, like the Utopia, always “foregrounds setting,” and is thus an ideal narrative
framework for critiquing particular nations, communities, or social sites (16). If apocalyptic texts
are dark and despairing, they also maintain a utopian impulse.
In fact, most apocalyptic narratives feature post-apocalyptic landscapes where
communities are beginning again, working towards the creation of new and improved societies;

7
Critics of sf generally acknowledge that “defamiliarization” is not bound only to speculative texts. While Patrick
Parrinder acknowledges the importance of scientific discovery to perceptions of reality, arguing that “for Kepler as
for Campanella the hypothesis of extraterrestrial life had an estranging effect” (5), he also reminds his readers that
“Russian formalists showed that the writing of a realistic novelist such as Tolstoy was full of estrangement effects”
(37). It was Victor Shklovsky who introduced the concept of defamiliarization in “Art as Device” (often translated
as “Art as Technique”), and this technique can be read in the works of Berthold Brecht as well as in various other
modernist art forms. To clarify this distinction, Parrinder argues that for the Russian formalists and other modernists
“estrangement” was used for “counter habitualization,” to shock readers out of their automatic patterns of perception
(39). While there is clear correspondence, speculative fiction stands out for its ability to present “supposedly strange
and unfamiliar worlds” that, viewed analogically to our world, “change our view of our own condition” (Parrinder
40).
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even those landscapes that seem wholly dystopian maintain a horizon of hope, a sense that the
world can be regenerated and reconstituted in superior ways. This is even true of texts known for
their apparent pessimism like On the Beach. Kramer’s famous anti-war film ends with the
reminder, proclaimed by a lingering banner, that “There is still time . . . Brother,” suggesting that
while the world ends in his film hope lingers on in the audience. Exposing the problems at the
base of current social, political, and economic systems is done for the purpose of instruction—
with the conviction that such knowledge will provide an impetus, and hopefully an imperative,
for change. Rather than being a sign of our pessimism, apocalyptic narratives indicate our hope
that current conditions can be altered. Perhaps the best way to understand this potential is to
consider apocalyptic narrative as a type of “critical dystopia.” According to Tom Moylan, critical
dystopias are “historically specific texts [that] negotiate the necessary pessimism of the generic
dystopia with a militant or utopian stance that not only breaks through the hegemonic enclosure
of the text’s alternative world but also self-reflexively refuses the anti-utopian temptation that
lingers in every dystopian account” (7). These texts gesture towards a future; if they do not
contain that future in their pages, they nevertheless urge the reader (or viewer) to see the
conditions of their world differently and realize their own potential agency.
* * *
But why has this particular narrative genre been used so frequently in the U.S. as a means
for critiquing society and imagining change? Is there something specific about American history
or culture that has shaped this apocalyptic utopianism? In order to answer these questions I focus
my project specifically on the history of secular apocalyptic narrative in the U.S. While there is a
notable body of apocalyptic texts produced internationally—many of which have influenced
textual production in the U.S., my investigation seeks to demonstrate how certain ideological and
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narrative traditions within American culture have shaped apocalyptic film and literature. By
focusing on the ways in which apocalyptic narratives have consistently articulated visions of
national and racial decline and have increasingly challenged hegemonic versions of American
society—especially in regards to the national race relations—I will offer an important
supplement to recent scholarship that has assessed the genre’s significance in America (or the
Americas), the American West, and California more specifically.
Much of this nationally-focused scholarship notes the distinctive and long-lasting
tradition of apocalyptic rhetoric and narrative in American culture, and argues the genre (or
mode) has made a notable mark on American cultural history. For example, beginning with an
examination of America’s Puritan origins in The Apocalyptic Vision in America, Lois Zamora
asserts that there is a notable literary tradition of “the portrayal of America as the site of
apocalypse, of transformation from Old World to New” (109). Similarly, in American
Apocalypses, Douglas Robinson argues, “The whole question of the apocalyptic ideology, of the
historical transformation of space and time from old to new, from corruption to new innocence,
from death to rebirth, is fundamental to American literature. The great majority of our writers
have insistently attempted to come to grips with the problems raised by the apocalyptic thrust of
the American Dream” (3). Working with the premises that the “apocalypse” is literally the “the
lifting of the veil,” or “a sudden revelation,” some of this scholarship has extended the generic
repertoire to include texts whose apocalyptic elements are predominantly modal. For example,
in Toward a New Earth: Apocalypse in the American Novel, John May examines mainstream
texts like Moby Dick for their apocalyptic symbolism, ultimately claiming that “no more
apocalyptic novel has appeared in the history of American literature than Moby Dick” (39).
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This assessment of apocalyptic narrative as a descendant of the nation’s utopian origins
has been taken to its logical geographical conclusion in examinations of apocalypse and dystopia
in relation to the American West, the new territory of the New World. William Katerberg’s
Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction and Mike Davis’s Ecology of
Fear—especially his chapter on “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles,” have explored how
apocalyptic narratives set in the American West, and California specifically, have been one way
of articulating a growing skepticism toward the promises of the American Dream.
This scholarship offers useful ways of understanding the consistent ubiquity and
popularity of apocalyptic narrative in American culture, but does not sufficiently address why
apocalyptic narratives have continued to demonstrate such a noticeable obsession with race and
with (re)defining America’s racial community. In Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear
Apocalypse in American Culture, Patrick Sharp notes that apocalyptic culture in America draws
not only from the nation’s religious history but also from its racial history and from popular ideas
regarding Whiteness, heredity, and racial destiny. Sharp illustrates the enduring effects of
frontier mythologies of savagery and White racial superiority on twentieth century post-
apocalyptic literature, arguing that this racialist history has continued to offer justifications for
U.S. imperialism and military violence.
8
Similarly, in his examination of nuclear war within a
transnational context, Paul Williams considers the atomic bomb as a “white weapon” within an
American and European cultural history that has assumed White technological superiority and
non-White expendability. These texts have usefully broadened the field of apocalyptic
scholarship in their focus on the genre’s racial dimensions.

8
Sharp concludes be asserting that he concludes, “the savage has served too often in the genre as a foil for civilized
progress . . . the savages of science fiction have helped keep the Darwinist racism of the nineteenth century alive”
(223).
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While I deal with similar themes, I depart from the assertion that apocalyptic narratives
have been, predominantly, a recurrent source of trenchant racialist ideas. While racism and other
social prejudices are clearly present in much apocalyptic narrative—as they are in other popular
texts—the apocalyptic genre tends towards more radical revisions than most critics allow. Rather
than agree with Sharp, who argues that notions of savagery and civilization have remained
relatively static in American culture throughout the twentieth century, I locate important points
of progressive vision in the genre, even in its more conservative periods. Mike Davis asserts in
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster that the apocalyptic mode has
long been rooted in “racial anxiety” (281). I demonstrate instead that apocalyptic film and fiction
has not only articulated these anxieties through paranoid genocidal fantasies but has also been a
forum for challenging racialist notions of human identity and for resolving racial tensions. While
I agree with Jacqueline Foertsch, who argues that African-Americans are too often relegated to
servile positions within apocalyptic narratives, I also highlight the importance of the
integrationist narratives they inhabit, and view these partial victories as part of the genre’s
progression towards greater innovative visions. As Afrofuturist texts like Butler’s Parable
indicate, apocalyptic literature has not only been used to justify violence against people of color,
but has been increasingly employed to transform the ways in that we imagine our human future.

The Evolution of the Apocalyptic Tradition in America before 1900
Most examinations of the apocalyptic tradition in America begin with the nation’s Puritan
origins. These cultural histories rightfully assert that even before its discovery, America was
being written into apocalyptic narrative, its meaning forged through readings of Revelation and
biblical prophecy. Influenced both by religious faith and entrepreneurial acumen, Christopher
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Columbus considered the conquest of the “New World” as a means to initiate the Second
Coming. As Jonathan Kirsch explains in A History of the End of the World, “[Columbus] was
convinced that God bestowed the gold and silver of the Americas on Christendom in order to
finance the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem” (170). Similarly, many Puritan colonists
came to the Eastern shores of North America with the sense that they were leaving behind a
corrupt old world for salvation in the New Jerusalem.
9
John Winthrop, Governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony likened the Puritan settlement to “a city on a Hill,” alluding to the
temple described as descending from heaven in Revelation.
10
America was the site in which the
prophecies of the Bible were realized; it represented a “new heaven and a new earth,” and was
alive with possibility “for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21)
11
.
Although there was little agreement about the timing or conditions of the apocalypse, for
White settlers there was a general consensus that America would surely be the place where the
glory of God would be realized and where Eden would be restored. This apocalyptic framework
formed the foundation of American exceptionalism and promoted a distinct view of the national
community as a group of elect brought together by both crisis and purpose. As Sacvan
Bercovitch asserts, “From the start Puritan Jeremiahs had drawn their inspiration from insecurity;
by the 1670s, crisis had becomes their source of strength” (62). This sense of crisis helped form
the basis of national identity, drawing communities together with a sense of mission. In later
years this mission would be articulated as the “social gospel,” a rhetorical tactic in which
theologians used Revelation as a call “to build on American soil a society worthy of the exalted

9
It is important to note that not all colonists viewed the New World in this way. As Kinane and Ryan argue, “While
Puritans were certainly attracted to the New World for their conviction of an imminent apocalypse, the extent to
which this conviction lured non-Puritans to New England remains a controversial matter” (108).
10
“And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21).
11
Citing America’s various appellations, e.g. “terra nova,” “The New World,” Jonathan Kirsch argues that ”it is
only in America that the book of Revelation would reach its richest, strangest, and most enduring expression” (171).
Olivas 20

vision of the new Jerusalem found in the book of Revelation” (Kirsch 181). This “call” or
“errand” was the foundation for the jeremiad. As Bercovitch argues, while America was long
seen as the site of Revelation, this possibility seemed to lie always beyond the horizon, requiring
greater piety and endeavor to be realized: “One way or another, that is, the community’s true
meaning lay not in the present, but despite the present in its future salvation” (79). Apocalyptic
rhetoric was thus long used both to condemn present practices and to instill hope for a better
future.
This propensity for promoting reform would lend itself to the development of competing
visions of apocalyptic transformation. For slaves and those opposed to the slavocracy like Nat
Turner, a narrative of apocalyptic transformation could be used to prophesize an end to the
nation’s system of racial oppression. As his Confessions indicate, Turner positioned himself
within the Biblical apocalypse explicitly, arguing that he had received divine instructions to fight
against slavery. He recounts,
And on the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit
instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid
down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and
fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should
be last and the last should be first [. . . .] —And on the appearance of the sign, (the
eclipse of the sun last February) I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my
enemies with their own weapons. (no pag.)
As Turner’s interpretation of events makes clear, the Biblical apocalypse could be either a tool of
the status quo or a means to justify and propel revolutionary action against it.
Olivas 21

Nat Turner’s use of apocalyptic rhetoric for the purpose of dismantling the nation’s racial
hierarchy is an early indication that competing narratives of apocalyptic destruction and
regeneration have had a long co-existence in America. While men such as Cotton Mather and
Jonathan Edwards may have used apocalyptic rhetoric to scare their audience into following the
mandates of God as they saw fit, Turner used it to shape his own revolutionary purpose. The
apocalyptic framework would continue to be a central mechanism of African-American
empowerment and faith. According to Maxine Lavon Montgomery, there is a distinct variant of
apocalypticism in black fictional discourse: “In that literary tradition apocalypse is a mode of
expression revealing a concern with the end of an oppressive sociopolitical system and the
establishment of a new world order where racial justice prevails” (1). A similar variant is at work
in Native American narrative history, whose experience of American colonialism had been
distinctly different from American settler society.
12
While the New World had been a site of
possibility for the coming settlers, for native inhabitants their arrival was a sign of the apocalypse
itself. As critics like Charles Mann have noted, American colonialism was the beginning of a
both a distinctive (un)humanitarian and environmental catastrophe. According to Mann, when
Columbus arrived in America he “set off an ecological explosion” in which “some species were
shocked into decline (most prominent among them Homo sapiens, which in the century and a
half after Columbus lost a fifth of its number, mainly to disease)” (351).
Despite the existence of such radical interpretations of the nation’s position within
apocalyptic narrative, eschatological narratives have often been used to bolster claims for
American exceptionalism. These narratives served a clear nationalistic function. In the early

12
The devastating effects of contact led to new variations of traditional native eschatological narratives. For
example, in the nineteenth century, Wovoka, a Northern Paiute religious leader, led his people in the Ghost Dance
movement with the hope of bringing about a cataclysmic event that would inaugurate a renewed world. Many
interpreted Wovoka’s vision to include the removal of European-Americans.
Olivas 22

years of the nation’s settlement, narratives of apocalyptic destiny rendered colonialism usefully
inevitable and favorable. By identifying America as the New Jerusalem, Puritan colonists
characterized their imperial violence as an important part of God’s plan to create a Holy City,
untarnished by the corruption of the old world or by the savagery of the American Indians. As
Richard Slotkin argues, early Puritan writing promoted “a mythology in which the hero was the
captive or victim of devilish American savages and in which his (or her) heroic quest was for
religious conversion or salvation” (Regeneration 21). This mythology, according to Slotkin,
characterized American violence against its native population as “regenerative.” It was through
their forceful appropriation and development of land that Americans would “regenerate their
fortunes, their spirits, and the power of the church and nation” (Slotkin, Regeneration, 5).
This mythology would evolve with the changing times and expansionists would use a
similar rhetoric. The Puritan saint became the American patriot fighting for revolution; the
sacred errand became manifest destiny, and the colony became the republic which then became
America—the imperial power (Bercovitch 92). As Slotkin argues in The Fatal Environment,
“The pioneer submits to regression in the name of progress; he goes back to the past to purify
himself, to acquire new powers, in order to regenerate the present and make the future more
glorious” (63). Acquiring and properly civilizing new land was framed as part of a divine
mission to be taken on by God’s elect. Not surprisingly, John O’Sullivan, who coined the term
“manifest destiny,” wrote that “the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the
excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the
worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True” (Kirsch 182).
13

13
The term “manifest destiny” was coined by John O’Sullivan in 1845 to explain the mission of the United States
“to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions”
(Stephanson xi).
Olivas 23

By the nineteenth century this mythology was framed more explicitly as a narrative of
racial destiny. America was seen as the site for God’s chosen people, and these people could be
identified, not only by their religious fervor, but also by their race and innate propensity for
civilization. As Gail Bederman argues, “Civilization denoted a precise stage in human racial
evolution—the one following the more primitive stages of ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’” (25). Set
at the Western trajectory of colonial expansion, America represented the apogee of the progress
of civilization, and in this sense, it also represented humanity’s most advanced accomplishment.
In his history of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in America Reginald Horsman argues
By 1850 the emphasis was on the American Anglo-Saxons as a separate, innately
superior people who were destined to bring good government, commercial
prosperity, and Christianity to the American continents and to the world. This was
a superior race, and inferior races were doomed to subordinate status or
extinction. (2)
While Horsman acknowledges that not all U.S. citizens believed in such rhetoric, such scientific
racism became ubiquitous in the 19
th
century, gaining leverage from the publication of works
like Comte de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1854). Those who had
made a reputation for themselves by cataloging the animal world soon gained fame for their
racialist theories. French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier, who published The Animal
Kingdom in 1817 expanding Linnaean taxonomy, argued that the Negro race was “the most
degraded human race, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is
nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government” (Stepan 98).
As Horsman’s assessment indicates, ideas concerning racial taxonomy were often framed
in apocalyptic terms. It was generally believed that those without a strong racial heredity would
Olivas 24

be destined for degeneration and extinction, while those of superior Anglo stock would go on to
rule the new and improved world reinvigorated by the absence or subjugation of weaker races.
On the one hand, these ideas provided one way of coping with the frightening possibility of
species extinction spurred on by Darwin’s evolutionary theories. If the Anglo-American
represented the fittest race then his future seemed secure. They also made the widespread
eradication of native peoples seem like an inevitable part of natural selection. On the other hand,
there were some doubts about the Anglo-American’s ability to remain strong amidst the
perceived racial and societal threats of the modern world. Many wondered: “if we could evolve
as a culture, could we also degenerate?” (Seitler 527). Could America, the chosen place with the
chosen people, fail at its mission?
Fears of the nation’s degeneration were articulated in a variety of ways. Blame for the
nation’s potential decline was aimed at the various factions believed to pollute the gene pool—
non-Anglo races, the mentally feeble, the criminal, and the insane—as well as modern
developments like increased reliance on technology and overcivilization.
14
Theories of
degeneration were a formative influence in discourses of “psychopathology.” As Michel
Foucault has asserted, such taxonomic discourses created categories of inclusion and exclusion,
promoting and reifying unequal social relationships. Similarly, William Greenslade argues,
Degeneration facilitated discourses of sometimes crude differentiation: between
the normal and the abnormal, the healthy and morbid, the ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’, the
civilised and primitive. Degeneration was at the root of what was, in part, an
enabling strategy by which the conventional and respectable classes could justify
and articulate their hostility to the deviant, diseased, and subversive” (2).

14
For a great overview of late nineteenth century theories of degeneration see William Greenslade’s Degeneration,
Culture, and the Novel 1880-1940, and also Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, Eds. J. Edward Chamberlin
and Sander Gilman.
Olivas 25

Fears of degeneration would help maintain America’s social hierarchy and also promote social
reform; they created a potential for both increased bio-power and improved social support
systems.
These imperatives were often difficult to differentiate. The theory of eugenics, whose
aim was often pronounced euphemistically as “building fitter families,” was a practice which
was both socially progressive and socially harmful and even tyrannical. Inspired by Charles
Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), especially his theories of the proper breeding of
domestic animals, Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, would coin the term “eugenics,” working out
his principles in Hereditary Genius (1869), “Hereditary Improvement” (1873), and Inquiries into
Human Faculty and Its Development (1883). In his introduction to Inquiries, Galton decreed that
he had discovered the best way that man might guide his own evolutionary development,
writing:
My general object has been to take note of the varied hereditary faculties of
different men, and of the great differences in different families and races, and to
learn how far history man have shown the practicability of supplanting inefficient
human stock by better strains, and to consider whether it not be our duty to do so
by such efforts as may be reasonable, thus exerting ourselves to further the ends
of evolution more rapidly and with less distress than if events were left to their
own course. (1)
Through a meticulous taxonomic description of human types, Galton’s Inquiries acts like a
guidebook for societal improvement. Other doctors, naturalists, and White supremacists would
soon join in the promotion of eugenic pseudo-science, using concepts of differing biological
fitness to defend racial segregation and anti-miscegenation laws.
Olivas 26

Theories of degeneration also contributed to particular characterizations of the
American landscape, motivating and shaping emergent environmental discourse. For centuries
Americans had cultivated a belief that its exceptional landscape was a primary source of its
strength. In popular narratives of American heroism, Anglo-American racial fitness was tested
by the wilderness, and it was through his conquest of both the landscape and its native
inhabitants that he proved and maintained his superiority.
15
In this way the Anglo required the
savage landscape (and its inhabitants) to provide a space in which he might be empowered. As
Anders Stephanson explains, O’Sullivan aligned freedom with “perpetual genesis, struggle, and
appropriation,” asserting that the liberty and autonomy of the (Anglo) American was dependent
upon the nation’s ability to secure new lands from which its inhabitants could “carv[e] out a
properly independent American existence” (41). Because this personal empowerment was tied to
the strength of the nation, Frederick Jackson Turner argued in “The Significance of the Frontier
in American History” (1893) that every forceful push westward was part of a singular story of
American development. As Kerwin Lee Klein explains, for Turner, America’s development
“rolls from east to west, from the past to the present” (79), and “at each stop of the frontier’s
continental march, society evolved from savagery to civilization” (80). At the end of this
movement civilization would ostensibly reach the highest stage of human evolution, a
democracy in which (White) Americans would “break the bondage of social rank” (Klein 86).
With the source of so much regenerative power connected to the undeveloped
expanses of the nation, what would happen to Americans in the crowded urban worlds they were
increasingly bound to? By the end of the nineteenth century many worried about the loss of the

15
Richard Slotkin has provided a thorough history of this mythology. In his examination of popular pioneer figures
like John Filson’s Daniel Boone, he argues that Filson notably linked “the heroic fable of Boone’s adventures to the
mystique of the wilderness land,” and produced a “characterization of the land as a wellspring of regenerative
natural powers, needing only the work of civilized man to domesticate and perfect it” (Fatal Environment 67).

Olivas 27

frontier—a reality that might weaken the nation’s citizens—and the degenerating effects of both
the city and modern industrial society more generally. As Lois Zamora claims, in the nineteenth
century “the image of the New Jerusalem is supplanted by the natural images of the wilderness,
the forest, the more classical natural image of Arcadia, or a secular Eden. . . . America was now
above all a symbol of the rejection of the urban past,” and ”the future lay westward, away from
the city and into the woods” (Zamora 108). While Turner had worried about the effects of the
end of frontier, many felt that the city dangerously eroded social boundaries that prevented racial
amalgamation; further, its dirty and congested quarters bred feebler men and women, plagued by
the weakening effects of neurasthenia and disease. These developments were all the more
frightening within the totalizing narratives of evolution and extinction.
Anxieties about the inability of Anglo-Americans to properly evolve within urban
environments were complemented by a belief that those races characterized as inferior would
degenerate or die out in any uncivilized space. Nancy Stepan argues that popular nineteenth
century racialists promoted a very non-cosmopolitan view of man, depicting him as an animal in
need of a specific habitat. Biologists like Charles Lyell, a friend of Darwin, reasoned that “Each
race of Man has its place, like the inferior animals” (99). Although there were some fears that he
could degenerate in the wilder spaces of the Southern hemisphere, it was evident that the White
man was biologically suited to the Americas. Together with the belief in “primordial racial
distinctions,” this “noncosmopolitanism provided support for the theory that blacks were
fundamentally ‘out of place’ in the Americas and were doomed to degenerate as they moved
northward into white, temperate territory, and as they moved socially and politically into
freedom” (Stepan 100). This claim was made outright by physicians like J. Allison Hodges, who
in his 1900 Annual Address to the American Medico-Psychological Association argued that
Olivas 28

“freedom itself caused degeneration in the Negro. . . Freedom was an unnatural environment
which removed constraints and plunged the Negro into ‘natural’ and innate excesses and
indulgence of the racial appetites” (qtd. in Stepan 102).
If Anglo-Saxons represented the nation’s best hope to fulfill a divine destiny then the
degeneration of the race would mean the degeneration of the nation. Thus there was an
imperative to guard the gene pool, as well as to preserve an environment in which those destined
to build the world’s greatest civilization (i.e. Anglo-Americans) could flourish, unmolested by
those with a propensity for savagery (i.e. people of color and other degenerates). Together,
eugenic/racialist discourse and environmental discourse sought to preserve the nation’s genes
and the nation’s landscape for the use and regeneration of its citizens. Nature—whether park,
garden, or wilderness—was seen as the balm for the degenerating effects of the city. Of course,
a confrontation with such wilderness could occur through imperial expansion and military
service. The discourse of degeneration thereby offered new justification for American
imperialism overseas, through which America could reclaim its racial destiny, shaping its
citizens as it had shaped the landscape before them. Together these works about degeneration,
regeneration, and racial destiny would form the basis of secular apocalyptic fiction that emerged
at the turn of the twentieth century.

Secular Apocalyptic Narrative and Speculative Fiction
Popular secular apocalyptic narratives began to emerge with more force in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century in response to evolutionary discourse—both in its belief
in progressive human change and potential degeneration—and as part of the growth of
speculative fiction. The late nineteenth century saw a resurgence of utopian narrative with works
Olivas 29

like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) selling almost as many copies as
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890)
would garner similar popularity in England. Both texts were futuristic socialist utopias, featuring
protagonists who fell asleep and magically woke up in a new world. These depictions of future
societies served as critiques of their contemporary capitalist worlds, illustrating—as Thomas
More had done in Utopia centuries earlier—how the depiction of other worlds could serve as a
useful device for urging a reconsideration of the present. The conceptual potential of imagined
worlds was not restricted to the imagination of utopia. As Jonathan Swift had also shown in
Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon demonstrated in 1872, these others
worlds need not be purely utopian to have an imaginative impact on the reader.
Such texts about the structures of idealized and/or satirized alternative societies
represented an optimistic response to evolutionary theories. The socialist utopias imagined by
Bellamy and Morris emerged out of an era of severe class stratification and wealth disparity in
England and the United States. While the emergence of socialism had occurred somewhat
mysteriously within their texts, their assertions that the future world would see the end of private
property and capitalist accumulation reflected the views of Karl Marx and Fredric Engels who
had predicted the inevitable end of capitalism and the dawn of communism by utilizing the
framework of dialectical materialism, a schema suffused with utopian assumptions.
These more hopeful works were complemented by more paranoid texts, many of which
focused on the uncertain future of prosperous races and nations within evolutionary history. In
both the U.S. and Britain national (and racial) anxieties were routinely expressed through “future
war” stories, an early form of secular apocalyptic fiction. Popular works like George Chesney’s
The Battle of Dorking (1871) and Pierton Dooner’s Last Days of the Republic (1880) used the
Olivas 30

possibility of national defeat to warn the nation about their potential demise in hopes of
prompting reform, while others, like Samuel O’Dell’s The Last War; Or, Triumph of the English
Tongue (1898) imagined total victory for Whites through the extermination of lesser races. Such
examples abound in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, pitting British and American
national armies against often racialized enemies. As Paul Williams asserts, these narratives
generally “understood future wars as fought, not between nations, but between races” (31). The
proliferation of stories of this type indicates the common racial anxieties driving early
speculative fiction. Because science fiction descended from travel narratives—stories of contact
with a primitive and/or exotic “other”—the genre initially promoted many existing ethnocentric
notions of racial and cultural differences.
16
Yet because the idea that the strong (Anglo) races
might devolve or become extinct was perceived as a form of unnatural selection by those
familiar with common discourses of Social Darwinism, narratives of White racial decline were
useful for drawing attention to the factors that might weaken the race. While future war stories
focused on the need to reinvigorate the military and the virility of male citizens, a variety of
other futuristic narratives highlighted the need to destroy certain elements of society before those
elements tolled the death knell for the race.
Recurrent figures of blame were not only capitalist culture but also the modern city. The
city invited easy condemnation, and was often used as a symbol of both modern technological
change and modern capitalist excess. In The Last American: A Fragment from the Journal of
Khan-Li Prince of Dimph-Yoo-Chur and Admiral in the Persian Navy (1889) by John Ames
Mitchell, America is a landscape of ruins, destroyed by slow degeneration. As its Persian
explorers assess the corpse of New York City they wonder how such devastation could befall
“the largest city in the world” (18). Through the men’s dialogue Mitchell reveals that the source

16
For more on this history see John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.
Olivas 31

of America’s downfall was its populace, who “were a sharp, restless, quick-witted, greedy race,
given body and soul to the gathering of riches” (21). These characteristics are attributed to the
nation’s European origins for, as the Persian elders claim, the “Mehrikans” “copied to a stitch the
fashions of Europeans” (35). Eventually this Western lifestyle led to physical deterioration, to
“nervous diseases unknown to us,” and to infertility, and when massive climate change hit the
continent its citizens were ill-prepared for survival.
H.G. Wells would offer a similar condemnation of the modern West as signified by the
metropolis in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). Wells’s sleeper Graham, like Bellamy’s Julian
West before him, wakes up in a future world to find that everything around him has changed—
but this time things are clearly dystopian. In the futuristic city Graham discovers that things have
degenerated to an abysmal stage of capitalist containment: “The city had swallowed up
humanity; man had entered upon a new stage in his development” (138), and “the whole world
was property” (139). In the completely privatized and mechanized space of the ultra-modern
city—a space that at first inspired awe—“men are no longer free . . . . Every city now is a
prison” (189). These conditions have resulted in “the disappearance of the household” (208) and
more significantly, in the upset of the traditional social hierarchy. White men are now ruled by
the black police and Graham soon joins with revolutionaries who hope to overthrow the powerful
Ostrog and his minions.
Wells offered another version of the degenerating effects of the modern world in The
Time Machine (1895), implying that the long-term consequences of living a life of luxury and
effete over-civilization might be White racial deterioration. When Wells’s Time Traveler arrives
at his first and longest stop in the future, he is still operating under the impression that a
movement forward in time is a movement towards human progress; but what he finds are two
Olivas 32

seemingly degenerate races. When he realizes their physical and mental feebleness he is
astounded. He explains, “Were these creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took
me. You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two
Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything” (21). This
realization, coupled with the Time Traveler’s increasing knowledge about the degeneration of
civilization to a type of cannibalism, and then to a planet without people, signals the demise of
the progress narrative of White racial destiny.
Wells’s use of technology to create a more plausible version of time travel indicates how
speculative fiction used science to make narratives of degeneration, regeneration, and extinction
more plausible. This is not to say that all readers believed in the real possibility of building a
time machine, but his vision of the end of modern social norms was not magically realized
through a hundred-year sleep, rather it was enabled through a story that sought to establish its
plausibility. In this way Wells participated in the inauguration of a genre that could make
apocalyptic change more plausible to the non-believer—greatly expanding the audience for
eschatological storylines. Later writers would similarly incorporate real threats—cosmic,
military, environmental, and nuclear weapons, into their stories, adding more believability to
their visions of transformation. As I will show, this added plausibility would exacerbate fears,
not only of racial extinction, but of species extinction. The need to secure human survival would
inaugurate more racially radical versions of the future in the years to come.

The Shape of this Project
The following chapters will investigate the evolution of secular apocalyptic narrative
from the turn of the twentieth century to the years after World War II when the genre
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experienced unprecedented proliferation. My first two chapters provide an important foundation
by illustrating how early secular apocalyptic narratives responded to nineteenth century racialist
discourse, and demonstrate how theories of evolution, degeneration, and racial destiny shaped
visions of national survival and decline at the turn of the century.
The first chapter, “Remaking the Man-of-the Woods: The Dawn of the Post-Apocalyptic
Frontier in American Literature,” examines how Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” and
George Allan England’s Darkness and Dawn responded to fears of white racial degeneration that
pervaded America at the turn of the century by envisioning a national community regenerated by
the post-apocalyptic landscape. Both texts exemplify a contemporary fascination with
wilderness survivalism by implying that a return to primitive living will regenerate the race (and
nation), much like the frontier of America’s past. By characterizing nature as regenerative and
the urban environment as a source of contamination and degeneration, London and England both
contributed to an ongoing tendency to racialize the American landscape. Implying that the post-
apocalyptic wilderness could be regenerative for Whites but that the end of civilization
seemingly caused the rapid degeneration of the darker races, these texts legitimate many racialist
beliefs.
The second chapter, “A Bio-politics of Necessity: Eugenic Fantasies in Post-Apocalyptic
America,” analyzes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland in tandem with several other genocidal
apocalyptic texts, arguing that Gilman uses the apocalypse as a form of negative eugenics, an
imaginative means to create and preserve a space of white power and racial purity. Reflecting the
logic of popular eugenic thought, Gilman’s apocalypse naturalizes genocide and legitimates strict
environmental, reproductive, and social control for the betterment of her imaginary community.
Gilman’s text reflects her beliefs that America had been continuously stunted by its attention to
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social problems caused by the evolutionary degenerate. She believed that “the highest social
development,’ democracy, ‘is repeated destroyed by the crowding of predatory power forces
with which it must struggle.” In “Is America Too Hospitable?” Gilman states that “Evolution
selects, and social evolution follows the same law. If you are trying to improve corn you do not
wait to bring all the weeds in the garden to the corn level before going on” (Ganobcsik-Williams
26). Herland illustrates the ways in which racialist theories played an integral role in White
feminist discourse at the turn of the century and indicates how the apocalyptic mode participated
in both the racialization of the American landscape and the legitimization of the bio-power of the
government.
The third chapter, “A Man among the Ruins: W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” and Post-
Apocalyptic Humanity,” works as a pivot point in my argument. W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story
“The Comet” indicates that the war transformed popular visions of national community and that
the apocalyptic mode provided a means for envisioning counter-hegemonic visions of America’s
racial future. By manipulating a form that so commonly promulgated racialist discourse, Du
Bois realized that he could renovate that discourse. In using the apocalyptic mode Du Bois is
able to destabilize familiar racial hierarchies and instead draw attention to the common humanity
which binds his characters together. He illustrates that in a post-apocalyptic world interracial
cooperation becomes a matter of survival, for the nation and for humanity, and prejudice seems
absurdly un-pragmatic and increasingly irrelevant. For Du Bois, and for many who would follow
in his footsteps, the mode was a useful tool for deconstructing racial ideology and for creating
Afrofuturist counter-narratives to common conceptions of black communal decline. I situate my
reading of Du Bois within the progressivism of the New Negro movement and also in contrast to
the racism of serialized science fiction which housed a proliferation of “yellow horde” stories in
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the 1920s and 1930s, illustrating the ways in which the apocalyptic mode has often served as a
conceptual battleground for competing visions of national renewal.
The last two chapters investigate the film and literature that emerged in the decades
following World War II. Chapter Four, “Regenerating American Community in Post-
Apocalyptic Suburbia,” argues that narratives of suburban survivalism served both to promote an
image of American resilience and exceptionalism during a time of Cold War anxieties and also
to imagine radical societal improvement. Analyzing narratives published between 1949 and
1963, including George Stewart’s Earth Abides, Philip Wylie’s Triumph, Pat Frank’s Alas
Babylon, I argue that the recent war, as well as the changing legal and social norms regarding
race and gender during this era, contributed to visions of communal survival in post-apocalyptic
fiction and film. These visions are strikingly more multicultural, more meritocratic, and more
successfully cooperative than traditional idealizations of American community. Writers
promoted these visions to encourage social change with the belief that the community’s
interracial cooperation and mutual respect could act as a blueprint for the kind of interracial
cooperation required to maintain world peace. Locating these works in suburbia, I argue that
these writers consciously sought to renovate ideas about American community in the nation’s
most rapidly expanding, and most homogenizing residential spaces, while narratives like Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the popular film Invasion of the Body Snatchers highlighted
suburban claustrophobia.
The final chapter, “The ‘Weird Spell’ of the Empty City: Reimagining the American
Metropolis in Post-Apocalyptic Films of the Atomic Age,” focuses on two nuclear films of 1959:
Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach and Harry Belafonte’s The World, The Flesh, and The Devil,
arguing that both films stand as clear testaments to a desire for both social renewal and urban
Olivas 36

transformation that drove many apocalyptic narratives in 1950s America. Together they illustrate
how such transformation was recurrently premised upon man’s ability to see himself as part of a
larger system—as a part of the human species rather than as part of a particular race or civilized
“type”—if he is to survive the perils of the twentieth century. My focus on film in this chapter
also enables me to investigate the ways in which post-apocalyptic imagery offers non-narrative
opportunities to engage viewers in reimagining the national landscape.

Olivas 37

CHAPTER 1
Remaking the Man-of-the Woods:
The Dawn of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier in American Literature

In Inventing the American Primitive, Helen Carr identifies a key dualism that has long
influenced the rhetoric of American identity. She writes, “the American can be, like the Indian,
Natural Man—simple, homey, honest, Natty Bumppo or Forest Gump—or, in contradistinction
to the Indian, a citizen of the world’s most modern nation” (8). In an effort to explore the effects
of this contradictory construction, Carr examines the politics of “the mythic figurations of the
United States as both the truly primitive and the truly modern” (9). This dualistic identity is, in
many ways the focus of this chapter. Like Carr, I am interested not only in the textual
representations of such dualistic figures, but also in their political and cultural effects; however,
unlike Carr, I will be examining this conception through texts that focus, not on representations
of the Native American, but instead on iterations of the White “man-of-the woods,” a figure that
migrated from the adventure and travel literature of the nineteenth century to the post-
apocalyptic literature of the early twentieth century.
17
As the popular literature of the era
evidences, this figure—embodying both a survivalist savagery and a propensity for cultured
refinement—was an extremely popular hero in American culture. Significantly, while the man-
of-the-woods figure is most often associated with “wilderness” genres like the Western, the
adventure story, and the travelogue, he also emerges within apocalyptic narrative, catapulting

17
Following Peggy Pascoe, I capitalize “White” here and throughout my dissertation to emphasize the social
construction of Whiteness. In What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America,
Pascoe writes: “And by capitalizing ‘White,’ I hope to help mark the category that so often remains unmarked, and
taken for the norm, when the fact is that, in American history, to be ‘White’ is often an aspiration as well as an
entitlement” (14).
Olivas 38

this traditionally religious genre into the secular mainstream, and offering America’s dualistic
identity a form that could more adequately respond to the country’s developing landscape.
The secular apocalyptic genre was born in an era when the natural world was visibly
diminishing. Within the imagined space of Nature—a place of both wilderness and Otherness—
White men could inhabit the roles of pilgrims, pioneers, frontiersmen, Indian killers, and
adventurers. They could interact with the wilderness, absorbing new skills and intelligence from
their contact with both savage people and savage conditions, while not themselves, becoming
savage. These identities, though based in reality, had come to play indispensable parts in
America’s story of development, and were central to the nation’s mainstream narratives of both
manliness and White supremacy. But the changes wrought by the industrial revolution and
subsequent urban development put these identities in jeopardy. Cities were quickly expanding,
experiencing unprecedented demographic shifts, and for the first time White Americans had to
grapple with the fact of geographic limitation, for it appeared that the nation had exhausted its
frontier.
18
Further, while the frontier had long been associated with White male empowerment,
there was a growing belief that urban environments were responsible for the weakening of men,
of the White race, and thus of the United States as a whole. Many of these fears were articulated
in apocalyptic terms, for according to the evolutionary theory that dominated popular discourse,
entire races, like species, could become extinct.
To avoid racial degeneration, and to continue to strengthen the nation with their
(supposedly) innately superior genes, White Americans would have to find new landscapes to
dominate and would have to find new ways of connecting with the natural landscape within the
changing world of modernity. To this end, there emerged a heightened interest in foreign

18
This pronouncement was made official by an 1890 Census which declared: “at present the unsettled area has been
so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” (Quoted in F.J.
Turner.)
Olivas 39

expansion and the nation propelled itself into various imperialist endeavors. At the same time
there developed a phenomenon of “frontier nostalgia” emblematized by popular entertainments
like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, literature like Owen Wister’s The Virginian, and Zane
Grey’s many works, including The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), works which championed the
vanishing wilderness as a space of bravery, adventure, and American fortitude. These renditions
of the American West maintained the nation’s frontier mythologies in the face of geographic
limitation. They responded to mass urbanization with a chorus of exceptional heroics and
exceptional landscapes, helping to frame American expansion—past, present, and future—as a
necessary means to strengthen and exemplify both the nation and its citizens.
19

But while the Western maintained the nation’s central mythologies by reimagining the
nation’s past, it was burdened with a sense of anachronism or imminent loss. The secular
apocalyptic genre thus emerged as a narrative method that could make America’s landscape
mythologies relevant for modern times. This genre was (and is) inherently future focused, with
stories often set in the near or distant future, or if in the present, focused on a need to survive
present catastrophes in order to ensure that the human future arrives. The apocalyptic genre was
finely attuned to the modern world as almost every story depicted—not only a new frontier for
rejuvenation—but also the fall of the metropolis; and this imagination of disaster strategically
harnessed the apocalyptic mood which pervaded the nation in a time of evolutionary anxiety.
Accordingly, the post-apocalyptic landscape depicted in popular novels and magazines
became a new frontier for White male protagonists to conquer and control. As Jack London’s
“The Scarlet Plague,” and George Allen England’s Darkness and Dawn demonstrate, the post-
apocalyptic frontier was a space in which White men could reconnect to their primitive

19
This history has been well explored by scholars of the American West like Richard Slotkin, Patricia Limerick, and
Richard White, etc.
Olivas 40

physicality, (re)gain their racial authority, and rebuild the nation in their own image. These
works demonstrate that the genre provided not only an opportunity to retell America’s frontier
mythologies, but also a perfect framework for imagining racial evolution and degeneration in a
way which further participated in a discourse of White supremacy. Echoing other popular texts
of the era such as Tarzan and The Virginian, the White men in these novels are strengthened by
their contact with the wilderness while simultaneously showcasing their innate abilities for
superior cultural development. The post-apocalyptic landscape would offer another opportunity
to showcase White superiority by recurrently emphasizing, not only the superior intelligence of
its White protagonists, but also the inevitable degeneration of the “savage” races who are either
unable to survive the apocalypse, or unable to rebound from mass calamity. However, as
London’s text shows, this genre also allowed an important ambiguity of the idea of the primitive
to surface. Can a White man, race, or nation, embrace the primitive, maintaining a rigidly
defined dualism, without becoming interracial, the definitive amalgamation of savagery and
civilization?

Racial Contamination, White Male Degeneration, and Urban Blight
By the time Jack London’s novella of urban collapse, “The Scarlet Plague,” appeared in
London Magazine in 1912, and George Allan England’s Darkness and Dawn had been published
in three installments in 1912, 1913 and 1914 as The Vacant World, Beyond the Great
Oblivion and Afterglow, many Americans were apprehensive about the effects of city life.
20
After
almost a century of mass urbanization, views of the city had shifted from the shining utopian
citadel of Protestant myth to a polluted, overcrowded, unmanageable slum. Many feared that
cities could corrupt one’s physical and moral health, causing neurasthenia, and various forms of

20
England’s three shorter novels were first published together as Darkness and Dawn in 1914.
Olivas 41

social and cultural degeneracy. Within the framework of evolutionary thinking set forth by
Darwin and Spencer, and through the eugenic pseudo-science catalyzed by such scientific
revolutions, cities were increasingly viewed as spaces that caused the degeneration, not just of
individuals, but of the White race as a whole. If cities were causing White men to grow weaker,
sicker, more effeminized, and less racially pure, perhaps the future of the race was in jeopardy,
and this could only mean that America itself might be vulnerable to collapse or external threat.
So what were the primary threats that America’s cities posed to man, race, and nation?
For those who lived within or sympathized with the working classes, economic inequality lay at
the base of urban blight. In an age of burgeoning socialism, capitalist exploitation formed the
basis of many urban critiques. Jack London addressed such issues in his apocalyptic novel, The
Iron Heel (1908), in which he imagined the end of the capitalist world and the beginning of a
socialist utopia. In a less fictional account, Upton Sinclair addressed the problems of the
modern city in his famous muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906), in which he exposed the
horrible working and living conditions of those employed in the meat-packing industry in
Chicago.
21
Others handled economic problems more nebulously, writing, as many Naturalist
writers did, about the city as an oppressively deterministic universe where the uneducated,
impoverished, and exploited were trapped in inescapable cycles of failure and misery. In
“Maggie, a Girl of the Streets” (1893), for example, Stephen Crane depicts the ways in which
those living in urban ghettoes faced foreclosed economic opportunities. Crane’s Maggie is born
to poor, violent, alcoholic parents, and the New York Bowery in which she lives is nauseatingly
filthy. Crane literally likens his impoverished characters to excrement, writing: “The building

21
Some writers, like Frank Norris, suggested that such phenomena transcended urban locales. In The Octopus: A
Story of California (1901), Norris highlighted the exploitation of wheat farmers at the hands of railroad monopolies
showing that the problems of the corporate trusts were spreading across the United States, affecting those seeking an
independent living in the West. In revealing how modern capitalism was overpowering, not only worker autonomy,
but the American landscape, Norris suggested that urban and industrial development were increasingly pervasive.
Olivas 42

quivered and quaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels” (130).
22

Ultimately, her lack of opportunities, as well as her inability to make educated choices, forces
Maggie into a life of prostitution.
Those who shed light on the economic forces underlying urban blight were soon joined
by others who worked to improve the living conditions and economic opportunities of the poor.
Famous reformers like Jacob Riis sought to expose the struggles of the urban poor in the hopes
that added visibility would bring about radical social change. His powerful How the Other Half
Lives (1890), brought attention to the economic divide in New York City, a place where “three-
fourths of its people live in the tenements,” and is framed by his contention that “What are you
going to do about it?—is the question of the day.”
23
Answering Riis’s call, many activists made
great strides in bettering their cities by combatting monopolies and worker exploitation, and
seeking better housing and sanitation. Settlement houses, such as Hull House, founded in 1889 in
Chicago, offered education, day care, and an employment bureau. By 1910, there were more than
400 of them nation-wide. By its second year alone, Hull House served over two thousand people
per week, and would eventually grow to encompass 13 buildings, including a gymnasium,
cooperative housing for working women, meeting space for trade union groups, and a pool.
24

However, there was a great deal of writing that characterized the urban environment not
as a problem to be solved, but as something to be rigorously condemned—and perhaps
abandoned. Despite the existence of writers and artists who celebrated the vitality of the city and
its people, such as the Ashcan artists, a burgeoning discourse of urban disorder and decay

22
While literary naturalists like Crane exposed many of the terrible social and economic conditions in the U.S., not
all of them concretely politicized such problems, or sought solutions. Instead, such naturalist depictions of human
suffering can be read as apolitical existentialist ruminations on the human condition, or, as proof of a social
Darwinism that denies agency to those in impoverished circumstances.
23
Riis, Introduction, How the Other Half Lives (no pag).
24
“Reforming Their World: Women in the Progressive Era.” National Women’s History Museum.
http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/progressiveera/hullhouse.html
Olivas 43

suggested that the progressive embrace of America’s immigrant and impoverished classes was
misguided; that offering support to the needy with things such as settlement houses ultimately
weakened the nation. Those schooled in evolutionary science often criticized such social work
for perpetuating a system of “unnatural selection,” and focused on the ways in which the survival
and social inclusion of the “unfit” corrupted those around them. For instance, Robert Woods
began his conspicuously titled 1899 The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study, by asserting that
“isolated and congested working-class quarters, with all the dangers to moral and material well-
being that they present, grow along with the growth of our great cities” (1); emphasizing the
crowded conditions that “tend to disintegrate neighborhood life and to destroy what is best in the
home,” Woods warned that “evils of all kinds find here a congenial soil and produce a rank
growth” (2). He articulates a common middle-class conception of city problems as he
emphasizes the growing impact of the working-class on “our great city.” While their
questionable morals threaten the uprightness of their middle-class neighbors their numbers make
their presence unavoidable.
25

The rapid shift in urban ethnic and racial demographics added another element to this
picture of growing disorder. “By 1910 immigrants and their American-born children composed
more than 70 percent of the population of New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit,
Buffalo, and Milwaukee, and more than 50 percent in six other cities” (Ross 29). This
immigrant influx intensified nativist anxieties. In a 1911 Harper’s Weekly article titled “The
News in Twenty-Eight Languages in Modern Babel” journalist Frank Marshall White paints a
picture of a once resplendent New York beset by polyglot chaos. In a section of the city that was

25
This perception was the result of years of class-prejudice but also of the growing economic power of a working
class that had gained significant political force at the turn of the century e.g. “Between 1881 and 1905 there were
nearly thirty-seven thousand strikes” (Bederman 13).

Olivas 44

formerly “fashion’s sacred promenade” and once home to various “aristocratic residences,” one
now hears a hum of languages as newsboys vend their daily digests. White emphasizes the
enormous growth in foreign population, arguing that there are now more Jews in New York
“than there ever were in Jerusalem,” and more Italians “than there are in Naples” (24). The
cacophony which White depicts is a noisy assault on a once orderly metropolis.
Ultimately, this massive influx of immigrants was joined by an unprecedented black
urban migration, resulting in a conceptual darkening of the city that further transformed urban
America into a space besieged by a “rising tide of color.”
26
Although external migration had
been going on for centuries, between 1890 and the mid-1920s more than 25 million immigrants
arrived at U.S. ports and borders, the majority of which were considered “new immigrants,” in
other words, they did not originate from Northern countries like Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland,
Belgium, Denmark, etc. (Markel and Stern 759-760). Similarly, in the first decades of the
twentieth century “more than one-tenth of the country's black population would voluntarily move
north,” mostly into urban industrial centers (Marks 1). In the crowded city streets it became
nearly impossible not to feel an increasing ethnic diversity.
As many writers portrayed an America beset by class degeneration and multi-racial
influence, science lent a new vocabulary for articulating such fears. Recall the ways in which
Woods’s description of urban blight moved so easily from the scourge of “congested working
class quarters” to an organic metaphor likening the social degeneration caused by urban
crowding to a multiplying fungus or bacteria. With the concurrent rise of microbiology and the
major shifts in urban demographics, the language of germ theory and contagion provided useful
metaphors for describing growing social ills. Despite the regulation of immigrants and the

26
This phrase was popularized by Lothrop Stoddard who published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-
Supremacy in 1920.
Olivas 45

impositions of the Jim Crow era, social lines of race and class were less visible in the crowded
city streets, and were being constantly destabilized with each passing decade. Such
bacteriological conceptualization was particularly apt for describing over-crowded urban
environments where boundaries of race and class were becoming increasingly unclear; contagion
was a way of conceptualizing the threat of diminishing boundaries between social groups.
27

Certainly, the association between contamination and race was not new; African-
Americans and Native Americans had long been associated with impurity in the American
cultural imagination as a means for justifying their status as second-class citizens and their
attendant need for the benefits of “civilization.” As Anne McClintock reminds us in Imperial
Leather: Race Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, soap was a tool not only of
physical cleanliness but also part of the civilizing mission of the West. Similarly, in her analysis
of the imbrications between race, purity, and hygiene, Dana Berthold analyzes an 1883
advertisement in which three Native Americans are “sparkling clean and civilized” because of
Ivory soap. The script ends with these lines: “And now we’re civil, kind and good; And keep the
laws as people should; We wear our linen, lawn and lace; As well as folks with paler face; And
now I take, where ’er we go; This cake of IVORY SOAP to show; What civilized my squaw and
me; And made us clean and fair to see” (Berthold 11-12).
The association of physical, moral, and racial corruption with the city itself was a
growing phenomenon. The city was increasingly understood as a space which, invaded by
people of color and the lower classes, contaminated the White race; and it was also seen as a
place which threatened masculine authority. Modern urban life brought economic challenges to

27
In “Encroaching Dark: Germs and Race in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture” (2005), David
Raney provides an excellent discussion of the connections between bacterial and racial contamination. He argues:
“Contagion questions barriers and breaches them—and so does race, if a despised or feared racial element is
perceived as throwing off its shackles (symbolic or actual) and crossing lines previously uncrossable” (“Encroaching
Dark” 5).
Olivas 46

middle-class men while also offering more political power to the working-class, immigrants, and
women; and these developments seemingly threatened traditional Victorian masculinity, or
“manliness,” as it would have been termed at the time.
28
Further, many believed that the city
caused physical degeneration in men, promoting effeminacy and even neurasthenia. Taken quite
seriously at the turn of the century, “neurasthenia” was, according to George M. Beard in A
Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia); its Symptoms, Nature, Sequences,
Treatment (1888), a “lack of nerve strength” (8).
29
While Beard argues that many factors
contribute to one’s potential for neurasthenia, including heredity, he emphasizes the pathological
potential of both intellectual work and competitive culture: two common facets of the modern
urban economic sphere. He writes:
In hospitals, in dispensaries, and among the very poor everywhere, a typical case
of neurasthenia is difficult to find, but among the well-to-do and the intellectual,
and especially among those in the professions and in the higher walks of business
life, who are in deadly earnest in the race for place and power, this peculiar
impoverishment of nerve force that we call neurasthenia appears with alarming
frequency. (255)
Beard warns against the “competitive anxieties,’ so intensified in this country, this worry of
business and professional life that civilization fosters and deepens” (255).
Similarly locating the decline of modern man, aka, the White race, in the city in his
famous tome, Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau argued that urban living was over-stimulating

28
Gail Bederman offers a useful overview of early twentieth century views of manliness and masculinity in
Manliness and Civilization.
29
Beard’s first full-length text on neurasthenia was American Nervousness (1881) in which he described the
condition as a “nervelessness—a lack of nerve force” (qtd. in Bederman 85). He claims to have completed his first
study of the subject in 1868 with a paper he presented to the New York Medical Journal Association.
Olivas 47

and had thus caused men to become overemotional and less inclined to physical action. He
writes:
The inhabitant of a large town, even the richest, who is surrounded by the greatest
luxury, is continually exposed to unfavourable influences which diminish his vital
powers far more than what is inevitable. He breathes an atmosphere charged with
organic detritus; he eats stale, contaminated, adulterated food; he feels himself in
a state of constant nervous excitement” (35).
Such experiences, Nordau argues, “cost our brains wear and tear” (39), and eventually lead to
“both degeneration and hysteria” (43). Echoing the words of Robert Woods, Nordau uses the
language of contamination to describe the dangers of city life. In his focus on the body, he
creates an image of a man physically weakened by his environment; as his “vital powers”
diminish, he is susceptible to pure emotional states: to the effeminized characteristics of hysteria
and nervous excitement.
These fears of declining racial purity and male vitality were understood as signs of
national, as well as transnational, Anglo-Saxon degeneration. If White men were losing strength,
if the White race was losing strength, what would become of it? And if America was the most
advanced manifestation of the White race, what would become of the nation? Whiteness had
become synonymous with civilization; would civilization thus crumble?
30
As Americans sought
to avoid the predictions outlined in texts like The Decline of the West (1918) and The Passing of
the Great Race (1916) they guarded their borders from threats both national and biological that
were felt to be simultaneously apocalyptic and miniscule. As Ellen Richards wrote in 1910, “Our
enemies are no longer Indians and wild animals. Those were the days of big things. Today is the

30
For more on the assumed connections between Whiteness, masculinity, and civilization, see Gail Bederman’s
Manliness and Civilization, Nell Painter’s The History of White People, and Reginald Horseman’s Race and
Manifest Destiny.
Olivas 48

day of the infinitely little. To see our cruelest enemies, we must use the microscope.” (19).
Ironically, perhaps, these microscopic threats were concentrated in the nation’s largest urban
centers—spaces that held the most potential for the interaction of genes and germs. In urban
settings “the ordinary routines of daily life seemed fraught with danger, as contact with strangers
became more likely and as popular acknowledgement of an invisible microbial world gave yet
another scientific rationale to xenophobia, in addition to the eugenical one” (Brown 67). Thus, in
the minds of many white Americans during the Progressive era, the city was not merely
darkening but was becoming infected with a veritable “black plague.” And fighting germs was a
lot less romantic than fighting Indians.
These sentiments about urban degeneration and contamination would be central forces
driving apocalyptic narratives of the era. Through an imagination of urban disaster, writers could
abolish the multiple threats associated with city-life and in the process imagine the reinvigoration
of those who had been disempowered. Narratives of urban apocalypse also enabled another
critical transformation of the landscape: the triumphant return of nature. The post-apocalyptic
landscape is pointedly post-urban; it requires the cultivation of primitive skills, the renewal of
physical fortitude, and a new fraternity with the natural world. As I will illustrate, in the early
years of the Progressive era the genre capitalized on (and multiplied) discourses of urban decline
as well as popular ideas regarding the American wilderness.

Nature as the Great White Escape
Nature, or rather, a particular idea of nature, was the cure for many of urban fears.
While perceptions of the American wilderness have gone through numerous evolutions since
colonization, by the first decades of the twentieth century America’s remaining spaces of
Olivas 49

undeveloped nature had been transformed into refuges from the seemingly contaminated world
of the metropolis.
31
If the city was a place of pollution and materialist endeavor, the wilderness
was a place of cleanliness, purity, and moral uprightness; if the city was a place of
overstimulation and over-civilized effeminacy, nature was a place of solace and physical
strength; and if the city was being overrun by people of color and working-class firebrands and
degenerates, the wilderness had to be preserved as a space of retreat for a White middle-class
with the cultural development to truly appreciate Nature. American nature—whether wilderness
frontier, National park, or pastoral garden—was actively characterized through a variety of
popular cultural mediums. The concurrent rise of photography and the printing press helped
shape this particular type of nature worship. Ultimately, through repetition and adaptation,
nature was constructed as a space for the White upper and middle classes, particularly White
upper and middle-class men, to find physical and mental regeneration. Such ritualized
narrativization was so successful that it both provoked and was supported by an environmental
movement that aligned nature with White empowerment.
The idea of nature as a regenerative refuge from town or city-life has a long history in
American culture. The idea of “the New World” with its vast expanses of seemingly
undeveloped land was originally conceived as a refuge from the corruption of European cities,
and the nation has long relied on its landscape as a sign of its exceptionalism. This view of
nature as regenerative was not clearly bound to America; however, it had a particular resonance
in American culture because many Americans had come to see their landscape as uniquely
formative. Consider Thoreau’s description of the wilderness in Walden: “Almost every New
England boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of ten and

31
Roderick Nash examines this long history in Wilderness and the American Mind, tracing the transformation from
early colonists’ association of wilderness with evil, immorality, and danger through the more redemptive and
aesthetic views of deists, Romantics, and Transcendentalists.
Olivas 50

fourteen; and his hunting and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves of an English
nobleman, but were more boundless even than those of a savage” (143-144). For Thoreau, the
landscape stands as a symbol of American superiority against a more industrialized (and thereby
effeminized) Europe in which the English must hunt in “preserves” and do not have the luxury of
an extensive wilderness. Further, it is “more boundless even than those of a savage” because in
Thoreau’s imagination, the land has been sufficiently released from Indian land claims through
the successful enterprise of American colonialism. It is seemingly infinite and available, a
veritable new world of possibility.
32

By the nineteenth century, the idea that one could make “a redemptive journey away
from society in the direction of nature” had become a classic American fable.
33
As Leo Marx
argues in The Machine in the Garden, novels like Walden, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn all
depict figures who renounce their place in society and withdraw into nature in order to “regain
contact with essentials” (69). Marx notes that as a place “untainted by civilization,” nature offers
these male heroes a revealing but temporary “return to first things” (69), restoring them
psychically and physically before they return once again to civilization.
34
Marx emphasizes the
importance of their return, arguing that the hero must bring back what he has learned in order to
help civilization maintain its proper balance with the natural world; likewise, the hero must
remain connected to society in order to maintain a proper balance between his social and natural
self. Such idealizations of an intermediate experience between the natural world and society,
Marx argues, speak to a long-held valuation of what he terms the “middle landscape,” in
America, a space where, unencumbered by society, one is able to connect with what is original

32
For more on the iterations of these ideas, and of the evolution of thought about nature in American culture see Leo
Marx (e.g. 228), and also Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind.
33
Leo Marx 69.
34
Marx describes this restoration as “psychic renewal” (69), and as the restoration of “the vitality of unconscious of
preconscious experience” (70).
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and authentic, but where one remains safely remote from the primitiveness that lurks in the
vacuum of civilization.
This liminal space, and the idealized experience that it enabled, was championed in the
nineteenth century by Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau. As urban and industrial
development gained momentum, Thoreau and Emerson depicted the natural world as a quiet
place of meditation where one might achieve spiritual awakening, physical renewal, and self-
realization. In Walden, Thoreau depicts nature as a place where one might discover one’s true
self. He writes, “Not till we are lost—in other words not till we have lost the world—do we
begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are, and the infinite extent of our relations” (118).
This withdrawal from civilization was imperative: for both Thoreau and Emerson, nature
strengthens men that “have become the tools of their tools” in the modern industrial world
(Emerson 16), offering them an opportunity to realize their physical and intellectual potential.
Emerson argued that “The civilised man has built a coach, but he has lost the use of his feet . . .
He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun” (Emerson, “Self-
Reliance” 112). Emerson and Thoreau believed that in nature man could regain his legs and once
again become master of his tools, gaining an authority easily lost amidst the bustle of the
civilized world. However, neither man advocated a complete withdrawal from civilization, as
they clearly valued the cultural riches of society. Thus does Thoreau muse: “Is it possible to
combine the hardiness of the savages with the intellectualness of the civilised man?” (9)
As Thoreau’s question suggests, in order to reap regenerative rewards from the natural
environment, one had to be properly civilized. One chose nature, as Thoreau had chosen
Walden, and it was through this choice to live in the wilderness that the civilized man could
maintain his superiority to those whom nature seemingly acted upon. This requirement not only
Olivas 52

excluded Native Americans and other people of color, but those whose class status relegated
them to the less cultured, less educated, and therefore, less civilized rungs of society. It also
excluded women, who were generally considered unable to perform the hard labor required to
live alone in the wilderness, and whose idealized space was the home.
This construction of nature as an exclusive refuge for civilized (White) men was
maintained by John Muir, the godfather of environmentalism and a force in the creation of the
National park system. Although he is known for his solo forays into the wilderness, Muir was
also a writer and orator whose perceptions of the wilderness were widely read across the nation.
In Muir’s view, nature was a sublime creation. Recording his perceptions of Yosemite Valley in
My First Summer in the Sierras (1911), he writes, “No words will ever describe the exquisite
beauty and charm of this mountain park—Nature’s landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful
and sublime. No wonder it draws nature-lovers from all over the world” (280).
But nature was not for everyone; in fact, exclusivity was a requirement of a pristine
wilderness where lone exploration was possible. Muir envisioned the American wilderness as a
space for the clean and cultured American, someone who could fully appreciate the majesty of
the nation’s geological formations, and who would not pollute the space with their presence.
Muir argued that Yosemite was a place for the “traveler . . . whether tourist, botanist, geologist,
or lover of wilderness pure and simple” (DeLuca and Demo 552), and he “laments the presence
of loggers and shepherds” and “mocks those who work in the wilderness” (Deluca and Demo
552). Since the wilderness was to be used for leisurely or educated pursuits, it required a visitor
of a certain income and cultural background.
Part of this belief stemmed from racialist discourses that assumed that people of color
needed civilizing in order to be civilized; in the natural world they would quickly degenerate,
Olivas 53

returning to their more “natural” state of savagery. In Muir’s mind Native Americans, who had
long lived in the mountains and valleys through which he traveled, were not ideal residents of the
wilderness; they were unrefined and unhygienic. Traversing through the Sierras, Muir wrote of a
group of Indians from Mono: “A strangely dirty and irregular life these dark-eyed dark-haired,
half-happy savages lead in this clean wilderness” (Muir My First Summer in the Sierras, 277).
With such statements Muir participated in a movement that conceptually removed Native
Americans from the American wilderness by defining them as unfit for the idealized space.
Assuredly, this erasure had been ongoing for over a century by the time Muir voiced his
opinions. By constructing Nature as sublime, a popular perception in the nineteenth century,
writers and photographers had successfully emptied the American wilderness of people;
“Nature” it seemed, was an uninhabited space.
35
As Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo argue,
photographers like Carleton Watkins “dramatized [a] colonizing vision” of the Yosemite
landscape as a “sublime site.” Such sublime images “naturaliz[e] a construction of wilderness
devoid of humanity,” where “nature functions as spectacular object rather than as inhabitable
space” (547). Photography was a popular new art form and figures like Watkins, along with
Edward Curtis, and later Ansel Adams, were an integral part of the mythologizing process.
36

Through photography Native Americans could be written out of the landscape or shaped into
innocuously timeless symbols of American fortitude or historic nobility, figures which seemed to
stand outside of historical reality. This somewhat paradoxical positioning of Native Americans—

35
Over the course of the nineteenth century the American landscape underwent a positive transformation as a result
of two primary ideas: the sublime and the frontier. As William Cronon explains in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking
the Human Place in Nature, due to the influences of romanticism and primitivism, “The[se] two [ideas] converged
to remake wilderness in their own image, freighting it with moral values and cultural symbols that it carries to this
day” (72).
36
Other useful works that examine the ways in which photography helped shape mythologies of the American West
are: Martha Sandweiss’s Print the Legend: Photography and the American West, and Deborah Bright’s “The
Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics,” Art Journal , Vol. 51,
No. 2, Art and Ecology (Summer, 1992), pp. 60-71.

Olivas 54

as extinct and ephemeral, and as both noble and savage—would continue to problematize the
relationship that White Americans sought to construct with the natural world.
When the American landscape was not perceived as uninhabited, it was constructed as a
space in need of racial cleansing. Thus the construction of the American wilderness as sublime
and uniquely formative was complemented by the myth of the frontier. The idea of the frontier
and the frontiersmen, popularized by figures like Daniel Boone, Hawkeye, and Davy Crockett
participated in a national narrative of ideal heroism which, as Richard Slotkin has argued,
justified American colonization through an ideology of regenerative violence. In the narrative of
the frontier, famously articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner in "The Significance of the
Frontier in American History" (1893), the landscape offers American frontiersmen an
opportunity to take an active role in the formation of the nation. Violence against native peoples,
or anyone deemed uncivilized, was a necessary step in the formation of American democracy.
The wilderness was a place where savagery justified White supremacy and American
imperialism; the very concept of manifest destiny rested on the existence of wilderness.
37

The idea of the frontier, and of an American wilderness, offered White American men an
empowering identity. While Thoreau might make a foray into the wilderness in order to bring
back important life lessons to his civilized companions, figures like Davy Crockett were believed
to have actively formed the nation through their fearless combat with the savage landscape. The
benefits of the wilderness experience were understood as spiritual and physical, personal and
national. As men like Thoreau and Crockett grew stronger and smarter, so did the White race,

37
As Anders Stephanson explains in Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, John
O’Sullivan, the writer who coined the famous phrase, aligned liberty with “perpetual genesis, struggle, and
appropriation,” asserting that the freedom of the (Anglo) American was dependent upon the nation’s ability to
secure new lands from which its inhabitants could “carv[e] out a properly independent American existence” (41).
Within this national framework nature is not only a place of personal redemption but a place where the nation acts as
redeemer.
Olivas 55

and therefore, so did the nation; “Just as manliness was the highest form of manhood, so
civilization was the highest form of humanity. Manliness was the achievement of a perfect man,
just as civilization was the achievement of a perfect race” (Bederman 27).
President Theodore Roosevelt would make these connections explicit, recurrently
championing the formative power of the American landscape. In his Ranch Life and the Hunting
Trail (1888), illustrated by Frederic Remington (1902), he presents a romantic ethnography of
the cowboys, ranchers, soldiers, and pioneers living on the Western American frontier. The
frontier toughened men up, Roosevelt argued: “the struggle for existence is very keen in the far
West, and it is no place for men who lack the ruder, coarser virtues and physical qualities, no
matter how intellectual or how refined and delicate their sensibilities” (10). In this strength lay
the future of civilization. As Roosevelt writes about “the wild rough rider of the plains,” “Brave,
hospitable, hardy, and adventurous, he is the grim pioneer of our race; he prepares the way for
civilization from before whose face he must himself disappear” (100). Roosevelt famously tried
to cash on this cowboy aura, fashioning himself as a Westerner, a hunter, and a rancher in order
to prove his aptitude as the leader of the race and nation, and by extension, to prove the nation’s
aptitude as the fittest manifestation of the race.
38

By the end of the nineteenth century, these constructions of nature had enabled the
passage of legislation that helped forcibly empty the National Parks of any Native presence and
that criminalized many working-class employments on public lands. As Jeff Romm and Karl
Jacoby have shown, the National Parks, “our” great symbols of American wilderness, were made
available to White tourists by way of the forced removal of their native inhabitants. As a result,
the history of the environmental movement was, for most Native Americans, “a narrative of loss”

38
Roosevelt composed several other historical and/or auto-biographical accounts of the American West, such as The
Winning of the West (1903), Stories of the Great West (1916), and The Rough Riders (1919).
Olivas 56

(Jacoby 149). Similarly, as Jacoby illustrates through his valuable examination of the
development of National Parks, members of the working class were criminalized by legislation
that secured natural park space for recreational uses or that designated natural resources as
“public,” to be managed by the government and/or the big corporations they chose to do business
with.
The construction of the wilderness as a place of White refuge has had long-lasting
consequences. Many people of color did not (and have not) felt at home in the environmental
movement, and have struggled to feel safe and welcome in the nation’s undeveloped
landscapes.
39
In addition, this construction of wilderness as a place of freedom and regeneration
has contributed to perceptions of inevitable urban degeneration. Ultimately, the racial dichotomy
that characterized the American landscape—both urban and wild—became hegemonic through a
combination of legislative decisions, social violence, and the ceaseless mythologizing of popular
discourses by the early twentieth century.

The Man-of-the-Woods
Considering the importance placed on the nation’s undeveloped landscapes, the apparent
closure of the frontier led to an explosion of literature and social clubs that celebrated the mythic
“man-of-the-woods.” As the immense popularity of novels like Tarzan, The Call of the Wild,
and The Virginian, indicates, there was a hunger for stories in which living in nature brought
greater physical strength, superior wisdom, and more emotional fortitude to men (and

39
As Mark Foster points out, African American travelers and tourists did succeed in finding some solace in natural
spaces in the early 1900s; however, many recount being harassed on the road, encountering roadblocks, and feeling
limited by their ignorance of local racial customs. Instead of having the freedom to pitch their tent spontaneously or
to find a last minute hotel room, Black travelers had to plan ahead and make arrangements with friends and family.
Foster quotes one traveler who bemoaned such limitations, saying, "somehow it takes the joy out of gypsying about
when you have to be at a cer-tain place by a certain time" (142).
Olivas 57

anthropomorphized dogs). There were efforts across the nation to embody the manliness and
strength of these wilderness characters, to find a way of incorporating such strengths into the
civilized world. In order to counter potential national degeneration, Sir Robert Baden-Powell
founded The Boy Scouts in England (1908), part of a Scouting movement initiated by Ernest
Seton with his Woodcraft Indians (1902), and Daniel Beard with the “Sons of Daniel Boone”
(1905). With its focus on “pride in and development of the resources of the male self” and its
stress on “morality and self-sufficiency,” The Boy Scouts “was explicitly conceived as an effort
to renovate society” (Braudy 366). The Boy Scouts of America was founded just a few years
later in 1910, with Baden-Powell, Beard, Seton, and Teddy Roosevelt as some of its ardent
supporters.
Seton, who wrote prolifically, argued that time in nature was essential for strengthening
both men and the nation. In The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore (1912), he argues for the
merits of camping, and contends that it is through woodcrafts that men develop their manhood.
Seton writes: “Realizing that manhood, not scholarship, is the first aim of education, we have
sought out those pursuits which develop the finest character, the finest physique, and which may
be followed out of doors, which in a word, make for manhood” (5). Seton lists several acceptable
Woodcraftian pursuits:
Woodcraft—that is, Woodcraft in a large sense—meaning every accomplishment
of an all-round Woodman—Riding, Hunting, Camper-craft, Scouting,
Mountaineering, Indian-craft, First aid, Star-craft, Signaling, and Boating. To this
we add all good Outdoor Athletics and Sports, including Sailing and Motoring,
and Nature Study, of which Wild Animal Photography is an important branch; but
above all, Heroism (5-6).
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Similar activities were advocated by other scouting organizations across the nation in order to
draw young men back into the wilderness and away from America’s cities.
Importantly, such journeys into the wilderness were always temporary. Like Thoreau and
Crockett before them, scouts would learn from the wilderness but maintain their inborn
affiliation with civilization. Primitive cultures were similarly conceived as resources for
regeneration, and were considered most useful in concert with a civilized intellect. In
constructing a program of proper masculine development Baden-Powell had studied “initiation
and other tribal rituals” from “warrior cultures around the world,” in hope that the Scout would
be “a combination of Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock Holmes, steeped in practical knowledge
necessary for survival in a complicated world as well as able by observation and analysis to
penetrate its secrets” (Braudy 365-6).
Not surprisingly, it was in these years that Joseph Knowles became the nation’s first
survivalist sensationalized in popular culture. Sponsored by the Boston Post, Knowles entered
the Maine woods one morning in 1913 wearing nothing but an athletic supporter, to live for two
months on his survival skills alone. In a letter he wrote to President Wilson, he explained that the
object of his experiment was to “demonstrate that modern man is not only the equal of primitive
man in ability to maintain himself, but that civilization has so improved the human mind that he
may add to primitive life accomplishments which our early ancestors never knew” (qtd. in
Motavalli 19). Knowles’s journey in to the wilderness made front-page news, and apparently
doubled the circulation of the Boston Post.
40
Later that year his memoir, Alone in the Wilderness
was hugely popular; his survivalist escapades had made Knowles a celebrity. He was an icon of
the new middle landscape, a figure who had proven that he could be equally at home in both
nature and society, and could harness the primitive physicality of the man-of-the-woods without

40
Motavalli 23.
Olivas 59

becoming a savage. As Jim Motavalli argues, “Knowles’s newspaper readers undoubtedly
identified with his slow transformation from city dweller to nature warrior, as it was a path they
too might take some day. Here, at last, was a frontiersman tailor-made for changing times” (48).
This widespread interest in the benefits of the woods created a wealth of supporters for
the environmental movement which gained momentum at the turn of the century. But these
particular constructions of nature could be culturally problematic: while they characterized the
wilderness primarily as spaces for White male empowerment, they also intensified the
racialization of the American landscape. While Teddy Roosevelt argued for the “strenuous
endeavor” of American imperialism and celebrated the American frontier, the American
environmental movement flourished in an effort to conserve the spaces that had long furnished
one of America’s most sacred myths.
41

Regenerating the Race on the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier: George Allan England’s
Darkness and Dawn
The cult of nature found a home in George Allan England’s work, who, like Jack
London, suffered from bouts of illness while living in the city, and championed the natural world
for its restorative powers. While both London and England championed nature for many of the
same reasons as men like Roosevelt and Seton, they were particularly compelled to find an
escape from the exploitative and regimented structure of capitalist industrial modernity.
42

Writing about nature, both human nature and the natural world, offered the young writers an

41
William Cronon argues: “In the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wilderness preservation in the
United States, for if the wild land had been so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its last
remnants as monuments to the American past—as as an insurance policy to protect its future” (76).
42
Both men were known socialists. G. A. England ran for Governor of Maine in 1908 on a Socialist platform.
Olivas 60

opportunity to remain satisfyingly aloof from mainstream American society, and gave them each
a platform on which to promote their own social and political ideologies.
After he graduated from Harvard in 1902, England went to work for Mutual Life
Insurance Company in New York City but soon felt “run down” and developed tuberculosis. It
was then that he decided to make a change: England gave up work and spent two years
“roughing it” in the Maine woods. “The experience restored my health but roughing it doesn’t
earn any money, so I plugged into fiction-writing.”
43
Over the next three decades of his life
England would write numerous novels, short-stories, and essays, most of which were serialized
in popular magazines. The majority of his works reveal his admiration for those strengthened by
their encounters with nature. Such figures—survivalists, explorers, and intrepid adventurers—
could be found throughout both his travel writing and his speculative fiction. He emulated such
figures in his own life, attempting, as Jack London did, to participate in the lifestyles he wrote
about. In 1922 England joined a Newfoundland seal hunt which he later wrote about in “Vikings
of the Ice.”
44
The experience offered him a personal adventure and an opportunity to observe a
life of hardship caused by both harsh environmental conditions and the capitalist market which
endorsed such exploitative hunting operations.
45

England’s first installment of what would become Darkness and Dawn, appeared in The
Cavalier, an early pulp magazine, in January, 1912.
46
Its immediate popularity led him to write
two sequels in the next two years. As Darkness and Dawn indicates, apocalyptic fiction offered
England an ideal space in which he could explore alternatives to modern capitalism as well as

43
This excerpt is from an article titled “George Allan England Makes Granite State His Home” by Archie
Kilpatrick, believed to have been written in 1923. The name of the publication is unknown. For more information
see http://famous-and-forgotten-fiction.com/writings/george-allan-england-newspaper-article.html
44
This title was later changed to The Greatest Hunt in the World.
45
The seal hunt generated nearly $200,000, a significant sum in 1922. But as England writes in “Vikings,” hunters
usually only made about $10-12 per week, raking in about $50 for the whole expedition. (“’Vikings of the Ice’:
American Writer George Allan England's Newfoundland Seal Hunt,” Rattling Books.com).
46
The Cavalier was published by the Frank Munsey Co. between 1908 and 1914.
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celebrate the restorative powers of the natural world.
47
In Darkness, England depicts the post-
apocalyptic dark ages on an epic scale, beginning with the end of modern civilization, and then
slowly detailing the stages towards the dawn of a socialist utopia. His depiction of progressive
stages of development—from savagery to civilization, from monarchy to socialist democracy,
and from darkness to whiteness—reveal his immersion in both socialist and racialist evolutionary
discourses, and his clear valorization of the end of modernity, return of nature, and subsequent
strengthening of man and the nation show his participation in the popular cult of the primitive
embodied by “man of the woods” literature.
48
Importantly, while he illustrates the potential of
the post-apocalyptic landscape to regenerate his protagonists and to make way for the eventual
rejuvenation of the nation, his imagined utopia is predicated on the annihilation of the darker
races and the rehabilitation of an innately superior White society. By overhauling the economic
and political structure of the United States, but maintaining its racialist ideologies, England’s
vision is suggestive of the ways in which ideologies of race confined the progress of socialism in
the decades of its greatest potential, and similarly indicate the racial exclusivity of the myth of
regeneration in nature.
England’s tale begins when Beatrice Kendrick and Allan Stern awaken to a seemingly
dead New York City, on the 48
th
floor of the Metropolitan Tower. Although their survival is
never adequately explained, it is eventually concluded that the two survived a poisonous gas by

47
Although England is not as well-known as his more famous contemporaries who were writing speculative fiction,
like Edgar Rice Burroughs, England published at least eight other science fiction stories in the following years and
his story, “The Thing From—Outside,” appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s, April, 1923 Science and Invention, and
again in Gernsback’s first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926.
48
England’s socialism influenced his view of mankind as progressing through various stages towards progress.

While such progression is clearly Marxist, there were other influences as well. Mark Pittenger argues that “Socialists
built into their thinking [Lewis Henry] Morgan's model of cultural evolution proceeding from savagery through
barbarism to civilization, and Spencer's model of a social organism becoming ever more complexly interdependent
while progressing from the "militant" to the "industrial" social stage. They often imagined a socialist order
dominated by technocratic elites, especially scientists and engineers. The commitment to making socialism scientific
also often implicated socialists in the reinforcement and perpetuation of varieties of Darwinized racial thinking that
were widely considered legitimately scientific” (93).
Olivas 62

their safe altitude at the top of the city, and have slept away a thousand years while the world has
perished around them. Stern, a practical and innovative engineer, immediately sets to work,
ensuring their survival amidst the ruins of the metropolis. Beatrice, his former secretary, offers
companionship and domestic comfort. Eventually the pair encounters “the horde,” a savage and
bestial band of dark survivors, whom they must fight in order to escape the city. After many
adventures and near-catastrophes along the way, they meet a race of albinos living in the depths
of a large chasm that now splits the nation. Allan defeats the tyrannical chief of this “Merucaan”
tribe and then begins a long process of bringing them to the surface in order to create a new
civilization. After a final confrontation between the dark horde and the white Merucaans, Allan
and Beta live happily ever after among the new and improved civilization that they have created.
As a critic of modern capitalism, England fully embraced the apocalyptic genre’s ability
to lay waste to New York City, a fitting metonym for the destruction of capitalism. Although the
transformation of the city has supposedly taken over a thousand years, for Allan and Beatrice it
has happened overnight, and this quick and total transformation of New York reveals how
ephemeral such structures can be; yesterday the city was bustling with activity, today it is buried
in greenery. Upon waking to a seemingly dead city, Beatrice notes: “No familiar hum of the
metropolis now rose from what, when she had fallen asleep, had been swarming streets and miles
on miles of habitations. Instead, a blank, unbroken silence” (8). Allan and Beatrice soon discover
that “everything is overgrown with forests and vegetation” (27), and Allan muses: “Nature has
her revenge at last, on man!” (28).
As England transforms the city from a paved citadel of materialism into an overgrown
forest, he is able to radically alter conceptions of value and labor. The return of nature thrusts
Allan and Beatrice into primitive living conditions. There is no water running through the pipes
Olivas 63

of the office building, no edible food left to eat. Allan and Beatrice must learn to survive by
using their wits and their resources, and in a world in which life has been reduced to survival,
value has been reordered. Allan thinks: “Jewels, diamonds, wealth simply inconceivable! Yet
now a good water supply, some bread, meat, coffee, salt, and so on, a couple of beds, a gun or
two and some ordinary tools outweigh them all!” (46); in the post-apocalyptic world “all
standards of worth had wholly changed” (90). The lives of Allan and Beatrice are equally re-
valuated. As the only apparent survivors of an unknown catastrophe they begin to see themselves
as the engineers of the new world. After finding only bones and dust around them, Stern tells
Beatrice, “There may be someone else, somewhere,” but for now, he tells her, “I’m Adam. And
you—well you’re Eve” (104).
Now that nature covers everything and there is, ostensibly, no city left, England explores
the benefits of the post-apocalyptic natural world. The primitive and unpeopled environment
offers Allan and Beatrice unprecedented opportunities for growth, and Allan is excited about the
possibilities before him. Upon realizing that he survived a full-scale apocalypse, “Stern did not
even feel weak or shaken. On the contrary, never had life bounded more warmly, more fully, in
his veins” (23). His new life of hunting and exploring makes Stern quite happy. While Beatrice
creates a comfortable home for them in the office building, Allan enjoys his outdoor freedom,
and the new sense of importance attached to his labors. He also enjoys the new intimacy with his
young and attractive secretary, who has become a potential sexual companion in the new world.
England writes, “Stern, feeling the May breeze upon his face, hearing the birdsongs in the forest
depths, felt a well-being, a glow of health and joy such as he had never in his whole life
known—the health of outdoor labor and sound sleep and perfect digestion, the joy of
accomplishment and of the girl’s near presence” (93).
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Survivalism works its magic on Allan and Beatrice who soon become stronger and more
physically fit. Allan reflects on this fact often in the first section of the novel, musing at one
point that “plenty of bathing and good food put them in splendid physical condition, to which
their active exercise contributed much” (98). After several months of survivalist living Allan is a
changed man; but it is not until the pair encounters the horde, a race of dark beasts, that they
fully embody the survivalist spirit. The horde blocks their path to fresh water and Allan and
Beatrice must become warriors in order to ensure their survival. It is at this point that Allan
becomes an emblematic “man of the woods,” with Beatrice his Amazon queen. “Girt in his garb
of fur, belted and sandaled, well over six feet tall and broad of shoulder, the man was
magnificent. His red beard and mustache, close-cropped, gave him a savage air that now well
fitted him. For Stern was mad-mad clear through” (163). His magnificence does not go unnoticed
by Beatrice who is immediately attracted to his virility. As Beatrice observes him, tense for
battle, she feels “a thrill of admiration for this virile, indomitable man, coping with every
difficulty, facing every peril-for her sake” (165).
Beatrice similarly becomes the epitome of primitive strength. In chapter XXI, “Eve
Becomes an Amazon,” England highlights Beatrice’s transformation into warrior woman. He
later writes, “Strong was she; vigorous, rosy as an Amazon, with the spirit and the beauty of the
great outdoors; the life lived as a part of nature’s own self. [Allan] realized that never had a
woman lived like her” (307). Yet, Beatrice’s transformation is, in many ways, more extreme, for
not only as she gained physical strength: she has gained social status. In an effort to highlight
the social possibilities of his new world order, England repeatedly emphasizes the equality of the
survivors. He explains that in the post-apocalyptic world the idea of woman “had altered, grown
higher, nobler, purer—it had become that of mate and equal, comrade, friend, the indissoluble
Olivas 65

other half of man” (269). As Beatrice spends time with Allan, and the two talk about serious
matters, she feels that “Almost all, if not quite all, the old-time idea of sex had faded—the old,
false assumption on the part of the man that he was by his very nature the superior of woman”
(356). For the first time in her life Beatrice is experiencing a world with a different gender
ideology, and thinking about the old world, “with all its false conventions, limitations, and petty
stupid gallantries, she shuddered with repulsion. In her heart she knew that, had the choice been
hers, she would not have gone back to that former state of half-chattel patronage, half-
hypocritical homage and total misconception” (356). Through such reflections England
emphasizes the mutability of gender roles in new environments in an attempt to defamiliarize
normative gender ideology.
However, though Beatrice and Allan have both been strengthened by their primitive
encounters with the landscape, it is Allan who is the undoubtable hero of the new world. He
saves Beatrice from the horde more than once, rescues her from many other calamities in later
chapters, and repeatedly comes up with ideas for their survival, showing his innate superiority
and justifying his role as leader. Such episodes similarly indicate Beatrice’s dependence upon
him. She may be strong and Allan may see her as an equal, but she is always a potential victim
who must be protected by her stronger partner. As England writes, “their friendship,
comradeship, and love were based on the tacit recognition of absolute equality, save for Stern’s
accidental physical superiority” (356). This superiority may be “accidental,” but in her inherent
weakness, Beatrice is always secondary to Allan. Their names indicate this hierarchy: Allan is
the Alpha to Beatrice’s “Beta,” her nickname throughout the novel.
Although Beatrice does show some grit in their fight against the horde, and proves herself
a brave and valuable companion, she also naturalizes the gender norms of the pre-apocalyptic
Olivas 66

world through her primary interest in domestic pursuits. As they secure their survival in the city,
“Beatrice, like the true woman she was, addressed herself eagerly to the fascinating task of
making a real home out of the barren desolation of the fifth floor offices. Her splendid energy
was no less than the engineer’s. And very soon a comfortable air pervaded the place” (91).
Beatrice and Allan are both ideal survivalists because they are both immensely practical and
resourceful, but practicality manifests differently for women than it does for men. As Beta tells
Allan, “I’m a tremendously practical sort of woman. You may be an engineer, and know how to
build wireless telegraphs and bridges and—and things; but when it comes to home-building—,”
to which Allan responds, “I admit it. Well, lead on” (239). Thus Beta is allowed to rule only
where her expertise holds sway: within the home.
Though limited, England’s attempts to reimagine gender roles in post-apocalyptic
America was progressive for his time. Yet his failure to adequately challenge proscribed gender
roles reveals not only his own belief in the soundness of those roles, but is also indicative of his
immersion in racialist discourses that considered gender difference as a sign of civilization. In
the popular Darwinist discourse of the late nineteenth century, “civilization denoted a precise
stage in human racial evolution” and “one could identify advanced civilizations by the degree of
their sexual differentiation” (Bederman 25). Within this framework, “Savage (that is, nonwhite)
men and women were believed to be almost identical, but men and women of the civilized races
had evolved pronounced sexual differences” (Bederman 25). Beatrice’s adherence to domestic
engagements is thus a sign of her femininity and her Whiteness.
In a similar fashion, Allan’s inherent propensity for civilization, in other words, his
unmistakable “Whiteness,” is emphasized. He may be clad in furs but, with his red beard, he
reminds one more of a Viking than an African bushman. Further, he is continually characterized
Olivas 67

in ways which emphasize his civilized-ness—and thereby, his clear superiority to the other
survivors they encounter: the horde. To this end, Allan repeatedly showcases his superior
command of technology: he enables their escape from the horde by building “pulverite” bombs,
and later repairs a biplane with found parts. He also illustrates his manly restraint in his
relationship with Beta. Though he desires her, he refrains from pursuing her sexually until he is
sure that his advances are welcome. They refuse to become sexually intimate until they can be
properly married, even though there is no longer any social pressure to do so. This they
accomplish after finding a phonograph and an old recording of a wedding ceremony. Then, and
only then, do they consummate their marriage.
But perhaps the most telling evidence of Allan’s essential civilized-ness is in his ambition
to rebuild America. As part one of Darkness and Dawn ends, Allan tells Beatrice:
The race of men, our race, must live again—shall live! Again the forests and
plains shall be the conquest of our blood. Once more shall the cities gleam and
tower, ships sail the sea, and the world go on to greater wisdom, better things! A
kinder and a saner world this time. No misery, no war, no poverty, woe, strife,
creeds, oppression, tears—for we are wiser than those other folk, and there shall
be no error. (224)
As a builder of civilizations, Allan is the representation of Anglo civilization. He is the dawn
after the post-apocalyptic darkness, and the perfect combination of intellectual mind and
primitive body.
Their attempts to build this new civilization further articulate a need for an
intellectual/primitive union or dualism. At first the horde represents such a hope, but they soon
discover that the horde—because of its apparent racial make-up—possesses only primitive body,
Olivas 68

lacking the potential for intellectual development necessary for social perfection. After spying
their canoes, Beatrice and Allan think that maybe the boats “belong to white people, far
descendants of the few suppositions survivors of the cataclysm. There’s some slight chance that
these people may be civilized, or partly so” (123). However, when they hear Tom-Toms beating
Beta asks worryingly: “So they are savages?” (126). As the horde moves closer they realize that
their fears must be correct. “Why, they look black!” says Beatrice, “Black—yes, blue-black!
They seem so, anyhow. And—why, did you see the size of them? No bigger than apes! Good
Heaven!” (129).
While the Tom-Toms are the first sign of the horde’s degeneracy, their blackness is its
primary cause. Their color has, quite literally, made their physical contours difficult to
distinguish. As their name suggests, the horde is a mass of enemies rather than a group of
individuals; and it is further distinguished by its indistinguishableness. As Beatrice exclaims:
“What? Men? Animals? Neither! God help me, what—what are these things?” (143). Allan
surmises that “They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human things,” and hypothesizes:
Perhaps all the white and yellow people perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving
only a few scattered blacks. You know blacks are immune to several germ-
infections that destroy other races . . . . It’s quite possible that these fellows are
the far-distant and degenerate survivors of that other time. (153)
Without the existence of the white and yellow people, Allan hypothesizes, the remaining blacks
slowly degenerated. Language continued, he explains, but “in ever more and more corrupt
forms” (154), until eventually everything fell apart, moving back “toward the primeval state,
down through barbarism, through savagery . . . to animals” (154). Allan does for a moment
consider the possibility that these figures could be a new type of man, rising up towards
Olivas 69

evolution. However, Stern calls their dancing and drumming “Voodoo!” and “Obeah-work!”
(136), aligning them with Africa and the African diaspora. When Allan says, “our race” will live
again, he has clearly dismissed the horde as a lesser race that cannot be redeemed. In fact, as
soon as Allan deems them savages, their worth to the future of humanity is discounted and he
begins to think of creating explosives to destroy them (129).
In order to redeem the race and the nation, Allan must work with those inherently
equipped for civilization and progress, in other words, he must find some remnant of the White
race who might, like Beatrice and himself, have been strengthened through their close contact
with the primitive environment. His dream is realized when Allan plunges into the depths of a
deep chasm and finds a race of albinos living in the darkness of damp caverns. In contrast to the
horde of dark savages, these primitives are called “The White Barbarians” for, as Allan explains,
“They’re as white as we are—whiter even” (435). Their emphasized whiteness marks them as
men rather than beasts. It also indicates their claim to the land. As Allan notes, “Men they were,
white men, Caucasians, even like himself. Despite all changes of superficial character, their build
and cast of features bore witness that these incredible folk, dwellers upon that nameless and
buried sea, were the long-distant descendants of Americans!” (437) This ancestral connection is
made explicit through their naming. Calling themselves “Merucaans,” it is this White race which
represents the true Americans of the nation’s past, and that possesses an ability for rebuilding
civilization in America’s future. Unlike the horde, their primitive lifestyle is not a sign of their
genetic degeneration or innate deficiency, but merely of their lack of education and difficult
circumstances. As Allan explains: “It’s atavism. These people of ours were really civilized in
essence, despite all the overlying ages of barbarism. Civilization was latent in them, that’s all”
Olivas 70

(884). As a sign of their continued intellectual capacity, the Merucaans have an elder who has
retained the knowledge of the Old World, signified by his sacred copy of Pilgrim’s Progress.
Ultimately, through their encounter with the primitive, Beta and Allan have both grown
stronger and more assured in their own program for world-building. Together with the
Merucaans, they are uniquely qualified to build a better America because their Whiteness allows
them to possess both the knowledge and ability of the Old World aristocracy as well as embody
the strength of the primitive. In the end, they succeed in building “New Hope River--now a
beautifully terraced park and pleasure-ground,” with “the rolling hills, fertile and farm-covered”
(898), and a monorail that exceeds the speeds of any pre-apocalyptic train. There are “a hundred
thousand English-speaking people . . . with no racial discords, no mutual antipathies, no barriers
of name or blood; but for the first time a universal race, all sound and pure, starting right, living
right, striving toward a goal which even we cannot foresee!” (901). Their blue-eyed and blond
son becomes the new leader of this civilization, which, with its advanced technologies and
pastoral spaces, aspires to represent a perfected middle landscape.
England’s happy ending reflects his beliefs in the need to restructure society in order to
create a less exploitative, and more community-based social framework. At the “dawn” of the
new age that Allan and Beatrice bring about, there are no more masters, no more bosses, and no
more worker exploitation. Allan marvels at his creation, saying, it is a “world where labor reaps
its full reward—where work and worth go hand in hand!” (905). The post-apocalyptic space
reorders social valuation, and Allan gives his characters an opportunity to redefine themselves
through their work, which in the post-apocalyptic landscape, is indispensable to the creation and
survival of the new community. It also enables a complete overhaul of previous social
structures, allowing England’s characters to build the world that they deem best. However, it is
Olivas 71

also clear that the new and improved society that he envisions and the social equality he
encourages, is limited to the White race he has brought up to rule the surface. The dark horde is
not included in Allan’s plan for a better future and, in fact, must be annihilated in a final race war
before he can realize his dream of a new America.
In this sense, Darkness and Dawn is emblematic of the influence of racialist evolutionary
theories on visions of America’s future. In the world without civilization that England imagines,
the White race returns to primitive conditions only to grow stronger, and then emerges again on
the surface ready to conquer the world once again. In contrast, the end of civilization causes the
rapid degeneration of the darker races, who become bestial and seemingly beyond rehabilitation,
and whose obvious inferiority make them candidates for genocide. This contrasting view of the
effects of nature on Whites and non-Whites further legitimates the belief in the superiority of
White men and the degeneracy of darker races by resituating frontier mythologies on the post-
apocalyptic frontier of the near-future. The post-apocalyptic frontier gives England a new space
to retell such myths, and thus to perpetuate an ideology of White supremacy through a
developing form of popular culture. Such overt White supremacy was arguably an impediment,
not only to building interracial visions of national community, but also to building a more
inclusive socialism that could transcend racial barriers and thereby gain strength in the political
realm.
49

49
Identifying the multiple discourses that undoubtedly influenced England, including racialist evolutionary
discourses, Mark Pittenger argues, “these discourses and genres not only shaped England's work, they also shaped
his socialist generation's ability to envision the means of transcending an intolerable present and of inventing
alternative futures; and they further shaped, as well as reflected, his popular audience's views on the question of the
color line in the United States.” (94-95).

Olivas 72

Jack London’s Contaminated City and Retreat into the California Wild
While England was able to imaginatively maintain a clear separation between the
primitive and the civilized, between whites and blacks, Jack London offers a more complicated
picture of America’s post-apocalyptic racial future in “The Scarlet Plague” (1912). His story of
collapse due to plague quite literally reflects many nativist fears of the era, combining germs and
genes into a terrifying threat that penetrates and destroys the modern world. While a handful of
survivors are somehow immune to the plague, there is no possibility to escape the contamination
that is left in its wake. Like George Allan England, London emphasizes the ways in which
contact with the natural world rejuvenates his White protagonist; however, in significant
contrast, London also depicts the ways in which that primitive contact entails—not only physical
and behavioral transformation, but racial transformation as well. Ultimately London leaves
readers with an America strengthened by both renewed physicality and interracial hybridity,
presciently setting out the terms of the approaching idealization of a more multicultural America.
In 1915 miscegenation was illegal in 30 states.
50
Many feared that interracial procreation
would lead to race degeneration or “race suicide.” In line with this racialist logic, London argued
that “[The] stolid, practical-headed judgment of a stock-breeder should apply with equal force to
the breeding of humans. Humans breed in ways very and quite similar to those of animals; and if

50
In 1912, Congressman Seaborn Anderson Roddenberry (GA) proposed an amendment to the Constitution of the
United States that would have prohibited interracial marriage. Although this amendment was never passed, its
proposal is significant to this historical context. The proposal read as follows:
"That intermarriage between negroes or persons of color and Caucasians or any other character of persons
within the United States or any territory under their jurisdiction, is forever prohibited; and the term 'negro
or person of color,' as here employed, shall be held to mean any and all persons of African descent or
having any trace of African or negro blood."
(Congressional Record, 62nd Congress, 3rd session, Dec. 11, 1912. Vol 49, p. 502, qtd. from
http://www.lovingday.org/constitution).

Olivas 73

humans misbreed, the results are misbreds” (Kershaw 214-215).
51
But as “The Scarlet Plague”
indicates, London’s eugenic vision departed from that of popular white supremacists like
Lothrop Stoddard who warned against the degeneration of the Nordic race. Rather than
characterize interracial offspring as “misbreeds,” London presents the mixed-race youth of “The
Scarlet Plague” as enhanced hybrids; with their Anglo heritage and a healthy dose of dark
brutishness, they are ideally suited to lead America’s rebirth. London portrays such hybridity as
not only beneficial, but imperative: within the post-apocalyptic California landscape, interracial
procreation becomes a necessary step in the rejuvenation of the nation.
London’s post-apocalyptic story is able to both condemn what he perceives as the ills of
urban modernity and to create an imaginative space of rejuvenation in nature. His tale of
horrifying social collapse by a viral pandemic is narrated through the memory of Granser (a
variation of Grandfather), now a tribal elder, who escaped the San Francisco Bay Area and lived
in solitude for many years before finally reconnecting with a small community of survivors.
Emphasizing the tenuousness of Western civilization with its swiftly growing urban populations,
Granser describes the rapidity with which the plague eliminated the majority of mankind,
painting a grisly picture of city streets littered with bodies frozen with rigor mortis and reddened
by contagion. This tale of death provides the centerpiece of London’s short story; however,
Granser’s story of the plague is bookended by images of a futuristic California in which life now
overwhelms the landscape, surpassing the vitality of even the pre-plague times. As we enter
London’s deadly narrative we are confronted not by corpses, but by a “forest [that] on either side
swelled up the slopes of the embankment and crested across it in a green wave of trees and
bushes” (1). The only death that is immediately apparent is the death of the railroad: Along the

51
Eugenics was so popular in London’s day that he could not escape its conceptual hold; in fact, Daylanne English
argues that it could be considered “the paradigmatic modern American discourse”(2).
Olivas 74

verdant bank where Granser walks “a ten-inch tree, bursting through at a connection, had lifted
the end of the rail clearly into view. The tie had evidently followed the rail, held to it by the spike
long enough for its bed to be filled with gravel and rotten leaves, so that now the crumbling,
rotten timber thrust itself up at a curious slant” (1). This image of technological demise is later
coupled with emblems of pre-technological beauty: wild horses. London depicts these equines in
a moment of sublime splendor: “There were at least twenty of them, young colts and yearlings,
and mares, led by a beautiful stallion which stood in the foam at the edge of the surf, with arched
neck and bright wild eyes, sniffing the salt air from off the sea” (40). Such imagery frames the
apocalypse as a seeming catastrophe that has nevertheless enabled a return to a more beautiful
natural world.
London’s plague narrative indicates his distrust of the viability of city life and his belief
that the city’s rapid population increase, fed by a steady stream of new immigrants, would be
unsustainable. London’s conceptualization of the consequences of overpopulation as plague
indicates his position within contemporary discourses of immigration and racial fitness. London
was a known-nativist who opposed immigration, as well as a vocal supporter of eugenics and a
professed believer in White racial supremacy.
52
Although Granser is not a mere stand-in for
London, as narrator he becomes the mouthpiece for many of these sentiments. Arguing that
urban congestion has led to an American apocalypse, Granser explains: “But as men increased
and lived closely together in great cities and civilizations, new diseases arose, new kinds of
germs entered their bodies” (13). At first it is less clear that such population growth has racial

52
London argued in 1913 that “the future human world belongs to eugenics, and will be determined by the practice
of eugenics . . . [The] stolid, practical-headed judgment of t a stock-breeder should apply with equal force to the
breeding of humans. Humans breed in ways very and quite similar to those of animals; and if humans misbreed, the
results are misbreds” (Kershaw 214-215). Essays like “The Yellow Peril” and short-stories like “The Unparalleled
Invasion” show that London was not immune to the anti-Asian rhetoric of his day. Despite his affinity for a
transnational socialist ideal, he maintained his beliefs in Anglo superiority, claiming “I am first of all a white man
and only then a socialist!” (Kershaw 143)
Olivas 75

components; London’s focus lies instead on mere numbers as Granser’s pre-apocalyptic
descriptions of urban density contrast starkly with the emptiness of the post-apocalyptic
landscape. Trying to explain these facts of population to his grandsons who cannot understand
the immensity of “four million people in San Francisco,” Granser tells them: “Like sand on the
beach here, like sand on the beach, each grain of sand a man, woman, or child. Yes, my boy, all
those people lived right here in San Francisco. And at one time or another all those people came
out on this very beach—more people than there are grains of sand, More—more—more” (10).
The boys cannot comprehend these numbers, not only because of their illiteracy, but because
their world is now so extremely unpopulated. Their tribe numbers less than fifty and they know
only of a few other families of survivors, all equally miniscule in size. Yet the “new” germs in
Granser’s tale are clearly a result not only of urban congestion but of the new bodies—which in
London’s era were increasingly foreign—that now inhabit the city. The plague thus validates
nativist fears of immigrant invasion; it is a sign of both the dangerous unfitness of immigrant
bodies and the biological threat they pose to White racial purity and cultural authority.
To solve the problem of the contagious city London commits imaginative genocide, or
what John Swift calls “the most vigorous possible form of ‘negative eugenics’” (65), depicting
collapse as an inevitable outcome of the increased social contact and potential contagionism of
the urban environment. Contact must be eradicated at the local level—by recreating physical
spaces between people—but also at the global level, where increased mobility has enabled
greater international connection. Thus, as his opening image of the rusting train track reminds
us, the world must cease to be easily navigable. In a final act of global redefinition London re-
establishes the geographic impenetrability of international borders and returns far-away lands to
the world of myth. Granser tells his grandsons: “I know there must be such places as New York,
Olivas 76

Europe, Asia, and Africa; but not one word has been heard of them—not in sixty years. With the
coming of the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably” (20).
The benefits of this dissolution are clear. As the rapid spread of the germs have shown,
the pre-apocalyptic world was ripe for collapse. When bodies pressed in upon each other city
streets became Petri dishes for social disintegration. Granser recounts that “In the midst of our
civilization, down in our slums and labour ghettoes, we had bred a race of barbarians, of savages;
and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild beasts they were and
destroyed us” (22-23). Although this passage underscores the deterministic potential of
impoverished urban spaces, and even suggests Granser’s potential participation in that structure
as a member of the middle-class, it also carries a perceptible sense of Social Darwinism. When
social structures break down those who live in the slums, who are poor, and predominantly
immigrants and people of color, reveal themselves as “the wild beasts that they were.” In the
absence of social rules atavism is seemingly everywhere and London spends an equal amount of
time recounting the terrifying quickness of the plague and describing the rampant rioting,
drunkenness, arson, and murder that fill the streets during its spread. At one point Granser recalls
hearing a woman “crying shrilly for help” in the darkness, but he does not go to her aid because
amidst the bedlam “one heard all too many appeals for help” (22). This savage and chaotic
imagery eerily recalls London’s experience of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but it also
echoes Woods’ characterization of “The City Wilderness” where the degeneracy of the working-
classes has begun to infect the city.
53

53
Jack and his wife, Charmian, witnessed the aftermath of the earthquake firsthand and recalled that “Everywhere
they could hear the ‘strangled cries and sobs of people trapped in the rubble’” (Kershaw 172). He would later write
“San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories and a fringe of dwelling-houses on its outskirts . . . . Not
in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed” (qtd. in Kershaw 173).
Olivas 77

London’s picturesque and pastoral Californian future further justifies the genocidal
plague and opens up important speculative possibilities. The world may have “fallen apart” but
such rending has enabled survivors to access the myriad regenerative possibilities of nature. Not
only can men enjoy the aesthetic value of wild horses frolicking by the seaside, they can
themselves regenerate—spiritually, physically, and racially—through their close contact with the
natural world. London emphasizes these spiritual possibilities by describing the grandeur of the
post-apocalyptic landscape. Granser now has time to appreciate such beauty, and when he retires
to Yosemite Valley in the first years after his escape from the deadly city, he becomes an
emblematic man-of-the-woods in a place ripe with connotations of sublime and spiritual power.
Although the picture of nature described by Granser is not always grand, its overwhelming
abundance and immediate resilience indicates the power of the natural world and the striking
vulnerability of modern civilization. Returning to the coast via the San Joaquin Valley after only
three years Granser notes the return of the wild as weeds and brush now “overrun the agricultural
handiwork of man” (31).
The macabre convenience of the plague removes the permanence of field divisions,
roads, and other man-made writing from the landscape, transforming it from a place of
boundaries and the threatening social proximity suggested by such artificial borders, into one
defined by open spaces. These open spaces and the new communities that form in them invoke
the myth of the frontier which had been so central to popular understandings of the American
landscape. By depopulating and disabling the city and forcing a return to wilderness living,
survivors of the plague are required to work the land, to actively make a new world. Such
activity offers a promise of individual freedom and sense of heroic masculinity. London’s post-
Olivas 78

apocalyptic landscape is the space of ultimate White male fantasy; while the open landscape
liberates, survivalism enables a masculine recovery.
Because of his advanced age Granser is never presented as an ideal physical specimen;
but his past transformation from an effete intellectual to a rugged survivalist marks a movement
away from physical impotence towards a complete physicality realized through his grandsons.
Granser describes the feebleness which characterized his old life when he relates his escape from
a smoldering San Francisco. Walking out of the city with other academics from his department
and their families he reminisces that: “Our progress was painfully slow. The women and children
could not walk fast. They did not dream of walking, my grandsons, in the way all people walk
today. In truth, none of us knew how to walk. It was not until after the plague that I learned
really to walk” (London 27). Although, ironically, the scarlet plague initially renders the body
useless, manifesting as a numbness in the feet which then penetrates every muscle, it ultimately
gives survivors their legs back. Survivalism forces men back into their roles as active workers
and shapers of the physical world. For London, as well as for other Socialists of the era, such
physicality was the primary ingredient of manliness. In a letter he wrote in 1910 London argues
that a “real man” is one who “builds houses and plants trees,” “The man who produces is the
man who is most fully a man” (Labor, Leitz, and Shepard 952).
Through their confrontation with the primitive environment, London’s post-apocalyptic
survivors are on a frontier between savagery and civilization. As Granser recounts the past to the
young savage-looking herders, it seems unlikely that the young men will rebuild the civilization
that he describes. Not only do they find it laughably strange, but the plague has decimated the
human population to such a degree that there is no one to do the rebuilding; basic survival now
consumes the group. But what will their future be like? They have been renewed physically, but
Olivas 79

what will keep them from degenerating into the type of pure savagery imagined by George Allan
England?
London is careful to illustrate that while nature has taken over, forcing men back to a
primitive state of living, the survival of Whites and their genetic propensity for civilization will
guard against human degeneration. Granser’s survival enables the endurance of an idealized
Anglo cultural and intellectual history. As a trained classical scholar and thoughtful observer, he
is a sage of the post-apocalyptic community, possessing knowledge about the world and its
history about which the young men are deeply curious. Their education is important to Granser,
and he has stored away a cache of books in a cave to one day be discovered again by the
community. When Granser considers that the youths might never be interested in the texts, he is
not dismayed, for he also believes that the ideas within them will be rediscovered by a people
with a proclivity for intellectual development. For not only are Granser and his books the
repositories of knowledge, they are also representative of the genetic richness of the Anglo-
American, and are thereby suggestive of his intellectual potential.
This genetic potential is also represented by Vesta, a survivor who has inadvertently
become the new White mother of civilization. Vesta is greatly admired by Granser, who
cherishes her as a member of the San Francisco elite and describes her as “the perfect flower of
generations of the highest culture this planet has ever produced” (London 32). While Granser
contributes both knowledge and genes to the future of the nation, Vesta’s sole contribution is her
heritage. “That [Vesta] is intended to represent a proud remnant of racial and not merely
economic superiority seems clear enough from her name, with its suggestion of ‘vestige’ and that
of her father ‘Philip Saxon’” (Raney 424).
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Importantly, Vesta is married to Bill, an embodiment of physicality and savage power.
Drawn from the working class of the pre-apocalyptic world, Bill, “the Chauffeur,” is described
as “a large, dark, hairy man, heavy-jawed, slant-browed, fierce eyed” (32); he is a “grinning,
hairy, ape-like human brute” (35). Bill forcibly takes Vesta as his wife, but in doing so, he
enables a more perfect dualism to emerge. While Vesta ensures the intellectual and cultural
development of their offspring, Bill contributes a propensity for primitiveness that will
strengthen their children’s bodies and minds. If the old world was a place where men like
Granser—middle-class urban academics—held power and prestige, the new world is a place
where the strongest survive, a veritable Darwinian, or Spencerian, illustration of evolution.
Granser’s healthy grandsons, though illiterate and ignorant about his world, appear as the perfect
blend of Anglo heritage and indigenous wildness. Unlike the pre-apocalyptic youth of Granser’s
tales, they are physically strong and competent, yet they are also open to, and made for, further
intellectual development that rivals their white ancestors. They even represent this dualism in
their physical makeup, being both blue-eyed and brown skinned.
Ultimately London suggests the continuous and inevitable triumph of the White race
over the wild, naturalizing the sway of White supremacy. Speaking to his grandson “Hare-lip”
about their quick social regeneration, Granser foresees “a new Aryan drift around the world” and
avers that humans will enact “the same story over and over” (37, 39). Similarly naturalizing a
male-centric and imperialist view of evolution that would please Teddy Roosevelt, Granser adds:
“The gunpowder will enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and blood,
will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved” (39 my emphasis added). London thus
offers up a vision of eugenic transformation where, unfettered by the constraints of the pre-
apocalyptic world, his new “grandsons” will once again achieve world dominance, except this
Olivas 81

time, perhaps with more lasting success. However, it is clear that this new “Aryan” nation will
not possess the racial purity once championed by eugenic proponents.
If we consider the ways in which London sought to reimagine man’s relationship to
nature, renewed physicality, and potential racial hybridity, it is clear that the apocalyptic mode
provided him with a way to articulate beliefs about necessary human evolution that were quite
progressive for his time. London’s vision is full of contradictory racial logics; while it celebrates
its mixed-race youth, it also celebrates Anglo-Saxon heredity and presents a stereotypical picture
of a racialized Other; while it criticizes the exploitation of modern industry, it also characterizes
the city as a place of social contagion, a conception that fueled anti-immigrant rhetoric of the
time. However, it also makes clear that in some way the ideal American, as well as the ideal
America, is a composite of the best parts of those stereotypical genetic tendencies. When Granser
speaks to his grandson “Hare-lip” about “a new Aryan drift around the world” it would seem that
London is redefining “Aryan” to include the darkness of the hairy brute.
On the one hand this seemingly contradictory vision of miscegenation may be highly
personal for London. London struggled with his identity, feeling himself to be an amalgam of
types. Emphasizing the impact of London’s relationship with his own White parents and with his
Black wet-nurse and caretaker, Virginia Prentiss, and her family, with whom London remained
close throughout his life, Jeanne Reesman argues that “The reversal of London’s personal
phobias about miscegenation in his fiction indicates an internal ‘mixed’ self” (9). While this is an
intriguing reading of London, I would argue that London’s promotion of this mixed self was not
only personal, but also reveals the ways in which all narratives of White rejuvenation in Nature
inhabit a tenuous space in which the possibility of racial purity is nearly impossible to maintain.
London’s acceptance, and perhaps promotion, of miscegenation stems from the complications of
Olivas 82

endorsing a return to the primitive. How can one return to the primitive without becoming
darkened by it? In celebrating a masculine return to nature London is also celebrating the racial
other that inhabits that space. He foresees a future in which the White race—and America—is
strengthened by a growing inter-racialism, or perhaps a less literal “multiculturalism,” indicating
in many ways London’s own ideological progression from scientific racialism to a more
universalistic vision of humanity.
54

“The Scarlet Plague” is often seen as one of London’s more pessimistic assessments of
American society, for by setting his narrative in San Francisco Bay, on the edge of the West, he
directly confronts the failed optimism of Westward expansion as well as his own beliefs in the
unsustainability of modern life. But if we consider the ways in which London sought to
reimagine man’s relationship to nature, and the ways in which this challenged dominant racial
ideologies, it is clear that the apocalyptic mode is not merely about the catharsis of imagined
collapse but is ripe with conceptual possibilities that can challenge ideological norms and pave
the way for more progressive politics. For London, the best possibility of recapturing these
potentialities lay not only in tales of Alaska—as he famously explored in his most popular
works—but also in the imagination of apocalypse. The apocalyptic genre offered London an
alternate way of conceptualizing his theme of regeneration in the wilderness. Charles Crow
argues that as he attempted to move on from Call of the Wild:
London tried to locate the human equivalents of these canine parables. Then the
problem was to find a new way to transform human life through some initiation
during which people could safely encounter their buried instincts, overcome
whatever demons they might meet in themselves or without in this quest, regain

54
According to Reesman, London began reading Jung seriously in his last years (See chapter 8).
Olivas 83

unity of personality and a close kinship with nature, and bring this vision back, to
retain it, to incorporate it in a new kind of life in California (49).
As “The Scarlet Plague” shows, London’s new California may have cashed in on the myth of
regeneration on the frontier, but it also challenged the ideal of racial purity that seemed
inseparable from such mythologies.

Conclusion
The emergence and popularity of the man-of-the-woods figure in the early years of the
twentieth century is indicative of national concerns over manhood, White power, and the
changing American landscape, as well as of an increasing primitivism in modernist discourse.
But as I have shown, the emergence of this figure in the post-apocalyptic genre reveals
something else: that the national narrative of White rejuvenation in nature, and the assertion of
White superiority, required a narrative genre which could more adequately address anxieties
about the urban landscape, and which could more fully articulate the beliefs of evolutionary
science and eugenic pseudo-science that undergirded popular understandings of personal,
national, and racial degeneration and regeneration. The apocalyptic genre was a hybrid literary
form that wedded frontier nostalgia with apocalyptic possibility, acting as a perfect bridge
between mythologies of the past and visions of the future. As Lois Parkinson Zamora asserts in
The Apocalyptic Vision in America, “when the woods no longer offer an escape from time, when
the western expanse proves itself limited after all, there continues a palpable nostalgia for that
mythical land” (109). What better way to renovate this myth than by imaginatively destroying
civilization and ushering in a new era of post-apocalyptic frontier literature?
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Further, if the myth of the frontier enabled Americans to think of colonial expansion as
an inevitable, innocuous, and even beneficial event, the post-apocalyptic frontier could
imaginatively maintain that innocence at a time of aggressive foreign expansion. Its White
heroes recurrently showcased their innate superiority for civilization, and resuscitated a vision of
White male authority that was becoming increasingly challenged, both by the political gains of
women and minorities, and by the anxious pathologization carried out by scientists of
neurasthenia and degeneration.
But as Jack London’s narrative of miscegenation on the post-apocalyptic frontier
indicates, it was difficult to validate primitive strength without also validating the racial Other
and the potential intermixing that might strengthen the White race. These new narratives
revealed a tension which had always been at work in frontier literature: how does one learn from
the primitive, and validate its strengths, without becoming primitive and/or admitting the
possibility that the hierarchy between civilization and savagery, and White and Black, relied on
an ill-defined binary. One might recognize that racial lines had never been pure in America, but
the post-apocalyptic frontier suggested that if the nation, or its representatives, were to seek
regeneration in the primitive space of nature, such regeneration would entail, and perhaps, should
entail, an embrace of the racial Other so closely associated with that primitive space. In other
words, to reincorporate physicality into a race feared to be becoming too intellectual and effete,
perhaps it was necessary to incorporate the physical races—those traditionally deemed savage—
into the genetic makeup of the nation.
As visions of the post-apocalyptic frontier began to proliferate in American culture it
seemed that popular narrative had once again found a way to perpetuate a vision of America in
which violence offered the promise of redemption and where White supremacy could find its
Olivas 85

home in Nature. Further, by locating White authority and regeneration in the natural world, and
by envisioning the city as a space of foreseeable collapse, the apocalyptic genre contributed to
the racialization of American spaces that would limit the efficacy of the environmentalist
movement, and would likewise render the city as a national problem. But these visions, in
making the natural world a potential space of interracial procreation, or in making it fertile
ground for building a Socialist utopia, illustrate how the mode could also clearly serve as a
progressive vehicle. As I will argue in subsequent chapters, as the twentieth century wore on,
such progressive visions increased, and the apocalyptic mode, though always interested in
defining America’s ideal landscape and its inhabitants, would seek more multi-cultural, as well
as more urban, articulations of this ideal.

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CHAPTER 2
A Bio-politics of Necessity: Eugenic Fantasies in Post-Apocalyptic America

Writers like Jack London and George Allan England recreated the frontier in their
apocalyptic fiction, imagining the fall of the metropolis as a prerequisite for the regeneration of
the race through a post-apocalyptic primitivism. Meanwhile, other early purveyors of the
apocalyptic genre focused more fully on the eugenic possibilities of the apocalypse. Since
apocalypse characteristically causes the death of the majority of people, the genre allowed
writers to imagine a world of select survivors, where supposed undesirables could no longer
interfere with the perfection of the nation. Apocalyptic events are used in these texts to both thin
the population and to create boundaries that insulate chosen survivors from the metropolises that
embody the multiple threats of modernity (whether neurasthenia, genetic and bacterial contagion,
or working class degeneracy). In the eugenic strain of the secular apocalyptic genre it is not the
wilderness that promises regeneration but the walled garden, as illustrated by Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Herland, or the bounded ship, in Garrett P. Serviss’s The Second Deluge. These
circumscribed spaces, and their apparent utopian potential, suggest a need for both border
maintenance and genetic guidance, and emblematize the ways in which social, biological, and
environmental control could be imagined in ways that minimized their violence and ultimately
legitimated the bio-power of the government. It is no surprise then that the apocalyptic genre
began to proliferate at the same time that both nativist and eugenic activism were at their height
in the United States. In many ways, the genre provided a narrative framework for modifying
what might otherwise be ethically troubling. As texts like The Second Deluge, Herland, and Jack
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London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion,” indicate, the apocalyptic genre was an ideal vehicle for
justifying genocide and bio-political control.
Part of the argument these texts make is that thinning the population would be beneficial
to the nation; even texts not overtly concerned with eugenic improvement celebrate the
depopulated landscape left in the wake of an apocalyptic event. The genre not only imagines
human annihilation on a massive scale, but justifies such eradication by making it an outcome of
natural disasters. Few proponents of eugenics would advocate the killing off of all the supposed
“infirms” and “lower” races of humankind, at least, not openly; yet, most believed that such vast
leveling of the human population would strengthen the race. In many apocalyptic texts mass
genocide and/or mass human casualty is rendered both blameless and inevitable. Violence is
softened until it becomes a mere footnote in the march towards a better future. In this sense, the
genre focuses readers on the future benefits of population control, rather than on the ethical
dilemmas surrounding its implementation.
Many of these early apocalyptic works also suggest that those who take charge of genetic
selection are usually reluctant eugenicists. This reluctance is, in part, a result of their accidental
survival. For example, George Allan England’s Beatrice and Allan are the only survivors of their
New York apocalypse, and they just happen to be White, well-bred, and educated. Not only is
their survival strikingly accidental, their roles as masters of the future gain the same aura of
innocent authority. Through no fault of their own they become the only ones capable of
remaking society, and they accept the task with the confidence of their superior suitability to be
figures of bio-political authority. In this way the apocalyptic genre aided in cultivating the figure
of the ideal social/biological controller—a person, or set of people, whose talents and/or wisdom
justify their control over life and death. Although survival can be arbitrary in some apocalyptic
Olivas 88

scenarios—as London showed in “The Scarlet Plague”—long-term survival is typically enabled
by the manipulations of certain supreme cultivators. These figures, who are often but not always
scientists in the earlier iterations of the mode, survive because of their foresight and
resourcefulness, and soon become the masters of the new world, selecting who will join them in
their utopia. Many apocalyptic scenarios necessitate the selection of survivors as a precaution
against further death and/or degeneration, making eugenic control—and those who impose it—
an indispensable part of human endurance. If there are only ten seats left on the ship to save
humanity, one has to decide who would best serve the future of the race. In more extreme
scenarios these figures get to decide not only who survives, but also who procreates, revealing
their dominion over the new and improved world.
Such euphemistic rhetoric was indispensable to the eugenic movement. Proponents of
eugenic pseudo-science rarely saw themselves as advocates of extinction, despite the fact that
they often supported programs of forced sterilization and guarded procreation; rather, eugenic
programs were almost universally concerned with “building better families,” and framed their
mission as one of human survival and progress. As one doctor put it in 1912, “Eugenics means
beginning well” (Evans, Chicago Daily Tribune H4), and as Charles Davenport explained in a
lecture that same year, while not all races, or strains of humanity possessed the same genetic
strength, “The programme of eugenics is to secure in our population as large a proportion as
possible of persons belonging to the strains whose traits are of the greatest value to our social
order” (1).
55
Such ideals are reflected in the language of eugenic societies, which began to grow
in the 1910s and 1920s. In this era “Better Babies” contests gave way to “Fitter Families”
contests, popularizing the notion that eugenics was a tool for familial, and therefore national

55
From Eugenics: Twelve University Lectures.
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improvement, rather than an inequitable form of social control, or worse, a program of racial
cleansing.
Such euphemistic thinking can be seen, not only in eugenic mission statements, but also
in the discourses that supported and interacted with the eugenic aim to cultivate a purer, smarter,
and stronger race. Nativist arguments for securing national borders, and (domestic) sanitary
science—a movement headed by women who advocated increased social hygiene—tended to
reinforce racialist arguments for the professed purpose of building a stronger and cleaner race
and nation. Not surprisingly, eugenics was often framed as a form of “social hygiene.” In The
Task of Social Hygiene, Havelock Ellis argues:
And all social hygiene, in its fullest sense, is but an increasingly complex and
extended method of purification—the purification of the conditions of life by
sound legislation, the purification of our minds by better knowledge, the
purification of our hearts by a growing sense of responsibility, the purification of
the race itself by an enlightened eugenics, consciously aiding Nature in her
manifest effort to embody new ideals of life” (vi).
56

Ellis’s definition of eugenics as a process of purification indicates the ways in which efforts of
population control could be aligned with concepts of sanitation and public health. In this sense,
one can see how the aims of eugenics reflected movements to eradicate germs from the home;
germs and genes could be paired as threats to the family, race, and nation. Thus, in line with the
eugenic crusade for building a healthier and stronger race, “sanitary science” and “domestic
science” arose as methodologies of combating biological contaminants.

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The sanitary science movement, headed in part by Home Economics creator Ellen
Richards, was not outwardly occupied with racial fitness. Concerned with combatting
tuberculosis, typhoid, and other “infectious and contagious diseases,” Richards sought to educate
the public about proper sanitary practices that could improve public health. In Euthenics: The
Science of Controllable Environment (1910), her bible of domestic sanitary science, Richards
offered a step-by-step proscription for purifying the home, which is in the purview of the wife
and mother, and argued for the importance of both state and municipal hygiene. Richards was
not alone in her increased vigilance regarding contagions in the home, and her crusade for
cleanliness coincided with a broad expansion of federal public health agencies.
57

It is hard to argue against reforms that seek to improve national health; however, when
one considers how such movements often echoed the discourses, not only of the eugenic
movement, but also of anti-miscegenation and anti-immigration activists, it is evident that
popular conceptions of cleanliness and contagion were often weighted with racialist assumptions.
At the time when Richards was writing Euthenics, many believed that race, like bacteria, was a
“hidden malignancy” that could invade one’s physical (and social) health.
58
As JoAnne Brown
comments, “Germ theory inspired a versatile medical counterpart to Spencerian Social
Darwinism . . . Germ theory, in a sense, extended the implications of miscegenation, for it
implied that casual contact, and not only sexual intercourse, could spread racial illness” (70).
59

Brown examines how this belief in what she terms “Social Contagionism” was disseminated
through the multiple mechanisms of public discourse—advertisements, children’s books,
cartoons, magazine and journal articles, etc.—illuminating the forces which worked together to

57
Markel and Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs.”
58
“Like genes, bacteria and viruses operate at a sub-visual level yet with far-reaching consequences” (Raney 2, 3).
59
These associations were further supported by a conspicuous lexical connection: genetic theorists in the early
1900s spoke of “germ-plasm’ (or ‘germ cells’) as the material vessel for genetic transmission” (Swift 62).
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produce and reinforce understandings of disease that associated, contagion, race, immigration,
and crime. One example she cites is a children’s book published by the makers of 20-Mule Team
Borax, in which “black imps” threaten the health of a nursery “until they are vanquished by the
white uniformed soldiers of the 20-Mule Team Brigade” (Brown 59). In such a manner, racial
threats and bacterial pollution were recurrently entangled in American popular culture.
Brown’s invaded nursery example also illustrates the importance of border maintenance
in the service of national health. While sanitary science sought to protect the health of the
“home,” this conceptual space was not just local but encompassed the whole of the United
States. Havelock Ellis’s assertion that we need to promote “the purification of the conditions of
life by sound legislation,” suggests a need, not only for the passing of eugenics laws, but also for
strict immigration policy. While African Americans were generally singled out as the greatest
racial threat to white purity, Alan Kraut argues that the connections between immigrants and
disease were almost tautological in the early years of the twentieth century.
60
Entire groups were
often “stigmatized by medicalized nativism, each newcomer being reduced from ‘a whole and
usual person to a tainted discounted one,’ because of the association with disease in the minds of
the native-born” (Kraut 2-3). These attitudes were disseminated not only by the media and the
public, but also by government agencies that now guarded American borders from foreign
bacterial intrusion. Assessing the history of immigration and disease control, Howard Markel and
Alexandra Minna Stern draw attention to the fact that between 1891 and 1924 an increasing
number of immigrants were denied entry to the U.S. for medical reasons (763). They argue that
“[this] increase was not the result of a higher incidence of contagious or infectious disease;
rather, it was due to a growing list of ailments, physical disabilities, and, over time,
determinations of moral status” (764).

60
For more on this see Kraut’s Silent Travelers, Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace”
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Although some of the classifications were more popular in specific regions of the
country, an underlying premise colored them all: immigrants threatened the health
of the nation. Asians were portrayed as feeble and infested with hookworm,
Mexicans as lousy, and eastern European Jews as vulnerable to trachoma,
tuberculosis, and—a favorite “wastebasket” diagnosis of nativists in the early
1900s—“poor physique.” (Markel and Stern 766)
Of course, even when these diagnoses were present, many overlooked an important fact: most
groups designated as non-white were generally offered low wages and had limited access to
proper health care. In addition, many had endured a grueling and unsanitary journey to gain
access to American shores, often cause enough to appear “unfit”. Yet, all such class-based
realities were habitually naturalized through a lens of racial fitness, thereby strengthening anti-
immigrant rhetoric and reinforcing eugenic discourses of white superiority.
Thus, while prescriptions for national health and hygiene were presented with emphasis
on their social benefits, they tended to reinforce hierarchies of race and class, and to promote the
bio-political power of the nation by prompting the maintenance of borders, the pathologization
and sterilization of the working class, the brown-skinned, and the immigrant, and the increased
governmental control over the natural landscape. Racism in other words, could exist without
racists, advocates of life could actually be agents of death.
61
A rhetoric of social purification,
cultivation, and regeneration could obscure the reality of class-based and race-based persecution.
Biological and social control, as well as the maintenance of national borders, could be easily
justified when framed within such seemingly progressive discourses.
These progressive frameworks put power and authority into the hands of doctors and
other scientists who claimed superior knowledge of human biology. The biological hypotheses

61
I use this terminology to reveal the long legacy of “colorblind” racism in the U.S.
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made by zoologists like Charles Davenport and doctors like Havelock Ellis and Harry Laughlin
legitimated the power of the government to intervene in the health of the nation. When Dr.
Laughlin, who worked closely with Davenport, presented a report to the House Committee on
Immigration and Naturalization stating “that the recent immigrants were biologically inferior and
that they jeopardized the health of the nation,” he propelled the passing of new anti-immigration
legislation (Cuddy and Roche 13-14). Characterized as a health concern, such legislation was
accepted by many as a necessity. Men like Laughlin and Davenport, with their superior
knowledge of human genetics, were assumed to be appropriate social controllers and their
progressive framing of population control influenced popular discourses.
Ellen Richards’ sanitary crusade indicates that many women progressives also
participated in this euphemizing trend, claiming their authority from a different source: their
roles as mothers. The women’s movement, in its various phases, supported indigenous removal,
the sterilization of the unfit, the sanitation of the home, the securing of national borders, the
preservation of the natural landscape, and the cultivation of the domestic garden—as part of their
vision of a better America. Women activists got involved in such work by emphasizing their
roles as caretakers seeking to maintain the health of their families and to cultivate a stronger race
for the future of America. For example, in her examination of Indian removal programs,
Margaret Jacobs asks how so many well-meaning progressive women could have gotten behind
such vicious programs. She uncovers how their “maternalist politics” redefined the removal, and
often kidnapping, of indigenous children as an act of nurturing and rescue.
62

Progress narratives such as these, and the darker realities they obscured, are clearly
reflected in and multiplied by the apocalyptic literature of the era. Viewing Gilman’s Herland as

62
See Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the removal of
Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940, especially chapters 3-4.
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well as male-authored texts like London’s and Serviss’ indicates how the eugenic solution was a
recurrent trope of early apocalyptic narrative, often advocating the authority of both the male
scientist and the “Great White Mother.”
63
While all three authors illustrate the benefits of
thinning the population and molding a new world with the help of science, Gilman illustrates
how such manipulations can be effectively downplayed by transforming control into cultivation,
exclusion into protection, and regulation into survival. Herland’s verdure blooms brilliantly,
obscuring the roots of its apparent success, and Gilman’s euphemistic portrayal of bio-power
reveals the ways in which narratives of a post-apocalyptic survival participate in discourses of
population and border control.

The White Male Scientist as Supreme Cultivator
Human evolutionary (or de-evolutionary) potential was a driving force for much
speculative fiction of the early twentieth century. As writers explored potential futures, progress
and ruin were recurrently premised upon the survival and development of different human types.
H.G. Wells crafted one of the earliest tales of evolutionary speculation: The Time Machine
(1895), a quasi-scientific meditation on the potential future of the human species. Although
Wells’s novel was not traditionally apocalyptic in the ways I have described, his emphasis on the
potentially disparate evolutionary paths for different human groups, both here and in his less
known, When the Sleeper Wakes (1910), influenced a generation of writers both in England and
abroad.
The Time Machine unfolds through an act of storytelling, as its protagonist, merely called
the Time Traveler, recounts his recent experience of traveling to the future. In this way his
visions of the future act as warnings to his listeners; like John of Patmos, the Time Traveler has

63
I borrow the term “the Great White Mother” from Jacobs.
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had a vision of the coming end of humanity, not through any divine intervention, but through his
own clever ingenuity. The Time Traveler tells his modern-day London listeners a story of the far
future in which humanity is no longer recognizable but has evolved into two different
degenerated species, both horrific in their own way. The Eloi, who at first seem like little
humans living in an Edenic paradise, are carefree and childlike, lacking physical strength and
intellectual development. While the Morlocks, with whom the Time Traveler struggles for his
life, are the bestial, and more powerful counterpart to the Eloi. Upon reflection the Time Traveler
surmises that the wealthy, leisure class has grown into the weak and ineffectual Eloi, while the
hardy working class has become the race living underground. In a striking twist of fate the Time
Traveler realizes that the fair-skinned Eloi are rulers no longer, but are now the food supply of
the stronger and more capable Morlocks.
Through its broad view of human history The Time Machine considers how the
stratification of society—the upper and working classes—might evolve into two different
species. It is a condemnation of the luxuries of leisure, which can ultimately weaken a race and
lead to its demise. The Eloi represent the future of the white elite to whom the Time Traveler is
relating his story; through his descriptions of their entropic future, as well as through his
description of the powerful, carnivorous Morlocks—figures who are racialized through their
associations with darkness and their appearance as “queer little ape-like figure[s]” (39), the Time
Traveler presents a cautionary picture of human evolution. His vision of human alteration
reflects contemporary fears about the degeneration of the leisure class as well as the belief that
different races would evolve differently.
This story also showcases the power of the educated, middle-class, White scientist. The
Time Traveler’s ability to harness the secrets of the universe and the physical world are a
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consequence of his acumen; his invention has enabled him to gain a broader vision of mankind,
time, and evolution. On his machine he views the entire flux of civilization, remarking, “I saw
buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams” (Wells Time 16). In the end the Time
Traveler seemingly disappears from modern day London, leaving the reader wondering if he has
gone to seek adventure or to alter the future. He leaves his audience, both inside and outside the
text, with a clear argument for preserving and strengthening the power of the White race before it
is too late.
The White male scientist hero would become a lasting staple of apocalyptic narrative (as
well as in other types of speculative fiction throughout the twentieth century). Although many
writers have challenged, or at least questioned, the authority of the scientist at least as far back as
Shelley’s Frankenstein, this figure, who typically showcases his intellectual superiority,
unmatched ingenuity, foresight, and bravery, became a representative of the educated White
middle-class man as Social Darwinism proliferated alongside the growing genre of speculative
fiction. His intellect and abilities would mark his superior position within hegemonic discourses
of race and civilization. The scientist is often the last hope against a racialized enemy—whether
ethnically Othered or actually alien—and/or against the end of civilization.
Jack London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion” offers a telling example of this trend. First
published in 1910 in McClure’s magazine, London’s short story is set in 1976 when “the trouble
between the world and China reached its culmination” (69). Essentializing the Chinese as racial
Others, London explains that the war grew, in part, out of a fundamental difference between the
Chinese and the American: “The fabrics of their minds were woven from totally different stuffs.
They were mental aliens” (69).
64
Revealing a fundamental belief in the dangers of the “wrong”

64
London characterized the Japanese with a similar sense of innate difference. In “The Yellow Peril,” (1904),
London argued that while some things can be taught, there are inherited racial differences that will forever divide
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kind of procreation, London asserts that “the real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins,” for
eventually “there were more Chinese in existence than white-skinned people” (72), and “she was
spilling over the boundaries of her Empire” (73).
65
But while many feared “China’s advancing
hordes” (74), one man was ready for them: Jacobus Laningdale. Laningdale, was “a very
obscure scientist, a professor employed in the laboratories of the Health Office of New York
City” (75). In that sense, he is a humble man, a reluctant hero who just happens to use his
knowledge of germs to mastermind a solution to China’s threatening growth. As China
unknowingly waits to be attacked by the troops that line its shores, the nation is suddenly
bombarded by glass canisters containing a combination of deadly plagues. London writes, “Such
was the unparalleled invasion of China” (78), and this “was ultra-modern war, twentieth century
war, the war of the scientist and the laboratory, the war of Jacobus Laningdale,” and “so perished
China” (79).
While London likely intended his audience to read his short story with a critical eye to
the biological weaponry it showcased, the genocidal conclusion is strangely celebratory. In the
end there is an international agreement not to use such “laboratory methods of warfare” ever
again (79). However, after all of the Chinese are dead, Americans settle the Chinese mainland
along with their European allies and there is a self-congratulatory awareness that they have
successfully outwitted and outlived the Chinese. Jacobus Laningdale, with his classical name,

Americans from their “Oriental” cousins. He explains that while learned knowledge is exchangable, “[that is] not so
with our soul stuff, which 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. The leopard cannot change its spots, nor can
the Japanese, nor can we. We are thumbed by the ages into what we are, and by no conscious inward effort can we
in a day rethumb ourselves. Nor can the Japanese in a day, or a generation, rethumb himself in our image.”
65
Like many future war stories, London’s narrative reflected common racial anxieties of the era. The fecundity of
the Chinese had become legendary, eventually prompting a 1929 installment of Ripley’s Believe it or Not! to publish
“The Marching Chinese,” a piece including an image of the Chinese masses wrapping around the earth with the
caption: “If all the Chinese in the world were to march 4 abreast past a given point they would never finish passing
though they marched forever and ever” (no pag.).
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American heritage, and intellectual might, has saved the world from the yellow hordes and
ushered in a new era of foreign expansion and international peace. Genocide, the most extreme
form of negative eugenics, was a prerequisite of his heroic feat, but the happy ending of the tale
overrides the specter of death at the story’s center. After all, with China ready to pounce on the
Western world, it was an us versus them scenario. With Asia repopulated by Americans and
Europeans, the future of the White race has been secured.
Garrett P. Serviss’s The Second Deluge, which was serialized in The Cavalier between
1911 and 1912, presents an equally capable scientist, although his Cosmo Versál does not use his
expertise to build a super weapon, but a super vessel of survival: a technologically advanced ark.
The Second Deluge, which is, as it sounds, a story that modernizes the story of the flood in
Genesis, was enormously popular and was released as a novel shortly after its serialization.
Serviss, a writer and astronomer, used his knowledge of the cosmos to craft an unlikely but
scientifically plausible tale of apocalypse. The story’s popularity and plausibility was in part due
to the recent sensation caused by Halley’s Comet, which, passing close to Earth in 1910, had
incited panic when a handful of scientists warned of the potential danger of the closeness of the
comet’s gassy tail. But the tale also tapped into the popular desire to destroy the problematic
modern city, and to remake the world through the intelligent design of a scientist with the ability
and necessity to select the best humans for the future.
Cosmo Versál, whose name seems to denote cosmological truth, is introduced as a great
thinker in deep concentration amongst “all the indescribable apparatus that modern science has
invented” (1). These apparatuses, and his talents for astronomical vision have given Versál the
ability to see the future, and he makes a shocking discovery as he studies a photograph of the
“Lord Rosse Nebula”: the Earth is going to plunge straight into its watery mass. Predicting that
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“quintillions of tons of water will condense on the earth and cover it like a universal cloudburst,”
he realizes that it will mean “good-by to the human race—unless—unless—I, Cosmo Versál,
inspired by science, can save a remnant to repeople the planet after the catastrophe." (1) After
calculating that the waters will likely be six miles deep, he swiftly decides to build an ark,
asserting “I'll be a second Noah. But,” he adds humbly, “I'll advise the whole world to build
arks.” (1).
Thankfully Versál is not only smart but incredibly wealthy and he immediately begins
construction. With a superior knowledge of building materials Versál selects “levium,” a metal
that is extremely bouyant, and draws up elaborate plans for the biggest, most durable ship of all
time. Meanwhile, he tries his best to alert the world, posting warnings all over New York City
and contacting scientists and politicians around the world. He soon realizes, however, that no
one is taking him seriously: his will be the only ark; a fact that compounds his sense of
responsibility. This realization is followed immediately by his assertion that he will not only save
humanity but improve it.
The fate of a whole race is at stake. If we can save a handful of the best blood and
brain of mankind, the world will have a new chance, and perhaps a better and
higher race will be the result. Since I can't save them all, I'll pick and choose. I'll
have the flower of humanity in my ark. I'll at least snatch that much from the jaws
of destruction. (Chapter 1)
As passages like this demonstrate, his plan to improve the race is overtly eugenic, and he sets
about with the help of his assistant, Joseph Smith, to make a list of all of those who will be
invited upon the ark. As Versál claims, "The nebula, in drowning the earth, brings opportunity
for a new birth of mankind,” and as he reminds Smith, “the same conditions are said to have
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prevailed in the time of Noah. There was no science then, and we do not know exactly on what
principles the choice was made of those who should escape; but the simple history of Noah
shows that he and his friends represented the best manhood of that early age” (Chap 6). Now, of
course, Versál has vast biological and sociological knowledge to utilize in peopling his ship.
Versál’s selection of welcome survivors is revealed through a conversation with Smith
that illustrates both his confidence in his ability to choose an ideal community and his distress in
light of the responsibility thrust upon him. As he tells Smith:
I am to decide who shall be saved! I, I alone, I, Cosmo Versál, hold in my hands
the fate of a race numbering two thousand million souls!—the fate of a planet
which, without my intervention, would become simply a vast tomb. It is for me to
say whether the genus homo shall be perpetuated, and in what form it shall be
perpetuated. Joseph, this is terrible! These are the functions of deity, not of man.
(Chap 6)
Versál asserts that he did not welcome such responsibility, that he is, clearly, a reluctant
eugenicist. But he also accepts Smith’s assertion that he was “ordained” to do such work. As he
says, "If I felt any doubt that Providence had foreordained me to do this work, and given me
extraordinary faculties, and extraordinary knowledge, to enable me to perform it, I would, this
instant, blow out my brains" (Chap 6). Clearly, “Providence had foreordained” Versál by gifting
him with intellectual acuity and foresight. As a scientist he is most equipped to engineer the
survival of the species and to decide which equation of survivors will inaugurate the best future.
His opinion of the superiority of his role is clarified when he begins drafting a list of ark
invitees. The first category he creates is for the “men of science,” whom he deems “the true
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leaders” (Chap 6).
66
He continues his list, basing his choices on his presumptions about human
behavior and the realities of the disaster zone they will be encountering. Interestingly, he does
not make racial categories, but instead organizes his list by different “classes,” or occupations.
While this lack of attention to race suggests that Serviss was departing from mainstream eugenic
thought, Versál’s “color-blind” views merely obscure how race works. He views the various
occupational classes as purely representational of human ability and character, rather than
reflections, at least in part, of life chances. As he tells Joseph, his ostensibly naturally servile
assistant, "the occupation shows the tendency, the quintessence of character. Some men are born
rulers and leaders; others are born followers. Both are necessary, and I must have both kinds."
67

Versál calculates that his ark can hold one thousand people, not counting the crew, and he
builds a list which he believes will best serve the future of the race. He begins by establishing
principles of selection regarding age, gender, and family size that will allow him to include the
widest swath of humanity, since, as he asserts “the principles of eugenics demand a wide field of
selection" (chap 6). Estimating that, on average, each individual will come with two family
members, he creates the following chart of assigned spaces:
Occupation Names of Places (With No. and Probable No.)
Science (already assigned) 75 225
Rulers 15 45
Statesmen 10 30
Business magnates 10 30
Philanthropists 5 15
Artists 15 45
Religious teachers 20 60
School-teachers 20 60
Doctors 30 90

66
I accessed this text on Project Gutenberg and so page numbers vary depending on the format in which it is read. I
have cited chapters here instead of page numbers.
67
Versál brings a group of servants on board the ship whom he defends with a paternalistic spirit. "Every one of
these persons," he said to Joseph Smith, "is worth his weight in gold. Their disinterested fidelity to duty is a type of
character that almost became extinct generations ago, and no more valuable leaven could be introduced into the
society of the future. Rather than leave them, I would stay behind myself.” (chap 9)

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Lawyers 1 3
Writers 6 18
Editors 2 6
Players 14 42
Philosophers 1 3
Musicians 12 36
Speculative geniuses 3 9
"Society" 0 0
Agriculture and mechanics 90 270
____ ____
Totals 329 987

He then proceeds to decide who will fill the spaces in each category, selecting men from a
variety of nations, religions, and classes. Humorously excluding “society,” Serviss revises old
social valuations, claiming now that his “speculative geniuses” are his “most precious cargo,”
and taking on as many agricultural specialists, mechanics, and animals—both wild and tame—
as he can fit on the ship.
Knowing that his ark is the only hope for the salvation of humanity and that most of the
human population will not fit on the ship, Versál insulates his life-boat from the hordes he
expects to seek shelter. While the water will eventually create a totalizing boundary around the
ship, ensuring its safety from the masses, Versál protects the ark—which is the New World for
the time-being—initially, by surrounding it with armed guards, and later by building an
electrified field around its lower walls. When the panicked masses storm the ark they cannot
find a way to climb its towering sides and when they attempt to do so they are instantly stunned,
and in some cases killed, in a fantastically gruesome display of scientific ingenuity. “As the first
to arrive laid their hands upon the top of the low wall they fell as if shot through the brain,
tumbling backward on those behind. Others pushed wildly on, but the instant they touched the
wall they too collapsed. Wicked blue-green sparks occasionally flashed above the struggling
mass” (Chap 8). When the mass of panicked New Yorkers refuses to leave and begins firing
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weapons at Versál, he threatens to reply with machine-gun fire. Such violence is completely
justified within the needs of the narrative. Considering the limited resources of the ship, the ark
stands as a Malthusian argument for population control.
Serviss then lets lose the deluge, illustrating how the watery apocalypse wipes out life
across the planet while Versál and his invited guests remain safely buoyant above the submerged
planet. Foreshadowing and perhaps influencing future films of the apocalyptic genre, Serviss
depicts the downfall of numerous international landmarks in his description of ruin. From Paris
to London, to New York, each recognizable city is drowned, its citadels and bridges now the
final resting places of the ghosts of the past. Serviss spends a good deal of time showcasing these
sites as Versál and his crew explore submerged cities and remark upon the strangeness of the
new world. These views of dead cities add a powerful critical edge to the text, revealing the
swiftness with which massive change can occur. Through them, Serviss indicates that though
New York and London may have been great a few weeks ago, they are no longer relevant to the
world. In other words, even the structures that seem indestructible can become obsolete
overnight.
Such loss is not the end of humanity but its transition, and Versál ultimately revels in the
end of the modern metropolises. Offering a toast that is both mournful and celebratory, he tells
his companions that though it is sad that so many have perished in the disaster:
In this ark, which owes its existence to the foreseeing eye of science, you will be
borne in safety upon the bosom of the battling waters, and we will disembark
upon the first promising land that reappears, and begin the plantation and
development of a new society of men and women, which, I trust, will afford a
practical demonstration of the principles of eugenics. I have, as far as possible,
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and as far as the pitiful blindness of mankind permitted me to go, selected and
assembled here representatives of the best tendencies of humanity. You are a
chosen remnant, and the future of this planet depends upon you [. . . . ] ‘I salute,’
he continued, raising his voice and lifting a glass of wine from the little table
before him, ‘the world of the past—may its faults be forgotten—and the world of
the future—may it rise on the wings of science to nobler prospects!’ (Chap 9).
In the end, Versál does, in fact succeed in making this new world. Not exactly in the way he
envisions, as the ark does ultimately encounter other survivors, perhaps three million in all, but
he is confident that his contribution to the new world is indispensable. In his final chapter, titled
“New America,” Serviss describes the future community of the nation:
It was not the selected band with which Cosmo Versál had intended to regenerate
mankind, but from the Ark he spread a leaven which had its effect on the
succeeding generations. He taught his principles of eugenics, and implanted deep
the germs of science, in which he was greatly aided by Professor Pludder, and, as
all readers of this narrative know, we have every reason to believe that our new
world, although its population has not yet grown to ten millions, is far superior, in
every respect, to the old world that was drowned. (Chap 26)
Versál’s knowledge of the “principles of eugenics” and the “germs of science” supplement the
genes which he has rescued from the abyss. The survival of such thought ensures that even if
some accidental survivors contaminate the gene pool, such effects can be minimized and
hopefully eradicated in the eugenically-designed future.
Texts like The Second Deluge, in which White male scientists have a superior vision of
the future and superior tools with which to secure the survival of whom they deem the best of
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humanity, were clearly useful in proliferating discourses of White supremacy, male authority,
and even national exceptionalism. For as the United States continued to lead the way in
technological advancement it benefitted from tales that equated scientific and technological
progress with supreme Darwinian fitness. Moreover, the ways in which Serviss’s apocalypse
necessitates the preservation of an insulated space in order to sustain a population of survivors
indicates how the mode could complement discourses of population and border control.
While authors like W.E.B. Du Bois and George Schuyler would challenge the racial
components of such tales in later decades, such male-centric views of human survival were
immediately challenged by at least one well-known feminist writer: Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Gilman, who advocated the social and political empowerment of women for the benefit of the
nation, would renovate the apocalyptic mode, creating her own distinctive eugenic vision of the
future that offered agency and heroism to her female protagonists while critiquing male
supremacy.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland: The Great Mother and the Garden
Considering the emblematic celebration of the male hero-scientist-adventurer in early
apocalyptic fiction and speculative fiction more broadly, it is intriguing to find the mode utilized
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a writer known for her women-centered feminist critiques of
civilization and culture.
68
While narratives like Darkness and Dawn and The Scarlet Plague are
reminiscent of male-centric frontier narratives, Herland, first published in 1915, is a witty
response to such celebrated tales because it both de-naturalizes gender constructs and reveals the
misdirected nature of imperialist pursuits. In contrast to texts such as The Second Deluge and

68
Gilman has been credited as “the most prominent feminist theorist in America” at the turn of the century. She
published 2,169 stories, poems, books, and articles and made a living lecturing to women’s groups throughout the
U.S. (Bederman 122).
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“The Unparalleled Invasion” that revel in the intellectual might of their male protagonists,
Herland emphasizes the limits of male vision, repositioning her male characters on the margins
and characterizing women as wise leaders. Yet, like her male counterparts, Gilman uses the
apocalyptic mode to craft a specific vision of individual, social, and national regeneration that
conformed problematically with the popular Social Darwinism of her era. Her utopian vision is
clearly informed by eugenic and anti-immigrant ideologies.
Herland is framed as a traditional travel narrative, a recollection of an exciting journey
taken by its narrator, Vandyck Jennings, and his companions, Terry O. Nicholson and Jeff
Margrave. The three men are representative of the imperialist venture, which in the name of
scientific knowledge and civilization, sets out to explore and mine the resources of new lands.
Terry, a wealthy explorer, reflects the anxieties about the closing of the frontier which spread
across the nation in Gilman’s day, since “he used to make all kinds of a row because there was
nothing left to explore now” (3). As the men set out on their expedition to make maps, study
“savage dialects” and locate “strange flora and fauna,” they signify the ways in which science
has been recurrently used to justify geographical expansion. Jeff is a poet, a botanist and more
lucratively, a doctor, and Vandyck is a sociologist. Their foray into the “dark tangle of rivers,
lakes, morasses, and dense forests” is therefore not only reasonable, but also full of the hope of
discovery, classification, and perhaps even civilization (4).
However, it is clear from the start that the men do not have control over the narrative that
unfolds. As Vandyck begins the tale he asserts apologetically that “this is written from memory,
unfortunately. If I could have brought with me the material so carefully prepared, this would be a
different story” (3). His lack of confidence in his material is soon accompanied by his ignorance
about the existence of the “Woman Country” that his guides tell him about (7). The men have
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never heard of such a place and, as they discuss its possibility, they reveal their own erroneous
expectations. The men cannot conceive of such a place being dangerous, unless of course, there
is “a contingent of gentlemen with poisoned arrows or something” (8). Each man represents a
different spot on the spectrum of ignorance: Terry is on one end with his “visions of a sublimated
summer resort—just Girls and Girls and Girls,” Jeff is on the other, with his lofty expectations of
“roses and babies” everywhere. Vandyck sits in the more logical center, believing that they
might encounter a fully functional matriarchal society. However, none of the men are prepared to
discover a perfectly cultivated landscape inhabited by only women. As VanDyck exclaims upon
surveying Herland, “this is a civilized country! [. . .]There must be men” (13).
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By allowing the story to unfold in this manner, Gilman allows readers a parallel journey
of discovery and unsettled expectations. Like many utopian texts before, the reader can identify
with the traveler who has encountered a new land, and learn about the unnaturalness and
mutability of their own world in the process, an ideological process that inevitably overturns
one’s assumptions about the way things are.
70
This is the primary progressive strength of
Gilman’s text: it intensively defamiliarizes social norms, offering alternative ways of
understanding gender, culture, and society. In Herland gender roles are constantly de-
naturalized and the common binaries of “masculinity” and “femininity” are collapsed. As a
result, Terry, the narrative’s most typically “masculine” character feels “he was all out of
drawing” (75). Through discussions about gender and the growing realization of her male
characters, Gilman offers readers an awakening. As Vandyck asserts near the novel’s end, “We
were now well used to seeing women not as females but as people; people of all sorts, doing

69
I use “Herland” here, as I will in other places, to denote the nation within the text rather than the text itself.
70
I say “traveler” here to refer to both time travel and geographic travel. The protagonists in both William Morris’s
News from Nowhere and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward enter utopia by sleeping for an unnaturally long
time, while novels like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Bacon’s New Atlantis have protagonists that sail to new lands.
In each case, the reader accompanies the protagonist on their journey of discovery.
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every kind of work” (137). Creating an alternative space where hierarchies of gender are
reversed or deconstructed offers a powerful challenge to the male patriarchal authority that was
thoroughly embedded in American culture.
Herland is indeed an ardent argument for female empowerment and leadership. It is hard
for the men in the novel to deny, at least at first, that Herland is seemingly perfect. As Vandyck
Jennings and his fellow explorers, Terry Nicholson and Jeff Margrave, travel into Herland’s
interior via plane they remark that the secret nation seems to be “an enormous garden.” After
some investigation they determine that it is “a land in a state of perfect cultivation” where all
plants are expertly cared for. They begin to think that such an Eden is not the result of a few
hard workers, but the accomplishment of a society where everyone possesses a wealth of
ecological knowledge (13). Subsequently, their first encounter with the Herlanders takes place in
a perfectly cultivated forest where they meet three young women amongst the trees. The women
are so agile and comfortable in the tall branches that the men conclude they must be “arboreal”
(Gilman 19).
Instead of Amazonian tribes living in the wild, the men find small villages that are so
beautifully constructed that they cause one observer to reflect: “Everything was beauty, order,
perfect cleanness, and the pleasantest sense of home overall” (21). It soon becomes clear that
this perfect organization results in both beauty and efficiency. The men discover that the trees,
so carefully planted in the forest, are all useful. The women have thoughtfully selected species
that will bear the most fruit, and have “improved their agriculture to the highest point” (80), in
order to make the most of their small parcel of land. As Vandyck notes after observing the
women: “These perfect culturalists had worked out a perfect scheme of refeeding the soil with all
that came out of it . . . everything which came from the earth went back to it” (80-81). Such
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careful regulation ensures that the small nation will be able to use all of its resources as
effectively as possible and thereby remain viable.
The women’s focus on perfect cultivation is not only agricultural, but social and national
as well. Every plant is planted for maximum human benefit because the women of Herland view
the health and abundance of their natural resources with the future in mind, envisioning their
nation as one “unit” or “community” rather than limiting their “time-sense” to “the hopes and
ambitions of an individual life” (Gilman 80). The women see themselves as part of a national
community whose lifespan is indefinite. Maintaining the environment is part of maintaining their
nation; each plant is a part of the cultivation of the future.
Through their exquisite cultivating capacities the Herlanders explicitly conceive of
themselves as “mothers” of the future, and the concepts of “motherhood” and “mothering” are
central to the ethos of the nation. The women celebrate an ideal of growth and nurturing often
associated with Earth Mother goddesses, which leads VanDyck to conclude that their religion is
like a “Maternal Pantheism” (61). This concept of growth is articulated in multiple ways, as
Vandyck explains:
Their religion, you see, was maternal; and their ethics, based on the full
perception of evolution, showed the principle of growth and the beauty of wise
culture. They had no theory of the essential opposition of good and evil; life to
them was growth; their pleasure was in growing, and their duty also. With this
background, with their sublimated mother-love, expressed in terms of widest
social activity, every phase of their work was modified by its effect on the
national growth [ . . . This] fully awakened motherhood plans and works without
limit, for the good of the child (103).
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To signify this conception of perfect nurturing, the nation’s rulers are called “Over-Mothers” and
they rule with wisdom and compassion. Gilman writes, “With these women the most salient
quality in all their institutions was reasonableness” (77). Similarly, procreative motherhood is
not an individual achievement but an activity of national import. Vandyck notes that in contrast
to the more family-focused mothering of his homeland, “these women were all working together
at the grandest of tasks—they were Making People—and they made them well” (70).
However it is soon evident that such beauty and harmony can exist only by maintaining
strict control over the landscape and the nation’s inhabitants. Significantly, this control was
initially enabled by an apocalyptic event. Herland, it turns out, exists because over two thousand
years before the setting of the novel, a volcano and an earthquake sealed in the land, killing most
of the men. One might wonder why Gilman uses an apocalypse as a precondition for her utopian
nation. Utopian works from Bacon’s New Atlantis to William Morris’s News from Nowhere
relied simply on either geographic or historical rupture to secure their utopian spaces. Here
Gilman utilizes geographic isolation—but in the wake of apocalyptic catastrophe, because it
enables her to accomplish something else: a selective thinning of the population. In the wake of
the apocalyptic disaster the male slaves tried to take charge (The Herlanders are descended from
a polygamous and slave-holding society), murdering all the remaining males and the older
women; however the “infuriated virgins” successfully “slew their brutal conquerors” (56),
thereby facilitating the journey towards a utopian future. This violent beginning is not incidental
but plays an important role in the imaginative work of the novel. The earth-shattering catastrophe
and its aftermath rid the world of men, enabling the creation of a new world without the
imperialism and subjection associated with white men, and securing the women from the dangers
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of rape and miscegenation associated with black men. It also, incidentally, seals the surviving
women into a safe land-locked area in which such evils are no longer possible.
Although all readers of Gilman’s text notice the lack of men in Herland, the nation’s lack
of people of color tends to be less obvious. As the story goes, the male slaves killed all the White
men, and then the virginal women killed all of them; but what happened to the female slaves?
They seemed to have disappeared, if they ever existed at all. Within contemporary discourses of
women and sexuality one can assume that the “infuriated virgins” of the nation’s prehistory are
white women since popular stereotypes of the early twentieth century tended to characterize
black women as prurient and sexually available.
71
Further, in the future in which the novel takes
place, the Herlanders are clearly White, for as Vandyck claims, “there is no doubt in my mind
that these people were of Aryan stock, and were once in contact with the best civilization of the
old world. They were ‘white,’ but somewhat darker than our northern races because of their
constant exposure to sun and air” (55-56). Thus it would seem that the eradication of blackness
was another important component of Herland’s prehistory. Troublingly, the slaughter of the male
slaves who wished to dominate the women, and the disappearance of black women are so
seamlessly woven into the story of apocalyptic origin that they also seem like inevitable
outcomes of the initial catastrophe. Ultimately in a land without immigrant threat or racial
conflict, where people of color have been walled out or killed in the initial aftermath of the
original cataclysm, the women of Herland are safe—not just from men—but from the contagions
of interracial contact.

71
The sexualization of the black female body, and her stereotypical promiscuity were ideological tools used to
justify her enslavement and social control and to alleviate White rapists of responsibility for their recurrent assaults.
Furthermore, as Hazel Carby argues, characterizing black women as sexual victims also effectively diminished
black manhood. She writes, “Black manhood, in other words, could not be achieved or maintained because of the
inability of the slave to protect the black woman in the same manner that convention dictated the inviolability of the
body of the white woman. The slave woman, as victim, became defined in terms of a physical exploitation resulting
from the lack of the assets of white womanhood: no masculine protector or home and family, the locus of the
flowering of white womanhood” (35).
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The dangers of contact then become a threat that lurks at Herland’s borders, represented
metonymically through the figure of the modern metropolis. The city is where its male visitors
come from and to which they return. In this way the modern city represents a potential future for
the Herlanders; it is a future that might be theirs if they become connected to the world where
people and ideas, germs and genes are constantly exchanged within the fluid spaces of modern
life. After learning more about this world the women of Herland agree that “[they] are unwilling
to expose [their] country to free communication with [it].” As Somel, an Over-Mother, explains
to the men:
We find that in all your historic period, so much longer than ours, that with all the
interplay of services, the exchange of inventions and discoveries, and the
wonderful progress we so admire, that in this wide-spread Other World of yours,
there is still much disease, often contagious. (Gilman 145).
Significantly, the women are willing to forego access to all of the technologies of modern life in
order to avoid the threat posed by such communication. This threat is articulated in the language
of medical bacteriology which, as I have argued, carries with it a wealth of xenophobic
connotations. Somel’s assessment is based on an awareness of the potential for germs and genes
to pollute their nation. The city is a phantom that may destroy the perfection they have worked so
hard to attain.
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Geographic closure plays a critical role in the nation’s prehistory and also enables the
nation to become a kind of laboratory in which controlled social and genetic engineering are
possible. Throughout their two millennia the women of Herland have developed ways to create
the perfect population, thereby negating the need for prisons, specialized medical care, or
supplemental social welfare systems. Procreation in Herland is part magic—the women conceive

72
The figure of the modern city is more fully explored in Gilman’s sequel to Herland: With Her in Ourland (1916).
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parthenogenetically, without the help of men—and part eugenic engineering—the older women
carefully regulate which women should procreate and which women must refrain from passing
on their genes. At this point all of the women are adequately White, so the practice of negative
eugenics is used to root out a variety of social characteristics deemed undesirable. First and
foremost on the list of undesirable traits is sexuality. Despite the supposed perfection of the
nation, sexual behavior is not condoned in Herland but is seen as an “atavistic” inclination that is
grounds for denying a woman the right of motherhood (Gilman 89, 93). Considering that all
inhabitants of Herland are female, this imposition eliminates the possibility of any socially
acceptable same-sex relationships. Yet Herland’s proscriptions on sexuality are also in line with
Gilman’s particular view of white womanhood and with Victorian discourses of sexuality and
purity more broadly. As Gail Bederman explains in her useful analysis of Gilman’s adherence to
discourses of civilization, Gilman emphasized women’s superior virtue by way of their relative
asexuality. “Excessive sex-attraction,” a trait often associated with men, was, for Gilman, a sign
of “over-civilized decadence and racial decay” (Bederman 138)
73
. In this sense, the ability of the
Herlanders to maintain an asexual civilization shows their superiority to male-dominated
Western world. They are kept clean not only from same-sex attraction but from sexuality in
general.
74

The eradication of sexuality is the most striking—as well as the most well-defined—
aspect of Herland’s procreative program, but there is also an assertion that any women deemed
“unfit” are denied the privilege of motherhood. This strict process of negative eugenics is
seemingly required by the nation’s borders. Because the nation is landlocked, the women must

73
This claim was based on the notion that excessive sex-attraction resulted from emphasized sex distinction. Gilman
argued that such sex-distinction was “not the proof of civilized advancement” as so many social scientists had held,
but was in fact the cause of America’s social decline.
74
Bederman is quoting Gilman from Women and Economics 31.
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carefully monitor their population growth. But it is rendered more innocuous within the
discourse of perfect motherhood so central to Herland’s ethos; population control is a way of
nurturing the future. Ultimately this de-sexualization of women and program of strict
reproductive control are embedded within the holistic maintenance of the community nearly as
seamlessly as the obliteration of race. In other words, eugenics seems entirely justified and
useful, and its manipulations appear as natural as, say, an earthquake that shifts mountains and
creates new lands.
Moreover, it is difficult to question the practices of the Herlanders when one is
confronted by its fertile and impeccably manicured landscapes. Like London before her, Gilman
emphasizes the vitality of the natural landscape, introducing readers to her post-apocalyptic
space by way of the green beauty of the countryside. The fact that Herland is not only beautiful
but perfectly sustainable adds to its argument of perfection. In many ways Gilman’s novel is
emblematic of the development of ecological consciousness emerging in the early twentieth
century, because she illustrates how one might utilize the landscape in more future-conscious
ways. While such ecological interventions had many benefits, (i.e. many natural landscapes were
saved from industrial development), as I have shown, maintenance of the landscape also involves
a problematic process of exclusion and regulation. In this way the text is emblematic of the ways
in which arguments for eugenic programs and increased bio-political control over the nation’s
population were often couched in metaphors of beneficial cultivation. The landscapes of Herland
are tightly controlled by the elder “Over-Mothers” who determine acceptable cultivation
practices and acceptable behavior, and Gilman’s utopia obfuscates any potential conflicts or
disagreements regarding land use. Further, and more important perhaps, the ease with which
these images of environmental control are paired with population control—both genocidal and
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eugenic—is suggestive of the potentially dangerous imbrications between white supremacy,
biopolitics, and environmentalism within early twentieth century discourse. Herland may be the
picture of pastoral perfection, a seeming Eden whose environmental vitality bespeaks its
wonders, but such visual perfection is a result not only of ecological knowledge but also of strict
social maintenance.
Ultimately Gilman combines Herland’s convenient apocalyptic origin and procreative
regulation with domestic sanitary practices and ecologically sustainable agriculture and forestry,
in order to create a perfectly controlled space in which environmental, sexual, and racial purity
seem naturally wedded and socially beneficial. Through the guise of protecting and maintaining
its fertile homeland, Herland justifies closing its borders and characterizing foreigners as
potential threats; but the illusion of utopia can only partially obscure the fact that Herland is a
land of borders and regulations. On the one hand, Herland’s choice of exclusion seems
reasonable. When Terry attempts to rape a young woman he is asked to leave, and one can
assume that such threats—represented by men like Terry—are part of what the Herlanders wish
to protect themselves from. However, when one considers what Somel means when she warns of
the “contagions” of the outer world, it is clear that Herland’s values are also in-step with the
racialist and nativist arguments of the early twentieth century; the survival of Herland depends
upon preserving its borders.
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Conclusion
Herland illustrates how sanitary science, eugenics, and environmental control worked
together as seemingly innocuous weapons in the crusade against the contamination of American

75
See Nancy Stepan, “Biological Degeneration: Races and Proper Places” (from Degeneration: The Dark Side of
Progress. Eds. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
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spaces. It is a justifiably sanitized garden, an enclosed space in which beauty and efficiency offer
an aura of perfection. In the popular mind the beauty of a garden relied on such exclusion. As
Vera Norwood points out in her assessment of the gardening culture at the turn of the century,
“this idea that a fine garden began in an enclosed space appeared throughout women’s garden
literature and was implemented in intimate, walled gardens on the expansive estates of the
wealthy” (123). As Toni Morrison has argued, all utopian spaces rely on separation. In a 1998
interview Morrison asserted that, “the isolation, the separateness, is always a part of any utopia .
. . . All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed
in.”
76
In this way as in others, the woman’s garden was a counterpart to the man’s wilderness, as
both spaces served as metaphorical frameworks in which to imagine an ideal America and the
cultivation and control that might enable such perfection.
Clearly Gilman was not alone in conflating racial and environmental purity. What
Herland does represent however, is the way in which women—especially educated white
women—became the vanguard for many racialist and bio-political reforms, sometimes
inadvertently. Herland represents a pitfall of what Dana Sietler terms “feminist rescue,” for “by
representing eugenic ideology as the source of this rescue, [these women] racialize the language
of feminism.” (Seitler 66), thereby reifying a racial hierarchy they might otherwise wish to
ameliorate. The correspondences between the aims of eugenics and the aims of gardening,
between the aims of health advocates and aims of nativist activists, made racialist ideologies
more insidious and less obvious. Such correspondences made it increasingly difficult for women
to find trouble-free roles for social improvement during the Progressive period.
Such roles were imperative to the empowerment of women who made claims for suffrage
by asserting their usefulness to the nation. The fact that the development of medical bacteriology

76
From a 1998 PBS News Hour Interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth.
Olivas 117

coincided with the cult of domesticity added import to the woman’s role in the home.
77
The
sanitary reformist movement was couched in terms of the survival of America and justified its
nativist rhetoric as protectionist necessity; the sanitary and domestic sciences were framed as
critical endeavors in the preservation of the nation, and women were its vanguards. As Ellen
Richards argued, in the “New Crusade” of Euthenics, which aimed to create a better environment
for the human race, “to the woman of America has come an opportunity to put their education,
their power of detailed work, and any initiative they may possess at the service of the State” (11).
Richards reframed traditional domestic pursuits as central to the health of the nation, arguing that
“household engineering is the great need for material welfare, and social engineering for moral
and ethical being” (158). She urged women to take up their domestic responsibilities with
heightened intensity, arguing that “the future well-being of society is largely in the hands of
women” (149) and advocated national programs that would instruct women how to properly take
care of their home and families: “the teaching of domestic economy in the elementary school and
home economics in the higher is intended to give people a sense of control over their
environment and to avert a panic as to the future” (158).
Moreover, within the framework of environmental protection the women’s sphere of
control was not limited to the household but to the whole of the American landscape. In other
words, if the preservation of nature served a particular function within discourses of white
masculinity, it offered white women an expanded sphere of domestic control. Since “right living
conditions comprise pure food and water supply, a clean and disease-free atmosphere in which to
live and work, proper shelter, and the adjustment of work, rest, and amusement” (Richards x), in
order to secure the health of the family one had to, in fact, secure the health of the community

77
For more on these connections see Nancy Tomes’s The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in
American Life (1998). See also “Contagion and Culture,” a special collection of essays in American Literary
History (WINTER) 14(4): 617-624.
Olivas 118

and the nation more broadly. This expansive sense of home had many progressive political
consequences. It gave women increased confidence in their roles in maintaining the health of the
nation and allowed them to penetrate further into the political sphere without rejecting traditional
femininity; in other words, using the rhetoric of domesticity and the home, women could argue
for their necessary engagement in civic, environmental, and national issues and agendas. Ellen
Richards was not merely arguing for the maintenance of a hygienic home, but for a city that
offered homes clean water and other sanitized necessities. Thus, a woman who cared for her
family could use her role as a mother to justify her participation in civic issues like waste
disposal and industrial pollution, as well as national issues such as immigration and border
control.
Women secured such roles not only in the realms of sanitary and domestic science,
nativist activism and eugenic societies, but also notably in the early environmental movement. In
her exploration of Women’s Conservation Clubs, Cameron Binkley asserts that “women’s clubs
used conservation to expand the public and political influence of women” (180), and in her
survey of women’s clubs and activists Binkley illustrates how various women framed
environmental concerns as domestic concerns. As Clara Bradley Burdette, founder of the
California Federation of Women’s Clubs, would claim, forests mattered because they were “the
great natural reservoirs of the water supply that have made possible our homes, our health and
our prosperity” (qtd. in Binkley 182). Reframing the often marginalized role of housework,
Burdette asserted that she wanted to teach the women of the CFWC “how to teach the men to be
housekeepers of the state, even as she is the homekeeper” (186). Binkley indicates that Burdette
was one among many who made such claims, asserting that by framing their environmental aims
in relationship to the home, women ultimately gained a significant political foothold. She argues
Olivas 119

that “Club women used their organizations to publicize club positions, to lobby elected officials,
and to network with other women’s groups, male associates, local businessmen, and community
leaders in concerted attempts to influence public opinion and public policy” (202), and reaches
the powerful conclusion that “conservation, with its particular prominence in arid lands, offers
yet another explanation for why western women gained an early lead over their peers in the East
and South in obtaining suffrage” (203). While it is difficult to quantify the effects of
environmentalist activism on the broader political sphere, it is clear that as women became more
actively involved in gardening, forestry, and environmentalism, they found new routes to social
power, and new opportunities for employment as well.
78
It was during this time that women
began to find lucrative work as landscape architects, and nature writers, photographers, and
illustrators.
79

As I have illustrated, discourses of environmental protection and conservation tended
inevitably to interact with ideologies of racial purity and social regulation. Environmental
conservation and cultivation was never just about trees, streams, gardens, and national resources,
but was also about keeping America “clean” for the benefit of white middle-class Americans. In
this way environmentalism was both invested in and benefitted by anti-immigrant and eugenic
discourses and became an important force in the continued racialization of both the urban and
non-urban spaces of the nation. Thus, one must examine how feminist activists and health
advocates might have been compromised by their ideological affiliations with men like Spencer

78
Gardening culture offered women access to public horticultural societies as early as the 1850s and by the turn of
the century there were gardening clubs across the nation. In her investigation of the Women’s Club Movement
Glenda Riley points out ways in which such clubs championed a variety of domestic issues, noting that “when the
Garden Club of America organized in 1913, its mission statement included environmental concerns” (72). The ways
in which club members fostered connections between the home and the American landscape more broadly added to
their rising social and political power. As Riley asserts, because club women “identified environmental conservation
with such cherished white, middle-class values as motherhood, family, community, religion, and patriotism . . .
women’s clubs lifted conservation above a political agenda to an American ideology” (72).
79
See Vera Norwood, Made From this Earth chapter 4.
Olivas 120

and Galton. As Kristen Egan argues, “Gilman, like [Ellen] Richards, associates a clean
environment with a clean race” (77): “clearly Richards’s goal is racial purification, and she sees
euthenics, controlling one’s environment, as an immediate opportunity to work toward that goal”
(82).
80

At a time when eugenics societies coincided with stringent anti-immigration practices,
widespread violence against people of color, and the forced sterilization of young working-class
women, these eugenically focused apocalyptic narratives offered a usefully innocuous view of
social control and cultivation. While London, Serviss, and Gilman offer distinctly different
versions of the Supreme Cultivator, all three authors frame their versions of genocide as eugenic
opportunity. Their similarities reveal not only the ways in which eugenics was often
euphemized, but also the ways in which the rhetoric of domestic science and environmental
cultivation could grant authority to white women in a similar fashion that the more traditional
sciences (e.g. engineering, biology, physics) granted authority to the White middle-class male
scientists of popular narrative.
As Darwin’s evolutionary theories had led to a deeper consideration of the relationship
between men and their animal ancestors, Galton’s eugenic discourse had opened a door for
considering populations as flora to be planted and reaped. The rhetoric of cultivation, and its
attendant alignment of people with plants, was a common promotional mechanism of eugenic
thought. As Gilman herself noted in a 1914 essay, “Is America Too Hospitable?,” “Evolution
selects, and social evolution follows the same law. If you are trying to improve corn you do not
wait to bring all the weeds in the garden to the corn level before going on” (Ganobcsik-Williams
26). Such analogies were powerful rhetorical tools for the eugenic movement, which clearly

80
Kristen Egan has done valuable work in connecting race and sanitary science. See both: ”Conservation and
Cleanliness: Racial and Environmental Purity in Ellen Richards and Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (2011) and her
dissertation: “Infectious Agents: Race and Environment in Nineteenth-Century America” (2009).
Olivas 121

benefitted from the cultural shifts that emphasized the benefits of gardening and environmental
consciousness. The women’s movement—with its many footholds in both horticultural and
environmentalist practices and politics, had to tread a difficult line between asserting empowered
social and political positions and promoting racist agendas.
If Herbert Spencer promoted an ideology of the survival of the fittest, these various
visions of regeneration represent the common belief that such survival should be guided by those
who are supremely capable of deciding who is fit. In effect, by offering visions of beneficial
cultivation and population selection, such texts endorsed the growing bio-power of the
government, normalizing and justifying the practice of managing national bodies and borders.
When Cosmo Versál must decide how many people his ark can sustain, he provides a model of
immigration control that eventually leads to a utopian future. When the Herlanders showcase
their perfect society in relation to the world of men it is evident that opening their borders could
be disastrous, and that allowing unlimited reproduction would threaten their resources and
potential equilibrium. The Over-Mothers’ assertions that such interference would be contagious
adds to their unquestioned authority. As Priscilla Wald, Nancy Tomes, and Lisa Lynch argue in
their introduction to Contagion and Culture, “Contagion itself at once defies borders and
provokes their fervent reaffirmation. . . Faced with the threat of bodily harm (from violence as
well as disease), the public acquiesces to extreme reassertions of nationalism more readily than
in the face of any other threat (including an economic crisis)” (623). In many ways it is the
possibility of contagion that enables the social maintenance of Gilman’s nation: within the
context of contagion, genocide and exclusion become acts of salvation and necessity. Gilman’s
apocalypse, like Serviss’s and London’s, comes as a welcome act of redemption rather than as a
terrifying scenario of human annihilation.

Olivas 122

“All of this proves that none are so blind as those nearest the thing seen, while, on the other hand, the
history of the world is the history of the discovery of the common humanity of human beings among
steadily-increasing circles of men” (W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater 115).

CHAPTER 3
A Man among the Ruins: W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” and Post-Apocalyptic Humanity

When W.E. B. Du Bois’s Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil was published in 1920
it immediately gained the attention of readers from across the color line. Within three weeks of
publication it had already sold fourteen hundred copies and would be given a second printing
before the year was out.
81
Part of its popularity was due to the controversy it raised. With a
majority of reviewers noting its acerbic tone, and no doubt resenting its relentless attack on white
supremacy, it was, as David Levering Lewis notes, “one of the most controversial English-
language nonfiction works published that year” (20). While most critics found it difficult to
ignore Du Bois’s genius, many were overwhelmed by the fury of his social commentary. For
example, Harold Laski, whom Lewis characterizes as “the voice of academic socialism” saw
Darkwater as “a very brilliant, but hateful book—rather like, [. . .] what the southerner would
write if he turned Negro” (qtd. in Lewis 20).
Yet not all criticized the text for its vitriol. Many black readers—especially those in the
working class—expressed appreciation for the text’s verisimilitude. Many such readers sent
letters to Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, along with their purchase money, expressing their gratitude
for and need of Du Bois’s book.
82
Others appreciated his commanding rhetoric. One review,
written by Charles Edward Russell, and published in The Crisis, asserted:

81
David Levering Lewis argues that this small figure is “a robust number for such a book” (19-20).
82
Lewis, 22.
Olivas 123

Of all the penned indictments of the white man for his treatment of his dark-
skinned brother this extraordinary book is certainly the most powerful. It is the
colored man’s case for the court of civilization in which he is some day to be
heard; the colored man’s case set forth with such skill, such unassailable reason,
and such depths of veiled feeling that it compels not merely admiration but a kind
of awe. (34).
Such a powerful critique of White civilization was also appreciated by readers who realized the
book’s ability to prompt self-reflection. As Rebecca Drucker writes in her 1920 review in the
New York Tribune, “We have with characteristic Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy told ourselves that ours
is the white man’s burden. What is the white man’s burden, says Du Bois, but an unparalleled
burden of sin, and lust, and cruelty?” Drucker concludes: “It is not a sterile hatred that Du Bois
voices. It is an affirmation of the inherent dignity of all men of whatever color in which are
eighteenth century philosophers so touchingly believed. How may one fling back at this? How
deny its wisdom?”
Affirming the dignity of black men and women was both political and personal for Du
Bois. He was America’s preeminent black Marxist, historian, sociologist, and urban
demographer, and the first African American to get a PhD from Harvard. In many ways Du Bois
was the “evolutionary” black man; his intellect and rhetorical prowess stood as testaments to the
absurdity of racialist thought and eugenic pseudo-science.
83
Yet, despite his many
accomplishments, the only job that he could find was at an all-black university. Such experiences
had taught Du Bois much about the deeply ingrained nature of racial prejudice. An icon of
achievement, he struggled against a system of racialist thought that was far-reaching and
infuriatingly tenacious.

83
I borrow this phrase from Steven J. Ross.
Olivas 124

Trying to write a text that could adequately respond to what Du Bois now recognized as
rampant global inequality and exploitation and which could appeal to multiple audiences was no
easy feat. Du Bois was aware that his educated rhetoric could alienate working-class Black
readers; he also knew that his radical critique of White supremacy and imperialism would anger
many White readers. Thus he created a multi-genre, multi-vocal, text that mixes essays with
autobiographical sketches from Du Bois’s youth, poetry that moves between the hymn and
jeremiad, and short stories that range from religious parable to science fiction. Such a blend of
styles gave Darkwater a broader appeal in 1920, and continues to help show the simultaneity of
the many interconnected issues and ideas it investigates. Such stylistic eclecticism also invites
inquiry into the power of different narrative modes to convey social critique.
Of particular interest here is why Du Bois chose to include a piece of apocalyptic science
fiction in Darkwater. As Du Bois was undoubtedly aware, most secular apocalyptic narratives in
the early twentieth century imagined the annihilation of people of color in stories of apocalypse
and future war. Consider Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seamless eradication of the black
population at the beginning of Herland, the necessary genocide of the Chinese in London’s “The
Unparalleled Invasion,” or the atavistic degeneration that justifies the obliteration of people of
color in England’s Darkness and Dawn. These popular narratives were born from and
complemented the apocalyptic logic of evolutionary discourse, which was popularly understood
as a narrative of natural progress and proliferation, as well as of degeneration and extinction.
Within this pseudo-scientific framework—which was expressed through the language of
scientific racialism, eugenics, health reform activism and domestic science (to name a few)—
African-Americans and other so-called racial inferiors were bound for extinction. Through
repetition such narratives of racial destiny had troubling ideological consequences. Narratives of
Olivas 125

unavoidable obliteration, expressed through both scientific and fictional discourses, naturalized
the high infant mortality rates of African-Americans, as well as justified the violence against
people of color both inside and outside of the nation. Such narratives of evolutionary “failure”
also made ghettoes and slums the proper dying places of the unfit, harbors of the underclass to be
abandoned.
84
In other words, in its secular manifestations, the apocalyptic genre—and science
fiction more generally—seemed to be just another mouthpiece of racialist dogma.
85
It would
therefore seem an unlikely candidate for a text devoted to anti-racist ethics.
Yet, its racialist tendencies may be a principal reason why Du Bois chose the apocalyptic
mode, for by manipulating a genre that so commonly propagated racialist discourse, he could in
turn renovate that discourse. When Du Bois included “The Comet” in Darkwater he appropriated
a narrative mode that had been popularized primarily through racist tales and made it serve his
anti-racist agenda.
86
Writers like Gilman, England, Serviss, and London may have envisioned a
future of white supremacy, naturalizing white dominance through familiar discourses of

84
Of course, in the age of Progressivism there were many who believed that the city and its people could be
improved. In “Perils of Degeneration: Reform, the Savage Immigrant, and the Survival of the Unfit,” Daniel Bender
examines the history of urban reform inaugurated by the creation of settlement houses. Bender shows, however, that
while many reformers recognized the potential for improvement in the city-space and its inhabitants, they continued
to promote traditional ideas of racial fitness which cast certain “undesirables” into the wastebasket. Bender writes,
“settlement work meant guiding selection in surrounding immigrant neighborhoods, identifying and preserving good
racial stock, while encouraging the elimination of the unfit” (10).
85
Several critics have acknowledged the connections between early science fiction and scientific racism. In
Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John Rieder asserts that science fiction was born from narratives
of colonialism and stories of contact with a primitive and/or exotic “other.” As a result, the genre had (and has) the
potential to reify existing ethnocentric notions of racial and cultural differences. Similarly, in “Futurist Fiction and
Fantasy: The Racial Establishment,” Gregory E. Rutledge argues that the imbrications of science and fiction have
had devastating effects on the social and political position of African Americans in the United States, making the
genre highly suspect for black writers. Yet, as Rieder argues, while “much early science fiction seems merely to
transpose and revivify colonial ideologies, the invention of other worlds very often originates in a satirical impulse
to turn things upside down and inside out” (4).
86
I use the concept of “appropriation” here to emphasize the ways in which Du Bois cleverly repurposed a form that
was commonly used to promote racist ideology. I do not wish to characterize science fiction as a “white” genre,
created without the influence of black writers and thinkers. Although science fiction primarily developed as a self-
conscious genre by white writers in both Europe and the U.S., when one considers the likely influence of proto-
science fiction texts like Martin Delaney’s Blake: or, the Huts of America (1859-1861) and Sutton Griggs’ Imperium
in Imperio (1899) on the genre as a whole it is difficult to characterize sf (or any genre for that matter) as a white
literary form.
Olivas 126

civilization, evolution, and degeneration, but Du Bois used the apocalyptic mode to critique race
relations in America. An early example of what would later be called Afrofuturism, “The
Comet” marks an identifiable turning point in the development of the apocalyptic mode, as Du
Bois not only emphasizes and deconstructs racial ideology in his apocalyptic tale, but also
imagines a better future for black Americans and a mixed-race future for the nation. In addition,
Du Bois locates his vision of post-apocalyptic change in the city, departing from the recurrently
pastoral visions of renewal created by other writers who utilized the mode. “The Comet” rethinks
both race and space in America, setting an important precedent for the development of the
apocalyptic mode in later decades, and revealing the many ways in which visions of apocalyptic
doom respond to one another across America’s racial terrain.
“The Comet” is set during one day in New York City and follows a pair of survivors, one
white and one black, who contemplate their future together before they realize that the comet
has killed only a small part of the population of the city, leaving most people unharmed. Du
Bois’s particular choice of apocalyptic devices was likely spurred by the recent hysteria over
Halley’s Comet, which had passed near Earth in 1910. With the advent of new technology,
scientific analysis of the comet suggested that it might poison the Earth. This possibility was
proclaimed by several newspapers, inciting widespread panic. One New York Times article,
titled, “Yerkes Observatory finds Cyanogen in Spectrum of Halley’s Comet,” explained that
cyanogen was a very deadly gas and warned that Prof. Camille Flammarion “is of the opinion
that the cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the
planet” (NYT 1910). Although other scientists disagreed with this prediction, many people
bought gas masks and “comet pills.” Of course, Halley’s Comet did no damage despite its close
Olivas 127

approach; but Du Bois could both tap into the traces of fear left by the astronomical event as well
as utilize a familiar framework for his apocalyptic narrative.
The sense that people of color already lived within a dystopic, post-apocalyptic world had
also been driven home the year before Darkwater was published during a period deemed “The
Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson. It is estimated that “seventy-six black people fell
victim to mob violence and white vigilantism in 1919, the highest total since 1908 and an
increase of forty from 1917” ( Williams 232). The gruesomeness of these causalities, as well as
their celebration by white supremacists in photographs and post-cards, and their recording and
political use by black publications like The Crisis placed them prominently in America’s racial
consciousness.
87
Further, the reality that such violence could take place on the streets of
northern cities added to a growing sense of national mistrust.
88
For African-Americans and
immigrants of color who had recently migrated towards the promise of the city, the mutilated
black body served as evidence that America had failed to escape from its long history of racial
violence and suggested that the future held little promise for people of color. It was a bloody
reminder that though WWI had offered new employment opportunities for many people of
color—including armed service—such momentary gains had spurred retaliatory violence after
the war from those wishing to maintain America’s social hierarchy.
89
The NAACP held up
examples of lynched black veterans as symbols of America’s failed promise and sought to use
such corpses to make claims for the expansion of democratic citizenship rights (Williams 188).

87
In “Not Only War is Hell: World War I and African American Lynching Narratives” David A. Davis investigates
the ways in which images of lynched black veterans were used to make a case for civil rights. Davis argues that
“Lynching is deeply embedded in America’s racial psyche,” (477), and posits that “By the time of World War I,
lynchings had developed into a programmatic ritual of torture and murder” (478).
88
According to historian Eric Arnesen, in 1919 race riots occurred in two dozen cities and towns, including Chicago
and Washington D.C.. The largest outbreak of racial violence happened in Chicago where, after five days of
violence, thirty-eight people were dead and more than five hundred were injured (33).
89
Because of both declining immigration and the enlistment of many young men during the war, American
industrial employers offered jobs to many white women and racial minorities. Arnesen argues that it was during the
first war that “blacks, especially men, got their first real foothold in industrial jobs in the North” (7).
Olivas 128

Yet many more years would pass before such inclusion would be realized. In fact, in the years
that followed the Red Summer many more African-Americans would lose their lives to ritualized
racial violence while legislators would pass some of the strictest anti-immigrant legislation in
American history.
90

African Americans also experienced higher rates of disease due to their commonly
impoverished neighborhoods, limited economic opportunities, and poor access to health care,
factors which contributed to disproportionately high infant mortality rates. Because these higher
rates of death corresponded to women’s increased fertility control and subsequent drop in birth
rates, many predicted the black race might be on its way to extinction.
91
Pronouncements of
probable extinction were everywhere in the years leading up to WWI. One article, titled “Negro
Race Dying Out” appeared in the New York Tribune in 1911, concluded that “after close
comparative study of the mortuary statistics of this and other cities, . . . the American Negro is
slowly and steadily dying out, and will be virtually extinct in the twenty-first century” (3). The
same report, based on the findings of a Richmond doctor, were reported by the New York Times
and Boston Daily Globe.
In response to such prognostications, activists like Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams
emphasized the environmental factors that contributed to black mortality rates. For example, in a
1915 Chicago Defender article, Williams refutes the claim that African-Americans are more

90
The Quota Act of 1921 limited immigrants to 3% of each nationality present in the US in 1910; In 1922 Japanese
are made ineligible for citizenship; In 1924 quotas changed to 2% of each nationality based on numbers in US in
1890 and the Border Patrol was officially established. In 1929 the annual quotas of the 1924 Act were made
permanent.
91
According to Michele Mitchell, “Birthrates of native-born white and black women in the United States declined
with each decade as the nineteenth century ended and continued to do so as the new century progressed. The
diminution hardly went unnoticed. Most notably, perhaps, declining birthrates stoked fears about ‘race suicide,’ a
contemporary expression that encapsulated anxieties about immigration and concerns about women’s mobility,
increased access to higher education, use of birth control, and reevaluation of motherhood. (Mitchell 90-1).

Olivas 129

prone to disease and dying than their white counterparts. Williams reprints part of an address
given at a conference on tuberculosis, assuring readers that “The environment of the Negro in its
relation to the diseases which affect him, and especially tuberculosis, to which the claim is made
that he is so generically susceptible, offers an inviting field—and heretofore an unexplored field
for medical investigation, and affords a splendid opportunity for earnest effort on the part of all
sincere social workers” (8). Williams was at the forefront of a progressive movement which
sought to create a better future for the African American community by joining domestic science
with political pleas to combat the consequences of urban poverty. Through his social work he
“addressed urban sanitary conditions on a regular basis throughout the 1910s,” thus joining the
Progressive move towards the maintenance of a “sanitary home” (Mitchell 165). Many
community activists “equated filth with segregation,” and placed the blame for urban squalor and
disease squarely on the shoulders of a government upholding Jim Crow (Mitchell 169).
Yet while there were many valid reasons why African-Americans should worry about the
health of their communities, rampant predictions of so-called Negro extinction were encouraged
and often exaggerated by what Kodwo Eshun terms the “futures industries” of the era, a
conglomeration of scientific researchers, health and immigration reformers, domestic science
activists, and various popular culture media that disseminated predictive narratives premised
upon late nineteenth-century scientific racialism. While the participants in this “futures industry”
offered optimistic predictions for the White race, they contended that African-Americans were
biologically predisposed to degeneration and/or extinction. Most notable, perhaps, was Frederick
Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), in which he determined,
through data analysis, that African-Americans were a dying race. Hoffman asserts that not only
has there been a noticeable decrease in the African-American population but that such a decrease
Olivas 130

is a result of biological weakness. After blandly asserting his objectivity as a researcher, he
writes, “The decrease in the rate of increase in the colored population has been traced first to the
excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity” (310). In his
conclusion Hoffman notes “the powerful influence of race in the struggle for life”; however,
rather than see race as something that helps determine one’s environment, he asserts it as an
ontological category. He argues: “we have here abundant evidence that we find in race and
heredity the determining factor in the upward or downward course of mankind” (310).
Hoffman’s assertion that African-Americans were biologically predisposed to death and
degeneration was commonly accepted as an evolutionary truth in the early twentieth century. In
her work on reproduction and the concept of “racial destiny” in African-American culture at the
turn of the century, Michele Mitchell claims that popular texts like Hoffman’s “were neither
unusual nor extreme within majority discourse” (82). In fact, Mitchell argues that “Frederick
Hoffman’s [text] was simultaneously hailed by scientific racialists as providing incontrovertible
statistical evidence that African Americans were irredeemable” (83). Further, as Mitchell points
out, such racialist logic was so deeply embedded within the American consciousness that one
could even find it among the writings of African-Americans. William Hannibal Thomas, who
would later be labeled the “Black Judas,” infamously wrote The American Negro (1901) in
which he argued that “an imperious sexual impulse . . .[in] Negro character constitutes the main .
. . degeneracy of the race, and is the chief hindrance to [the race’s] social uplifting” (Mitchell
83).
92
For Thomas and for others who shared his views, degeneracy was the result of the
proliferation of bad genetic types. Within a Social Darwinist framework African-Americans were
bound to degeneration and eventual extinction in a world of superior racial types; like the Native

92
For more on Thomas see John David Smith’s Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro
(2002).
Olivas 131

Americans before them, African Americans were subject to a narrative of inevitable
disappearance.
93

According to eugenicists, traits like criminality, feeblemindedness, and vulnerability to
disease were biologically predetermined and inheritable, as were propensities for artistic,
intellectual, and physical ability. Such traits were also understood to be structured by racial
and/or ethnic heredity; instead of seeing race as a factor that influenced economic opportunities,
education, or access to medical services, eugenicists believed that race determined one’s physical
constitution and behavior (without regard to environment). As geneticist and prominent
eugenicist Charles Davenport argued in Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), “all men are
created bound by their protoplasmic makeup and unequal in their powers and responsibilities”
(iv). Therefore young people must learn “to fall in love intelligently” (4). Such popular
arguments became more specifically racialized through discussions of amalgamation. While
Davenport would argue against racial amalgamation based on his belief that racial mixing could
be “disharmonious” (Provine 791), other eugenicists were less benign in their estimation of the
darker races. In 1918 anti-miscegenist rhetoric gained a more insidious foothold in eugenic
discourse when Paul Popenoe and Roswell H. Johnson, published Applied Eugenics, which
William Provine asserts was “the most widely used textbook on this subject for more than 15
years” (791). In Applied Eugenics Popenoe and Johnson plainly assert that “it must be admitted
not only that the Negro is different from the white, but that he is in the large eugenically inferior
to the white (286). They thus conclude that:
There is some evidence from life insurance and medical sources, that the mulatto
stands above the Negro but below the white in respect to his health. There is

93
Reginald Horsman explores the history of these beliefs in Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American
Racial Anglo-Saxonism, arguing that “by the early 1850s the inherent inequality of the races was simply accepted as
a scientific fact in America” (134).
Olivas 132

considerable evidence that he occupies the same relation in the intellectual world;
it is a matter of general observation that nearly all the leaders of the Negro race in
the United States are not Negroes but mulattoes. Without going into detail, we
feel perfectly safe in drawing this conclusion: that in general the white race loses
and the Negro gains from miscegenation. (293)
These scientific assertions about innate racial inequality would be echoed by others within the
scientific community throughout the next decade despite the presence of increasingly vocal
disagreement by anthropologists such as Franz Boas.
94

As I illustrated in my last chapter, such discourse was also ubiquitous outside of the
scientific community. In fact, Daylanne English argues that in the 1910s and 1920s eugenics can
be considered “the paradigmatic modern American discourse”(2).
95
It is not surprising that such
pseudo-science was so popular, after all, the eugenic movement offered white supremacy
scientific credibility, thereby naturalizing American imperialism in places inhabited by the
darker races as it simultaneously justified inequality at home. Eugenic thought also cast a
shadow of futility over social work whose focus was the preservation and promotion of the black
community by making the social ills of African-Americans and other people of color seem like
the natural consequences of some biological weakness. In fact, within the logic of eugenics,
preserving “bad stock” through social activism or community assistance would only lead to a
kind of unnatural selection. Though some Progressives sought to improve the lives of the poor

94
According to William Provine it wouldn’t be until the 1930s that the majority of scientists began to change their
minds about amalgamation. Provine explains that “this change came [partially] from biological evidence. In the late
1920's and early 1930's geneticists experienced a growing realization that human heredity was more complex than
they had previously thought. Thus they became more hesitant to make positive statements about hereditary race
differences and the effects of race crossing” (794).
95
As an example English points out that the success and popularity of eugenic discourses led to legislation and
jurisprudence in the U.S.: “Between 1907 and 1930, twenty-four states enacted statutes permitting compulsory
sterilization of feebleminded or otherwise dysgenic state residents”(10).
Olivas 133

and disenfranchised, many assumed that “the savage races might take generations—even
centuries—to catch up, even given the most careful, paternalistic attentions from benevolent
Anglo-Saxons” (Bederman 123).
At the same time, many White eugenicists, such as Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard,
and Clinton Stoddard Burr “decried the ‘dysgenic’ effects of the war in killing off the ‘fittest’ of
Nordic ‘stock’” and feared “the rising tide of color” (Whalan 16).
96
Of course, such fears were
premised upon the idea that Anglo-Saxons were the proper heirs to the evolutionary throne, and
that the war had unnaturally dispensed with the world’s fittest people. In contrast, the deaths and
suffering of people of color was imagined as a more natural step in the evolutionary order.
National survival, which was viewed as inherently tied to the health and power of the White race,
America’s ostensible “best and brightest,” would require the preservation and policing of White
bodies.
Thus when Du Bois confronted the problems facing the black community—and the
international oppressed classes more generally—in the 1920s, he knew that he not only needed to
grapple with the dire economic conditions, violence, and structural inequalities that plagued
communities of color, he needed to deal with the racist ideologies of difference that supported
and naturalized the globalized social hierarchy. Conveniently, the extremity of the war had
opened a conceptual space in which to reassess the ideology of white supremacy and European
superiority that had long formed the centerpiece of the discourse of civilization. After the
devastating use of new military technologies it seemed, as Marcus Garvey said in 1922, that the
West was “competing with itself for its own destruction” (25). Many modernist writers and
artists famously turned away from Europe towards other cultural sites, trying to find a way out of

96
Grant’s 1916 bestseller The Passing of the Great Race (revised in 1918) was just one of several texts predicting
the decline of the West, a decline of which the war was the ultimate expression” (Whalan 16).
Olivas 134

a culture that seemed doomed by its own greed and aggression. As a result, new cultural value
was given to African-Americans, Africans, Asians, and other groups who had been “othered” by
the hegemonic discourse of civilization.
97
But for activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, such cultural
valuation was not enough to ensure greater equality in America and the world more broadly.
What was needed was an extreme shift within the ideological foundations of Western thought, a
re-evaluation, not just of the cultural riches of people of color, but a reevaluation of the humanity
of people of color.
Du Bois recognized that most forms of modern exploitation—capitalism, racism, and
colonialism—were justified by ideologies of essentialized racial difference in which some people
are more “human” than others. In other words, he recognized the myriad ways in which the
hegemonic discourses of race and civilization functioned to uphold and naturalize social
hierarchies. By championing an inclusive humanity, by restructuring the meaning of that
concept, he could fight all forms of exploitation at their conceptual base. In his radical
confrontation with ideology Du Bois sought out what Frantz Fanon would later call “a new
humanism.”
98
As Fanon would declare in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), “When I search for
Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an
avalanche of murders” (252). He contends that we “need a new model” and proposes, “Let us try
to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth”
(252).
Du Bois’s interest in breaking down ideologies of difference was also stimulated by his
hopes for the expansion of worker’s rights and for a more inclusive socialism. The shifting

97
As many scholars of modernism have argued, Western art and music were forever changed by Africanist
influences and an aesthetic return to so-called primitive art.
98
Recognizing that the very concept of “human” was socially constructed (sociogeny), rather than biologically
constructed (phylogeny/ontogeny), Fanon would similarly advocate the deconstruction of Western conceptions of
men/women, black/white, at the level of the “human.”
Olivas 135

demographics of the industrial sector resulting from war conditions had led many black workers
to believe that their economic prospects were improving; however, most were denied entry into
trade unions or given support in securing fair wages or working conditions. Du Bois was
frustrated with the racism of socialist groups and by their blindness to issues of race. He
chronicled the exclusion of Black workers in The Crisis, seeking to expose the rampant
hypocrisy of many so-called socialist organizations.
99
As Reiland Rabaka claims, Du Bois
understood that “The white communists and socialists had volumes of radical rhetoric regarding
the ‘brotherhood of mankind’ and the equality and inherent rights of workers, when in actuality
they meant white workers and even more . . . white male workers” (116). Du Bois sought a
socialism that aspired to equality for all people, and hoped to achieve a true brotherhood of man.
With his burgeoning Pan-African sensibilities, Du Bois extended his socialist vision beyond
borders of race and nation and envisioned a new global reality. In his 1916 “The Battle of
Europe” he writes: “Brothers, the war has shown us the cruelty of the civilization of the West.
History has taught us the futility of the civilization of the East. Let ours be the civilization of no
man, but of all men” (217).
Out of this growing sensibility to both the globalized nature of racial and economic
exploitation and the racial “science” which justified such widespread abuse, Du Bois composed
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. Darkwater is both a scathing analysis of the ideology of
inequality that lays the foundation for Western imperialism, and a revolutionary and prescriptive
realization of the possibility of a new humanism. Throughout the text Du Bois proposes a view
of humanity that shifts conceptually away from ideologies of difference and towards an
understanding of human camaraderie. This need for a conceptual shift continually emerges
within the work’s more specific discussions of social ills. For example, as he speculates about

99
“Trades Unions” The Crisis, 15, no. 5. March 1918.
Olivas 136

the possibility of democratizing industry in America he exclaims: “But beyond all this must
come the Spirit—the Will to Human Brotherhood of all Colors, Races, and Creeds; the Wanting
of the Wants of All.” (123); and when he considers Africa’s future he asks, “What shall the end
be? The world-old and fearful things,--war and wealth, murder and luxury? Or shall it be a new
thing,--a new peace and a new democracy of all races,--a great humanity of equal men? (56).
Ultimately it is this “discovery of a common humanity of human beings among steadily-
increasing circles of men” that Du Bois hopes to catalyze through his text (115).
Darkwater allows Du Bois to analyze the ideological foundations of a world engaged in
catastrophic warfare. Making connections between evolutionary theory, scientific racialism,
colonialism, and the issues of the Great War, Du Bois centers his critique on the failure of the
modern West to value human lives, identifying a penchant for “human hatred” (35). According
to Du Bois this “despising of men” (35), as well as an overvaluation of whiteness, are part of a
terrible “phantasy” that has “imprisoned and enthralled” the Western world (24). Thus, to build
a better future Du Bois argues for nothing less than an epistemological shift, a new way of
thinking about the human. Without such a shift, the Western world would continue to fail at its
supposed democratic mission, for how can any nation that uses an ideology of innate racial
inequality to justify global (and internal) imperialism succeed in “realizing the broadest measure
of justice to all human beings” (DW 110)? Without granting full humanity to people of color, the
Western world would continue to suffer culturally from racial exclusion, for the “spiritual losses
may be vast and fatal and yet all unknown and unrealized because idea and dream and ability are
paralyzed by brute force” (DW 120). Without such a shift, Du Bois exclaims in a revolutionary
spirit, there will inevitably be more bloodshed, for if Europe clings to an ideology of racial
inequality “this is not the end of world war,--it is but the beginning!” (DW 35).
Olivas 137

In order to facilitate this conceptual shift Du Bois utilizes a variety of genres and textual
strategies. First, Du Bois unifies various social oppressions, revealing their commonality, by
combining their discussion within one text. Critics such as Susan Gillman and Alys Eve
Weinbaum have noted that Darkwater’s texts are in “mutual dialogue,” and through their
juxtaposition they transform one another and alter the meaning of the text as a whole (6). His
combination of topics elucidates the network of oppression linking American racism and
European imperialism, and it is for this insight that Darkwater is most often cited. Further, in
texts like “A Litany in Atlanta,” and “The Hands of Ethiopia,” Du Bois draws a line which
reveals the international community of the black diaspora and which helps his readers see the
immediacy of the violence abroad as well as at home. Similarly, by including “The Damnation
of Women” and “The Servant in the House,” Du Bois shows how issues of race, class, and
gender overlap and reinforce one another.
But As “A Litany in Atlanta” illustrates, Du Bois did not rely on the essay alone to
deliver his sociological and political views. Darkwater contains several short allegorical pieces
and poems that use religious imagery to make political pleas for civil rights. For example, “A
Litany in Atlanta” serves as a desperate call for God’s help in the face of endless violence.
Capturing the sense of despair and urgency that the black community suffered during the Red
Summer, Du Bois asks, “Doth not this justice of hell stink in Thy nostrils, O God? How long
shall the mounting flood of innocent blood roar in Thine ears and pound in our hearts for
vengeance? (18). “Jesus Christ in Texas” aligns the lynching of a black man with the martyrdom
of Jesus; “The Second Coming” imagines a black Jesus. Such pieces add a sense of prophecy to
Du Bois’s discussion of America’s present and future and fit in well with a community of black
readers steeped in the literature of the Bible. They also elucidate the rampant hypocrisy of a
Olivas 138

Christian community that supports racial violence and, by casting Jesus Christ as black, suggest
the common suffering of humanity while also destabilizing the connections between racial
ideology and religious dogma.
As a tale of apocalyptic change and revelation, “The Comet” is similarly informed by
Biblical tradition, but the apocalypse proves to be an especially potent device for undermining
the racist logic that perpetuates violence and inequality. An apocalyptic narrative about the
seeming annihilation of humanity, “The Comet” is fundamentally about human survival and
thereby allows Du Bois the fullest expression of his sociological diagnosis. In using the
apocalyptic mode Du Bois is able to destabilize familiar racial hierarchies and instead draw
attention to the common humanity which binds his characters together. In a post-apocalyptic
world interracial cooperation becomes a matter of survival, for the nation and for humanity, and
prejudice seems absurdly un-pragmatic and increasingly irrelevant. Thus, “The Comet” serves as
a fictional literalization of his calls for a new humanism articulated in other parts of Darkwater;
in it he seems to recognize the critical possibilities of the apocalyptic mode.
* * *
In the opening scene of “The Comet” we meet Jim, a young African-American
messenger, who stands on the steps of a bank on Broadway feeling invisible to the hordes of
people who move through the city. Du Bois writes, “Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him
save in a way that stung. He was outside the world—‘nothing!’ as he said bitterly” (195). Du
Bois stresses the stakes of Jim’s social devaluation by describing the hazardous occupation
allotted him. Specifically, Jim faces the perils of the lower bank vaults, a dark labyrinth that he
must navigate because, as Jim acknowledges, “It was too dangerous for more valuable men”
(195). Within the context of the other sections of Darkwater, Jim’s experience reflects the lives
Olivas 139

of many African-Americans of post-war America who, in 1920 when “The Comet” appeared
were not only struggling to attain economic and political power in the United States, but were
fighting for their lives in a society which treated them as expendable. Thus when the bank
president asks Jim if he is scared about the approaching comet he shortly replies “No.” How can
one be afraid of such a mystical threat when faced with such real perils on a daily basis?
Du Bois’s apocalypse offers an opportunity for change to an already troubled world; for
despite the frightening confrontation with an astronomical body, it is in the post-apocalyptic
world ushered in by the comet where Jim’s humanity is finally recognized. Du Bois begins by
illustrating Jim’s lack of worth within modern Manhattan in order to illustrate the chasm between
reality and possibility. When Jim, who we now understand is black and relatively powerless,
descends into Manhattan’s dark underbelly and becomes trapped in a bank vault, Du Bois
provides an image that serves as a clear metaphor for America’s social hierarchy; but Du Bois
also emphasizes how Jim’s isolation from the white world is initially what saves him. When Jim
emerges from the vault the world has changed. Bodies are strewn across the bank floor, and
across the city streets. “The stillness of death lay everywhere and everywhere bowed, bent, and
stretched the silent forms of men” (197). Broadway is no longer thriving with the rhythm of
movement but is instead filled with corpses. Yet within this deadly post-apocalyptic space Jim is
liberated. Hungrily grasping food from a Fifth Avenue restaurant, Jim thinks, “Yesterday, they
would not have served me” (Du Bois 198). Rather than take a subway to Harlem he gets into the
first Ford he sees, parked on the side of the street, and rushes off past “crowds and groups of
cars, pausing by dead policemen” (198-199). He now has more mobility in New York than he
has ever experienced. Thus, while Jim is clearly horrified by the death that surrounds him—he
actually falls fainting over a corpse—he is also immediately aware that such mass death has
Olivas 140

inaugurated a shift in social norms. Now there are only the dead and the living, the human
survivor and those who have succumbed to catastrophe. Jim’s survival is the first sign of his
humanity, for in the logic of popular evolutionary discourse, only the most civilized, only the
most human among us, will survive.
100

New possibilities for social connection exist within the post-apocalyptic city where
human community becomes a divine gift and “human” supplants all other social identities.
When Jim first hears another person speak, “the human voice sounded in his ears like the voice
of God” (Du Bois 199). Solitude now draws survivors together and necessity compels them to
transcend ideologies of difference which might earlier have prevented their communion. When
Jim comes face to face with Julia, a young white survivor, Du Bois writes: “They stared a
moment in silence. She had not noticed before that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as
white” (199). Clearly race has not disappeared, because the two are compelled by their social
history to regard one another through an engrained racial lens. Yet their circumstances compel
them to think of one another as human first, as racial subjects second. “So a moment each paused
and gauged the other; then the thought of the dead world without rushed in and they started
toward each other” (199). In this moment, the status of human has become unfettered from the
ideologies of difference that enabled the previous racial hierarchy. Jim and Julia are now
connected and comforted by their human similarity and are compelled to consciously disregard
race.
In a city hit hard by disaster racial difference no longer seems relevant or tenable. Julia
looks to Jim for comfort, while Jim asks her to accompany him to Harlem so that he might
discover the fate of his family. When Jim emerges from his house in Harlem, he tells Julia that

100
As Kay Anderson argues in Race and the Crisis of Humanism, because evolutionary theory suggested that some
races were destined to die out, “to be civilized . . . was to survive as a people” (30).

Olivas 141

he has lost “everybody” (200). They search the city together, desperately hoping to find other
survivors but find no one. There is nothing but “Silence, silence everywhere, and no human
sign” (202). Through their desperate searching, and experience with death and loss the two bond
quickly like soldiers on a battlefield. In this way Du Bois imagines a relationship between a
black man and a white woman that does not seem like a threat to eugenic or moral purity but
instead seems like the most rational, most pragmatic response to a world in crisis.
Within this imaginative framework Julia begins to see Jim more and more as a man and
less as a black man. When Jim makes decisions about their next course of action, “She looked at
him now with strength and confidence. He did not look like men, as she had always pictured
men; but he acted like one and she was content” (202). Although she later experiences a moment
of fear when contemplating Jim as nothing but a black male threat, she concludes that he, in fact,
“seemed very human,--very near now,” and she exclaims “how foolish our human distinctions
seem—now,” to which Jim responds “Yes—I was not—human, yesterday”(205). The coming of
the comet allows Jim to show his true quality and humanity. It brings about the utopian
possibility that Du Bois longs for in “Of Work and Wealth” when he writes “What a world this
would be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is
no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior!” (emphasis added 78). As Du Bois
allows his readers to witness Julia’s discovery of Jim as a man, to see past her fears of him and
instead to urge him away from suicide, he offers readers a radical conceptual awakening. While
this image of interracial companionship compels white readers to see the humanity of a young
black man, it also suggests that the prejudices held by the white middle class are not fixed. After
all, the apocalypse has only just occurred and Julia has already let go of her fears of rape and
instead sought friendship and comfort with Jim.
Olivas 142

Of course, since they may be the only survivors of the comet, Jim and Julia not only need
one another, the post-apocalyptic world needs them. Soon after they realize their shared
humanity Jim and Julia contemplate their new roles as progenitors of the future. Du Bois offers a
provocative image of potential interracial romance as Jim and Julia regard each other. Drawing
towards one another, “they saw each other face to face—eye to eye. Their souls lay naked to the
night. It was not lust; it was not love—it was some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither
touch of body nor thrill of soul. It was a thought divine, splendid” (207). Julia thinks of herself as
“primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life,” and she thinks only of
Jim’s “vigorous manhood” (206). Jim sees himself as a “mighty Pharaoh” as he is drawn towards
his procreative destiny (207). This moment offers a vision of interracial connection that speaks
loudly against the anti-miscegenation and eugenic discourses of people like Popenoe and
Johnson.
101
Du Bois’s narrative also challenges common assumptions about black male
sexuality; Jim is no threatening sexual predator but a gentle man whose virility can enable the
creation of a new civilization.
In its challenge to racial stereotypes Du Bois’s narrative is a creative complement to the
scientifically-based deconstruction of essentialist and biological racial discourses articulated by
those such as Franz Boas whom Du Bois had so frequently published and promoted in The Crisis
and to which he refers in other parts of Darkwater.
102
The specter of mass death has caused a rift
in the fabric of the norm, offering characters and readers alike a new perspective on their
relationships and their city. In this way the comet has fulfilled an apocalyptic promise: it has

101
Because, as Rod Edmonds asserts, “racial theory, with its insistence on the purity and supremacy of Aryan races,
implied the inevitability of decline as races as cultures mixed and reproduced” (40), one can see the radical nature of
Du Bois’s positive representation of potential interracial procreation.
102
Du Bois often used Boas to support his contention that racial hierarchies had no biological foundation. This is one
of the central arguments of “The Real Race Problem,” an essay by Boas that was included in one of the very first
issues of The Crisis.
Olivas 143

provided a revelation, an unveiling, of the kind that was offered to John of Patmos in the Bible.
Jim and his white companion make this narrative device explicit. As they sit on a rooftop in
Manhattan contemplating their potential future together, Jim mutters “Death, the leveler!” and
Julia responds “And the revealer” (206).
By privileging biological reproduction as a central component of the new world, “The
Comet” is clearly in step with eugenic discourses of its day. In fact, by ending Jim and Julia’s
post-apocalyptic revelry with the imagination of an interracial future, “The Comet” offers a
heterosexual eugenic solution to the problem of the color line similar to the utopian ending
envisioned in Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928).
103
Such a pro-natal paradigm presented particular
difficulties for women as well as for those who resisted the heterosexual imperative. Within Du
Bois’s framework Jim is the great “Pharaoh,” the patriarch and noble progenitor of mankind, not
a sub-human type whose ascendance on the evolutionary ladder has been stalled out by
biological ineptitude. But what position does this leave for Julia? Or for Jim’s wife who appears
at the tale’s end? Are these women simply to be the baby-makers which eugenic culture has
urged them to be? Are they the epic mothers, the “black Madonnas,” promoted through the
discourse of true womanhood?
104

Despite his radical argument for miscegenation, one cannot overlook the ways in which
Du Bois’s eugenic fantasy participated in the prescriptive domestic and sexual discourses of his
day, and recognize the ways in which such discourses could alienate black women, thereby
arresting the power of any collective movement for civil rights. Eugenic discourse angered many

103
Critics have noted Du Bois’s tendency to use romance as a means for imagining political change. Weinbaum
argues that for Du Bois interracial romance became a central part of his “antiracist, anti-imperialist, internationalist
politics of the 1920s.” (Weinbaum)
104
In “The Black Madonna: Notions of True Womanhood from Jacobs to Hurston” Laurie Kaiser argues that the
“black madonna’ character developed in African American literature to compete with the ideal of the white
Madonna upheld by the cult of true womanhood” (98).
Olivas 144

women of Du Bois’s era—both white and black—for its insistence on women’s roles as mothers,
and many resented the ways in which such positioning disabled them economically, politically,
and sexually. For many it was difficult to be recognized politically and intellectually when
motherhood was seen as one’s highest calling, or as one’s “duty” to a race that was in ostensible
decline. And for those who struggled economically such pro-natalist rhetoric ignored the
material difficulties which children could exacerbate. Many opponents of birth control were
concerned about the “survival of ‘the race’ and the large family, but did not address the triple
work load most black women faced. Rearing children, doing housework, and working outside the
home were common for many African American women, working-class women in particular”
(Hart 74). Thus, while many “black men of the 1920s and ‘30s promoted an ideology of
glorified black motherhood . . . .1920s black women writers attempted to create a geographic and
discursive space for sexual yet childless black women in masculinized Harlem” (Stavney 534).
Writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston directly confronted natalist rhetoric
in their work as they sought to eradicate both racial and gendered social prescriptions. In
response to narratives like “The Comet” and to the overt social and political activism of eugenic
uplifters, they created narratives in which women resisted maternity. For example, rather than
allow Teacake to survive the apocalyptic Hurricane that bears down on Florida near the end of
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston has Janie shoot him in self-defense. Hurston then
leaves us with a vision of Janie speaking intimately with a female friend and finding peace alone
in her house. Wrapping her shawl around her she seems to hug herself, claiming the body that for
so long has been used and threatened by others. Her progression to this point in the novel has
been gradual, but Janie’s freedom and pleasure at the end of Their Eyes suggests that Hurston
saw some improvements in an African American woman’s ability to possess, and to love, her
Olivas 145

own body. In a less joyful ending, Larsen’s Helga Crane resists motherhood only to succumb to
it in the closing pages of the story, when it overwhelms her completely. As she loses herself in
constant pregnancy, Helga loses her identity and vitality. Allison Berg argues that Larsen “does
not allow her heroine to ‘refuse’ motherhood, focusing instead on the damaging effects of
culturally enforced maternity . . . Larsen makes maternity the greatest obstacle to black women’s
self-realization and artistic production (105-106). In this way, Berg argues, Larsen’s depiction of
Crane “implicitly asks for a broader definition of black womanhood” (106).
“The Comet” thus reveals the ways in which the political work of some apocalyptic
narratives can be limited by an emphasis in procreative futures. But while “The Comet’ might
fall short of renovating early twentieth century gender expectations, it offers a startling look at a
mixed-race future. Du Bois’s eugenic fantasy is interracial, an extremely radical image for 1920s
America. Ideas about miscegenation, and the miscegenation laws that normalized and
legitimated such ideas, have been central to constructions of race in America. Peggy Pascoe
argues that after Reconstruction miscegenation laws functioned as “the ultimate sanction of the
American system of white supremacy” and reminds us that “at one time or another, 41 American
states and colonies enacted them” (49). Thus while Du Bois may be endorsing heteronormativity
and an urgent procreation, I would argue, along with Daylanne English, that one must view his
interracial vision within the climate of his times. English argues:
As a result of his rigorous defense of the quality of the mulatto, critics have often
ascribed to Du Bois a color-based intraracial elitism. But Du Bois’s discussions of
quality and color in the 1920s must be seen in the context of his refutation of
‘mainline’ American and European eugenics—the most powerful and common
Olivas 146

version, a Stoddardian version that took the biological inferiority of the racially
mixed as a given. (English 60)
Presenting an interracial human family as the promise of the future ran counter to almost all of
the other prescriptions for societal improvement of the era.
105
Du Bois was using the concept of
the interracial family as a radical metaphor for an emergent nation and an emergent humanity.
106

In the end, “The Comet” reaches no utopian conclusion, a step which could provide a
limited blueprint for his readers. Instead, civilization returns with its racist assault when Jim and
Julia are joined suddenly by a group of white men, one of whom hurries toward them calling out
“My daughter!” It seems that while many people in New York City have succumbed to the
cosmic gasses within the comet’s tail, those on the outskirts of town and beyond have survived.
When life returns Julia removes her gaze from Jim, never to glance at him again, and her father
hands Jim money, thanking him for taking care of his daughter. In this moment Jim has once
again been relegated to his former position of almost complete powerlessness. In addition, cries
from the crowd to “lynch” him, are reminders that Jim is again threatened by white violence,
while the money bestowed on him by Julia’s father indicates his ostensible value in American
society. When Jim’s wife and dead infant appear on the roof shortly thereafter, he is confronted
by a picture of his bleak future. While his imagined mixed-race children could have been the

105
Of course, while mainstream eugenic discourse spoke of miscegenation, or “amalgamation” more commonly, as
a threat to racial purity and thus to racial fitness, some argued, like Du Bois, that amalgamation would make the
species stronger, or that amalgamation was actually the norm. At Michele Mitchell recalls, many claimed the
ubiquity of mixed blood: “Shortly before the 1890 census classified approximately 15 percent of the race as
‘mulatto,’ noted author Charles Chestnutt argued that more than half of the race was ‘of mixed blood.’ Over a
decade later, journalist T. Thomas Fortune believed 30 percent was more accurate; Pauline Hopkins ventured in her
novel Contending Forces (1900) that ‘no such thing as an unmixed black on the American continent’ still existed”
(Mitchell 212).
106
Walter Benn Michaels argues that the importance of the family as a means to represent the collective national
identity “began in the 1920s to occupy a central position in American culture, which is to say, first, in the idea of
what an American was and, second, in the idea of what a culture was. The significance of the family is that it was in
terms of family relations that the new structures of identity were articulated.” (6). See Our America (1995).

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future of all humanity and he the patriarch, his black baby is dead and he is once again a member
of the underclass. His wife, who is “brown, small, and toil-worn” (209), remains unnamed and
silent as she falls into his arms.
This ending emphasizes the reality of black oppression in similar ways to the tale’s
beginning. Yet, now that we have come to know Jim and Julia, racial inequality seems even
more ridiculous. Jim, who has shown himself to be the stronger and more capable of the two, is
now less valuable than Julia within America’s racial hierarchy. The threats to lynch Jim seem
cruel and absurd after he has revealed his kind and empathetic nature. Once Julia has seen him as
a man, once we have seen him as a man, his demotion to a less-than-human servitude seems
strange. Racial hierarchies seem abnormal. And we feel Jim’s sadness when faced with his dead
child, as the corpse represents a now-dead future that had just seemed so bright.
Du Bois refuses to give his readers a happy ending, or a sort of narrative opiate; instead,
he leaves readers frustrated—as they should be when considering the reality of racial oppression
in America—but stimulated by the thought experiment, or experience, enabled by Du Bois’s use
of the apocalyptic imagination. After reading “The Comet,” one realizes that Du Bois’s story has
accomplished one of the powerful feats of speculative fiction: it has defamiliarized normative
social ideologies.
107
In this case, race can no longer be seen as a biological or ontological reality;
it has been revealed as ideology. “The Comet” enables a transformation of perception, opening
up a reader’s ability to see through apparently natural ideologies and leading to an enlightened
understanding of the constructedness of the present. It reminds readers, as it reminds Jim and

107
While the term “defamiliarization” was originally coined by Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky to describe a
technique which he saw as integral to all literature, science fiction critics have identified defamiliarization as a
central mode of sf. . Darko Suvin, a leading critic in science fiction studies, has characterized defamiliarization as
“cognitive estrangement,” in his attempt to describe a “creative approach toward a dynamic transformation rather
than toward a static mirroring of the author’s environment” (qtd in Varsam 206).
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Julia, that race is a constructed distinction that is nonexistent outside the strictures of social
norms.
But it is significant that “The Comet” is not just speculative fiction, but apocalyptic
fiction. As several critics have noted, the short story’s interest in widespread death was
undoubtedly a result of the experience of WWI. Amy Kaplan acknowledges the topicality of the
genre in 1920 by reading the apocalyptic violence as a metaphor that “merges the carnage of
European ‘civilization,’ the “Red Summer” across the United States, the militancy of the black
soldiers who “return fighting,” and the threat of anticolonial revolts at home and abroad,” and
argues that “The comet brings the war home into the modern metropolis and into the heart of the
black and white families” (Kaplan 207). Kaplan’s critique is helpful in elucidating the ways in
which the experience of the war destabilized race relations in America. Similarly, Reiland
Rabaka argues that Du Bois creates “a world which metaphorically mirrors the one white folk
imperially invented and orchestrated, especially considering the then-recent bloodbath of World
War I” (67). The casualties of the comet certainly invoke the numerous corpses of the era’s
conflicts.
In addition, the post-apocalyptic space has an uncanny resemblance to the “no-man’s
land” of the war. Like “no-man’s-land” Du Bois’s post-apocalyptic city is a site that in its
startling confrontation with death unhinges normative social ideology. By the time Du Bois
wrote “The Comet” the conceptual space of “no-man’s land” had become an enduring part of the
cultural memory of the WWI. In his investigation into the psychological effects of the war, Eric
Leeds discovered that “astonishing numbers of those who wrote about their experience of war
designate No Man’s Land as their most lasting and disturbing image. This was a term that
captured the essence of an experience of having been sent beyond the outer boundaries of social
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life, placed between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the uncanny” (15). Veterans
recounting their experiences in no-man’s-land explained that despite the danger and death that
lurked in such spaces, “there were strongly positive and intrinsically rewarding elements” such
as “the comradeship that erased ‘artificial’ social barriers” (Leeds 24).
After the war this liminal space became a familiar motif in popular literature, especially
among black writers. Mark Whalan argues that African American writers were principally drawn
to this space because it was a place where traditional social rules and expectations are suspended.
He writes:
The appropriation of no-man’s-land gave a particularly African American
inflection to one of the most evocative landscapes and metaphors of the war; the
terrain operated as a desegregated space that, in the violence it hosted, did not
discriminate according to race (or indeed class or nation) and was quintessentially
modern. The space-in-between, thereby, became libratory, taken up by African
American writers who saw in it a potent territory to enact their own dreams of
inclusion and self-presence. Such a space severely troubled social hierarchies of
all kinds . . . (81).
No-man’s-land appeared in a variety of works from the period suggesting that it had become a
familiar mode for processing the changing terrain of America’s racial landscape. According to
Whalan, at least four works appeared in the Crisis between 1920 and 1924 that dealt centrally
with the experience of no-man’s-land, and other texts, such as Jessie Fauset’s novel There is
Confusion (1924) and Victor Daly’s Not Only War:A Story of Two Great Conflicts (1932)
utilized the space in their final pages (70). In many of these wartime stories white and black
soldiers rescue one another and/or die together and in the process are compelled to rethink their
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conceptions of race. There is often a physical closeness between the men, who, injured and
bleeding, forge a type of “homosocial reconciliation” on the battlefield (Whalan 80). For
example, in Florence Bentley’s “Two Americans,” published in The Crisis in 1921, a young
black soldier walking through no-man’s-land meets the injured white leader of the lynching
posse who killed his brother. Bentley emphasizes the horror of the young black man’s
experience through his recollection of his brother’s lynching. Yet within the space of no-man’s-
land, and after a visit from his ghostly brother, he decides to carry the injured white soldier to
safety. As the two lay together seeking medical care, they begin to understand racism more
clearly. One night the young white soldier says elliptically before he falls to sleep: “I’m thinkin’
if those folks back home could see this Hell that hate has made over here—maybe they would
get a light on some things. If I ever get back’[ . . .]” (252). In the end both men die of their
injuries and are buried in the same grave. As two unidentified soldiers they are simply labeled
“Two Americans.” In the space of no-man’s land men could come to know one another within a
desegregated space, perhaps the only desegregated space they had ever had the chance to
explore.
“The Comet” was also born out of the ideological instability caused by the war
experience. WWI had offered many soldiers new opportunities for crossing racial lines, and had
at once revealed the internationalism of racism and the relativity of racial ideology. In fact, many
Black soldiers argued that the war had expanded their sense of the world. As part of his
investigation of the experiences of African American soldiers during the first World War, Chad
Williams cites one veteran who exclaimed “My mind had broadened and I had a greater vision of
the world,” and another who recalled, “Those experiences have broadened my vision, [I] am no
longer a provincialist” (146). Many black soldiers had friendly and even romantic interactions
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with white French women during their time overseas, and many began to see the mutability and
relativity of racial ideology. Du Bois chronicled many of these experiences in The Crisis, and
traveled overseas himself several times.
Yet Du Bois chose the apocalyptic mode, not only because it captured this mood of
fatalism and instability but because he saw in it a critical potential that so precisely answered his
call for a new humanism. Realism was clearly important for Du Bois, whose autobiographical
interludes in Darkwater communicate the reality of black oppression. He knew the value of hard
facts: he catalogued lynching statistics and data about black migration in The Crisis Magazine in
order to keep the public informed about their community. But Du Bois was also clearly aware
that the realism of data and autobiography was not always the most effective way of
communicating the hard truths of racism in America, or of influencing an audience. This is likely
why he had chosen to include “Of the Coming of John” in The Souls of Black Folk, a short story
which follows a young black man on his transformation from jolly ignorance to educated
depression, and ultimately, to suicide. Such a story added a powerful emotional element to the
text as a whole. Du Bois’s awareness of the emotional impact of dramatic narrative was likely
why he crafted his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), and his anti-imperialist
romance, Dark Princess (1928).
Thus, Du Bois turned to this non-realist, apocalyptic mode in Darkwater, as he turned to
narrative and poetry as a whole, because Du Bois mined literary genres for their conceptual
possibilities. “The Comet” is evidence of what the apocalyptic mode can do. Not only do we
walk away from “The Comet” with an epiphany about the constructed-ness of race, but we see
the utter absurdity of that construction in a world that emphasizes mortality. Not only does “The
Comet” provide a space for an African-American man to show his quality and defy the racial
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stereotype of the black male rapist, it reduces both Jim and Julia to their human selves,
destabilizing the social identities that separate them from each other. “The Comet” allows
readers to envision interracial cooperation and potential romance, and it makes such connection a
necessity of human survival. Du Bois seemed to understand what many other writers would
realize in the coming decades: that no other literary mode emphasizes the humanness of its
characters more forcefully.
Du Bois knew that in order to most powerfully transform the way his readers saw race
and space, he had to bring the story home to them. By bringing catastrophe home to New York
City Du Bois could make his message more immediate and relatable, and he could make the city
space a site of potential change. While Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, along with a
slew of other writers, demonize the city and its growing immigrant, impoverished, and African-
American populations, suggesting, through their apocalyptic vision, that the city should be
abandoned, Du Bois produces a narrative in which the city has the potential to be transformed. In
its most utopian moment “The Comet” depicts a white woman and a black man sitting atop a
skyscraper, contemplating the building of a new world. Du Bois’s city is not an unsolvable
problem; it is a site ripe with progressive potential. This view is emblematic of the pro-urban
bent that Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler identify in much African-American literature of
the period in their useful The City in African-American Literature. In fact, while writers like Jack
London romanced the natural spaces outside the city, many African-American writers reversed
this trend, imagining the city as the space of greatest social possibility and individual growth.
After all, it was in the city where African-American art, literature, and culture was flourishing in
a movement later termed “The Harlem Renaissance.” New York City of the 1920s offered new
social and economic opportunities for black empowerment and it was there were many African
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Americans would find their voices. But Du Bois wanted to show that the potential to shift things
even further lay right under the surface of the city’s seemingly fixed segregationist and white
supremacist world.
Positioned at the end of Darkwater, right before “A Hymn to the Peoples” in which Du
Bois petitions God to “make Humanity divine!,” “The Comet” culminates his efforts to renovate
the human and bring about “the union of the World!” (211-212). Du Bois may have discovered
the power of the secular apocalyptic mode while reading H.G. Wells, or perhaps by reading Jack
London, Charlotte Gilman, or George Allan England. However, through his commitment to an
“anti-racist social ethics” Du Bois was the first to realize its progressive critical potential.
108

Earlier secular articulations of the mode were like most narratives of white supremacist fantasy;
they were narratives starring white protagonists who had to save humanity from degradation
and/or annihilation, narratives that quite plainly showcased mainstream ideologies of social
Darwinism and which had long served as justifications for imperialism and social inequality.
With “The Comet” Du Bois claimed a form that was often used to perpetuate white supremacist
ideology and turned it into a weapon that could dismantle that ideology at its foundations; he
showcased the use of apocalyptic narrative as a tool for the critical evaluation of race and white
supremacy (issues at the center of current critical race theory). “The Comet” is evidence that Du
Bois discovered the ways in which various literary techniques could aid him in what Reiland
Rabaka calls “guerilla wordfare,” the use of “radical writing as a form of freedom fighting” (68).
Perhaps Du Bois was able to realize the critical potential of the apocalyptic mode because
of his awareness of the power of apocalyptic rhetoric within the black theological tradition. The
critical use of apocalypticism was not entirely new to the African American Christian

108
Reiland Rabaka posits that “no matter which position Du Bois embraced and argued, an anti-racist social ethics
was ever at work and at the heart of his agenda and ultimate objectives” (66).
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community, of course, and in The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction, Maxine Lavon
Montgomery identifies the prevalence of apocalyptic rhetoric in both the black theological
tradition and in black literature. Montgomery argues that there is a distinctive variant of
apocalypticism in black fictional discourse in which the apocalypse is welcomed as an end to an
oppressive system and an opportunity for a new beginning. Arguing that the black literary
apocalypse has a “dualistic voice” with an inherent irony, she illustrates the ways in which
various black authors use “the apocalypse as an idiom and shed light on the ongoing and often
elusive quest for equality in a peculiarly American promised land” (14). Du Bois’s view of
America as a place where an apocalypse could actually liberate people from racial oppression
clearly echoed the rhetoric of the black community. However, while Du Bois was likely drawing
on this tradition, his use of a literal apocalypse in a science fiction story, as well as the
ideological maneuverings which the genre enabled, were truly innovative.
Du Bois’s apocalyptic tale was not the national tragedy imagined by writers such as H.G.
Wells or Jack London, writers who feared the imminent decline of Western civilization or
foresaw the potential dangers of technological progress and advanced weaponry. For Du Bois,
the present is ripe with decay long before the apocalyptic comet arrives; the other texts within
Darkwater emphasize this fact. The arrival of the comet is not the first or even the direst threat to
African Americans’ existence; living within a society of structural and legal inequality has long
created an atmosphere of eschatological dread. In this way “The Comet” emblematizes Mark
Sinker’s contention that “The central fact in Black Science Fiction - self-consciously so named
or not - is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened: that (in P[ublic] E[nemy]'s
phrase) Armageddon been in effect.”
109
As Mark Sinker and others have argued in the last few

109
In his now well-known 1992 article written for The Wire, titled “Loving the Alien,” Mark Sinker made this claim
for the unique sensibility of black sf. Sinker claims that “The ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole
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decades, from a post-colonial perspective America and other parts of the colonizing world are
themselves Alien nations, while African-Americans or members of the African diaspora more
generally, are protagonists in a real abduction story.
110
Sinker’s point is thus echoed by Mark
Dery in his 1994 Flame Wars:
African-Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees;
they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields
of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been
done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding,
forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers readily come to mind.
(180).
Within such a framework it is difficult to see future technology as the most fearsome threat to
human mortality or to understand apocalyptic change as something that might be wholly
undesirable. Through such insights Sinker and Dery opened up a new critical discourse about sf,
which they would term “Afrofuturism,” a literary movement that subsequently helps to reframe
the apocalyptic mode.
111

Central to Afrofuturist discourse is an understanding of the social and political
importance of narratives of African-American futurity. Mark Dery amphasizes this imperative,

societies, abducted and genetically altered swathes of citizenry, imposed without surcease their values. Africa and
America -and so by extension Europe and Asia - are already in their various ways Alien Nation. No return to normal
is possible: what "normal" is there to return to?” Mark Bould echoed many of these sentiments in ”The Ships
Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF,” an article which appeared in a special issue of Science Fiction
Studies devoted to Afrofuturism (#102 = Volume 34, Part 2 = July 2007).
110
Many have argued that their forcible abduction marks African-Americans as intimately connected to the sf mode,
while others have marked the African-American experience of displacement and homelessness as the quintessential
experience of modernism, calling African-Americans the true modernists.
111
In conversation with Tricia Rose, Samuel Delaney, and Greg Tate, Mark Dery identified a new critical discourse,
which he would term “Afrofuturism,” for identifying and evaluating “speculative fiction that treats African-
American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20
th
century technoculture—and, more
generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced
future” (180).

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asking, “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies
have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible
futures?” (180). Further, how can people of color contend with a popular culture which
recurrently positions them as the causes or collateral damage of apocalypse? Or with a pseudo-
scientific discourse that imagines them in inevitable decline or extinction? An Afrofuturist
inquiry investigates the ways in which writers and other creators might imagine a (better) future
for black people, a future which resists the logic of “the futures industry” (Eshun 290). Echoing
Dery’s fear that “our collective fantasies” of the future have been engineered by “technocrats,
futurologists, streamliners, and set designers” (Dery 180), Kodwo Eshun argues that the
recurrent fictional genocides of people of color in sf, as well as the common media-speak about
inner-cities and so-called third-world countries “demoralize us; they command us to bury our
heads in our hands, to groan with sadness (292). Eshun argues that “Afrofuturism, then, is
concerned with the possibilities for intervention within the predictive, the projected, the
proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional” (293). Further,
in contrast to many mainstream apocalyptic narratives which “conflate blackness with
catastrophe” (Yaszek), envisioning a future premised upon the obliteration of people of color, or
a seemingly more benign obliteration of race, Afrofuturist texts can interrogate the workings of
race, power, and technology, and often (but not always) attempt to challenge social inequality.
Du Bois’s “The Comet,” is evidence that revisionary Afrofuturist texts were born
alongside the myriad narratives of doom and apocalypse that predicted (and reveled in) the end
of people of color in the early twentieth century.
112
Unfortunately, with the advent of the science
fiction magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, white supremacist fantasies would remain at the

112
Sherree Thomas’s anthology, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora (2000),
which spans the entirety of the twentieth century, indicates that Afrofuturism had long been a part of the sf tradition.
Olivas 157

center of American popular culture. As Patrick Sharp posits in Savage Perils, apocalypse would
repeatedly be imagined in “future war” narratives involving white heroes and menacing savage
hordes.
113
For example, The Adventures of Buck Rogers, a popular series which would first
appear in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories in 1928 and later become a hit radio show, featured
the title hero fighting Mongols and half-breeds. But with “The Comet” Du Bois illustrated that
the apocalyptic mode could do more than serve racist fantasies. It defies the trend that Mike
Davis and Patrick Sharp have identified in the genre by envisioning a world in which a black
man’s humanity and potential can be realized, and where a post-apocalyptic multi-racial
American community can develop, realities that would become defining features of the
apocalyptic mode in later years.
114
In fact, despite its apparent singularity, the post-apocalyptic
vision of interracial cooperation—and potential romance—imagined in “The Comet” would
become a trademark fixture of apocalyptic film and fiction in the post-war 1950s. As I will
discuss more fully in my final chapter, Harry Belafonte’s 1959 film The World, The Flesh, and
the Devil, follows the narrative of “The Comet” so closely that it is difficult to imagine that
Belafonte isn’t directly indebted to Du Bois. One could say the same thing about more recent
films like I Am Legend, starring Will Smith (despite the fact that it is an adaptation of a Richard
Matheson novel with a White central character). Looking backwards from post-WWII
apocalyptic films and literature—from black sf writers like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delaney
to more mainstream white writers of the 1950s like Philip Wylie and Pat Frank—it is clear that

113
In Time Machines : The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950, Mike Ashley
explains that the “future war story is a significant sub-genre within science fiction and a major part of pulp science
fiction, particularly in the years after the First World War” (9).
114
In Ecology of Fear Davis writes: “The abiding hysteria of Los Angeles disaster fiction, and perhaps of all disaster
fiction—the urge to strike out and destroy, to wipe out an entire city and untold thousands of its inhabitants—is
rooted in racial anxiety . . . white fear of the dark races lies at the heart of such visions” (Davis 281). Sharp also
identifies this trend, writing: “authors such as Burroughs and London created white heroes who distinguished
themselves as champions of civilization against racially inferior savages. Their heroes of the future were racial
heroes whose mastery of technology made them masters of the frontier” (Sharp 106).
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Du Bois’s little story had an important impact on the American racial imagination. In composing
“The Comet” Du Bois offered readers a seminal example of the ways in which one might draw
from the African American Biblical tradition of apocalyptic prophecy—an early form of
Afrofuturity, from empowering icons of African history, and from popular narrative modes, to
rethink America’s future. As he imagined a new humanity for black Americans, and an
interracial paradigm of national and human survival, Du Bois’s story shows the ways in which
Afrofuturism can confront narratives of inevitable communal decay.
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CHAPTER 4:
Regenerating American Community in Post-Apocalyptic Suburbia

World War II marks a significant moment in the history of apocalyptic fiction. While
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) had begun to
explore the dystopian potential of totalitarian “utopias,” few were prepared for the extremities of
the Second War. Hitler’s normalization of genocide was terrifyingly successful, leading to a
whole new era of film and literature that explored the world-ending possibilities of mind-control
and authoritarianism. Fears of governmental and military regimes were exacerbated by the
development of alarming apocalyptic technologies. The use of atomic weaponry against Japan
propelled a new type of narrative: the nuclear apocalyptic. When the Soviets revealed their own
technological prowess in the coming years, atomic narrative surged forward, becoming one of
the primary mechanisms for exploring the imminent possibility of apocalypse in America.
Nuclear reality changed the nature of national fear and its visions of post-apocalyptic
survival. In the common nuclear scenario the post-apocalyptic landscape might be unlivable,
requiring a long-term retreat to an underground shelter. In these narratives radiation poisoning
acted as a silent but deadly foe, penetrating every space of the nation and threatening to change
its victims biologically, transforming them into grotesque casualties of an invisible war. Cities
were often destroyed in atomic narrative, an act which forced characters to rural or suburban
enclaves, and citizens had to work together to endure the hardships of scarcity and post-
apocalyptic danger that characterized their disintegrating communities. Despite the fact that the
United States had been the source of atomic danger during the war—rather than its victim—these
narratives repeatedly played out scenarios in which the nation had to fight for survival against
atomic threat.
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In many ways this vision of victimization and resilience was a result of Cold War
propaganda that demonized the Soviet Union and encouraged Americans to prepare for total war
by learning survival skills and stocking supplies. Pragmatic and resourceful families were
considered to be on the front line of American defense. Cold War defense planners expended a
lot of time convincing American civilians that it was critical to prepare for the possibility of
nuclear war since “civilian defense preparedness was considered a component of a larger
comprehensive plan for national security” (Grossman 43).
115
Such preparedness was not only
seen as crucial to the potential post-atomic survival of the nation, but was an essential means for
calming the fears of an impending attack. As Andrew Grossman argues, civil defense planners
had to convince Americans of the survivability of nuclear war in order to promote a sense of
calm confidence in reaction to Soviet threat. Civil defense planners worked hard to “reconstitute
nuclear reality” because “the management of panic and terror depended on assuring the public
that life would be ordinary after nuclear attack” (Grossman 54). In this way, one can no doubt
argue that many of the post-apocalyptic narratives I will be examining served, at least in part, as
patriotic and palliative responses to the perceived dangers of the Cold War.
While DIY preparedness was a central part of American civil defense, the fortification of
the home and the vision of the American homeowner as self-trained repairer and builder were
also characterizations and activities promoted by popular culture. Explaining that DIY home-
repair was an activity of both domestic defense and domestic pleasure, Sarah Lichtman argues
that this “Do-it-Yourself Security” mentality permeated American culture in the atomic age.
116

115
A wealth of civil defense literature promoted activities like building fall-out shelters and stocking proper supplies
while the FCDA (Federal Civil Defense Administration) worked with various propagandists, including many writers
and filmmakers, to make nuclear war seem more tolerable. For more on these issues see Andrew Grossman: Neither
Dead, Nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War.

116
This phrase is taken from the title of Lichtman’s article: “Do-It-Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home
Fallout Shelter in Cold War America,” 2006.
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After the war, many magazines “promoted do-it-yourself as ‘necessary but fun’, as home-front
shortages of skilled workers forced men and women to learn how to repair and to decorate their
own homes” (Lichtman 42). This do-it-yourself mentality coalesced quite smoothly with the
booming craze for fall-out shelters and Cold War civil defense. Although few Americans
actually built shelters, the belief that one should be prepared to take care of oneself and one’s
family in a time of nuclear war was suited to the development of amplified domestic pragmatism
and independence. Necessity was only part of the draw of course, as DIY activities also gave
many Americans an empowering sense of accomplishment in a world increasingly dominated by
corporate culture and assembly-line production. DIY culture was thus a growing leisure
activity. “By the mid-1950s, do-it-yourself was the largest of all American hobbies and the third
most popular form of recreation for married men—surpassed only by reading and watching
television” (Lichtman 42). As a testament to this popularity Lichtman cites a 1954 edition of
Time magazine that featured, on its cover, “an eight-armed man astride his lawnmower, happily
engaged in several do-it-yourself projects at once” (42).
117

But the promotion of pragmatic survivalism was also the result of a significant shift in
national thinking, and perhaps even a catalyst that propelled that ideological shift. Post-war
survivalist narratives are strikingly collective in their imagination of survival, recurrently
emphasizing the resourcefulness of the suburban family and the benefits of intra-community
cooperation. They place new value on citizens who had traditionally been ostracized from
mainstream conceptions of American community and envision an America that is more

117
One can easily find other, similar examples of the popularity of DIY activities in the era. There were countless
magazines, manuals, articles, and trade-shows devoted to the theme. A 1955 Do-It-Yourself exhibition in Los
Angeles attracted thousands of attendees who jumped at the opportunity to learn more about “painting, wall
papering, cooking, gardening, operating power tools, floor covering, and wall paneling” (LAT). DIY culture was
more than a cult movement; it was a new niche in the economic and social marketplace. As one 1954 Women’s
Wear Daily article titled “Do-It-Yourself Opens New Demand,” asserts, the fashion industry should focus its efforts
on “tapping” into the new market by creating clothes suitable for DIY activities.
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multicultural, more meritocratic, and more successfully cooperative. In this way, post-war
apocalyptic narratives did not merely serve as instruments of government propaganda, but were
also mechanisms for imagining societal improvement.
The narratives I investigate here were published between 1949 and 1963. The recent war,
as well as the changing legal and social norms regarding race and gender during this era,
contributed noticeably to the visions of communal survival popularized in post-apocalyptic
fiction and film. As Du Bois illustrated with “The Comet,” catastrophic war could lead to major
reconsiderations of social arrangements and hierarchies. After all, were racism and
ethnocentrism not central factors in the atrocities of World War II? The Holocaust revealed that
the direct consequences of racialist pseudo-sciences like eugenics were not utopia or
evolutionary progress but genocide and social disintegration. The old models of racially
homogenous utopias, and eugenic progress seemed outmoded. In a time of civil rights marches,
school integration, and an increasing awareness of racial inequity, it seemed imperative to
imagine a more integrated national future. While the narratives I examine may have been
somewhat stifled by an inability to see outside of racial categories, they nevertheless sought a
new vision of multi-racial social harmony that could provide the basis of the nation’s—and
presumably the world’s—post-war regeneration. As post-apocalyptic narrative moved towards
larger and more diverse visions of American community, they recognized the need to imagine
more inclusive and more harmonious visions of a nation that was struggling to maintain peace
inside and outside its borders.
Like their early twentieth-century forebearers in the secular apocalyptic mode, these
works are not content with merely representing the strength and fortitude of the nation, but are
also committed to the imagination of national improvement. As works like Ray Bradbury’s
Olivas 163

Fahrenheit 451, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, and Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body
Snatchers indicate, many post-war narratives utilize the post-apocalyptic landscape primarily as
a space for critiquing current national realities. And as Bradbury’s novel and others such as
George Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon (1959), and Philip Wylie’s
Triumph (1963) show, many of these narratives also use the post-apocalyptic American
landscape for envisioning new identities, economies, and social dynamics that ultimately
improve the nation and its citizens. The apocalyptic event rearranges the relative value of
material goods; it simplifies life to a pre-technological level; and it empowers those who can
manage its exigencies. These narratives rely on the fact that in a time of crisis everyone is
liberated from their “normal obligations” (Sontag 28), and can become someone of significance.
Apocalypse was considered to be a realistic possibility in the post-war period, and though
frightening, this plausibility lent itself to a belief in the likelihood of widespread change. To
reinforce this realism authors and filmmakers situated their post-apocalyptic communities clearly
in the American landscape, and this placement in actual geographic regions, states, suburban
communities, and cities, promoted new ways of inhabiting those specific social sites. The most
common site of post-apocalyptic survival and revival was suburbia, suggesting that it was there
that many Americans felt the nation most needed reorganization—or at least, where it had the
most potential for social progress. Suburbia was booming and full of contradictions. It was both
overwhelming White and hostile to people of color and economically affordable to a great
number of first-time home buyers, making it the most accessible and the most restricted
residential space in the nation; it was liberating and constraining, community-focused and
insular, heterogeneous and uniform. In other words—it was the perfect space to interrogate and
renovate notions of ideal community.
Olivas 164

Of course, not all post-apocalyptic film and fiction of the post-war era can be celebrated
for promoting progressive depictions of the nation’s future. Films such as When Worlds Collide
and Five, end with an idealized vision of their two White protagonists—Adam and Eve of the
future—contemplating their roles as the new progenitors of mankind, an image akin to the
eugenically-minded narratives of the early twentieth century. Others, like Panic in the Year Zero,
reiterate traditional hierarchies of race, class, and gender, centering narratives on the success of
their White male heroes who gain newly justified positions of power over the family and
community in a time of crisis.
118
Yet, as this chapter will illustrate, there are also a wide range of
texts—including some that retain their White male leaders—that rigorously reconfigure social
hierarchies. For the attempt to value American resilience and resourcefulness naturally
bolstered, not only the need for collective cooperation, but also the need for those with hands-on
skills, people who might be customarily undervalued in American society. The survivalist
situations imagined in these texts require all hands on deck; every individual skill becomes
integral to the success of the community. This necessity leads to a (re)valuation of the common
people who keep their households, communities, and the nation’s infrastructures running, and
encourages the deconstruction of assumptions about race, class, and gender. As they emphasize
the importance of building a new collectivity of skilled workers, unrestricted by the nation’s
entrenched social prejudices, as a prerequisite for the survival of the nation and humanity more
broadly, these works emphasize the importance of racial integration, and provoke a revaluation
of the nation’s citizens that transcends traditional social categories.

118
The fact that so many texts imagined strong White father-figures in the post-war period indicates that many
writers felt a renewed need to assert and justify male authority in the post-war period. This suggests that this era,
like the decades in which the secular apocalyptic genre first emerged, was a time when men experienced a
distinctive shift in gender relations, and felt an increasing instability of patriarchal authority.
Olivas 165

The Survivability of Suburbia in the Atomic Age
In the long 1950s the location of many post-apocalyptic narratives thus shifted to
suburbia, a rapidly developing space that seemed ripe with opportunity.
119
Affordable housing
developments gave many Americans an unprecedented chance to own a home and to participate
in the establishment of new communities; and while the nation’s cities seemed to be
deteriorating, suburbia offered both green space and urban proximity, making it a new type of
“middle landscape,” a perfect place for rejuvenating citizens physically without denying them
the intellectual, cultural, and economic benefits of the city. Post-war post-apocalyptic narratives
cashed in on the atmosphere of possibility associated with these new residential developments,
imagining a handful of survivors fending for themselves, their families, and their small
communities while the local metropolis is destroyed in a nuclear firestorm. Not only was
suburbia the actual site of most post-war residential development, but it was also the place likely
to be spared by nuclear attack. As nuclear fears grew, suburbia seemed safely remote from the
predicted urban danger zones: New York and Los Angeles would surely fall, but the suburbs
would likely harbor survivors who could rebuild the nation and prove its resilience.
The atomic bombing of Japan in August, 1945 drastically impacted perceptions of urban
sustainability. While they had long been targeted as strategic military targets, never before had
entire cities been so devastated by a single blast. Consequently, the bombs that fell in those first
weeks in August are most often remembered, not by the names given to them by the U.S.
military, “Little Boy,” and “Fat Man,” but by the cities they destroyed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, the atomic technology was celebrated for its

119
By the “long 1950s” I mean to refer to a larger period characterized by Cold War anxieties. I borrow this phrase
from Keith Booker who argues, in The Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s, that “it
makes sense, in terms of periodization, to treat the peak Cold War years of 1946-1964 as a unit (which I call the
long 1950s), rather than arbitrarily limiting oneself to the 1950s proper” (Chap. 1 notes). Like Booker I will use the
term “1950s” to indicate this longer period throughout this chapter.
Olivas 166

amazing war-ending power against a hated enemy; the American public was not initially fearful
of becoming victims of atomic attack since in the years following these first blasts the U.S. was
still the only nation to possess such weaponry.
120
However, as information about the bombings
proliferated in popular magazines, the atomic bomb became increasingly feared as a city-killer.
Graphically detailed works like John Hershey’s “Hiroshima” played a central role in this
shift in sentiment. Published in The New Yorker in 1946, Hershey’s article offered readers a first-
hand account of Hiroshima that captured the horrifying effects of the atomic bomb on civilians.
“More vividly than all previous publications combined, ‘Hiroshima’ suggested for Americans
what a surprise atomic attack could do to an American city and its inhabitants. Although Hersey
quoted the official estimate of 78,500 killed, he believed this was a conservative calculation, and
he placed the death toll at 100,000 (Yavenditti 37). For the first time Americans were faced with
the reality of what the bomb had done to the people of Japan; and when they realized that they
were not the only ones to possess atomic technology this knowledge quickly turned to fear.
121

The development of atomic weaponry by the Soviet Union and the American development of the
Hydrogen bomb in the coming years exacerbated the fears that had begun to grow in the early
post-war period.
122

By the early 1950s the colossal destructive potential of nuclear arms and radioactive fall-
out prompted many to wonder if the nation’s cities were a considerable liability. In their
immensity and lavish displays of capitalist excess they seemed to invite an attack from Soviet
Russia, and if America was attacked its cities could be laid to waste in a matter of minutes. The

120
Michael Yavenditti points out that “According to the Gallup poll of August 16, 1945, 85 percent of those
Americans surveyed approved the atomic bombings, while only 10 percent disapproved and 5 percent had no
opinion” (25).
121
The Soviet Union tested an atomic device, “Joe-1” or “First Lightning,” on August 29, 1949.
122
Hydrogen bombs were significantly more powerful than their predecessors. When “Mike” was detonated in the
Marshall Islands in November, 1952 it made a stunning impact. It was much larger and more devastating than
anyone had imagined.
Olivas 167

urban centralization of people and political and economic infrastructure meant that the nation
could be easily decimated with the use of only a handful of weapons. As Americans
contemplated the possibility of nuclear attack, it seemed that the safest place to be was away
from America’s cities. Fears of the city were so prevalent, in fact, that they motivated both urban
planning and suburban development. In his analysis of this phenomenon, Michael Quinn Udley
argues that a coalition of urban planners and national defense advocates argued for “sprawl as
strategy,” promoting “defensive dispersal,’ or the “encouragement of low-density development
on the periphery and the thinning out of inner cities” (60), as a strategy against nuclear assault.
Similarly, Matthew Farish argues, “Salvation, for some families, meant moving – as
Washington, DC realtors advertised –‘beyond the radiation zone’” (128). This zone was more
than a place of the imagination; it was rather, a distinct mapping of urban risk based on maps
made after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
Suburbia was safely outside of these perceived atomic risk zones. In the imagination of
atomic apocalypse, cities died while survivors flourished on their edges, rebuilding the nation
from the security of their well-stocked homes or fall-out shelters. Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow!
(1954) offers what is probably the most explicit assessment of urban risk and relative suburban
safety.
123
The novel, which imagines the events before, during, and after an atomic attack on the
U.S., contains a two-page map of its fictional sister-cities “Green Prairie” and “River City” that
positions “ground zero” in the center of its downtown with concentric circles spreading outward
that mark the movement from “total destruction/firestorm,” to “approximate outer limit of severe
damage/fires only local,” to the safety of outer suburbia (272-3). Wylie places this map in the
middle of his “X-Day” chapter, offering a useful visualization of risk. When “the plutonium

123
Tomorrow! was printed in hardcover three times; it was reissued as a paperback in 1961 and sold more than
30,000 copies (Schwartz 410).

Olivas 168

fist” hits, almost instantaneously River City “was nothing,” and Green Prairie “was gone.
Forever gone” (270). With emphasis, Wylie repeats: the “two great metropolises lay stricken
below, as the mushroom formed and soared. . . . The heart of the cities was gone” (271). In the
ensuing days Wylie’s survivors discover that “about twenty-five other cities had been hit by
fission bombs like the one which had struck the Sister Cities” including New York, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia (312). But though the city dies, man survives (309),
and Wylie’s White middle-class family repairs the home that was hit by the nuke’s blast waves
and their surrounding suburban community. Wylie, who worked with the FCDA to promote civil
defense preparedness, offers his readers a happy post-atomic conclusion.
124
In the end his
protagonists are alive and well in their suburban home raising livestock and preparing for the
arrival of a new baby. Their safety and happiness seem fully secured. Not only is the war now
over, but the city, which was the home of the “negro district,” greedy businessmen, and rioting
mobs, is no longer. Tomorrow! ends with a vision of White middle-class abundance and family
harmony, echoing the troublingly White supremacist narratives of earlier times.
Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth (1950) imagines a similar fate for the American
metropolis. The entire novel takes place in a suburban home in Westchester, New York, on the
periphery of nuclear attack. While Gladys Mitchell does her daily chores her daughter draws her
attention to an important radio announcement which warns: “Do not leave your homes. . . . So
far as we can determine, no damage has been done except in areas in and around major cities”
(16). Importantly for the Mitchell family, New York City was one of the Soviet targets, the place
where Jon Mitchell, Gladys’s husband, went to work that morning. Gladys and her daughters

124
Philip Wylie worked for both the FCDA and the OWI (Office of War Information) during WWII. Grossman
describes him as “a fervent proponent of national civil defense training and a passionate supporter of the FCDA’s
mission,” and notes that “throughout the early 1950s, Wylie worked very closely with the agency during the writing
of his best-selling novel Tomorrow!,” which was, in fact, dedicated to the FCDA (56-57).
Olivas 169

spend the rest of the novel holed up in their suburban home, boiling water and researching
radiation sickness, which it turns out, is a very real problem even in suburbia. But the city—
referred to recurrently in relation to Jon—is defined only as an absence. It is in suburbia where
America survives, and Gladys and her eldest daughter, Barbara, demonstrate their strength and
resourcefulness in the face of loss, fear, predatory danger, and a consummate interruption of
normalcy.
The death of the city is taken to an extreme in Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow,
whose post-apocalyptic citizens, refusing to create “easy targets to a potential enemy” (72),
enshrine in their new constitution: “No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand
people or two hundred buildings to the square mile shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere
in the United States of America” (1). As a result of this prohibition Brackett’s post-apocalyptic
landscape is undeveloped and agrarian. Its most successful communities are those, like the
Mennonites, who had for centuries refused to allow the progress of modernity to infiltrate their
communities. Yet, rather than endorse this rural lifestyle as an ideal American future, Brackett
explores the need for a middle ground between the progress of modernity associated with the city
and the backwardness represented by rural communities that refuse change. Brackett’s
Mennonites are fanatically anti-technology and anti-progress. They outlaw radios and books and
anything else that might convince their youth of the value of progress. Brackett ultimately shows
the impossibility of limiting knowledge and change. Her young protagonists refuse to be left in
the dark and they strike out for the mysterious “Barterstown,” the first chance they get.
While the destruction of urban centers was obviously plausible in the event of nuclear
attack, the belief that American cities would be systematically obliterated was never a given. As
Matthew Farish argues, the fact that “virtually all of these imaginative damage maps were
Olivas 170

centred precisely on the urban core [was] an extraordinary assumption, given the admitted
inaccuracy of such bomb exercises, but also a strategic decision that created zonal models with
profound structural and moral repercussions” (131). One might consider what payoff such
models offered their audiences, whether presented in fiction or as part of actual urban risk
assessments. Farish argues that, regardless of their accuracy, such mapping ultimately “bolstered
calls for the spatial independence of new communities from urban centres,” thus exacerbating the
rift between city and suburb (Farish 131). Such renderings undoubtedly made it easier to attract
middle-class citizens and their resources to suburban enclaves. The sense of suburban
independence was augmented by their typical design. Levittown, which set the design pattern
that many would follow, came equipped with its own shopping centers and recreational
facilities.
125

Imagining urban annihilation also made it easier to cope with the fear that social chaos
would proliferate in the event of attack. Many felt that cities were places where population
congestion would lead to mob violence and mass panic. Because they were also areas occupied
by the poor and disenfranchised—and the primary residential sector open to the people of color
who had been denied entry into suburban developments, these fears were exacerbated by
expectations about the eruption of racial and class-based violence. By positioning the bomb in
the center of the city, writers could annihilate these “undesirables” in a seemingly inevitable
way, an accidental genocide on par with Gilman’s Herland.
126
As Jacqueline Foertsch argues,

125
Levittown was one of the original all-inclusive new developments. In a promotional spread that included aerial
photos, in American Builder article publicized in 1949 that “Seven shopping centers, seven swimming pools and
recreational buildings go up to accommodate 37,000 people living in 10, 102 houses erected by Levitt and Sons”
(“Community” 82).
126
Examining the demographic effects of an urban ground zero Andrew Grossman writes, “Using the FCDA’s own
civil defense urban analysis of 1953, we can see what the post-attack environment would look like from an
ethnographic perspective . . . Killed outright would have been 93percent of all Jews, 65 percent of all Catholics, and
33 percent of all Protestants . . .We can infer as well that large segments of first- and second-generation southern and
Olivas 171

“atomic-era African Americans [were] thought to deserve their fate for failing to meet the criteria
for admission to the suburban safe haven” (3). Destroying the “Negro district,” as Philip Wylie
does in Tomorrow! enables White survivors to avoid the conflicts predicted by Civil Defense
analysts like Neil Smelser who thought that in a period of post-atomic survival, “there will
emerge a number of racial, ethnic, and religious cleavages of the sort that have created so many
touchy political problems for American society in its recent history” (qtd.in Foertsch 15). As
Foertsch notes, this rhetoric was a common part of civil defense planning, which wrestled with,
amongst other things, the tensions inherent in the possibility of segregated shelters.
127
She argues
that
within scenarios acknowledging the prospect of racial conflict lies often the
implicit coincident acknowledgement that nuclear attack would be less the
founding occasion for said conflict than the long-awaited opportunity for two
historically polarized classes (i.e., the haves and have-nots marked variously by
race and ethnicity) to slug it out to the death. (16)
While the potential social reorganization that could emerge from nuclear disruption might be
seemingly utopian to the disenfranchised, it was terrifying to those that benefitted from the status
quo.
128

eastern European ethnic groups and the increasingly large African American population that reside in the major
target city areas would also have perished” (101).
127
Matthew Farish makes a similar claim about the ways in which fears of social/racial tensions were exacerbated
by the possibilities of nuclear war. He cites a report on civil defence (sic) and morale “predicting that ‘social
disorganization’ would follow an atomic attack, [and notes that] the authors were particularly concerned by the
potential for ‘tensions’ in complex cities such as New York, Chicago or Detroit: ‘It is awesome to reflect on what
would happen in one of these cities if colored people and white people were forced into close association in shelters,
in homes, and even evacuation reception centres’ (sic)” (9). See also Grossman, esp. chapter 4.
128
Robert Heinlein explores this post-nuclear reversal of racial fortune explicitly in Farnham’s Freehold (1964), a
novel that is both utopian and dystopian—depending on one’s racial position within the story. In Heinlein’s post-
nuclear future the descendants of African-Americans rule the earth, overpowering and enslaving their White
servants.
Olivas 172

Ultimately these narratives of urban annihilation indicate how certain cultural
assumptions about the American landscape influenced the imagination of apocalyptic disaster.
As I have discussed, despite the many interventions of writers with an alternative view of
America’s landscapes, perception of cities as corrupt and corrupting has a long history in
American culture—and in the American secular apocalyptic tradition more specifically—as does
the promotion of a more natural “middle landscape,” where citizens can gain the benefits of
nature while remaining close to civilized life. These perceptions clearly remain operable in 1950s
apocalyptic narrative. As Carl Abbott argues, in the majority of post-war post-apocalyptic
narratives “Cities are, in effect, the villains. They share partial blame for the nuclear war itself by
their very existence as tempting targets. In the days and weeks after the attack, they continue to
be the source of danger from dispersing radiation, creeping epidemics, and hungry, half-mad
refugees” (Abbott 182). In leaving the city behind post-apocalyptic survivors thrive in places
more representative of “a middle landscape, a compromise that preserves the intellectual heritage
of the cities without being in or of cities (Abbott 188). These locations also enable the
reassertion of traditionally powerful identities. While “for more than two centuries, American
culture has emphasized the value of nonurban people and places, of yeoman farmers,
frontiersmen, and country towns” (Abbott 177), the city-leveling apocalypse enables a clear
return to the values associated with an older America. They suggest that cities are not sites to be
renewed but sites to be abandoned or destroyed.

Suburbia: Utopia or Dystopia?
The alternative to these urban quagmires was not complete escape into nature or pastoral
life, but a move towards the landscape of suburbia. This move happened in record numbers. “By
Olivas 173

1950 the national suburban growth rate was ten times that of central cities, and in 1954 the
editors of Fortune estimated that 9 million people had moved to the suburbs in the previous
decade” (Jackson 238). For the White families allowed entry, suburbia was a place that avoided
the problems associated with the city but that remained unmistakably tied to technological
progress. It stayed connected through arteries of railways and roadways and many who lived in
the suburbs enjoyed the independence of their automobiles as part of their commuter lifestyle.
Suburban developments were typically outfitted with the newest time-saving technologies,
attracting new owners with their promise of being on the cutting-edge of modernity. Levittown
homes came with “a deluxe kitchen and every appliance in the book (“Goldmine,” American
Builder).
129
In addition, “Each home came complete with a washing machine and a television
set at a time when these devices were still seen as wonders of technology available only to the
upper middle classes” (Pendergast 147).
The design and production process of suburban developments was also seen as extremely
modern. Never before had so many homes been created so quickly and made so affordable; they
were seemingly available for everyone, especially veterans who benefitted from the GI Bill.
130

The first homes in Levittown sold for $6,990 and $7,990, with ranches going for $9,500, and
there were “no down payments, no closing costs, and no ‘hidden extras’” (Jackson 236). As
architecture critic Paul Goldberger notes, “Levittown houses were social creations more than
architectural ones—they turned the detached, single-family house from a distant dream to a real

129
As part of his promotional campaign, William Levitt claimed that each house he sold came equipped with a
Bendix washer (Jackson).
130
The GI Bill, or more formally, The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, provided education and training,
loan guaranty for homes, farms or businesses, and unemployment pay. According to the U.S. Department of Veteran
Affairs, “Before the war, college and homeownership were, for the most part, unreachable dreams for the average
American. Thanks to the GI Bill, millions who would have flooded the job market instead opted for education. In
the peak year of 1947, Veterans accounted for 49 percent of college admissions. By the time the original GI Bill
ended on July 25, 1956, 7.8 million of 16 million World War II Veterans had participated in an education or training
program. Millions also took advantage of the GI Bill’s home loan guaranty. From 1944 to 1952, VA backed nearly
2.4 million home loans for World War II Veterans.”
Olivas 174

possibility for thousands of middle-class American families” (qtd. in Jackson 236). They were
created in an “assembly-line fashion, using pre-fabricated building materials. During one period,
Levitt was starting and finishing approximately 150 houses a day” (Pendergast 147). Further, the
lay-out of the homes and communities offered new opportunities for family time and outdoor
recreation. Most had large windows that provided a view from the kitchen to the yard outside,
enabling mothers to keep an eye on their children, while “family rooms” offered opportunities to
watch television and play games together.
In many ways, the suburban developments pioneered by William Levitt and mimicked by
hundreds of other developers seemed like paradise in relation to the crowded and dirty urban
communities where most suburbanites once lived. They were closer to nature and more
representative of the small town America romanticized in the nation’s cultural history—their
ranch-style designs even evoked the Western frontier—yet they were thoroughly modern. Levitt
worked hard to maintain this balance. He planted fruit trees and evergreens on each plot and
created curvilinear “roads” or “lanes” that minimized traffic and maintained a linguistic
connection with America’s backwoods areas.
131
In order to further create a park-like feeling, no
fences were built on plots and there were sixty playgrounds, ten baseball diamonds, and seven
“village greens throughout the development.”
132

Thus, for many reasons the suburbs stood as a testament to American ingenuity and
superiority. As Elaine May asserts in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
Era, “the suburban home, complete with modern appliances and furnishings, continued to serve
as a tangible symbol of the American Way of Life, and a powerful weapon in the Cold War
propaganda arsenal” (144). May recalls Richard Nixon’s assertion that “the essence of American

131
Jackson, 236.
132
Ibid.
Olivas 175

superiority” lay in the “consumer-oriented suburban home” (154). The suburban home was a
sign of American independence and a symbol of what capitalist development could do; the
luxuries of each home were welcome signs of the benefits of the capitalist driven economy.
“When developer William Levitt declared, ‘no man who owns his own house and lot can be a
Communist. He has too much to do,’ he acknowledged the longstanding ideological and political
power of the idea of the private, suburban home in the nation’s consciousness, an idea that came
to fruition during the post-war period” (Lichtman 43).
This idealization was aided by real estate promotion and American popular culture.
Television became a primary conduit of the utopian presentation of suburbia since, as Lynn
Spigel points out, “while in 1950 only 9 percent of all American homes had a television set, by
the end of the decade that figure rose to nearly 90 percent”(33). Television shows like Leave it
To Beaver (1957-1963), and Father Knows Best (1954-1963) offered idealized versions of
upright American families. Both featured White, educated, middle-class families who lived
fairly untroubled existences. Leave it To Beaver, which ran for 234 episodes, was a tremendous
success and was syndicated for decades.
133
Father Knows Best, which began on the radio and
ran for 203 episodes, presented a similarly idealized family. Such popular presentations aided in
the proliferation of an idealized version of American suburbia that maintains a foothold in the
American imagination today.
Obviously there were clear problems with this idealization of post-war suburbia. For one
thing, many people of color did not get to enjoy the potential benefits of these new spaces.
While the low-cost of many new suburban homes—as well as the possibility of getting FHA
loans—was open to many members of the white working class, such opportunities did not extend

133
The program was even revived in the 1980s as “The New Leave it to Beaver,” which ran for more than 100
episodes.
Olivas 176

beyond the color line.
134
The FHA also encouraged home-owners to create and enforce
restrictive covenants. Such overt racism troubled many in the American community. A 1952
article from the Philadelphia Tribune claimed that “Levittown Breeds Hate,” and contested the
declaration made by its promotional literature that it was “The most perfectly planned
community in America.” Instead, the Tribune claimed that since “Negro applicants have been
refused,” it is apparent that “Levittown is not the most perfectly planned community in America.
It is just the opposite. Any community which is deliberately planned to discriminate against any
religious or racial group of Americans is not consistent with Democratic principles” (4).
Although the U.S. Supreme Court made restrictive covenants illegal in 1948, many stayed in
place for decades, operating through non-mandated but de facto practices like redlining and
harassment. When the first black family did move into Levittown in 1957, they were met with a
mob of protesters hurling rocks and curses.
Thus while suburbia seemed utopian to many White families, it was dystopic to most
families of color. Further, while whites fled to the new Levittowns, poor people of color were
trapped in “blighted” areas by restrictive covenants and redlining practices; and urban conditions
became even worse.

As the white middle-class moved to the suburbs, “the inner-city housing
market was deprived of the purchasers who could perhaps have supplied an appropriate demand
for the evacuated neighborhoods” (Jackson 244). Subsequently, urban low-income housing
became even more overcrowded because many slums were destroyed but not sufficiently
replaced with affordable alternatives. A 1966 survey done by the National Commission on Urban

134
After World War II a disproportionately high number of African Americans were given “blue tickets,” a form of
non-honorable discharge form the military. As a result they were disqualified from the benefits of the GI Bill.
According to Phillip McGuire, “Of the 48,603 blue discharges issued by the Army between 1 December 1941, and
30 June 1945, 10,806 were issued to African Americans, 22.23% of all blue discharges at a time when African
Americans constituted 6.5% of the Army” (146). According to Sara and Tom Pendergast, this practice affected 60%
of African-American veterans (147).
Olivas 177

Problems found that, “of 1,155 projects, 67 percent were predominantly residential before urban
renewal, but only 43 percent were residential afterward,” and that “most of the residences built in
redeveloped areas were too expensive for the former occupants” (Qtd. in Von Hoffman 318).
Ultimately it would become evident that the splendor of the suburbs and the dismal conditions of
the city were results of some of the same policies.
135
Offering a similar assessment of the effects
of the Housing Acts, Raymond Mohl argues that, by the 1960s,
Federal high-way construction alone destroyed some 35,000 housing units each
year. Urban renewal had similarly devastating consequences in the inner cities:
within little more than a decade after urban renewal legislation in 1954, over
400,000 residential units had been destroyed in the inner cities - a process that
soon came to be labeled "Negro removal." Enforcement of minimum sanitary and
housing codes in many cities, along with massive abandonment of properties by
slum-lords, also forced extensive demolition of low-income rental housing. (13).
To many it seemed like cities were in the process of decay while the ideal American community
was flourishing in suburbia. As Kenneth Jackson argues, “As the suburbs drew off the wealthy,
central cities became identified with social problems” (274).
Assuredly, there was some social variation in new housing developments that challenged
embedded social norms. Levitt himself was Jewish and there were few restrictions that barred
Jews or Catholics, or other “white ethnic minorities” from buying homes in his development
(Pendergast 147); in addition developments fostered connections between the White working-
and middle-classes. However places like Levittown tended to be overwhelmingly White, a fact

135
In Crabgrass Frontier Kenneth Jackson argues that while public housing “has become an important institution”
in other countries, in the U.S. “government assistance has served mainly to create invidious distinctions between
city and suburban life.” (229). Further, because “the beneficiaries of [home ownership] programs were typically
white and middle-class” such programs have also clearly increased the nation’s racial divide.
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that fed the anxieties that many residents felt about the homogeneity of suburbia. Whiteness was
only one sign of this problem, as not only did people look relatively similar but houses were
almost uniform in appearance. Architects were routinely disturbed by the repetitious design of
suburban communities; for many the “little boxes on the hillside” seemed to exemplify the
triumph of social conformity and consumerism.
136
To maintain this visual sameness home
ownership in many communities came with a list of rules regarding acceptable ways of
maintaining the appearance of one’s home. For example, clotheslines were outlawed in many
communities (including Levittown), as were loud colors and loud music.
Policing acceptable behaviors was, of course, a phenomenon not limited to the suburbs.
During the climate of the Cold War Americans were called upon to conform to the dictates of
civil defense planners and to police one another in order to root out any potential subversives.
Professing a patriotic spirit and upholding America’s capitalist ideas by cultivating consumerism,
as well as showcasing one’s mental and physical preparedness for war, were some of the primary
ways that citizens could showcase their national loyalty. Subversion was not merely defined as
communist activity but was also a term used to describe citizens who seemed particularly
apathetic, fearful, or unengaged with Civil defense. As Andrew Grossman writes, “In the world
of the FCDA, an unprepared or uncaring citizen engaged in a form of disloyalty” (119). In this
sense, good citizenship was presumably overtly detectable since it required proactive behaviors.
Encouraging citizens to report perceived disloyalty, the FCDA created an atmosphere of self-
imposed conformity. “In the United States the panoptic eye was not the central state per se, but
your neighbor who, trained within the milieu of the Cold War emergency, is prepared, nay,
required, to report subversive behavior” (Grossman 121). Fearing the consequences of

136
This phrase is taken from the song written in 1962 by Malvina Reynolds as she drove through the suburbs of San
Francisco.
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sedition—whether intentional or perceived—many Americans tried hard to fit in. It was a
difficult position, as many felt compelled to conform to social expectations despite their potential
revulsion at conformity. This conundrum later led Keith Booker to conclude that, “In short,
Americans in the long 1950s suffered from two principal fears: the fear of being different from
everyone else and the fear of being the same as everyone else” (19).
Conformity and homogeneity were also associated with industrial and social
standardization. As Booker argues, this was “the Golden Age of American standardization and
homogenization as Fordist-Taylorist mass production techniques reached new heights of
sophistication and new levels of penetration into every aspect of American life” (10). Booker
argues that this standardization was aided by televisions which “helped to homogenize the
thoughts and dreams of the rapidly expanding American population” (10). As novels like Sloan
Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (made into a film in 1956 starring
Gregory Peck) illustrated, the compulsion to conform to standardized societal expectations was
incredibly difficult for veterans who had seen the atrocities of the Second World War. While
conformity was nothing new to veterans who had been asked to don matching uniforms and
march within the ranks of the armed services, the abrupt requirement to return to normal life
after the war was almost impossible. Few could leave their incongruent and often traumatic war
experiences behind and fit neatly into the corporate or industrial machine.

The Suburban Dystopia
The problems and pressures of social conformity were explicitly explored in the popular
culture of the era alongside the more recurrent narratives of suburban harmony. Besides The
Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, another realist novel and film of the era to explore these issues
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was Grace Metalious’s best–selling Peyton Place (made into a popular film in 1957). Peyton
Place suggests that the clean and upright appearance of the American small-town had a dark
underbelly. Such narratives suggested that citizens who worked hard to appear moral and upright
were in reality fighting to hide their own shortcomings and the seemingly pure spaces of
America were just as corrupt as any others. Peyton Place also suggests that the dishonesty
required to properly conform to the expectations of small town life could result in constant
family tensions and even dissolution.
These perceived tensions drove an entire genre of sf film and fiction: the suburban
dystopia, a place that was often on the edge of apocalyptic catastrophe. In these dystopic texts
writers creatively mapped out potential dark futures for the nation, with an eye towards the
ramifications of current social problems. According to Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, the
dystopic text “served as a prophetic vehicle, the canary in the cage, for writers with an ethical
and political concern for warning us of terrible sociopolitical tendencies that could, if continued,
turn our contemporary world into the iron cages portrayed in the realm of utopia’s underside” (1-
2). The existence of so many suburban-based dystopias in the long 1950s suggested that there
was a wealth of trepidation associated with the new housing developments. Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451 (1953), which was made into a film by François Truffaut in 1966, Richard
Matheson’s I am Legend (1954), which was made into a film starring Vincent Price in 1964, and
Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), offer distinctive assertions of what makes
suburbia dystopian. Yet all of these texts suggest that in the 1950s suburbia was a place of
deadening social conformity, a site in which inhabitants degenerated into mindless and
disconnected citizens, and caused communities to fall apart as their isolation from other
communities augmented fears of external contamination. These concerns could surely be applied
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to post-war American culture more generally, a time that has generated a wealth of criticism
about the rise of consumer culture, the mind-numbing effects of television, and the tastelessness
of the emergent mini-mall; but these works indicate that this criticism was often articulated
against the backdrop of suburbia, a site that seemingly emblematized all that was wrong with
America.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers a look at suburban conformity that is so terrifying it
is generally classified as a horror film. Based on The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (originally
serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954), Invasion depicts the small suburban town of “Santa
Mira” as its inhabitants lose their individuality after visiting spores from outer space infect, kill,
and then replicate them. Invasion suggests that the greatest danger facing America is a loss of
identity and social intimacy within a world where conformity has replaced intentional, self-
driven behavior. Completely overtaken by the forces of alien invasion, the people of Santa Mira
are shells of their old selves; they are thoughtless and sociopathic, focusing solely on the goal of
complete communal conversion.
Invasion has been read as both a conservative and a progressive film; while some argue
that it is a critique of McCarthyist witch-hunts, others see the ultra-conformity of Santa Mira as
an indictment of communism. For Walter Wanger, the film’s producer, The Invasion of the Body
Snatchers was “a picture on the subject of ‘conformity’ showing ‘how easy it is for people to be
taken over and lose their souls if they are not alert and determined in their character to be free’”
(qtd. in Hoberman 20). In an interview with Tom Hatten (available on the 1998 remastered
DVD), Kevin McCarthy claims that he always thought the film was about “the guys on Madison
Avenue,” emotionless businessmen who had lost touch with those around them. However, both
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Hatten and McCarthy assert that Siegel claimed to have no political motive for making the film.
Similarly, in response to questions of his own political motivations, Jack Finney claimed:
For years now, I’ve been amused by the fairly widely held notion that The Body
Snatchers has anything to do with the cold war, McCarthyism, conformity . . . . It
does not. I was simply intrigued by the notion of a lot of people insisting that their
friends and relatives were impostors. (qtd. in Hoberman 22).
While Siegel and Finney would avoid claiming political interests, it is possible to attribute this to
the political dangers of their contemporary moment. Further, as McCarthy and Wanger suggest,
the emotionless clones of Invasion were malleable signifiers of real social and cultural problems.
Regardless of the purportedly non-political intentions of some of those involved in its
production, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is suggestive of many of the most pertinent problems
of post-war American life. These problems are illuminated via the backdrop of suburban bliss.
The community in which Dr. Miles Bennell (McCarthy) resides is White though it houses
citizens from both the working and middle classes. Often framing its inhabitants coming in and
out of the doors of their residences, the film shows rows of suburban lawns and doorsteps
extending as far as the eye can see. At first, such components of the film lead to a sense of
profound security; there seems to be little reason for crime or social unrest amongst Santa Mira’s
inhabitants. In addition, the film unfolds through the perspective of Dr. Bennell, who has a great
degree of social mobility, wealth and respect.
It is soon evident, however, that something in the town is amiss. Many townsfolk come to
Bennell with the complaint that their family members are “not themselves.” Wilma, his
girlfriend’s cousin, complains that “something is missing” in her uncle Ira. She explains that
“that look in his eye is gone . . . . There is no emotion, none . . .” However neither Dr. Bennell
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nor Dr. Kaufman, the town’s other leading physician, believe in the complaints of their patients.
Rather than take such claims seriously, they continually offer drugs, alcohol, and psychiatric
appointments, believing that contemporary medical science can solve the quickly multiplying
incidents of mental abnormality. When their efforts against the spreading invasion prove futile
the entire town is overcome by emotionless “pod-people” and Dr. Bennell is on the run with his
girlfriend, Becky, to escape the town’s oppressive conformity.
The stakes of Invasion are high as the town is faced with the potential end of the human
race. While the film ostensibly proposes that this loss of humanity is a result of cosmic spores, a
significant piece of dialogue between Miles and Becky suggests that in Santa Mira the seeds of
imminent disaster were already rooting in the homogenous town:
Miles: In my practice I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain
away, only it happens slowly instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind.
Becky: But, just some people, Miles.
Miles: All of us. A little bit. We harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we
have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear . . . as
you are to me.
For Miles, a “hardening of hearts” is akin to utter dehumanization; humanness is bound to social
intimacy and emotional connection. Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers a suburban nightmare
that turns the positive potential of self-contained suburbia into a site of complete social
degeneration. Siegel’s film can be read as a parody of the suburban condition where in pursuing
the same version of the good life, everyone loses their individuality. Prescriptions for proper
behavior meant to foster a more beautiful and harmonious community are shown to restrict
individual liberty and critical thought. There is no escape from the totalizing effects of these
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social expectations. Bennell’s only escape is to leave the town on foot. He tells Becky, “Our only
hope it to make it to the highway,” and he later ends up alone in a mass of cars yelling
hysterically.
137

While Invasion of the Body Snatchers draws attention to the deadening effects of social
conformity, Fahrenheit 451 depicts a suburban community degenerating because of the constant
mediation of mind-numbing technology. Set in the future (some time in the late twenty-first
century), Bradbury’s suburbia is a place where books, thinking, and dialogue—discounted as
unnecessary and dangerous—are replaced with the constant hum of televisions, radios, and
commercials. When on the train, Guy Montag, Bradbury’s protagonist, can hardly think because
of the constant commercials being piped throughout the train-car. Montag’s wife, Mildred,
spends all of her time either listening to her “seashells,” earpiece radios, or watching the “walls,”
an all-encompassing television experience. Exterior spaces are similarly transformed by
technology; people rarely walk the streets, instead viewing the landscape from the windows of
high-speed vehicles.
Bradbury’s world depicts the efficient machines of the future as the tools, not of a utopian
civilization, but as the causes of dystopia. While the inhabitants of Bradbury’s world seem to
have everything they could ask for in their sleek technologized world, they have grown weaker
and less intelligent in the process. As (former) Professor Faber tells Montag:
Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour,
at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re
playing some game in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall

137
Interestingly, this “highway scene” in which Bennell yells to drivers “There’s no escape . . . no time to waste . . .
You’ll be next!” was the film’s original ending. However, as McCarthy explains in his interview with Hammett, the
studio thought this ending was “too downbeat” and thus opted for the “added” ending with which the movie entered
theaters. This second ending shows McCarthy telling his tale to police officers and doctors who then inform the FBI
to “stop all trucks in and out of Santa Mira.”
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televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells
you what to think and it blasts it in. (112)
Faber’s monologue suggests that the word has accelerated beyond one’s ability to process
information; and further, that people seek out stimulation at every opportunity. While Montag is
increasingly critical of the consequences of these technologies others around him don’t seem to
even notice what has happened; they are oblivious to their mental distraction and degeneration,
leaving Montag alone in a suburban hell.
This isolation is a primary part of Montag’s nightmare. Of great distress is that his wife,
Millie, has become almost vacant, like one of the pod people from Invasion. Millie represents
what has happened to the people of Bradbury’s future world. Always plugged in to audio or
visual entertainments, Millie relates more to machines than to other people, leading Montag to
think that “No one has time any more for anyone else” (53).
138
He wonders if he might be able to
communicate with her better if he were to “buy himself a Seashell broadcasting station and talk
to [her] late at night” (72). Fully emphasizing her evaporation into the world of simulation,
Millie even plays a “housewife” in her TV world. As David Seed asserts, “Fahrenheit 451
dramatizes the effects of the media as substitutions. Millie finds an ersatz intimacy with the
‘family’ on the screen which contrasts markedly with her relation to Montag” (79).
In order to escape this suburban nightmare Montag must destroy his home and Captain
Beatty, the Fire Chief. As the head of the book-burners Beatty represents the suppression of
knowledge and the promotion of what Susan Sontag has called “technocratic man.” He values a
human society that is industrious and efficient above all else, telling Montag that reading and

138
The problems associated with the increasing presence of technological entertainments was explored in many
dystopian texts in the post-war era and subsequently became a recognized staple of postmodern fiction. Some other
early examples of this trend include Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) and Kurt
Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952).
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contemplation are mechanisms for unhappiness; it is pragmatism that is essential to man’s
existence. Beatty explains, “Any man who can take a TV apart and put it back together again,
and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide rule, measure, and
equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial
and lonely” (91). For Beatty man is better as machine than animal; yet Bradbury indicates that in
losing his “bestiality” man loses his humanity, revealing post-war fears associated with
“technocratic man” to be well-founded.
After he flees the nightmarish neighborhoods of dystopic suburbia Montag finds an
alternative community that has resisted technological domination. The “Book People,” a literary
minority, lives by the river memorizing the literature that has been cast out of mainstream
technocratic society. Together with these literary outsiders Montag watches as bombs explode
over the sprawling metropolis. Bradbury writes:
He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air.
They had displaced each other. For another of those impossible instants the city
stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be,
taller than the man who built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and
sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million
colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a
side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. (185-186)
The destruction of the city and its surrounding suburban enclaves is enabled by the dropping of
military bombs, suggesting that the technologized culture of Fahrenheit 451 has become much
more of a threat than military weaponry. In fact, the bombs allow the possibility of post-
apocalyptic rebirth. Pointed out quite explicitly in Professor Granger’s mentioning of the
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“Phoenix,” the destruction of the old world allows the possibility of redemption and
regeneration. Fahrenheit 451 asserts that invasive and distractive technologies—that
increasingly separate us from one another—are major threats to our individuality and to our
community. The good life promoted by both corporate and political America, which was
premised upon the self-contained universe of the suburban home is, for Bradbury, merely a
mechanism of individual degeneration and social disintegration.
Both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Fahrenheit 451 imagine the source of social
malaise as primarily external to their central characters. While Guy Montag initially works for
the dominant institutions that impose social conformity, his change in consciousness enables him
to escape the confines of his suburban nightmare. Similarly, Miles Bennell is threatened by his
local community but is able to find a way outside of the conformist space where he can gain
refuge. In contrast to these visions of external threat is the story of Robert Neville in Richard
Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend. While Neville initially seems to be beset by dangerous
forces from outside the safety of his suburban home, it soon becomes clear that the biggest threat
to the survival of civilization is actually Neville himself and his self-enforced isolation.
After an apocalyptic plague forces him to live alone in his suburban enclave in temperate
Southern California, Robert Neville’s existence is characterized by the monotony of survival. He
spends every day gathering supplies, fortifying his house, and murdering the vampires born from
the plague. This presentation of post-apocalyptic survival is incredibly dull, suggesting that “in I
am Legend, ridding the world of the undead is a never-ending, unheroic task” (Waller 258).
Neville is explicit and repetitive about his inability to handle the banality of routine. He laments,
“In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had
adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long
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last” (111). Every day is the same for Neville, and although he does not live by the clock as one
working-class or middle-class American might, his thankless daily work—composed of killing a
race that seems un-killable—is determined by the rising and setting of the sun. Neville’s endless
work of destruction is a:
Demanding Sisyphean task—a routine rather than a ritual. Thus for much of the
novel Neville resembles another of the many alienated workers so often discussed
in the fiction and nonfiction of the 1950s, who receive no pleasure and no
challenge from their jobs, but can do nothing except continue the routine and take
out their frustrations, as does Neville, in after-work drinking. (Waller 258)
Indeed, Neville’s life in post-apocalyptic America is not that far removed from the average
routine of a working man in 1950s America. When he muses, “life was still a barren, cheerless
trial. Despite everything he had or might have (Except, of course, another human being), life
gave no promise of improvement or even of change” (95), Neville’s depression is not unfamiliar,
nor is his entrapment. Unable to leave his home after the sun goes down, he listens to classical
music because “it helped him to fill the terrible void of hours” (16).
Neville’s universe is literally self-contained since he has converted his suburban house
into a fortress to ward off the undead neighbors who visit him in the night. The segregation
between Neville and his aberrant neighbors is more complete than any suburban planner might
have imagined. Neville conceptually separates himself from these outsiders, introducing them as
“they,” several times before he explains whom he is referring to; in his mind such creatures do
not even transcend an ambiguous pronoun. As Kathy Patterson concurs, the hordes of vampire-
zombies who continually torment Neville can be read as racialized “Others.” Citing Neville’s
many references to the hordes as forms of “blackness,” Patterson contends that, “Robert Neville
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is a ‘borderland gentleman,’ a white man who finds himself alone in a savage world where he
must learn to adapt, relying on his own authority and autonomy to establish dominance over his
environment” (21).
139

In many ways Neville’s attempts to fortify his domestic space against the forces of
vampire-zombies represent the extreme consequences of the DIY fortification promoted by the
government and the leisure industry of the 1950s. Robert Neville is the epitome of individualist
survival: he is a capable, middle-class white man who works continually to improve his
domicile, and with it, his safety. He is the eight-armed DIY-er on the cover of Time Magazine.
Neville “seems to be a parody of the suburban homeowner, obsessed with do-it-yourself home
repair projects like replacing broken windows and cleaning the front yard of corpses” (Waller
258). Perhaps fed by this propaganda machine, Neville cannot even understand what drives his
unceasing home repair. He wonders, “What had impelled him to enclose the house, install a
freezer, a generator, an electric stove, a water tank, build a hothouse, a workbench, burn down
the houses on each side of his, collect records and books and mountains of canned supplies . . .
?” (96).
As part of his survival strategy Neville has built a fortress and he permits none to enter,
and as a consequence of his total isolation, Neville begins to “[lose] touch with humanity” (125).
Even when he encounters Ruth, a (secretly infected) survivor, and discovers that although Ruth
is infected she has been living with a new society of infected humans, he refuses to let down his
guard; chances for social connection exist but Neville refuses them. As a result, it is apparent that
it is his conviction in the necessity of his own security and isolation from external forces—in this

139
This racial difference is imagined more completely in The Omega Man, a 1971 adaptation of the novel starring
Charleton Heston. The film depicts Neville (Heston) beset by the attacks of a “family” of zombies who become
albino upon being infected. This has a strange effect on the appearance of the murderous Zachary, played by
African-American actor Lincoln Kilpatrick, who at one point refers to Neville’s stronghold as a “honky paradise.”
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case, the racialized “Others” of post-apocalyptic America—those whose blood is infected—that
has led to the nightmarish monotony of his solitary existence. When Neville realizes at the close
of Matheson’s novel that he is the monster which the new community fears, he finally
understands that his repudiation of the Others and his domestic fortification are factors which
have led to his own degeneration.
These dystopic apocalyptic narratives propose that many of the supposed comforts of
suburbia were, in fact, sources of social degeneration. Perhaps the suburbs promised new
pleasures with their technological appliances, increased opportunities for the working class, and
racial uniformity, but such narratives imply that such seemingly attractive opportunities were not
necessarily conducive to individual, social, or national progress. In order to maintain communal
and personal intimacy, perhaps the good life would require diversity, something that might entail
both happiness and instability; and it would certainly require social connection. As Americans
romanticized the good life of consumer-driven, technologically advanced suburbia, they had to
imagine new ways of creating coalitions and maintaining social connectedness.

Regeneration in Post-apocalyptic Suburbia
Another type of post-apocalyptic narrative tried to do just that: imagine explicitly how
the developing space of suburbia could serve as the site of national regeneration. These utopian-
leaning post-apocalyptic narratives investigated many of the same problems—overreliance on
technology, increased social disconnectedness, materialism, racial segregation, and routine—but
rather than indicate how such elements might lead to degeneration, these narratives use the
apocalypse to remake the New World into a more meritocratic and empowering place. In these
novels the landscape of suburbia has drastically changed and the apocalyptic event requires
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survivors to find new ways to inhabit their decimated communities. Rather than flee their
suburban communities, the protagonists in these narratives create new connections with their
neighbors and become agents of a large-scale transformation. While these utopian-leaning texts
can be strikingly different in their presentation of both calamity and resolution, they all promote
a re-evaluation of normative assumptions regarding social value and ideal national community.
In Alas Babylon, published in 1959, Pat Frank envisions the collapse of a materialistic
and disconnected American neighborhood and replaces it with one that is tightknit and newly
aware of life’s essentials. Frank’s narrative takes place in the small town of Fort Repose, a
fictional place in central Florida, before, during, and after “the Day” of nuclear attack. Under the
leadership of Randy Bragg, the people of Fort Repose not only survive the war but flourish.
They learn how to fulfill their own basic needs and become happier and healthier in the process.
Even though many modern luxuries are gone, there is a sense that in becoming simpler, life has
improved. By the end of the novel the people of Fort Repose have become so self-sufficient and
content that they refuse the offer of assistance extended to them by the U.S. Air Force.
In imagining the end of civilization Frank emphasizes the end of capitalist systems of value.
Objects are no longer valued based on their abstract worth within the marketplace, but are solely
evaluated in terms of use-value. This makes money practically obsolete. As Frank writes,
By afternoon the cash registers of Fort Repose were choked with currency, but
many shelves and counters were bare and others nearly so. By afternoon the law
of scarcity had condemned the dollar to degradation and contempt. Within a few
more days the dollar, in Fort Repose, would be banished entirely as a medium of
exchange, at least for the duration. (119)
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Pointing out the paradigmatic consequences of this development, Frank depicts a banker who
cannot seem to get a grip on reality. Realizing that “this was the end. Civilization was ended,” he
shoots himself in the head, fittingly using a bullet that is green with mold (122). Others have a
similar difficulty adapting to the new system of value. As “Bigmouth Bill” discovers, not only
does jewelry lack its former value, it has become dangerous. “Jewelry! Diamonds, emeralds,
pearls, tinkly little bracelets, all hot, all radioactive. That’s rich!” (209).
For Randy Bragg and his small community of friends, family, and neighbors, these
changes are both liberating and empowering. Without electricity and the many amusements of
the old world, people return to the library, prompting one resident to realize that “for the first
time in her thirty years as librarian of Fort repose she felt fulfilled, even important” (187).
Randy also feels an increasing sense of self-worth in post-apocalyptic America. As he assumes
new responsibilities, including caring for his brother’s family and protecting his community from
lawlessness, he kicks his drinking habit and reflects that “he was leaner and harder, and
truthfully, felt better than before The Day” (181). Such recognitions of life’s improvements after
“The Day” are abundant in Frank’s text. Noting that he no longer has to adhere to the rules of
bureaucracy, a thought that would please every American, one survivor remarks happily, “No
tax. No alimony. Let us count our blessings. Never thought I’d see the day” (182).
Yet all of these changes are relatively minor in comparison to the changes in race
relations that occur after The Day. Fort Repose had been a clearly segregated town before the
war but in its post-apocalyptic state racial separation seems not only trivial but counter-
productive. The Bragg household sits in close proximity to the Henrys, an African-American
family, and as Randy quickly realizes, the survival of his family rests on the relationship that he
can maintain with them. The Henrys have their own water-supply and ample livestock. They are
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good farmers and know how to maintain their equipment and the landscape they work. Long
constrained by racial prejudice, the Henrys have learned to provide for themselves. In contrast,
the White and well-to-do know little of life without electricity and grocery stores. When the
social infrastructure collapses, the White middle-class community of Fort Repose has to seek
help from those, such as the Henrys, whose social marginalization has long instructed them in
the art of survival. As Frank writes, “Like thousands of other towns and villages not directly
seared by war, Fort Repose became an island. From that moment, its inhabitants would have to
subsist on whatever was already within its boundaries, plus what they might scrounge from the
countryside” (117); and the greatest bounty in the county lay on the Henry’s homestead.
Already on good terms with the Henrys, Randy connects all local houses into their
waterline. The Henrys are glad to help, and they begin working side-by-side with Randy to make
their small community sustainable and safe. Randy builds an especially equitable relationship
with Malachai Henry, once the brother of his cleaning woman, Missouri. Recognizing the talents
of Malachai, Randy makes him head-mechanic and places Bill McGovern, his white father-in-
law-to-be, as Malachai’s assistant. It is an important moment in role-reversals as the white
patriarch must be, as he terms it, “mechanic, second-class” (171). Randy’s decisions are no
longer bound by traditional racial prejudices. Caring only for the success of his community, he
puts a premium on individual talent.
The relationship between the Henrys, the Braggs, and the other locals becomes
increasingly intimate and central to the survival of the group as a whole. Because of their country
know-how and self-sufficiency, the Henrys become role-models for survival, providing fresh
water, fresh meat, and practical knowledge to their white neighbors. In exchange, they benefit
from the education and resources of their community; they receive protection from Randy whose
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leadership skills and military background offer an important stability to the region. Frank thus
presents a community in which mutual necessity has forced racial integration and brought about
the overt recognition of the central importance of the black community—as represented by the
Henrys. In the most radical moments of the novel, Frank works explicitly to show the
arbitrariness of racial categories and to question their value in a survival context.
The economics of disaster placed a penalty upon prejudice. The laws of hunger
and survival could not be evaded, and honored no color line. A back-yard hen
raised by a Negro tasted just as good as the gamecocks of Carleton Hawes, the
well-to-do realtor who was a vice president of the county White Citizens Council,
and there was more meat on it. Randy saw Hawes, a brace of chickens dangling
from his belt, drink water, presumably boiled, from a Negro’s jug. There were
two drinking fountains in Marines Park, one marked “White Only,” the other
“Colored Only.” Since neither worked, the signs were meaningless. (Frank 191)
Whiteness, like money, is shown to be an abstract value with no real worth. In post-apocalyptic
America value is measured in relationship to potential use, function, or skill, rather than to some
system of abstract categorical thinking.
This reassessment of value offers the women of the novel a greater chance for social
empowerment as well. Randy’s girlfriend Lib (Elizabeth) surprises him with her physical and
mental strength. When her mother, Lavinia, dies and must be buried, Lib shares the burden of
digging. “As she dug, her stature increased in Randy’s eyes. She was like a fine sword, slender
and flexible, but steel; a woman of courage” (174). The women of Fort Repose repeatedly show
their worth, albeit in ways that are comparatively conventional. They run the libraries and
educate the youth; they sew the clothes for the community; and they find creative ways to
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provide fine meals for their families. In one scene that typifies the woman’s role as homemaker
in a time of crisis, Randy enters his dining room to find the table “set for a feast—a white cloth,
two new candles; a salad bowl as well at each place” (225). As he marvels at the tasty meal
before him the women explain how they researched edible plants in the library and foraged for
them outside. The salad is made of “fiddlehead ferns, hearts of palm, bamboo shoots, wild
onions, some of Admiral’s ornamental peppers, and the first tomatoes out of Hannah Henry’s
garden” (226). The women have even learned basic mycology and have endowed the table with
fresh edible mushrooms.
The novel is not without its racist and sexist assumptions, and there are elements of its
view of social relations that are problematically paternalistic and patronizing. The Henrys are
clearly too eager to help “Mister Randy” (150) when he comes to request assistance with his
water supply. They seem to have a difficult time altering their ingrained diffidence towards the
Braggs. Further, even Randy acknowledges that “The Henrys supplied more than their share of
food for the benefit of all” (184). The Henrys are unmistakably critical to the survival of the
community but it is less apparent that they too require assistance. All that Randy can think to
offer them initially is to “help them guard the food supply. Keep away the prowlers—cats,
wolves, humans, or whatever” (184). Jacqueline Foertsch explores this problem in
“Extraordinarily Convenient Neighbors: African-American Characters in White-Authored Post-
Atomic Novels,” arguing that though the Henrys are granted an important place in the novel,
there is a sense that they are still primarily the servants of the community. She deems them
“servant-savior-savants,” and asserts that:
while they exhibit terrific skills and rare knowledge that save white lives
following the detonation of the bomb, their talents and wisdom support the post-
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nuclear lifestyle (and enrich the narrative interest) of the white characters. Their
own needs for such support are emphatically downplayed or, worse, denied
through authorially enforced self-sacrifice. (124)
Foertsch offers a cogent analysis of the novel’s limitations—for, as she asserts, there is still a
noticeable hierarchy to post-apocalyptic civilization. One can read this in the paternalistic
attitude of Bragg towards the Henrys, the Henry’s unequal contribution of resources, as well as
the ultimate death of Malachai—the smartest and most competent black character in the novel.
One can also read an imbalance in the importance which the novel places on the lives of its
central white characters, whose love lives and survival take up the majority of the storyline as
well as its final pages.
The gender progress within the novel is even more narrowly conceived. In focusing on
everyone’s use value, men and women are limited to gender stereotypes regarding their innate
strengths and weaknesses. Men like Randy rise to the challenges posed after the atomic attack,
becoming stronger, more responsible, and more confident in their leadership of others—
ostensibly the natural role of men. Women become even better at their roles as homemakers,
nurturers, and domestic scientists, yet they never prove their independence but remain in need of
their male caretakers. Their dependence is justified by the fact that the post-apocalyptic
landscape has become a lawless place; in order to ensure their physical safety and that of their
children the women depend upon the strength and knowledge of weaponry that the men possess.
Randy reflects, “The more he learned about women the more there was to learn except that he
had learned this: they needed a man around” (299). These dynamics mirror, not only the typical
gender assumptions of mainstream 1950s America, but also the expectations and proscriptions
urged by civil defense advocates. As Sarah Lichtman argues,
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For women, do-it-yourself security relied on informed consumption and gender-
normative domestic duties. According to civil defence (sic) literature,
preparedness resided in a well-stocked larder and ‘emergency housekeeping ’ ,
responsibilities essential to women’s role as homemaker. Even though this
emphasis took place at a time when women were returning to the workplace at
greater rates than at any other time since the Second World War, they remained
housekeepers and childcare providers first. ( 2)
By promoting traditional gender roles as empowering and necessary, Alas, Babylon offers new
value to everyday tasks but also reifies the customary system of social expectations.
Yet while its imagination of a more equal society is clearly limited, Frank’s novel does
important work in reimagining the possibilities of American community. While he may not
deliver a perfect vision of social equality, Frank does succeed in deconstructing—at least
partially—the conventional inequalities of his time. He defamiliarizes racial distinctions and
social roles. He makes readers see the potential importance of both White and Black members of
the community, of both men and women—and emphasizes the essential role that collective
cooperation plays in national survival. This was a significant ideological intervention in 1959.
The symbiotic relationship between his characters, as well as the valorization of the Henrys’
many skills offered a useful vision to a Civil-Rights era audience, one that was arguably quite
influential.
140
His post-apocalyptic community is representative of a desire to transform America
from a society of materialistic and prejudiced individualists to a place of equitable interracial
meritocracy. Such visions served an important utopian function in the American imaginary. By

140
This audience was vast; according to Richard Schwartz, “Still in print more than forty-five years after its release,
[Alas, Babylon] has sold more than two million copies according to the paperback cover and was required reading in
many American high schools throughout the Cold War. (Schwartz 410)
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envisioning a racially integrated community and deemphasizing racial difference, his novel
participated in the cultural shift towards racial integration that was at work in the late 1950s.
A similar narrative of social equity unfolds in Philip Wylie’s Triumph, a novel that is
seemingly obsessed with race. Triumph is less explicitly suburban than Wylie’s previous
apocalyptic novel, Tomorrow!. Its characters do not remain in their suburban homes but find
refuge in a subterranean fall-out shelter amongst the wealthy suburbs of Connecticut. Yet this
shelter is not unlike a suburban enclave. It has a family room with a TV, a roller-skating rink,
even a pool (eventually), and seemingly endless corridors of space for its inhabitants who spend
their leisure time playing bridge and drinking high-balls. Over the course of two years this
shelter houses fourteen survivors who are representative of American diversity, and their
experiences together serve as a blueprint for the kinds of change that Wylie believes might
improve the nation and thereby prevent it from succumbing to the annihilation of World War III.
“Sachem’s Watch,” the immense fall-out shelter built by White millionaire Vance Farr,
serves as a stage for observing how this microcosm of American community copes with disaster.
Wylie goes to some length to include a representative from each major ethnic group in American
society. While Farr and his wife, Valerie, and daughter, Faith, have obviously planned to inhabit
the shelter in a time of nuclear war, not all enter with predetermined invitations. Many have
been invited to Farr’s lavish house for the weekend, but the war surprises the group and with few
seconds to spare they must plunge into the depths of Farr’s refuge. This spontaneous evacuation
includes the Farrs’ “Negro” butler, Paulus Davey, and his dark-skinned daughter, Heliconia
(Connie). Also included is protagonist, Ben Berman, a Jewish scientist, Lotus (Lodi) Li, a
Chinese (American) scientist/mathematician, George Hyama, Farr’s Japanese (American)
scientist/engineer assistant, Kit Barlow, Faith’s egotistical fiancé, and Pete Williams, a White
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working-class meter-reader who just happened to be checking the Farr house meters when the
first bombs hit. In the days following their evacuation the group rescues another four survivors
by digging through a wall in one of the shelter’s tunnels. This brings their total up to fourteen
including two “Latin” survivors, Angelica and Alberto, and two White children, Dick and
Dorothy. As Valerie Farr makes plain, “it’s perfectly miraculous, this group! A real League of
Nations, yet everyone an American” (98).
Wylie frequently highlights the racial differences of his cast of characters. The women’s
ethnic differences are generally described in terms of their physical beauty. Although she later
gains recognition for her math skills, when Lodi Li is first introduced, Faith tells her “I think the
Chinese are the most lovely women on earth—and you are one of the loveliest I ever saw!” (18).
Similarly, Connie enters the scene as “the beautiful colored girl” (50), and later attention is
brought to her “feline, dark body, a black panther body” (232). Similarly, Angelica is described
as “dazzingly attractive. Half Spanish—South American, maybe—and half Irish. She has that
blue-black hair that some Italian women possess, but it’s wavy and light, not heavy like most
such hair” (102). George Hyama, Paulus Davey and Ben Berman are also marked by race.
Davey, as a lifelong black servant of the Farrs, is given little agency or identity in the novel; his
race is marked by his absence and insignificance. George and Ben however, are both central to
the group’s survival. Ben is Jewish and meditates on the significance of his ethnic identity. He
remembers overhearing anti-Semitic jokes about his appearance, and his sense of otherness has
prevented him from expressing his affection for Faith. George’s identity as the “Japanese boy” is
exaggerated as he pursues a relationship with Lodi, the Chinese girl (202); in one scene Lodi
tells him tauntingly, “You know George, the Chinese have always detested you Japanese” (182).
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Wylie’s emphasis on and ultimate celebration of racial differences shows him to be an
early purveyor of American multiculturalism. His vision is both limited and progressive: as he
attempts to celebrate racial difference he also reifies race as a real category and hides Whiteness
within a state of assumed neutrality in the process. Yet, this tactic also gives Wylie the
opportunity to point out the necessity of building a cohesive community of racially different
Americans, and he is intent on renovating assumed social roles. As Vance says, “There can’t be
any servant-master setup down here! We’re all going to have to stand shifts. Cooking. Public-
room cleaning. Laundry. Dishwashing. All other chores. Tomorrow we’ll have a meeting and I’ll
prepare schedules of duties for everybody, with change-off times” (58). Despite their differences
this community must pool its talents and work cooperatively towards their survival. George, a
trained engineer from MIT, proves himself to be indispensable to the survival of the group, as
does Ben, also a scientist. Lodi is a math genius and works with the two men in their endeavors
to maintain a livable environment and to make contact with a rescue party. At one point she is
found “grease-blackened” as she “operat[es] an automatic drill press” (141). Kit and Alberto
both show their bravery in times of danger, and Vance Farr is continually credited with the
whole enterprise since he had the money and the foresight to build the shelter. Connie, who is a
whiz at languages, translates the foreign broadcasts they discover on their television and radio.
The group does not begin in fraternity and at times it seems that their inability to work
together will be their undoing. Vance Farr and his alcoholic wife are at first estranged. Adding to
their marital tensions is the fact that Angelica happens to be Vance’s Latin mistress (hence the
tunnel). Kit and Ben are threatened by one another as they fight for Faith’s affections. Pete, the
meter reader, is initially in a state of panic when he thinks that the Chinese, as represented by
Lodi, have captured him; and no one seems to like the suave Alberto. Yet their obligatory
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internment together forces the small community to build new social bonds.
141
As Ben notes after
a year together:
He was fond, he now thought, of every single person in the group. Very fond.
Each, in his or her own way, had shown great bravery, persistence, patience, and
love for another, in that best and greatest sense of love, which involves a sacrifice
of selfish ends for he needs of others. He had become fond of Alberto Rizzo!
Amazing. A thing Ben would once have thought impossible. (211).
Ultimately Wylie suggests that working together as a community and recognizing one another’s
worth are integral elements to the maintenance of peace—a claim that has greater significance in
a novel about World War III. For the text argues that it is not race itself, but feelings of racial
superiority that lead to conflict. Ben thinks:
The ‘differences’ made by race and religion are superficial. Environment and the
attitudes of other people to anyone, or to any minority group, regarded as
‘different’—and of course, in consequence, as inferior—make the only important
differences that exist. And all of that . . . illusion. A dozen branches of science, in
thousands of unanswerable tests, had shown no special quality or superiority in
black man or white, brown, or yellow; Jew or gentile or Moslem or Hindu. But
most human beings, and the arrogant white man in particular, had refused to
examine the evidence and accept the truth; and in the rejection of known reality,
they now had lost . . . everything. . . For their sins? . . . Ben considered. (189)
Wylie places the error of racism at the foundation of apocalyptic death; and the community’s
interracial cooperation and mutual respect becomes a blueprint for the kind of interracial

141
The device of forcing characters of different races together so that they are forced to work out their differences
has become a staple of post-apocalyptic narrative. This narrative framework was also used in Stanley Kramer’s 1958
film, The Defiant Ones, starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis.
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cooperation required to maintain world peace. As Ben realizes near the novel’s conclusion, the
group’s survival was not only enabled by resourcefulness and determination, but by “love”
(274), and it is clear that such love of humanity might save America from future calamity, as it
has saved Wylie’s survivors.
While Wylie’s novel focuses primarily on the problems of racism, George Stewart’s
Earth Abides (1949) urges a radical reassessment of human hierarchy that goes even further by
emphasizing man’s equivalence, not only with other men, but with all creatures of the earth. The
novel centers on the experiences of Isherwood Williams (Ish), a young White man from San
Francisco, who survives an apocalyptic plague and later becomes part of a collectivity of
survivors living in the suburban hills of the east bay.
142
By the novel’s conclusion Ish has
helped create a new civilization comprised of a multi-racial community. With a new calendar,
new rules, and new social relationships, this group marks a new beginning for humankind. Of
utmost importance in the novel is their reintegration into nature.
In its imagination of the fall of the city and the return of both the natural world and
primitive survival, Stewart’s novel has a lot in common with other post-apocalyptic frontier
narratives. Like Granser in London’s The Scarlet Plague, and Allan in Darkness and Dawn, or
Randy in Alas, Babylon, Ish is physically and mentally revitalized by the post-apocalyptic
landscape. Alluding to Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson (84), Ish sees himself
as a man cut loose from constraints, even asserting that he feels “a greater freedom” than he has
ever felt before (169). Since he begins the novel as a sick man, his physical recovery is explicit,

142
Although Stewart’s viral apocalypse departs from the common atomic formula of most post-war apocalyptic
fiction, viral threats were feared equally imminent, especially at a time of increased world travel. To make such a
point clear Stewart inaugurates the tale with a 1947 admonition from Chemical and Engineering News: “If a killing
type of virus strain should suddenly arise by mutation . . . it could, because of the rapid transportation in which we
indulge nowadays, be carried to the far corners of the earth and cause the deaths of millions of people” (1).
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and over the course of the novel Ish and the others in his group gain the strength of the hunter
and the builder.
In addition, like “The Scarlet Plague,” and Triumph, Earth Abides suggests that human
survival and regeneration might entail racial mixing and/or interracial cooperation. Ish is drawn
out of his solitude by Em, a dark-skinned woman who is so kind and thoughtful that he hardly
stops to consider her race. Ish notices “the wide-set black eyes in the dark face, the full ripe lips,
the swelling curve of the breasts beneath a light-green smock” (106), making her racial
difference from him apparent. Yet, as Ish notes, such a thing as race makes no difference to them
now. “Her social status must have been, Ish judged, somewhat lower than his. But there was
nothing more ridiculous to contemplate, now, than all that business of social classes” (107).
Stewart’s post-apocalyptic America, like Wylie’s and Frank’s has new rules, new measures of
value; old racial categories seem outdated and the new law of the land is successful collectivity.
While at first Ish is clear disconnected from others due to his inability to see himself as a
part of his community, he eventually realizes that long-term human survival relies upon the
ability to act as a collective, to pool resources skills and ideas, to share our love and experiences.
To further emphasize the importance of the collective, Stewart reveals the limits, not only of
individual effort in a survival situation, but also of individual perception. Even though his
pragmatism, intelligence, and resourcefulness make Ish seem to be the model survivor, he
makes many errors in judgment as a result of his own narrow views of others. By revealing Ish’s
limitations Stewart refuses to grant Ish dominance in the group. Instead, Stewart suggests that
there are no “ideal” individual survivors of catastrophe, only a lucky few who do the best that
they can with their collective strengths. This collectivity is a necessary part of survival since no
individual has all of the necessary skills for long-term survival.
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Yet Stewart’s community of survivors thrives, not only because they renovate their social
relationships, but also because they learn to appreciate their equivalence with other creatures
within the natural world. Taking his revision of human behavior and social ideology beyond the
limits of typical progressive thought of the Civil Rights era, Stewart dethrones the human species
and promotes a new ecology. He progressively reimagines our relationship with nature: humans
are not a superior species but merely another life form vying for survival on a planet with limited
resources. Stewart writes, “As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run
escape the fate of other creatures . . .” (8). The “Great Disaster” serves as proof that mortality
eventually dethrones every species, no matter their apparent strength or power. The human
species is not exceptional and the wilderness soon comes “moving in to take charge” (78). Like
Rome, New York has fallen (66); it is another passing of the guard in human history only this
time humans are not left at the top of the hierarchy.
By asserting the equality between different races as well as between different species
Stewart offers an even more radical re-evaluation of social norms in post-war society, one that
might more effectively combat the ideologies of dominance that lead to world-ending
destruction. As Jeffrey Myers argues, “the ethnocentric outlook that constructed ‘whiteness’
over and against the alterity of other racial categories is the same perspective that constructed the
anthropocentric paradigm at the root of environmental destruction” (5). In many ways one could
argue that Stewart was ahead of his time. He realized that the greatest threats to the nation’s
future were social enmity and environmental disregard, and he hoped that we might remedy both
with a greater regard for all species and all races.

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Conclusion
On the one hand Triumph, Alas, Babylon, Earth Abides, and Tomorrow!, can be read as
mechanisms of national glorification; they stress the resilience, strength, and resourcefulness of
the American family in the event of a catastrophe—usually an all-out nuclear attack by Soviet
forces. The nuclear crisis in these novels reveals the strength of its citizens as they overcome the
challenges brought about by war-time scarcity and social and political instability, and brave the
dangers of the physical landscape. By emphasizing the possibility of survival and the strength of
Americans who are faced with the devastating reality of nuclear war, these novels participate in
the “reconstitution of nuclear reality” that was actively advocated by federal bodies like the
FCDA.
143
Moreover these novels represent World War III as not only survivable but winnable.
At the end of Frank’s novel the U.S. military asserts: “We won it. We really clobbered ‘em!”
(316). Wylie presents a similar representation of American military might in Triumph by
including a parallel plot that centers on the “last ditch” maneuvers of a handful of U.S.
submarines and an aircraft carrier. After months of reconnaissance and planning the remaining
U.S. military personnel successfully destroy the last Soviet bases, caissons that have been
secretly hidden under the sea. This annihilation emphasizes the intelligence of the U.S. military
as well as their patriotic sacrifice, for each man endures months of sub-oceanic isolation
knowing that even in the event of military success they will likely perish. As one submarine
captain discovers, he has no reason to doubt his men’s endurance, since “his crew, to a man, was
single-mindedly devoted to the now-hopeful chance of action against an incredibly ruthless
foe—a satanic foe, they felt, so they bore the long watch without complaint” (222). In the end

143
This is a common argument made about Cold War era post-apocalyptic fiction. As Evans writes, “The rhetoric of
the Cold War involved images of mass destruction, with the United States surviving relatively intact to begin anew.
Narratives of nuclear survival found in the popular media of the time act as an extension of the American belief in
its own invulnerable omnipotence” (136).

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the men do die, but not without first carrying out their mission. “Operation ‘Last Ditch’ was a
triumph,” and “within hours, the last effective adherent of communism and its last effective
instrument of force vanished” (240). In a triumphant recognition of their accomplishment Wylie
writes, “The doctrines of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Merov, and Grovsky were
finally undone . . . at the cost of half a world and of the vast majority of people who once called
themselves free and civilized” (240).
On the other hand however, these visions of American strength and resilience are clearly
tempered with doubts about the survivability of nuclear war.
144
Wylie ends his novel by
announcing the obliteration of the U.S. and the creation of a new international community by the
surviving countries of the Southern hemisphere. Wylie is not merely celebrating the heroism of
the American military or the staying power of its citizens; he is drawing attention to the
terrifying prospects that can result from doing business as usual. The world ends for the United
States because the nation made a fatal error. As the few survivors note when viewing images of
destruction via television, “It’s not we who need to see such examples of the hideousness that
wiped out our world. [ . . . .] It was the people who were eradicated—that billion-plus” (262).
They failed to realize that nuclear war was “Mutual suicide [ . . . .] Where’s your winning side?”
(262). Frank’s characters reach a similar conclusion, noting that with the availability of nuclear
armaments “war is no longer an instrument of national policy, only an instrument for national
suicide. War itself was obsolete” (236). The question thus becomes, not merely how can we
survive nuclear war and prove our patriotic resilience, but how can we avoid nuclear war and
ensure the survival of the human race?

144
This decrease in optimism is evident in Wylie’s novels: while Tomorrow! ends with a suburban family living
happily in their old neighborhood, Triumph concludes with the acknowledgement that the thirteen remaining
survivors are all that is left of the United States. Although the Soviets have been defeated, everyone else in the
northern hemisphere has perished as well; when the survivors leave their underground refuge they “leave the United
States of America forever. And when they had gone, the place would have no name” (277).
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These novels clearly do more than merely envision a triumphant post-nuclear return to
the status quo. Characters and communities have changed in post-apocalyptic America and
Wylie, Stewart, and Frank not only showcase the nation’s aptitude for resourceful survivalism,
they assert America’s potential for progressive transformation. This assertion can be considered
similarly patriotic, as visions of American progress speak to the nation’s exceptional ability to
evolve towards utopia; however these visions of social change also urge readers toward a broader
vision of what might make a nation extraordinary. This involves a reconsideration of human
identity; one that sees beyond assumptions of racial, national, or species’ superiority and instead
locates man within a collective.
145
As post-apocalyptic narratives have become more ubiquitous
in American popular culture it is worth examining what role they have played in modifying
common conceptions of race and community. While the genre has surely participated in
engineering a particular vision of American futurity, one wonders to what extent these narratives
have assisted in preventing apocalyptic catastrophe and promoting social integration.

145
It is ironic, perhaps, that such a communal vision could be so popular at a time when “communism” was a dirty
word in the United States. Yet this may be one reason why the idea of multiculturalism has had so much appeal: it
provides a framework for imagining the nation as a collectivity of difference; it sustains the idea of individualism
while promoting a vision of communalism.

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CHAPTER 5
The “Weird Spell” of the Empty City:
Reimagining America in Post-Apocalyptic Films of the Atomic Age

It is 1959 and a young Harry Belafonte is alone, running through a silent and motionless
New York City. He calls out but echoes are all that answer. As he runs frantically through the
empty streets he is dwarfed by clusters of towering skyscrapers. He expects to find someone
staring down at him; he can feel the old world watching him, measuring him. But now it is a
dead world. He is the only survivor of the nuclear apocalypse, the only human left to take up
residence in the vast cityscape. His fearful and frantic movements begin to subside and his
eagerness grows as he realizes the possibilities open to him in the new metropolis. He is no
longer limited by the strictures of segregation, no longer oppressed by the social hierarchies of
the old world, and when he and a beautiful young white woman become friends and potential
partners, it seems that a new world order is emerging.
In 1959, in the midst of America’s Civil Rights Movement, this vision of post-
apocalyptic possibility was brought to life in The World, The Flesh, and The Devil, produced by
Belafonte’s HarBel Productions and directed by Ranald MacDougall. Frustrated with the ways
that Hollywood—as well as America—usually dealt with race, Belafonte had formed HarBel
with the hope of offering more progressive depictions of race relations in America. The World
was a striking reworking of cinematic and racial norms, for although black men had begun to get
lead roles in Hollywood films, it was the first time a black man was pictured as the last man
alive, his full humanity granted by imagery that insisted he was now the center of the world.
146

Fulfilling many of Belafonte’s hopes for his new production company, The World, which so

146
Belafonte was named “Hollywood’s first Negro star” in 1957 by Modern Screen (Ross 187).
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closely resembles Du Bois’s “The Comet,” offered its black protagonist a central position in the
narrative and in America’s future. He is a strong and capable survivor, possessing all of the
working-class skills necessary to get things up and running again. Expecting nothing to be
handed to him freely, he is able to overcome the disappointments of the post-apocalyptic
landscape, to deal effectively with its privations. He is America’s best hope, and as a handsome
and virile young man who gains the attention of the only woman survivor, he seems vital to the
regeneration of all humanity.
This narrative (re)appraisal of an African-American man had a defamilarizing effect on
normative racial ideology. As audiences watched Ralph Burton (Belafonte) move through the
city, his visual diminution—which was suggestive of his previous social value as a black man—
seemed at odds with his newly acquired value as the last man. The racial tensions that arise later
in the film have a similar oddness about them. What value lay in racial norms when humanity
itself was under threat? What reality lay in racism when there were so few left to re-people and
rebuild the world? And how could anyone not think that Burton, with his golden voice and
striking good looks, was the right partner for the beautiful Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens), the
only woman left in the world? In this way The World made an argument for the deconstruction
of racial norms and promoted a vision of racial integration at a time when segregation and anti-
miscegenation were still the norm.
Belafonte’s film also promoted a vision of interracial community in New York City, a
site that was becoming increasingly associated with deterioration and danger, and which—due to
suburban migration—was becoming less racially integrated. The World reimagines this city
space, making it the site of national regeneration. It is there that Burton and Crandall begin
again, mining the infinite resources of the modern world. And it is there, by the United Nations
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Headquarters that an interracial peace is later made. The World exemplifies how the post-
apocalyptic cityscape—a place that would become a staple of post-apocalyptic film in the post-
war years—could signify the transience and flexibility of social structures, and could engage
audiences in contemplating new social arrangements in formerly segregated landscapes.
In this way film offered something new to the apocalyptic genre—especially when
produced by a company concerned more with politics than proft. Imagery of post-apocalyptic
cities could serve as places of possibility; stages upon which to try out new identities and social
arrangements. As 1950s films like The World, the Flesh, and The Devil and Stanley Kramer’s On
the Beach indicate, cities and those who live within their streets could change dramatically
overnight. In this imagined transmutation lay the possibility to reassess structural and ideological
norms. Sometimes these cities are sites of disaster and survivors scavenge for resources amidst
the detritus of civilization; but sometimes the cities are empty, offering no impediments to
change or reconstruction. The post-apocalyptic city is ripe for development and encourages
audiences to reconsider its possibilities. Its nascent aura invites one to dream about the future of
the nation, and in this way, it isn’t surprising that the post-war proliferation of post-apocalyptic
films coincided with the explosion of the film Western. The post-apocalyptic film, like the
Western, offered a space for national imagining that could reach vast audiences—yet unlike the
Western, that space could be located in the future and in an urban locale.
Considering the widespread anxieties regarding atomic apocalypse in the post-war era
this utopian potential of apocalyptic film may seem counterintuitive; but it helps explain the
steady popularity and ubiquity of the genre. While many have argued that the American appetite
for apocalyptic movies indicates a growing sense of pessimism about the future, an analysis of
their utopian aspects reveals an underlying optimism at work in the production and consumption
Olivas 211

of such films.
147
In addition, such a reading indicates that the popularity of apocalyptic film may
not be due merely to an attraction to what Mike Davis calls the “glamor of decay,” but to an
attraction to the possibility of decay as a sign of inevitable and holistic change.
148

Susan Sontag famously warned that post-nuclear disaster films offered an “aesthetic view
of destruction and violence—a technological view” (28), which she felt was ultimately an
“inadequate response” to the threat of nuclear war (37).
149
She felt that they are dangerously
escapist, that they could “normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it”
(37). Yet, while audiences might appreciate imagery of destruction, such enjoyment does not
necessarily stifle a critical engagement with a film or with the apocalyptic disaster that it
represents. One can enjoy a cinematic disaster without becoming complacent about the
possibility of destruction, and without becoming a passive (and enthusiastic) recipient of
spectacle. In fact, a rendering of a destroyed city can be exciting and encourage critical
engagement, for it invites viewers to perceive the city as a transformable space.
While many films of the Atomic Age are labeled as “disaster” and “apocalyptic,” they are
also post-disaster and post-apocalyptic. The disaster at the film’s center, or sometimes at its
beginning, is an agent of transformation and the film is usually more about survival than
catastrophe.
150
Such an invitation to imagine change within the urban environment can be quite
enticing for audiences who are, in fact, engaged with current social and political issues. Even

147
Richard Berger and Teresa Heffernan have argued that apocalyptic fictions help us articulate a postmodern
disillusionment with the possibility of radical change. See Heffernan’s Post-Apocalyptic Culture and Berger’s After
The End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse.
148
In Ecology of Fear Davis writes, “The decay of the city’s old glamor has been inverted by the entertainment
industry into a new glamor of decay” (278). Similarly Mark Seltzer argues that we live in a “trauma culture,” in
which crisis has begun to form the centerpiece of community.
149
The idea that nuclear war was un-representable, or unthinkable, was a common refrain in the nuclear criticism
that emerged in the decades after WWII.
150
As Mick Broderick notes in “Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster,” “the sub-genre of SF
cinema which has entertained visions of nuclear Armageddon concerns itself primarily with survival as its dominant
discursive mode” (362).
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Sontag seems to realize this potential within the disaster genre, as she acknowledges that “the
lure of such generalized disaster is that it releases one from normal obligations” (28). Although
she dismisses this tendency as escapist, there is something quite powerful about a fantasy in
which one is no longer bound to old social roles, especially when one considers the ways in
which ideologies of race, gender, class, and sexuality are strong determinants of one’s social
positioning in America. Thus, the explosion of apocalyptic film after World War II was not
merely a result of a pessimism regarding humanity’s future, or of a desire to either anesthetize
atomic fears or relish in the visualization of collapse, but was an effect of the realization that the
apocalyptic landscape offered new opportunities for social and national imagining, particularly in
regards to America’s racial community.

Cities and Suburbia in the Post-War Period
Cities had long been associated with social problems in American popular culture. The need
to reimagine the American city in the post-war period, and the individuals and community who
reside within, was driven by an increasing awareness of urban problems—and perhaps by an
exaggerated perception of that increase—as well as by the corresponding growth of the suburban
environment, the residential utopia of the 1950s. The housing shortage that followed the end of
World War II added urgency to an already ubiquitous belief in the need for city transformation.
In fact, “from 1941to 1948, legislatures in 25 states passed urban redevelopment acts” (Von
Hoffman 304). However, despite the hopeful Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, which sought to
improve post-war housing options, by the late 1950s it was apparent that living conditions for
many urban residents were getting worse. Even though there were efforts to shift from urban
redevelopment to urban “renewal” with the Housing Act of 1954—which focused more effort on
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the rehabilitation and conservation of existing buildings—the federal housing acts tended to
create what many critics deemed “second ghettoes” and to displace low-income communities
(Von Hoffman 313). Ultimately, because most resources accompanied Whites as they moved to
suburbia, there was little help for urban communities, and in the 1960s such trends only
increased.
By the late 1950s American cities were also associated with both civic corruption and
licentiousness thanks to recurrent denigrating filmic depictions. These negative perceptions were
at least partially grounded in reality. Cities did offer many temptations which smaller towns
could not provide, making them easy scapegoats for juvenile corruption and adult vice. More
condemning however, was the apparent corruption of the men bound to regulate such iniquity,
and to keep the city safe for its inhabitants. A controversy emerged which spotlighted police
corruption after the beating of seven men by over fifty members of the LAPD on December 25,
1951. Deemed “the Bloody Christmas,” the victimized men had already been taken into custody
when they were beaten, illustrating the ludicrousness of the force imposed upon them. This
event tarnished the reputation of the LAPD and widened the divide between law enforcement
and communities of color.
151
Tales of police corruption made popular news stories and were
likely disproportionately represented in accounts of police procedure. For example, a Chicago
Tribune happily quoted a story from a London newspaper that criticized the New York police
department for being “laughingly called New York’s finest” when they were, in fact, “probably
the world’s most consistently corrupt law agency” (“Call New York,” Chicago Daily Tribune
36).

151
See Edward J. Escobar, “Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police Department,
Mexican Americans, and Police Reform in the 1950s,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (May 2003), 171-199.
Olivas 214

Such tales of corruption at the city’s center were echoed and thereby amplified by
popular film and fiction. Perceptions of the city as a space of lawlessness and corruption were a
centerpiece of film noir, which in the 1950s dominated cinematic representations of the city. The
film noir city was the place of the gangster, the criminal, and the corrupt politician; it was often
dark, dirty, and stiflingly crowded. It was a place, as Raymond Chandler famously argued in
“The Simple Art of Murder,” “where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law
and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing” (10). The noir city required the
figure of the upright detective, the figure who might provide a moralistic center to an otherwise
nihilistic world. While Chandler’s Marlowe may have been more gentlemanly than Mickey
Spillane’s Mike Hammer, both detectives were defined by their honesty and integrity in a world
in which no official civic or national body was sufficient to take care of things. The popularity of
this figure, as well as his position as both savior and detective, indicates just how bleakly the city
was imagined during this period. In film noir the city was a dangerous labyrinth that required
superior strength and vision to navigate.
152

Of course, this depiction of the city as a place of darkness and corruption was not wholly
a 1950s phenomenon. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis, which is perhaps the most popular
depiction of the city in early film, presented the city as a space of both technological wonder and
severe class oppression. For the multitudes condemned to dwell beneath Lang’s futuristic city,
the metropolis was a veritable Hell. In their investigation of the city in cinema, John Gold and
Stephen Ward argue that since the 1920s cities have been represented to reflect an increasing
sense of their oppressiveness: “Cities were now typically enclosed, overcrowded, noisy and

152
James Donald writes that the labyrinthine or enigmatic city is “a dangerous but fascinating network of often subterranean
relationships in need of decipherment. The detective embodies knowledge of the city’s lore and languages, and the daring to
move at will through its society salons, its ghettos, and its underworld.” James Donald, “The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces,”
Visual Cultur, Ed. Chris Jenks. (London: Routledge, 1995) 79.
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tense” (61). As John Gold points out, the gangster movie in the 1930s and the darkness of film
noir in the 1940s and 1950s “reinforced the cinema's negative portrayals of cities” (339). Such
representations of urban corruption were so pervasive in the post-war period that, as Colin
McArthur argues, the only positive cinematic representation of the city during the era could be
found in the Hollywood musical.
153

Complementing this negative portrayal was a recurrent positive representation of small
town America. Consider Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), or William Wyler’s The
Best Years of Our Lives (1946), two films that trace their protagonists’ journeys to rediscovering
the value of their small-town lives. This love of small-town America was also celebrated
regularly in the Western, a popular genre that saturated both television and film. Shows like The
Rifleman (1958-1963), Bonanza (1959-1973) and The Virginian (1962-1971), and films like
Bend of the River (1952) and My Darling Clementine (1946) centered on ranch life, offering
landscapes that consisted of vast tracts of land, small town centers, and quantifiable populations.
The small Western towns depicted in such films and programs were often the sites of conflict,
but there was a sense in the Western that order could be restored if a man of honor (a gun-
fighting protagonist) chose to stand up for what was right. In the end most Western landscapes
were spaces of freedom and possibility.
154
The towns did not contain or corrupt the men, but
were places for community-building and resupplying.
Of course the Western town was a relic of the past, as was the idyllic small town that was
seemingly untouched by modern times. By the 1950s, housing development was moving at such
a fast pace that there were few places left that resembled the small towns of Hollywood film;

153
See Colin McArthur,“Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City,” The Cinematic City, Ed.
David B. Clarke, (London: Routledge, 1997) 32.
154
The sense of freedom conveyed by the Western was likely aided by cinematic technologies. In the 1950s
cinemascope and VistaVision allowed filmmakers to create awe-inspiring panoramas of space. This visual spectacle
made protagonists—as well as the small homes and towns they inhabited—appear increasingly unencumbered by
the complications of modern civilization.
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roads and suburban development now reached out and linked towns together with unprecedented
haste. With the coming of both television and the automobile, it was no longer possible to
remain insulated from the outside world; small-town life was becoming increasingly modernized.
While the perfectly simple small town likely never existed, by mid-century it seemed to be
disappearing. As a testament to this disappearance Walt Disney included both “Main Street
U.S.A.” and “Frontierland” in his famous theme park when it opened in 1955. While
Frontierland offered visitors an opportunity to canoe through a river encircled by dangerous
Indians, shoot rifles, and dine at a “Prairie Outpost,” Main Street offered a beautiful idealization
of small town U.S.A. with decorative Victorian architecture, penny arcades, ice cream parlors,
and horse-drawn street-cars. Disney offered both of these themed spaces as opportunities to
experience a part of America’s glorious past. He explained, "For those of us who remember the
carefree time it recreates, Main Street will bring back happy memories. For younger visitors, it is
an adventure in turning back the calendar to the days of grandfather's youth" (qtd in Shaffer 126).
This celebration of small town purity and simplicity was actively channeled to suburbia, a place
that could simultaneously represent traditional American values and modern living. Suburban
tracts did not look much like the bedecked streets of Main Street U.S.A., but developers
promoted them as sites of safety, cleanliness, and community, and their purchase was incredibly
simple (if you were of the correct racial and religious background, of course).
Of course, since de facto housing segregation had been growing for decades, regularly
restricting people of color from new residential opportunities, African-Americans often
understood the suburbs as a place of exclusion and even persecution. In contrast, the city was a
place—not of more pronounced corruption—but rather another site that embodied the structural
inequalities with which they grappled. Yet it was also a place where political groups could come
Olivas 217

together, and thus the city was often where an empowering revolutionary consciousness could
develop. Amiri Baraka argues that this “revolutionary black nationalist,” consciousness, which
was “violently anti-white,” had long been growing in the cities, from the Harlem Renaissance to
the Black Arts Movement (155). White supremacy and racism—which could occur in both city
and suburb—remained the clear impediment to black freedom.
In fact, as I illustrated in my examination of “The Comet,” many African-American
writers have tended to see the city as a space in which individual identity and freedom can finally
be discovered and /or secured.
155
In Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, a young black man
travels from the South to New York City as part of his journey of self-discovery. Although
Ellison emphasizes the impossibility of a typical happy ending for a young black man in 1940s
New York, in the end his narrator finds an empowering place to live, albeit underground. As
Robert Butler argues, “Ellison’s hero sees his ingenious subterranean ‘home’ as a place of
‘hibernation’ providing him with the kind of new life which traditional American heroes have
found in the West” (Hakutani and Butler 124). The city is rendered with a similar sense of
possibility in the works of James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Richard Wright, to name a few. Thus,
it is important to note that the anti-urbanism that characterized mainstream film and fiction was
primarily the work of white writers and filmmakers who viewed the city as a place that curtailed
individual freedom and success. Many such works, Toni Morrison argues, view black people, “as
patients, victims, wards, and pathologies in urban settings, not as participants” (37).

155
As Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler write in The City in African-American Literature, “A substantial
reversal of this anti-urban drive in American literature may be found in African-American writing. . . While one of
the central drives in our classic literature has been a nearly reflexive desire to move away from the complexity and
supposed corruption of cities toward idealized non-urban settings . . . very often the opposite has been true in
African-American letters” (9). For example, they claim, “For both Ellison and [Charles] Johnson the modern city is
what the West is in mainstream American literature, an indeterminate open space creating the independence,
freedom, and mobility necessary for achieving genuine selfhood” (15).
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The Post-Apocalyptic Empty City in Post-War Film
Apocalyptic films like The World, the Flesh and the Devil, and Stanley Kramer’s On the
Beach, suggest that people did not want to abandon their cities, nor watch them die, but instead
sought new ways of perceiving their possibilities. Was it possible to have a city without crowds,
noise, or cars, a place in which one could run barefoot through the streets with unlimited
mobility? Could one imagine a city where a new type of American community could flourish, in
which segregation and racial tension were not the norm? The nuclear apocalyptic scenario
offered new ways of commenting, not only on war and technology, but also on social relations
and city structures, as the empty cityscape became a place to articulate progressive visions of
America’s future. The cities in these films are at once familiar and alien, recognizable but
unknowable, and it is something in this particular blend of the uncanny with the normal that
invited viewers to reimagine the possibilities of the city, and the structures of social relations
they often symbolize. While Kramer’s empty San Francisco paradoxically incorporates the
feeling of the open West into the city, creating a new type of urban pastoral, Belafonte’s film
seeks to dismantle the racial hierarchy which the boundaries of the city—both geographic and
ideological—tend to foster, portraying a more progressive vision of African-Americans on the
big screen. Despite their many differences both films stand as clear testaments to a desire for
both social renewal and urban transformation that drove many apocalyptic narratives in 1950s
America.
The World, the Flesh and the Devil depicts the struggles of three survivors in post-
apocalyptic America. The film opens with Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte), a black miner,
getting trapped underground when nuclear war wipes out the majority of the population above
him. Burton surfaces only to find that he may very well be the last man alive. He travels from
Olivas 219

his small hometown in what might be Ohio or Pennsylvania to New York City only to find the
city empty. Eventually he meets Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens), a young white woman, and they
form a friendship that is shortly complicated by suggestions of romantic desire. However, when
they meet another survivor, Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer) a love triangle ensues. After a conflict
between the men that almost ends in homicide, the three survivors walk hand-in-hand into the
streets of New York as “The Beginning” flashes across the concluding image.
In his review of the The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, Bosley Crowther lauds the
“weird spell” cast by the imagery of a seemingly dead post-apocalyptic New York City.
156

Emptied of its well-known sights and sounds the city that never sleeps is made astonishingly
strange. While Crowther and others criticized the film for its clichés and evasive handling of race
relations, almost everyone seemed to agree that its ghostly urban spectacle was worth seeing.
Philip Scheuer, for example, calls the film “a technological triumph,” and is amazed that the film
“contains no process shots, no trick shots, no double exposures and no fake backdrops.” (LAT
E1). Yet, the film plot falls short for Scheuer who concludes that “it might have been a
sociological triumph too, but it falters in the stretch.” This point was echoed in a Variety review,
which pointed out that “MacDougall shot a great deal of the film in Manhattan, and the realism
(and the pains taken to achieve it) pay off.” Variety praises cameraman Harold J. Marzorati who
“takes full advantage of the empty, echoing streets and the peculiar spirit of a city deserted”(6).
Fifty years later TCM reviewer Jeff Stafford would offer a similar assessment of the film’s
power, arguing that, “the sexual competition over Stevens gives the second half of The World,
The Flesh, and The Devil a blunt, melodramatic fascination but it’s the first half of the film
which is genuinely haunting and memorable.”
157

156
See: Bosley Crowther Screen: Radioactive City: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil Opens. New York Times, May 21, 1959.
157
See: Stafford, Jeff. ”After The Apocalypse: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil.” TCM.com 4/9/2009
Olivas 220

These reviews suggest that such remarkable imagery could overcome the limitations of
the film’s somewhat stifled narrative, but more importantly, they suggest that the spectacle of an
empty cityscape was clearly enticing for audiences; that the absence of people, sound,
machinery, etc. at the city center is more interesting than their presence. At first glance this may
seem problematic, for one might ask if the attraction to a post-apocalyptic city engenders an
attraction to nuclear apocalypse. Yet, Belafonte’s film is clearly interested in the causes and
consequences of bellicosity. Although The World is not about the terror of the atomic bomb and
makes little mention of the politics of the Cold War, the film uses nuclear war as an example of
the extreme consequences of hate and aggression. The specter of total war hangs over the tale of
Ralph, Sarah, and Benson, adding urgency to their attempts at social harmony. According to
MacDougall, Sol Siegel, the film’s producer, wanted to tell a story about both racial tensions and
survival, because, "Siegel felt strongly, as do many historians, that these two problems are
interrelated and that we must solve both in order to solve either" (AFI). Ultimately, the
apocalyptic scenario associates racial conflict with mass death and destruction while aligning
interracial harmony with social regeneration. By envisioning a group struggling with racism, and
realizing the need to overcome racial prejudice within a survival context, The World makes a
clear argument about what transformations would be necessary to ensure America’s future. The
film’s conclusion is not merely about the cooperation of romantic rivals but about the potential
cooperation, intimacy, and perhaps polygamy, of a small interracial group within an American
city.
The journey to this happy ending begins at ground zero. Ralph Burton is a miner and
while miner’s work is itself often dangerous and underpaid, Ralph is at the literal bottom of the
American economy, and he soon finds himself abandoned and in the dark. Seeing no rescuers,
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Ralph works his way up the vertical shaft of the mine towards the sunlight.
158
Once on the
surface, Ralph is shocked to find his town empty. He reads old headlines which proclaim
“Millions Flee from Cities,” and “U.N. Retaliates for Use of Atomic Poison,” and realizes that he
has survived a nuclear war. Yet his own social position has immediately improved. Now
aboveground, he has the freedom to select a new car from a local showroom and he soon heads
towards NYC. When cars clog the bridges into the city, Ralph finds a small fishing boat; as he
paddles towards Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty stands behind him, a symbol forever tying
America’s political aspirations to its famous urban landscape. From his initial ascent, to his
commandeering of the new car, to his arrival to Manhattan, Ralph has gained economic freedom
and mobility. In a representation of social hierarchy reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,
Ralph’s rise to power is seemingly complete once he is seen at the very top of New York,
gleefully looking down at his penthouse apartment from atop a skyscraper.
159

However, it is clear that ridding the world of people is not enough to eradicate the racism
that had relegated Ralph to the lower rungs of the social ladder. Initially the structure of the city
itself seems oppressive, for when walking through the deserted streets of lower Manhattan Ralph
is visually dwarfed by the skyscrapers. Viewed in long-shot from above, Ralph can be seen as a
small figure moving through the streets; then, shot from below, Ralph looks up at the empty
buildings towering over him. The camera spins slightly, and as Ralph begins to run through the
streets once again, he spins, adding a sense of disorientation which makes the city seem even
more sinister. The contrast between Ralph’s diminution and the extreme scale of New York is
repeatedly emphasized as his small form is framed by the large cement walls of city buildings.

158
Pat Frank’s Mr. Adam (1946) begins in a similar manner except with a White protagonist.
159
Leslie Fiedler traces this stark representation of social hierarchy from Dante’s Hellish (underground) city to E.M. Forster’s
“The Machine Stops,” to Metropolis, recognizing that it has long been a trope in science fiction. See: Leslie Fiedler,
“Mythicizing the City, Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature, Eds. Michael Jaye and Ann
Chalmers Watts.(New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981) 119.
Olivas 222

Such sequences initially highlight Ralph’s utter isolation and loneliness. As he honks the horn of
an abandoned car, he looks up at the buildings around him, but they offer only indifference. The
Empire State Building stands untarnished, but it has lost all of its promise; without the social
connections Ralph so ardently seeks, these architectural wonders are now what Vivian Sobchack
calls “monumental gravestones.”
160

Ralph’s first response to the desolate metropolis is despair; but he soon grows suspicious
as he looks up at the empty windows peering down at him and his sadness turns to anger. As his
frustration reaches a crescendo he fires a pistol aimlessly and shouts: “Come out! What are you
hiding for?! What did I do? I know you’re there, I can feel you staring at me!” Despite the fact
that the nuclear apocalypse has emptied New York of would-be racists, Ralph carries the history
of his persecution within, and he knows, as Ximena Gallardo argues, that “the wealthy whites
who used to own and populate the now-vacant skyscrapers would consider him undesirable in
this part of town”(222). His isolation is further emphasized through the juxtaposition of his
echoing footsteps and cries for help with the silences of city sights. It is apparent, that Ralph’s
sense of being watched and measured is a sign of his own internalized racism. Stephanie
Larrieux points out that this is most apparent when Ralph stands looking at a statue of George
Washington. She writes:
The image of Ralph crouched at the feet of George Washington in conjunction
with the film’s racial narrative make visually literal Ralph’s double
consciousness—that of being both black and American. The statue of George
Washington serves as a stand-in for the absent racialized social structure that
Ralph has internalized. Although located in the background, the statue of

160
Vivian Sobchack writes, “Marking the death of the city as an actively functional structure, skyscrapers in these films [i.e. The
World, The Flesh and the Devil, Five, and On the Beach] stand as monumental gravestones” (132).
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Washington is center frame. The iconic representation of George Washington as
one of the founders of American democracy has added meaning. Both black and
American, Ralph is simultaneously present in and invisible to society. (135)
The film thus reflects the feelings of isolation and alienation which many black men likely felt in
1950s America. The physical structures of the city contribute to Ralph’s feelings of alienation:
the skyscrapers and statues confront Ralph with traces of the racist world that, though dead, live
on symbolically in the architecture of the city.
Yet it is soon evident that the empty city is not subject to the rules of the pre-apocalyptic
world. In fact, the apocalypse has improved Ralph’s opportunities. He now has a greater
freedom to make a life for himself, to manipulate the environment around him to suit his needs in
whatever way he sees fit. Indicating the future he can build in the city, Ralph begins to pick up
trash along the street. Revealing his many talents, he fixes up a modern penthouse apartment and
gets the electricity working again. Always donning his tool belt, and showing his skills with
welding tools, motors, and telephones, Ralph works around the clock to build a nice home in the
city. The apocalyptic scenario has thus offered a glimpse, not only into the social and
psychological experiences of a black man in America, but has shown him to be a productive and
skilled survivor.
161
Further, as the only known person left in the world, Ralph has become the
new normal; he has become, in other words, the human left among the inanimate remains of the
city. This fact is driven home by his procurement of two white mannequins who he names Betsy
and Snodgrass, two figures whose plastic smiles are cold and creepy compared with Ralph’s
vigor. Through this assertion of Ralph’s post-apocalyptic humanity Belafonte accomplished one
of his primary cinematic goals. After forming HarBel, Belafonte had claimed: “I intend to show
the Negro in conflicts that stem from his human condition and not solely from the fact of his

161
This scenario would be replayed with another black actor in 2007 I Am Legend starring Will Smith.
Olivas 224

race” (Ross 204). There was no clearer way to indicate Ralph’s human plight than to place him
in an environment that threatened human survival.
When the plot produces another survivor, this time a young white woman, the
correspondence between The World and “The Comet” is even clearer. Now this industrious
young black man must convince a white woman of his humanness—both for his own sake and
for the survival of the nation. For in both The World and “The Comet,” and many other post-
apocalyptic tales, human survival is tied to procreation while human happiness is dependent
upon the formation of friendship and community. Luckily for Ralph, Sarah’s loneliness has
already convinced her of his value. She is terrified when she thinks that Ralph has jumped from
his apartment balcony; and is relieved when she realizes he has merely discarded Snodgrass.
Seeing Sarah from his balcony, Ralph runs quickly down to find her. As the last humans on
earth, the two are drawn together; when Ralph asks Sarah if he will see her again, she replies, “I
need you, Ralph Burton.” They quickly become friends and race seems irrelevant. Ralph is
clearly more industrious than Sarah, as she is never seen lifting a figure to repair their homes,
and one could argue that he is serving Sarah; however, as he connects their telephones and runs a
wire of electricity to Sarah’s apartment his care for her seems to stem from his manliness—and
apparent attraction to her—rather than from any racial hierarchy.
But when Sarah asks Ralph if she can move into his building, he refuses, explaining
sarcastically that “People might talk.” Ralph’s reluctance to allow Sarah in might have made
sense in pre-apocalyptic 1950s America, but the apocalypse has destabilized such social taboos,
making them seem quite strange and counterintuitive. His refusal to become close with Sarah
reveals the magnitude of his internalized sense of social and racial hierarchy. Even though he
knows that they live in a new world he cannot rid himself of the fear of persecution. The pair
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struggle with this paradox. When Sarah asks Ralph to cut her hair he can hardly stand the
intimacy it requires. He becomes overwhelmed and as he tries to leave, the two become engaged
in a discussion of the relevance of their racial differences. Pleading to him for more closeness,
Sarah tells Ralph, “I know you. You’re a fine and decent man! What else is there to know?”
Ralph replies, “In that world that we came from, you wouldn’t know that. You wouldn’t even
know me. Why should the world fall down to prove what I am and that there’s nothing wrong
with what I am?!” As she breaks into tears, Ralph calmly says, “Look, we leave it the way it is
and I won’t mention it again, OK?” Sarah pauses and replies, looking up at him, “We haven’t
said anything about love, have we?” But Ralph walks out the door, refusing to engage her
further.
The persistence of this racial ideology ultimately leads to the film’s central conflict, as
Ralph’s reluctance to pair up with Sarah leaves an opening for a new suitor. When Benson
Thacker shows up, a love triangle arises; as a middle class white man, Ben is Sarah’s ostensibly
more suitable, but less desirable partner. Many critics disliked this plot turn, feeling that it was
too formulaic. However, the film’s love triangle, which could be seen as a simple plot device,
reveals the ways in which racial boundaries in America are repeatedly policed through the
imposition of sexual boundaries. The film may not challenge these limits as much as many
wished. In fact, according to Belafonte, such sexual control was occurring behind the scenes of
the film as well, as the unmistakable chemistry between Belafonte and Stevens led to massive
rewrites of the script in order to decrease the intimacy between Ralph and Sarah.
162
Yet despite
the limitations imposed upon physical contact between the actors, The World does succeed in
making taboos against miscegenation seem unusual and irrational. In fact, the film’s rendering of

162
See: Harry Belafonte, My Song, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) 199-200.
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interracial intimacy was radical enough that the film was boycotted by several Southern
theaters.
163

Such fears of reprisal and racial unrest likely led to the film’s somewhat ambiguous
ending when it is unclear what will ultimately become of the trio. Ben initially instigates a fight
with Ralph in order to win Sarah, and the two men play a game of cat-and-mouse through the
empty city streets. Ben soon throws down his weapon, not coincidentally, in front of the UN
building, and it is clear that the men must find some way to live with one another. Sarah joins
hands with Ralph, and then with Ben, and the three walk into the city hand-in-hand before “The
Beginning” flashes across the screen. This ending suggests that the three will build a new
community together in which black and white will no longer take up arms against one another,
and with the appearance of the UN, such local cooperation is aligned with international peace.
While this ending might not clearly resolve the romantic dispute, it does leave an opening for the
possibility of interracial sex and even potential polygamy. Friendship is the first step in building
a future, for in a post-apocalyptic world, every living human counts, and the future of the city,
and the nation which it represents, depends upon the successful communion and procreation of
its few inhabitants. In order to create a future, the trio will inevitably need to have children.
While some critics thought the film should have gone farther, and been more explicit,
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MacDougall explained that, "The precise ending must take place in the minds of those who see

163
According to Stafford, the film was “boycotted by some theatres in the South and in one case a showing in
Georgia was halted because of erupting racial tensions in the audience” (2). In addition, Steve Ross points out that
“South Carolina legislators threatened to pass a bill imposing a $5,000 fine on any theater that ran it, while Florida
Klansman picketed a Jacksonville theater with signs proclaiming ‘A TICKET TO THIS SHOW IS
INTEGRATION” (201).
164
Bosley Crowther felt that this ending was “such an obvious contrivance and so cozily theatrical that you wouldn’t
be surprised to see the windows of the buildings suddenly crowded with reintegrated people, cheering happily and
flinging ticker tape.” Albert Johnson argued that “This parable exemplifies today’s approach to the theme of
interracialism; vague, inconclusive, and undiscussed” (7). And Melvin Maddocks claimed that “What starts out
bluntly and starkly, ends up in glib clichés, with a softly ambiguous sideglance at the race issue and a resolution so
bland and evasive as to be meaningless.”
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the picture. It was not our purpose in making the picture to tell people what to think. They must
think for themselves” (AFI).
The ways in which The World, the Flesh, and the Devil wrestles with issues of racial
integration and the possibility of miscegenation indicates that the film is not only a response to
the nuclear fears which were running rampant in 1959, but that it is also clearly a reaction to the
changing race relations at the time. These connections were made explicit by Belafonte who
“linked his cinematic efforts to the goals of the civil right movement” (Ross 203). With
segregation no longer legal and a radical social movement on the rise, the United States was
beginning to undergo a momentous sea-change when HarBel released The World. While
desegregation would take decades to transform the American landscape, legislation like 1954’s
historic Brown vs. the Board of Education was challenging long-held American social norms.
Resistance to racist legislation and social practices was also becoming more visible. When
Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders were arrested in Alabama in 1956, it made
the national news and King’s conviction made the front page. “Even network television covered
the boycott and arrests. For the first time (as would later be said), the whole world was
watching” (Hoberman 323-324). America was in the process of transition, and the post-
apocalyptic landscape of The World offered one such place in which to envision this new social
space.
To imagine an interracial community cooperatively rebuilding America from ground zero
in a city almost destroyed was a radical conception. Such an image not only made an argument
for integration, but brought a sense of utopian possibility that such transformations could occur
in places that were increasingly disregarded and abandoned. While in 1959 Senator Jacob K.
Javits would claim “that New York City was in ‘grave peril’ from urban blight and decay”
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(“Javits,” NYT 28), suggesting that the city was already an “almost destroyed” dystopian site,
The World answered with a hopeful look at the transformations possible if racial hierarchies and
social aggression could finally be overcome. It called for a transformation of the idea of
American community, and perhaps of the international community. Rather than mark the city as
a site worth abandoning for the greener pastures of the suburbs, The World suggested that
America’s ideal community could blossom within the city streets.
The World’s visualization of empty urban space adds power to its calls for social change.
By depicting New York City with amazing realism (using “no trick shots” etc.), but also
presenting a city that is weird, The World ultimately defamiliarizes New York. In other words,
while viewers may feel that they know the city—its structures and rhythms, social rules and
norms—they find in The World that they do not. Its iconicity makes New York the perfect site
for this process, for after years of representation through photography, fiction, and film, the city
seems knowable even to those who have never been there. This act of defamiliarization
encourages new ways of seeing life in the city. For instance, while taboos on interracial romance
might be naturalized in the real world of 1950s America, in Ralph and Sarah’s post-apocalyptic
world such social restrictions seem, not only strange, but ridiculous; and while the color line may
inhibit young black men from owning property in downtown Manhattan, or from having real
social power, Ralph’s choice of housing in the film seems both logical and well-suited, while his
control over the radio, newspaper, and electrical system seems like the natural results of his
presence as the last man alive. The World thus makes normative racial ideology seem like an
arbitrary social construction; in fact, the very idea of racial difference seems strange when
humanity is on the brink of extinction. Coming together is a necessity of survival. In this way
the apocalyptic film’s urban protagonists are pointedly distinct from their noir counterparts:
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unlike the solitary private “I” of detective film and fiction, the post-apocalyptic survivor is bent
on finding others to connect with; he, or she, is emphatic about the need for social connection.
165

This undermining of habitual perspective can powerfully affect viewers’ perceptions of
what is possible in the world around them, and is therefore a critical step in utopian thinking.
Once one begins to see interracial taboos for the unfixed social constructions they are, rather than
as eternal rules for preserving the so-called natural order of things, it becomes possible to move
past such social prescriptions. Utopian thinking is primarily the ability to think beyond the
limitations of common sense reality. As a mode of thought, rather than a concrete place, “Utopia
must be the exploration of alternatives in a way that supports or catalyzes social transformation”
(Levitas and Sargisson 13). For this reason, scholars like Tom Moylan align utopian thinking
with “counter-ideology” and argue that it is “the negative thinking of utopia [that] stands
opposed to the affirmative culture of the present dominant system” (Moylan 163). Fredric
Jameson makes a similar point. Arguing that our dreams of what is possible are limited by our
experience, Jameson asserts “that at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us
more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment” (xiii). By defamiliarizing New York
City and the people living within its streets, and by presenting a world in which blacks and
whites can live together in harmony, The World creates a spell which draws viewers out from
behind their habitual lenses and allows them to see the possibility, and apparent necessity, of a
new type of American community. When Crowther asserts that The World’s dead city creates a
“weird spell,” he indicates how successfully such imagery works to estrange viewers from their
normal relationship to city space.

165
As Frank Krutnick argues in “Something More than Night: Tales of the Noir City,” “the noir detective is a
privatized hero, customized to the atomistic regime or noir’s urban Gesellschaft [ . . .] Marlowe, like other noir dicks
is a private “I.” “Striving constantly to justify his status as private ‘I’, the detective rejects the claims of social
identity. Marlowe’s contacts with others are fleeting. . .” (89-90).
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* * *
Although it pleaded for a different sort of social transformation, a similar spell was cast
by Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), a film adapted from Nevil Shute’s best-selling 1957
novel. Often considered one of the most pessimistic films of the era, OTB depicts a world in
which nuclear fallout has killed everyone and everything outside of Australia; however, during
the course of the film a cloud of nuclear radiation sweeps towards the Southern hemisphere until
even Australia is doomed to perish. The film’s final shots are a series of stills of Melbourne;
empty and silent, its only moving objects are old newspapers blowing through the streets under a
banner which ironically proclaims: “There is Still Time . . .Brother.” OTB, which was shot in
black and white by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, includes visions of a deserted San
Francisco, an empty San Diego, and finally, an empty Melbourne as part of its post-apocalyptic
landscape.
While many noted the dramatic impact of the empty scenery, most reviewers discussed
the relative realism of the film’s depiction of a post-nuclear landscape, and/or the film’s potential
ability to provoke anti-nuclear sentiments.
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For example, Ernest Callenbach argued that On the
Beach was “a useful film to have around, since it may scare people into thought, and there is
virtue in any new reaction in politics these days. But it will not scare them in any useful
direction, really, except perhaps to strengthen anti-fallout and hence anti-bomb-testing
sentiment”(56).

Bosley Crowther argued that the film’s most powerful anti-nuclear argument lay
in its celebration of life. Crowther writes, “The great merit of this picture, aside from its
entertaining qualities, is the fact that it carries a passionate conviction that man is worth saving,

166
Such eerie scenery was implicitly praised by the Academy who nominated OTB for Best Film Editing and Best
Musical Score and was the reason reviewer Richard Coe claimed that “No matter what you think of this tingle,
you’ll certainly not forget it.”
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after all.” Several politicians criticized the film, arguing that its bleak portrayal of the aftermath
of nuclear war was exaggerated. Utah’s Senator Wallace F. Bennett, also a member of the Joint
Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, argued that the film’s portrayal of such widespread
nuclear contamination was “unscientific, unrealistic, and dangerously misleading” and claimed
that the Atomic Energy Committee had “clearly demonstrated’ there would be many survivors
even in a country subjected to heavy nuclear attack” (“On the Beach Scored,” NYT 24). This
political conversation was, of course, the aim of the film’s director. Kramer, who would go on to
make such controversial films as Inherit the Wind (1960) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
(1967), had already become famous for his social message films. The year before he released On
the Beach, Kramer gained critical recognition for The Defiant Ones (1958), which was
nominated for eight Academy Awards. The film, starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis,
portrayed two escaped convicts—one black and one white—who become friends through their
struggle to survive. The Defiant Ones was one of the earliest indications of Kramer’s belief in
racial equality. As On the Beach indicates, Kramer also held strong convictions about the deadly
totality of nuclear war; in order to emphasize the seriousness of nuclear catastrophe, he worked
with United Artists to ensure that On the Beach was released simultaneously in more than twenty
cities worldwide (including Moscow) in December of 1959 (AFI).
In the service of his social mission, Kramer utilizes empty city imagery in a variety of
ways. First of all, rather than depict any decaying or mutated bodies, as Shute does in his novel,
Kramer draws attention to the structures and people that remain after the end. Death, as well as
its cause, is an invisible reality within the film, and as a result, the threat of nuclear fallout seems
unlikely while the cities pictured seem relatively nonthreatening. However, the seeming
benignity of both the city and Australia is a dangerous illusion. Kramer asserted, as did Shute,
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that the most hazardous effects of nuclear war might be invisible. Such perceptions of nuclear
danger were becoming increasingly commonplace--as the American public became more aware
of the long-term results of radiation exposure in places like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini
Atoll—yet there was still debate about the extent of nuclear fallout and about the potential
survivability of nuclear war.
In response to such debates, Kramer depicts a chilling vision of the end of humanity that
captures the magnitude of species extinction, while remaining grounded in a story about several
individuals. The film contains many sequences of happy end-of-days carousing; those lucky
enough to live in Australia are given a little extra time to enjoy their Earthly paradise. As the
title intimates, On the Beach positions life “on the edge,” illustrating the transience of love,
family, and simple pleasures, within a world of nuclear threat. Although some hold out hope for
life after nuclear Armageddon, it is soon apparent that radiation levels are rising and no one will
survive the spreading fallout. As submarine Cmdr. Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck) and his crew
discover, there is no one left alive in California—the mythical site of possibility—and this fact
seems to seal humanity’s fate. In one of the film’s most devastating scenes, Cmdr. Towers leads
his crew back to the U.S. in order to pursue the source of a scrambled Morse code message. The
crew has been trying to decode the message for days, and can only guess that someone must be
alive along the California coastline. However, when one man, wearing full radioactive regalia, is
sent into a harbor in San Diego to investigate the message, he finds a Coke bottle hooked on a
window shade tapping out an incoherent signal to a mostly empty world.
In Kramer’s post-nuclear world there is no hope of survival. To fully foreclose the future,
and to add a strong sentimental edge to his the film, the impossibility of romance, procreation,
and child rearing are emphasized. While a love affair blossoms between Moira (Ava Gardner)
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and Dwight (Peck), it is clear that there is no time left for their romance. This point is made
most evident near the film’s conclusion as Dwight’s submarine cruises away from shore leaving
Moira alone on the ocean cliffs as the daylight diminishes. We know from Moira’s earlier
dialogue that she is smitten with Dwight, and it is difficult to see their time together cut short.
This unfinished romance defied the typical Hollywood ending and likely frustrated audiences
who enjoyed seeing the two stars together.
Even the film’s most unsentimental viewers would be saddened when confronted with the
imminent death of Lt. Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins), his wife (Donna Anderson), and their
newborn baby. Kramer introduces this trio early in the film in a scene in which Peter attends to a
crying baby while his wife sleeps. When she wakes, Peter reminds her that they must go out and
buy more milk because “no more milk will be delivered.” Thus, it is immediately clear that the
bliss of the family unit has already been altered by a quickly disintegrating society. Over the
course of the film the Holmes family tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy. Along with their
friends Dwight and Moira, we see them playing on the beach, hosting a party, and speaking of
their love for one another. However, it is quite clear that their time together will soon be over and
that their new baby will never have a chance at life. Aware that the coming nuclear radiation
cloud will cause a slow and painful death, Peter secures suicide pills for his family, and though
his wife initially resists it, they ultimately decide to kill themselves and their daughter. Kramer
carefully crafts his presentation of the Holmes family and the love affair between Dwight and
Moira in order to elicit a powerful emotional response from his viewers. His ability to evoke
emotional suffering in his audience enables him to convey some sense of the magnitude of loss
inherent in nuclear apocalypse.
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The enormity of loss is similarly conveyed by the film’s empty cityscapes. They stand
both as emblems of human achievement and emblematize the magnitude of loss which Kramer
hopes to tether to the prospect of nuclear war. This is first evident when Dwight’s crew reaches
San Francisco Bay, which is introduced through the iconic image of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The bridge, now deserted, is a haunting reminder of the greatness which man can accomplish,
and thus, adds to the sadness of his demise. It is, like the skyscrapers of the city, a kind of
“monumental gravestone” of man’s aspirations. Kramer’s choice of this particular iconography
was deliberate. The empty, undamaged city which the men explore in Shute’s novel is near
Seattle. In contrast, when they encounter San Francisco they find disaster. Shute writes:
They inspected San Francisco from five miles outside the Golden Gate. All they
learned was that the bridge was down. The supporting tower at the south end
seemed to have been overthrown. The houses visible from the sea around Golden
Gate Park had suffered much from fire and blast; it did not look as if any of them
were habitable. They saw no evidence of human life, and the radiation level made
it seem improbable that life could still exist in that vicinity. (179)
By depicting the Golden Gate and its city still standing, still splendid, Kramer gives viewers a
site they have likely seen a hundred times: not only was the bridge often a stand-in for the city
itself, or even California more broadly, it had also been featured in countless films by 1959.
With its steep hills rising up from the bay and visible trolley-car tracks, the city is similarly
iconic. Standing empty, these icons are now a sign of man’s greatness and of the great waste he
has made of his future.
The sense of loss upon seeing San Francisco’s landmarks is narratively augmented by the
reactions of the submarine crew, whose view of the city is now limited to the small frame of the
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sub’s periscope. As each crew member takes a turn looking through the periscope at the city,
their faces grimace with disappointment. The streets of San Francisco are empty. No cars climb
up its steep hills, no pedestrians clog its sidewalks, and no boats sail in its harbors. The men
seem to finally realize the stakes of the nuclear catastrophe: the city offers a visual narrative of
total death. In reaction to this undeniable reality, Swain, a member of the crew who once lived in
San Francisco, jumps from the escape hatch and begins to swim ashore. A similar sense of loss
emanates from an empty San Diego harbor where the crew next travels to find the source of the
Morse signal, and finally from the concluding shots of Melbourne. Looking at places that once
teemed with life and movement, it is haunting to see such spaces empty; each empty space is a
ghostly “memory palace,” each city an elegy to human civilization.
Yet while Kramer’s empty cityscapes add to the film’s pathos, they also provide new
ways of seeing the city, encouraging shifts in perception that ultimately support Kramer’s more
overt anti-nuclear argument. Like The World’s New York City, Kramer’s post-apocalyptic cities
are eerily strange. For example, viewed from the center of the road in one long shot, the Golden
Gate Bridge is completely empty, and the strangeness of this fact is exaggerated both by the time
spent on the image and by the film’s eerie soundtrack. The soundtrack is equally disturbing when
Kramer shows a now abandoned San Diego hydroelectric plant, whose mundane industrial
architecture and dirt roads seem like an alien landscape as Lieutenant Sunderstrom passes
through in his cumbersome radiation suit. By making such sights strange, Kramer provokes
viewers to see their familiar cities with fresh eyes.
Kramer’s empty San Francisco conveys more than a sense of loss and/or danger; it also
suggests new modes of inhabiting the city. Once Swain has left the ship, he experiences an
excitement and a feeling of freedom that is actually quite appealing, especially compared to the
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cramped quarters of the submarine. His exuberance is clear when he refuses the Captain’s orders
to return to the ship saying, “I have a date on Market Street! I’m going home!” When the men
encounter Swain the next day he has become the picture of vitality. Illuminated by the sunshine,
Swain sits on the edge of his boat with his feet dangling in the water, fishing. Swain tells the
Commander that he has a case of beer to share, and seems playful and relaxed. After telling
Towers that everyone is dead, he asks about radiation poisoning; however, resigned to his fate,
he looks up at the clear sky above and says, “Well, the weather’s OK if the wind would die down
a little.” When Towers tells him he will become sick and asks him if he needs anything before
they leave, Swain responds, smiling, “I’ve got two hundred drug stores to choose from.” The city
is now open to Swain like an expansive playground.
As Swain sits on the edge of the boat with his pants rolled up and his hands on his fishing
pole, he resembles rural figures like Huck Finn. A young white man within an open, uninhabited
expanse to explore as he pleases, Swain seems to have regained the freedoms of the mythic
American landscape. Even his name supports this bucolic characterization: called “Yeoman
Swain” by the crew, his association with the countryside is almost redundant. As he sits in San
Francisco Harbor, Swain brings this rural ideal to the city, creating a new type of urban pastoral.
His presence in San Francisco Bay indicates that one can embody the physical strength
associated with rural living within an urban environment, and also that one can enjoy the
freedoms associated with the natural world without giving up the luxuries of the metropolis.
Swain is a living example, of the way that, while the old city—of cars, roads, crowds, and
machinery is dead, another city can be made. Now water is underfoot instead of asphalt, now a
shoeless young man enjoys the San Francisco sunshine, rather than a square in a suit. As the
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cold, grey submarine disappears from sight, Kramer leaves his audience looking over Swain’s
shoulder, alone but very much alive.
For many Americans, the pastoral ideal was located in the nation’s frontier past, and this
particular portrayal of freedom reflects the cult of the frontier that was experiencing a resurgence
in the 1950s. As the landscape was being developed at a more rapid rate than ever before, the
idea of the American frontier survived in the imagination, and was represented ubiquitously in
popular culture. Thus, as I noted in my introduction to this chapter, Westerns, and gunfighting
heroes, were extremely popular when On the Beach was released. Swain’s Huck-like boyishness
and comfort in the natural world would have made him an attraction to audiences steeped in what
J. Hoberman calls “Davy Crockett madness” (287). Hoberman argues that this frenzy for
Crockett (in particular) was catalyzed by Disney films like 1955’s Davy Crockett, King of the
Wild Frontier, Disney shows like “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter” (1954), and songs such as
“The Ballad of Davy Crockett,’ which, after its release in March 1955, sold more copies in less
time than any in recording history” (Hoberman 288). These updated versions of Davy Crockett
emphasized his abilities as a fighter and his connections to the natural world.
167
The popularity of
the Crockett ballad, which celebrated Davey, “King of the wild frontier,” and the fandom that
urged thousands of young boys to save their money up for coonskin caps, speaks of a strong
desire for a reconnection with nature—and for all the adventure that it might offer. Swain is now
the king of the post-apocalyptic frontier. He has escaped the confines of the military submarine,
has shown his strength and resilience by swimming ashore, and has shown his ability for
playfulness even in the face of his imminent demise. Although he will die, Swain invokes a
version of the American Dream, breathing life into a dead city.

167
Richard Slotkin writes that Crockett spent his early years “wandering from farm to farm on the frontier, with
intervals of militia service, Indian fighting, speculation, and hunting” ( 414).
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The sheer emptiness of Kramer’s city would have been an attraction for audiences used to
associating open spaces with utopian possibility. The popularity of the Western during the
period, both in film and television, indicates the hunger for open landscapes during the post-war
era. Westerns became defined by their visual presentation of space, and their narrative
references to the American frontier. Films like Bend of the River (1952) portray families seeking
to build new communities in the West; and “Bonanza,” a television series which debuted in 1959
featured the lives of the Cartwrights on their “thousand square-mile ranch” (IMDB). During the
same period, outside the boundaries of the Western genre, the Beat movement romanticized the
open American highway. Published in 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road revealed a deep
longing for liberation from social and domestic norms, and visualized America as a space to be
traveled through, and transcended, rather than settled. Thus, as this context suggests, when On
the Beach arrived in theaters in 1959 an American appetite for open spaces had been building
throughout the decade. In this way, the filmic depictions of an empty San Francisco, an empty
San Diego harbor, and an empty Melbourne did more than scare audiences; such images were
also enticements. These empty spaces appealed to the utopian desires of many Americans to find
spaces in which new communities and new identities might be possible.
While Kramer leaves these possibilities relatively open, he clearly advocates for a
renewal of the pastoral spirit—and perhaps community—that can exist within the city. By 1959,
thanks to boosterism, television, and the movies, the pastoral ideal was firmly planted in the
suburbs. The suburbs did, of course, represent a kind of “middle landscape.”
168
They were not
rural and yet they were a reprieve from the more industrial urban cores. As Chris Sellers argues,
“If anything, in comparison with life among the skyscrapers, suburban living meant a closer

168
As Leo Marx has famously argued, the idea of the “middle landscape,” has long been an ideal in American
culture. This is a space where one can live within a civilized society without giving up “the regenerative power
[that] is located in the natural terrain” (228)..
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acquaintance with open space and sky, with non-human flora and fauna. With its abundant plant
life, both trimmed and weedy, with its ubiquity of pets and wilder creatures, from deer to
songbirds, urban-edge living has kept alive those aspirations dreamed by Rachel Carson in the
opening of Silent Spring” (476).
169
However, as many environmentalists have noted, this
harmonious association between the suburbs and nature was devastatingly misleading.
170
Not
only did suburban development destroy the natural landscape; many suburban homes had
relatively small outdoor areas. Appearing as “little boxes” in a row, their ability to evoke the
feeling of the countryside was often limited. Yet, because both the small town and suburb had
been so fervently celebrated by film and television, as places of natural beauty, moral
uprightness, and community values—as places of true American values—it was difficult not to
believe in their mythology.
On the Beach, for all of its pessimism, is also clearly making an argument for the central
importance of nature to mankind during a time of rapid technological change. As a counterpoint
to the mechanization and routinization of the post-war city, as well as to the modern technologies
which it represented, OTB offers an idealized vision of nature and natural man, ultimately
suggesting that such reevaluation might aid in the fight against nuclear war. The film makes clear
that it was an overreliance on technology, and overconfidence in man’s ability to use it well, that

169
Sellers refers to Carson’s description: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to
live in harmony with its surroundings . . . The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with
fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields.
(1962.1).”
170
Sellers argues that “The main profile of ‘suburbia’ in environmentalists’ arguments was as nature’s nemesis;
most environmental historians turning to suburban history have emphasized the resulting environmental
destruction.” He cites Adam Rome’s Bulldozer in the Countryside (2001) as a key example (475). Many of these
environmental concerns were raised in the 1950s and 1960. One result of such environmental concern was the
California Land Conservation Act of 1965 and Article XXVII of the California Constitution (1966) which offered
financial incentives to encourage landowners from selling their land to developers. Article XXVII asserts in
Section 1: “The people hereby declare that it is in the best interest of the state to maintain, preserve, conserve and
otherwise continue in existence open space land for the production of food and fiber and to assure the use and
enjoyment of natural resources and scenic beauty for the economic and social well-being of the state and its
citizens.” Such conservation programs soon spread across the nation.
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led to the development of nuclear weapons and subsequently to the extinction of the species. As
Dr. Julian Osborne (Astaire) explains, “The war started when people accepted the idiotic
principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they
couldn’t possibly use without committing suicide.” Echoing the anxieties of Shelley’s
Frankenstein, he adds: “The devices outgrew us; we couldn’t control them.”
Further, as Crowther noted, Kramer’s film indicates that “man is worth saving, after all,”
and it is not only because of his technological triumphs, but also because of his strength and
vitality; and life is cultivated in nature. Kramer makes this point clear by positioning the pre-
apocalyptic fun and frolicking in the Australian countryside. Before they die, Dwight and Moira
join countless others who retreat from the city to enjoy their last days fishing, swimming,
drinking, and picnicking. Both wearing checkered camp-style shirts, the pair seek some last-
minute adventures in the woods. It is in the country, at a small hotel in the rain, where Dwight
and Moira finally embrace.
This country frolic is accompanied by the music of “Waltzing Matilda,” Australia’s
unofficial national anthem, which is incessantly sung by the carousers, but also provides the
theme to the film’s soundtrack. In part, the song is a joyful invitation to seek adventure in
nature. The song, which begins, “Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,/Under the shade
of a Coolibah tree,/And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boil,/You'll come a
Waltzing Matilda with me,” continually asks the listener to come easily along with him. As the
speaker is a “swagman,” or itinerant worker, his invitation is really to come walking towards the
shady stream (or “billabong”), and possibly along to other places where he may roam. During the
course of the song, this swagman dies, but continues to entreat the listener to join him. However,
the invitation to adventure in the song’s refrain ultimately emphasizes the need to choose
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movement into nature—to choose life—even in the face of death. When the world ends in On
the Beach, “Waltzing Matilda” plays across Melbourne’s empty streets. It is both an elegy to
humanity and a plea for a human future that can somehow bring life back into the city. After all,
as Kramer emphasizes in his last shot, “There is Still Time . . Brother.”

Conclusion
To some extent, these two films do indeed revel in their imagination of destruction. It is,
after all, quite exciting to watch Harry Belafonte run through a post-apocalyptic landscape and
imagine if he truly is the last man alive. Kramer’s haunting film is equally emotionally
provocative. The suspense that underlines such (im)possibilities is titillating, and at times,
cathartic. Yet what is actually destroyed in these films is the normalcy of everyday life; what is
disrupted is perception; and perhaps what is most exciting is the hope for change that remains at
each film’s edges. For films of the atomic age were not primarily about destruction, but about
transformation. As Joyce Evans argues, “transmutation became a key motif in nuclear films from
1950 onward,” because “atomic technology was presented as transforming all it came into
contact with—nuclear survivors, atomic spies, and alien invaders” (8). While such
metamorphosis often involved physical change, represented by monstrous insects, mutant
humanoids, and devastated landscapes—the bomb was also understood as a force that could
forever alter people and places internally. In these visions of apocalypse one sees man’s
potential to become something wholly new; they illustrate precisely where utopian politics and
the imagination of apocalypse converge. One sees in these apocalyptic narratives, “an openness
to humanity becoming something that it is not yet, something it can hardly imagine, beyond
cognition, inarticulate, and sublime (Katerberg 175). As these films imagine new ways of
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interacting in and with the metropolis, they recurrently present their viewers with a striking
openness that invites such utopian imagining. It is important not to overlook the sheer impact of
such imagery, even if the films themselves seem arrested in their political aspirations. As
Stephen Heath argues: “Narrative never exhausts the image . . . . Narrative can never contain the
whole film which permanently exceeds its fictions” (18).
The cinema has been a powerful force in shaping perceptions of the city. In fact, because
they developed contemporaneously, “The city has been shaped by the cinematic form, just as
cinema owes much of its nature to the development of the city” (Clarke 2). Film is responsible,
in part, for making New York City iconic; it is because of film that the Golden Gate Bridge can
so quickly identify San Francisco. Over time, such depictions make it nearly impossible to see
our cities outside of the Hollywood narratives that have shaped them, but they also remind us of
the power of film to alter our understanding of the spaces in which we live. Colin McArthur
argues, “cities (and, indeed, all urban spaces and even ‘natural’ landscapes) are always already
social and ideological, immersed in narrative, constantly moving chess pieces in the game of
defining and redefining utopias and dystopias. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that cities
in discourse have no absolute and fixed meaning, only a temporary, positional one” (20).
When one considers the social and political consequences of the binary that positioned
the city as a dystopia and the suburbs as utopia, it is clear why re-presenting the city was so
imperative in the 1950s. This binary conceptually separated communities that might otherwise
pool their resources for societal improvement. Convinced that they were not, in fact, a part of
the city, suburban homeowners could avoid any sense of civic duty towards the blighted areas
that touched the edges of their communities. In addition, this binary influenced social programs,
federal funding, and disaster preparedness programs. Matt Farish argues:
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The discourse of urban decline and the various distinctions maintained and
encouraged between central city and suburb were of very specific strategic value
– in channeling money not spent on inner-city improvement to the national
arsenal, but also in consistently locating, through a powerful combination of lurid
drama and rational science, the locus of atomic danger in the heart of America’s
cities. Such circular histories are a telling reminder of the peoples and places
literally left behind by the combination of geopolitics and science during the early
Cold War. (141)
Adding insult to injury, those left behind to suffer in the deteriorating neighborhoods were
routinely pathologized in subsequent decades.
The post-apocalyptic empty city emerged at a time when American cities were being
abandoned, both physically and politically. They speak, not only of a desire for urban
transformation, but also of the limitations of the supposed suburban ideal. While suburbia was
always suspect to those it excluded, as many others had begun to discover, the suburbs were not
the places of freedom and moral safety of which many had dreamed. In fact, as films like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and novels like Fahrenheit 451 (1953) would indicate,
suburbia could be a dystopian space whose prefabricated and homogeneous nature could
suffocate its inhabitants. This realization complicated any easy condemnation of the urban
environment, and stimulated a reassessment of its possibilities.

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EPILOGUE: 2015
“Where must we go…we who wander these wastelands in search of our better selves?”
(Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015)

A man stands looking down across an arid landscape. It is a brown dusty image that
stretches into a hazy horizon. No trees break up the expanse, no greenery covers the hills. In the
foreground a lizard wriggles, revealing, like the man, that life has fought on to survive in this
unforgiving wasteland. But as the lizard turns its two heads it exposes its mutation—it is a small
monster grown from nuclear apocalypse. The man, fully adapted to this world, snatches up the
lizard with the speed of a practiced predator and devours it. He invites us to wonder if we, too,
could live under such conditions. Will we be survivors or victims of the world we have
poisoned? And if we can navigate its ragged terrain can we also reshape it?
This is the landscape of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Defined by its
barrenness and hostility to life, this landscape offers no respite, no refuge, and no rest for its
inhabitants. Poisoned by nuclear radiation the land cannot be farmed, and its people must
scavenge and fight for the little that remains. In this battle for survival the strongest survive, and
some use their dominance to rule and exploit the meek. There seems to be very little hope of
rescue or regeneration. Even Max, the film’s titular hero, seem hopelessly out of luck; soon after
he eats the lizard he is captured by a gang of ”War Boys” and turned into a “bloodbag,” his
strength drained to regenerate one of the berserker-like scavengers who dominate the land. This
is the post-apocalyptic landscape of the post-nuclear age, and though Max meets some who
dream of finding “The Green Place,” there seems to be no refuge, no place of regeneration from
the apocalyptic catastrophe that has laid waste to the land.
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As Fury Road drives home, there has been a significant transformation in the ways that
nature is represented in the apocalyptic genre. While early apocalyptic narratives feature nature’s
abundant return, more recent apocalyptic narratives have envisioned a more desolate future
landscape. When we entered London’s “Scarlet Plague” we found a “forest [that] on either side
swelled up the slopes of the embankment and crested across it in a green wave of trees and
bushes” (1). Similarly, in Darkness and Dawn the lush greenery of the natural world returns as
soon as man is gone to swallow up the city; years later in George Stewart’s Earth Abides, nature
comes back so immediately that Ish and his tribe must learn to hunt and to guard their food
supply against pests and predators. In earlier decades, such imagery framed the apocalypse as a
catastrophe that enabled a return to a more beautiful natural world. It was there in that natural
world that characters regenerated; the wilderness was a place that existed, a refuge from the
problems of the modern world.
As knowledge about potential environmental collapse spread in the post-war period,
prompted initially by texts such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), and later through
scientific studies and other eco-critical texts, apocalyptic narratives have been less prone to
imagine nature’s post-apocalyptic return. Several Cold War writers and filmmakers, such as
Walter Miller, Philip Wylie, Stanley Kramer, and Ray Bradbury, were at the front of this trend
with novels and films that tried to depict the long-term environmental effects of nuclear war. Yet
as knowledge of the long-term effects of radiation have increased along with a greater awareness
of humanity’s devastating environmental impact, this trend has come to define later iterations of
the genre. In Max’s world environmental devastation is so totalizing that dust-storms and
poisonous lakes are the norm. This devastated landscape—and the frenzy for resources it
provokes—have become humanity’s greatest barriers to future survival.
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These landscapes suggest, as Miller asserts quite explicitly, that we must change our
relationship to nature—and to one another—if we are to survive. As climate change threatens to
turn pastures into deserts, and industrial pollution continues to poison water supplies, Fury Road
emphasizes the tenuousness of Earth’s fertility and urges viewers to proactively avoid a future of
environmental collapse. Rather than seek ownership over resources like “guzzaline,” Fury Road
suggests that we must work together to plant seeds, to cultivate the land with an understanding of
how our present practices impact the future. Domination, exploitation, and social conflict
prevent social and environmental regeneration. This world—with its decimated predatory
society and scarcity of resources—acts as a warning and an impetus for change.
Miller’s film stresses that rather than maintain the hope of finding greener pastures, those
who walk the wastelands must recognize their roles in remaking the decimated world. As Max
and his companions discover, there is no “Green Place,” and Fury Road recommends that it is
“the Citadel, the center of human civilization, that must be redesigned. Miller’s film ends with
hopeful possibility as the Citadel, once ruled by a greedy patriarchy, is taken over by a group of
women—mothers and warriors whose greatest treasure is a large bag of seeds. With plans to
make food and water available to everyone as they transform the Citadel into a farm and garden,
the women bring fecundity and equity back to the mechanized and hierarchized city. The crisis
of apocalypse is a community-building mechanism, and Miller emphasizes the need for people to
come together in unexpected and unprecedented ways in order to build a better world. He also
suggests that humanity might have more hope for the future with women at the helm.
Miller’s explicit promotion of a women-centered civilization has earned him acclaim as a
radical feminist director and indicates how the process of rethinking humanity’s relationship to
nature has coincided, not only with an examination of racial hierarchies, but also with a critical
Olivas 247

examination of patriarchy and gender roles. Emphasizing the value and potential of female
leadership, Miller’s feminist future is made possible by the remarkable “Imperator Furiosa,”
played by Charlize Theron, a warrior woman who risks her life and reputation to rescue the
wives of the patriarch and take them to safety. Like Octavia Butler’s Lauren Olamina, James
Cameron’s “Sarah Connor,” and Ridley Scott’s “Ellen Ripley,” Furiosa is a woman with the
strength and aptitude to lead humanity in a battle against their apocalyptic future. As these
characters indicate, apocalyptic narratives of the late twentieth century and beyond have
increasingly granted women powerful positions as saviors of the human race. In concert with the
genre’s continued interest in building coalitions between ethnic groups, classes, and species,
these progressive visions of women warriors has aided in normalizing and justifying social
equality.
While women have gained ground as warriors and heroes in apocalyptic narrative, men
have become increasingly “domesticated,” their heroism tied to their ability to protect and
connect with their children. As films such as San Andreas (2015) and novels such as Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road demonstrate, the genre has become more intensely focused on imagining
roles that empower the father and reconnect him with his children and former spouse. San
Andreas, Roland Emmerich’s 2012, and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, all feature fathers
who are estranged from their wife and family—through divorce or separation—yet through the
course of the film are able to prove their worth and commitment to their children and former
partners. In War of the Worlds Ray Ferrier (played by Tom Cruise) proves, through his heroic
protection of his children, that he is not the deadbeat Dad his ex-wife accuses him of being, but a
brave, capable, trustworthy man. Both 2012 and San Andreas fortuitously kill off step-father
figures during the apocalyptic events, making way for the reconciliation of the parents and the
Olivas 248

regeneration of the heteronormative family unit at the film’s end. The Road, which offers
perhaps the bleakest vision of our desolate future landscape, focuses on the love and devotion
that a father feels for his son. In McCarthy’s novel there is little hope of survival, but the
unforgiving, unhospitable landscape requires characters to find new ways to work together and
discover new ways to value one another. It is on the barren post-apocalyptic terrain where the
father becomes intensely aware of the value of his son in his life.
* * *
In most current apocalyptic film and fiction there is no longer a place of escape from the
coming catastrophe. Not only is the wilderness poisoned and/or devastated by ecological
collapse, traditional places of refuge are now seen as the complicated and insular places of
dystopian narrative. While Gilman could depict the walled garden utopia of Herland without
much attention to the problem of its exclusivity and social control, such depictions have given
way to the more critical films such as Snowpiercer (2013), in which the bounded ship—or in
this case a train—is clearly reliant on a troubling social hierarchy in order to sustain itself. Even
less critically-minded films like 2012 suggest that the ship for humanity will not be populated by
a well-chosen band of select survivors, but rather, will be primarily populated by those wealthy
enough to afford passage.
Further, as myriad space-travel narratives assert, other planets lack the promise of refuge
that they may have once had in the popular imagination. Escaping off-world is too difficult —as
films such as Interstellar (2014) suggest, too undesirable as WallE (2008) and Bladerunner
(1982) imply. And as Kim Stanley Robinson demonstrates in his Mars trilogy, building a new
civilization off-world may help humans escape the present ecological crisis, but does little to
repair the propensities that led to such devastating planetary problems.
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The impossibility of escape—either into the verdant wilderness, utopian garden, or outer
space—reorients audiences back to the Citadel. It is there that change must happen—there that
humanity must plant and cultivate the seeds that will reorient nature back into the center of our
lives. These holistic depictions of change are necessary because, as Octavia Butler argued in a
1996 interview, “We keep playing the same record,” and “we are either going to continue to play
the same record until it shatters . . . or we are going to do something else.” By shattering the
status quo with the vehemence of apocalyptic annihilation, these texts mandate change, and as
Butler explains, “the best way to do something else is to go someplace else where the demands
on us will be different. Not because we are going to go someplace else and change ourselves, but
because we will go someplace else and be forced to change” (Potts). Rather than retreat,
humanity must change, and narratives of apocalypse will likely continue to aid in that
transformation. As we consider how the systems we have constructed—social, political,
industrial, economic, etc.—help or hinder us as a species, and as we recognize our ability to alter
those systems, we will be better equipped to do so. At the very least, apocalyptic narrative will
continue to draw audiences to the site of collapse to get used to the uneven ground of a world in
transition.

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