“Now I am become death the destroyer of worlds”.
In one of the most well known examples of the interaction between technology and society, J. Robert Oppenheimer said he thought of this phrase from the Bhagavad Gita while observing the Trinity nuclear bomb test on July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer was a deep thinker, contributing much more to physics than just his work on the Manhattan Project. As with all deep thinking, there are threads and connections to the larger world, and the way we interact with technology. Oppenheimer captured the big picture in just nine words, which he could do because of his deep understanding.
Deep thinkers such as Oppenheimer aside, general understanding of the human relationship with technology is lacking. There is no greater example of this than the way changes in technology supported the racial divide in the US since the end of the Civil War. Racism has no place in an advanced society based on science. Superficial differences that might trigger a response in the primitive parts of our brains have no meaning when analyzed objectively. Yet extensive racism persists in the country that was advanced enough to develop both nuclear devices and the transistor, and many other advances in technology. Understanding the role technology played in propagating racism is necessary to ending it, which means looking at the history of technology in the US and how technology was deliberately used to spread racist ideas.
Nuclear power and weapons came out of the explosion of technology that began around 1850. Precursors to that technology explosion, such as steam power, improved iron-working, scientific advances, and the Age of Enlightenment go back about 300 years. Individual advances such as Newton's Principia or the writings that brought Galileo before the Inquisition are understood today for the important scientific developments they were, but at the time, they did little to affect the daily lives of most people. Just as a bubble of magma melts through the Earth's crust for many years before erupting as a volcano, it took time for scientific advances from the Renaissance through the Age of Enlightenment to propagate through the crust of human understanding. When these ideas did erupt into the general consciousness, they changed the landscape.
We are still adjusting to the societal impacts wrought by the technological changes of the nineteenth century. For one thing, those changes did not affect all areas of the globe uniformly, and still have not brought full benefit of technology to most of the world's population. The ability to fabricate iron pipe in large quantity at a low price led to clean drinking water in parts of the world but not everywhere. The technology is available; it just hasn't been used as well as it should be. Death still destroys worlds in places where poor choices don't use technology to help people.
We in the United States have yet to adapt to the technology shift in the treatment of fellow humans, especially people of color. On October 2, 1836, a sailing ship docked in in the port of Falmouth in Cornwall. It was nearing the end of the Age of Sail, though to the people on that ship, returning home from a journey around the world, wooden sailing ships were in their glory, the peak of technology. A young man disembarked the ship and dashed to his family home to start publishing what he had seen, learned, and understood on that journey, including thoughts that began to come to him when that ship stopped in the Galapagos. It has been over one hundred and fifty years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, a book that proved, among other things, that all homo sapiens are more alike than we are different. Further research by a multitude of others would reveal that all humans are from Africa, our ancestors just left the continent at different times if at all. No humans are objectively better than any other human is, but there are still some who seek artificial differentiation based on superficialities.
By the 1850's a deep rift had grown in the United States. Steam and iron created industry in the northern and western states, while slavery powered the largely agricultural southern states. Much of the world had abolished slavery, or was on the way to abolishing it. Southern US states resisted this global trend, becoming ever fiercer in their demands for northern states to return escaped slaves and recognize slaveholder’s right to own other humans. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina issued an ordinance of secession based loosely on the US Declaration of Independence, though omitting phrases such as "...all men are created equal...", and stating that the reason for secession was the failure of northern states to support slavery. Other states followed South Carolina and the crisis grew through early 1861 until on April 12 the South Carolina Militia began firing artillery on the United States Fort Sumter.
Between that April day in 1861 and exactly four years later, when the Army of Northern Virginia marched past the Union Army of the Potomac and stacked their rifles in surrender, the technology of war changed completely. On land the Minie' ball obsoleted infantry tactics that descended from medieval armies, and General Ulysses Grant developed new battle techniques that predicted the battlefields of World War I by 50 years. Balloons were used for surveillance, and photography recorded real battle conditions in a way that paintings never had. At sea, a submarine sank a warship in combat for the first time, and the ironclads at the Battle of Hampton Roads rendered all the wood-hulled navies of the world obsolete in a matter of hours. Death was working overtime to keep up with all the fatalities new technologies were creating.
Technological changes in warfare never changed more rapidly than the next eighty years. A wooden ship sunk by an ironclad at Hampton Roads was sunk by ramming, an ancient technique with an engagement distance between ships of zero. Over the next decades, the engagement distance between ships grew exponentially, thousands of meters in the engagement between the Huascar and Cochrane, tens of thousands of meters in the Battle of Jutland, and hundreds of thousands of meters on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese fleet attacked from a distance of four hundred and forty kilometers. That war would end with the nuclear explosions on August 6th and 9th, 1945, when the bombs Oppenheimer helped create literally destroyed the worlds of hundreds of thousands human beings. It took only hours for ironclads to render wooden warships obsolete, and it took only days between July 16th and August 6th to go from a test in the New Mexico desert to use of a nuclear weapon in war. Technologies often change the world in rapid and powerful ways.
Technology created many powerful beneficial changes over those same eighty years, including indoor plumbing, electricity, automobiles, and wood-based paper. The ancient world, with it's ancient ideas of human populations separated by skin color, was destroyed by an overwhelming march of science and technology. European advantages of geography were displaced as peoples around the globe quickly adopted and adapted the new technologies. These generally beneficial technologies often had unintended consequences. Automobiles solved the health problems of using horses in cities, and electricity made life safer and more convenient, but both contributed to new problems such as climate change. Wood pulp paper would have it's own benefits and problems.
In the former Confederate states, a powerful and deadly use of emerging technology was unleashed as the war ended. Slavery was the foundation of the Confederacy, as described in the documents of secession and the Confederate Constitution, yet even as the last slaves were freed on June 19th and the last armed insurgents surrendered a few days later, a new narrative about the war started to form. This narrative was not based in the documented facts of the war, but illusions of an antebellum glory that never existed. There were many aspects to the Lost Cause narrative that slaves were happy to work on plantations, or that slaves were not capable of being free, that slaveholders treated slaves well, that the war was due to Union aggression, and slavery was not the cause of the war. All of these were, and are, lies. These lies, and others developed as part of the Lost Cause narratives, might have faded into history had they come at another time. As it happened, the Lost Cause lies started to proliferate near the beginning of the technological explosion, and just as Oppenheimer realized too late that he had become Death, the nineteenth century technological explosion carried the Lost Cause lies far and wide without people understanding the immense destruction they would wreak.
Printing was largely a manual process for hundreds of years after Gutenberg invented movable type. By the end of the Civil War steam and steel were becoming easy and inexpensive to use, and the new ability to make volumes of good quality paper from wood pulp was making paper inexpensive as well. Combining the availability of inexpensive paper with larger and more powerful presses, large scale publishing became a reality, and with scale came standardization. Texts could now be produced in large numbers, and for the first time large quantities of books were accessible to many people. Newspapers began to proliferate, using larger and more automated presses. The first examples of true mass media began to proliferate, and those promoting the Lost Cause lies were quick to adopt this technology. Organizations such as the Southern Historical Society collected and published Lost Cause narratives from insurgent leaders anxious to justify their loss and distance themselves from the failures of the Confederacy. Those of us who have the benefit of history understand the dangers of false narratives, but during the middle of the late nineteenth century the general public had not yet developed such understanding and the lies were left unchallenged.
Before long, the Lost Cause lies were deliberately incorporated into school textbooks. Textbooks themselves were a new technology made possible by the advances in printing, and groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy saw to it that history textbooks in the South told only the Lost Cause narratives. Even today, many elementary and secondary school texts repeat the lies of the Lost Cause even in the face of objective facts. Other actions by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, such as building monuments and naming roads, were older propaganda techniques that did not spread widely beyond the Confederate states. Unlike these older forms of propaganda, the new technology of mass media spread the Lost Cause lies throughout the United States.
Reconstruction was an opportunity to move the United States into a leadership position in the world. Had the attempts to unify the nation and all citizens within it been successful, the technological advances of the war and the later innovations born of the diversity of the population could have made the United States a global leader earlier than eventually happened. If white supremacy had been put down, the US would have been in a uniquely powerful position to share domestically developed technologies with all peoples of the world. Instead, the Lost Cause lies poisoned the soul of America, dividing citizens by superficial skin color into separate living and working environments, different churches, and different economies, through Jim Crow laws, police violence, and lynchings. Media technology was key to this oppression, destroying worlds of opportunity for millions of American citizens.
Around 1900 former Confederate soldiers started to pass away due to age, leading to a resurgence of the Lost Cause narratives. More statues and memorials were built, with the intent of intimidating black people and asserting white power. More books were published, including one book by a deeply racist author, titled The Clansman. This author, who does not deserve to be named here, used the technology of publishing to disseminate wildly racist ideas that had already been proven wrong by On the Origin of Species and subsequent work. This author was not alone in publishing racist ideas, not by a long shot, but this particular book would go on to inspire of some of the most vile events of US history.
In 1915 a film was released, a technological milestone in the development of visual media. This film used new and innovative camera techniques, and, at about three hours, was the longest film yet made. This film also pioneered the use of extras, making hundreds of extras appear to be thousands. Orchestras were used for the first time to accompany the film, innovating the use of sound with film. Unfortunately, this film also marks the use of technology to deliver a disgusting message of propaganda, something repeated by other films in the US and around the world. This film, The Birth of a Nation, was based on the book The Clansman, and portrayed black men as violent and ignorant, whites as victims, and the KKK as heroes. Lost Cause lies had crossed from the first mass media technology of print to the new technology of film.
After the release of the film, membership in the KKK dramatically increased. This increase in KKK membership and other events set the stage for events starting May 31, 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Reports in the print media of a young black man attacking a young white woman brought out crowds, and an editorial in the paper appears to have inspired violence, though no copy of that editorial can now be found. On June 1, white mobs made real the fictional story of The Birth of a Nation as they viciously attacked the most successful black neighborhood in the country. Technology, first print and then film, had become Death, and in Tulsa and many other places destroyed the worlds of black people across the US.
Technologies of redlining and highway planning were used to maintain separation of white and black neighborhoods for many decades. When automobiles became common the demand for high speed arteries into the hearts of cities grew. These highways displaced many black and minority communities, slashing through their residences and isolating them from city centers, while providing a path for whites to flee to the suburbs. As with the deconstruction of Reconstruction, this deliberate segregation harmed all Americans, turning vibrancy into decay. Had the highways been planned using thoughtful techniques that created opportunities for everyone it would have avoided decades of urban problems. There is no question that the highway designs and the redlining of certain areas by institutions to deliberately segregate populations had a direct and harmful effect on people of color.
Atrocities in other countries since the end of the Civil War, such as South African apartheid and Nazi death camps, came after a general awareness of mass media technology. Compared to the documentation of the horrors of slavery, other atrocities are better documented. Those who would deny more recent atrocities are faced with overwhelming evidence of the truth, often from a variety of sources. In contrast, the mass media narrative of the Lost Cause looms large next to the documentation of slavery. Lost Cause advocates dismiss evidence of slavery as outliers, claiming that the majority of cases were different. Though the Lost Cause narrative is just the same handful of lies told over and over, in aggregate it creates a big lie that seems to carry weight until examined closely. Using mass media created an artificial abundance of documentation at the dawn of mass media, before the general population became aware of and sensitive to the power that media can have. That allowed the Lost Cause lies to take hold and maintain the narrative in a way that later big lies could not. In South Africa and Germany we see that media has been used to create context instead of suppressing fact. Honest assessment of the records is taught, and monuments mark the atrocities that occurred. White supremacy was no less potent in South Africa than Alabama, and there is no denying the extreme racism in the ashes at Auschwitz, but in the United States the Lost Cause lies still remain.
There are persistent dangers in failing to understand how technology allowed the Lost Cause lies to propagate. Since these lies have persisted for one hundred fifty years with little direct analysis or challenge, it demonstrated the power of the big lie. Current evolution and climate change deniers may not have directly taken their causes from the Lost Cause narrative, but the fact that it has been allowed to persist showed that there was space in the media to create artificial truth. Understanding how the early days of mass media allowed the Lost Cause lies to spread is critical to unwinding them and ending the damage they still do. Mass media can undo the lies of mass media. Some new analysis of the Lost Cause is developing, and some of the monuments of hatred are starting to come down, but much more needs to be done. Textbooks must be revised, using the best historical research, to tell the actual conditions of antebellum slavery and the events of the Civil War. Monuments and museums documenting the realities of slavery and the effects of the Lost Cause narrative must be expanded where they exist and established where they do not. At the same time, there were some notable technical advances made by the Confederacy, and we must include them without endorsing the society that created them.
Undoing the damage of the Lost Cause will take time, but is necessary to the future prosperity of the United States. The US might not have made it to the moon first were it not for a brilliant black woman who was a mathematician at NASA. She had the opportunity to contribute, but we will never know how many brilliant scientists, inventors, and artists never had the opportunity to develop their ideas because the Lost Cause lies unjustly painted them as ignorant or stole their futures. Looking at current challenges such as global climate change, we must face all anti-scientific rhetoric with strong resolve. If we allow artificial truth to persist, it will propagate, as the Lost Cause lies have demonstrated for over one hundred and fifty years. Our future depends on collaboration to address global challenges, and we cannot risk losing even one great mind to long disproved lies such as the Lost Cause.
Additionally, as we look forward at new forms of media interacting with our lives and society, the Internet, cell phones, digital audio and video technologies, and wearable tech, we must learn from the history of the Lost Cause lies. Narrative has great power through emotional resonance. If we do not regulate the narrative stream, it will drown us in lies, half-truths, and deliberate confusion. Everyone loses if that happens. Lost Cause lies poisoned the United States, but we can fight through that poison, heal the wounds, and learn to use technology better in the future. When we do, we will become creators of new worlds instead of destroyers.
