A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

sense this dream of perfected communication manifests as the desire for the collation and broad
dissemination of information. The impulse of Diderot’s Encyclopedie and its ongoing resonance
capture the centrality of this desire in the Enlightenment vision. The building of database and
network continue to occupy a central role in the will toward rational perfection, though the faith
in such efforts as necessary and sufficient has eroded considerably. In the nineteenth century
such faith remained intact. As I argue elsewhere, the emergent middle classes (what Richard
Ohmann refers to as the professional managerial class) of the time drew fundamental links
between perfected communication and reform. 23 Socials ills were based largely on ignorance, so
the logic goes, and the free flow of information and discourse was thought to meliorate those ills.
Open lines of communication were central to the vision of a rational culture, a culture that had no
place for mystification.
This raises the question: how could a movement like modern Spiritualism, a movement
centrally concerned with the affairs of the afterlife, align itself with such a rational vision? Or as
prominent New York attorney George Templeton Strong queried,
What would I have said six years ago to anybody who predicted that before the
enlightened nineteenth century was ended hundreds of thousands of people in this
country would believe themselves able to communicate daily with the ghosts of their
grandfathers? - that ex-judges of the Supreme Court, senators, clergymen, professors of
physical sciences, should be lecturing and writing books of the new treasures of all this,
and that others among the steadiest and most conservative of my acquaintances should
acknowledge that they look on the subject with distrust and dread, as a visible
manifestation of diabolic agency? 24
The above quote, taken from Strong’s diaries, captures the sense of dismay felt by many of his
contemporaries regarding the massive popularity of modern Spiritualism in America.
What are we to make of the emergence, in the context of a socio-historical moment that
23 Mark Harrison, “Sensationalism, Objectivity, and Reform in Turn-of-the-Century America” in Turning the
Century, ed. Carol Stabile (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000) 55-74.; Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines,
Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996).
24 R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977).
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