The Great Disappointment in Review.
Millennials, Millerites, and Millenarians.
The Millerites of East Palestine, Ohio spent the day of October 22, 1844 with tremulous hearts and sweaty palms. One of two things would happen by sunrise of the 23rd: either the followers of the tent-preacher William Miller—along with as many as a half-million of their Millerite brothers and sisters—would be raptured into heaven as the End Times arrived; or their religious sect would be forced to admit that its central tenet was wrong. You’ve got to give it to Miller—he went all in, putting his chips on a publicly falsifiable claim: that Ragnarök would arrive on October 22, 1844.
As you may be hearing Miller’s name for the first time,1 you are likely aware that the End Times did not arrive by dawn of the 23rd, and when the 180th anniversary of that sweaty-palmed night arrives next week, it will go largely unmarked.2
II. The Hudson River School as Geomancy.
The Millerites and their end times sympathizers were partly successful in a weird geomagnetic project. During the years of 1833, when Miller and a generation of tent preachers began their ministry, and the beginning of the Great Disappointment,3 a sea of towns in America were named after Biblical locations: Hebrons, Palestines, Gideons, etc. The apocalyptic cults like Miller’s understood that Christ was coming again—they had the date, but the location was anyone’s guess. Some of Miller’s followers abandoned Miller to establish colonies in the Holy Land, believing the prophecy was correct but the location was just off. But for those who couldn’t travel to the Middle East, why not bring the Holy Land to you? This period didn’t redraw the map, but it did rename it: A village of railroad mechanics unimaginatively named Mechanicsburg in 1803 became, in 1833, the hamlet of East Palestine.
That strategy wasn’t only for millenarians—plenty of Americans who didn’t anticipate Christ’s return also named their towns Galilee. American towns are named in a few ways: for the mechanics that settle the burg (eg., Mechanicsburg, OH); for the European hometown of the founders (New Amsterdam, etc.); or a sorry attempt is made to capture the native name for the place. But the weirdest category, to me, is places with Biblical names: there are villages in Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Connecticut, and New York all named Sodom. But naming your town after just any old place in the Bible doesn’t just remind you of the old Alma Mater—it recasts the new terrain as anciently familiar. A strategy to order a wilderness: this is not untamed nature, but an invocation of the magical sites. Maybe Jesus will stride through the gateway we have traced for him in the hills of Ohio—but we will, if not him.
But as the nomenclature of discovery exists to eliminate the inhabitants of a place, the act of naming exists to dis-order the meaning of the existing place-names—and to thereby dehumanize them. Having removed all the people from the eastern United States, the ruins of their civilization were razed, and all that remained was to insinuate ancient geography onto that terrain.
Such was the project of the Hudson River School, which began almost exactly when the Great Disappointment occurred. Frederick Church expressed his piety through place: maybe this mountain is as good as a temple. Thomas Cole, the father of the movement, was light on Jesus when he wrote in 1836 about “American Scenery,” but heavy on ruins. “You see no ruined tower to tell of outrage—no gorgeous temple to speak of ostentation,” he lamented. But they’re there, if you know how to look:
“The lofty Catskills stand afar off—the green hills gently rising from the flood, recede like steps by which we may ascend to a great temple, whose pillars are those everlasting hills, and whose dome is the blue boundless vault of heaven.”4
These ruins belong to us Western European settler-colonials, and they mean that we belong here, even if our past here is strictly imaginary. That language of nature-as-temple is related again and again in the literature advocating for the nature preserves that became our National Parks. National Parks are good things, if you take the settler-colonialism that necessitated them as a given. But as to the leverage provided by the “temple of nature”: birds get sanctuaries; people get reservations.
III. Consecrating a place with a portable painting.
The geomantic project is secularized, but its appeal to our nomad’s need for a meaningful place is bracingly successful. The Met’s insightful Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 makes a case for the power of a portable painting to consecrate a space, and I’m a big proponent of “destination pictures.” Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California was painted by a German-born artist in a studio in New York depicting a place in California, and the journey to Birmingham, Alabama, where the picture resides, will change you. Not only is it an “attraction,” it changes the city of Birmingham. You must go!
That too, it’s vanishing. The geomancy of the art world is dismantling itself—there is no day, no year, and no place—it’s cocktail hour at Art Basel somewhere. The Great Disappointment is tomorrow—should that dread day ever dawn.
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day, and thanks for reading.
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
The Seventh Day Adventist denomination is a part of his legacy, and that’s not nothing. Miller was a more interesting character than I’m giving him credit for: he started a Christian, left the faith after he read Voltaire, became a Deist and a Freemason, and then slowly tried to reconcile it all. Only when he insisted on doing the math that is in the Bible did he settle into his role of deranged visionary. I think that’s the real takeaway: math is a dangerous gateway. Mommas, don’t let your kids near the stuff.
Miller’s initial claim was that the rapture would fall between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844, but when all of those days came and went, one of Miller’s followers got his pencil out and found a new date later that same year that simply had to be it. With hundreds of thousands of followers, it’s no surprise that at least some of them came up with new dates after 10/22/44, giving Jesus extension after extension.
Truly we were more honest in our naming conventions in the 1840s—it truly was a great disappointment.
Thomas Cole, “American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine, January, 1936.