Scratching the Surface

Geology and politics aren’t obvious bedfellows, but nearly every presidential election in recent memory carries a reminder of North America’s Mesozoic past. Take a look at a map of voting by county, and you’ll find an arc of blue snaking across the deep-red South. It starts in Arkansas, and then makes its way across Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia before taking a turn around Augusta and heading north through the Carolinas into Virginia. This is the Black Belt. Originally the term referred to the region’s dark, fertile soils — perfect for growing cotton. After the Civil War, it came to mean counties in which Black citizens outnumbered the white.

The Black Belt represents the area of the South where the slave economy was at its most intense. The reason for this pervasiveness ultimately comes down to geology. The soils of the Black Belt are so fertile because of deposits of chalk, chalk laid down in shallow seas in the Cretaceous period. Which means that every four years, voters trace the coastline of North America as it looked in the days when Tyrannosauruses roamed the earth. Of course, they do so unwittingly: Few people consciously vote according to what’s in the local bedrock. But that doesn’t mean that geology isn’t meaningful in other ways. Indeed, as the historian Caroline Winterer shows in her new book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton University Press), it can shape how an entire nation sees itself.

Winterer’s book tells the story of the gradual discovery, spanning the early 19th century, that the Earth was millions, and even billions, of years older than the Bible would suggest. The move away from Biblical chronology was a slow process, taking the better part of a century to become fully rooted in the American consciousness. Once the idea of deep time fully sunk in though, it transformed the way Americans perceived their country and their continent. (That said, none of Winterer’s protagonists ever used the term “deep time,” a term only coined in 1981 by the journalist John McPhee, whose Annals of the Former World series remains one of the only popular books to attempt for geology what Tolstoy did for the Napoleonic War.)

Deep time, Winterer argues, helped establish America’s place in the international pecking order. In the late 18th century, learned Europeans regarded the New World as literally new. Not just late in being discovered by Europeans, America was thought to have been the last continent to emerge out of the primordial seas. The discovery of fossils of various ages, including trilobites every bit as primitive as their European equivalents, helped convince geologists on both sides of the Atlantic that the New World was equal in antiquity to the Old. Later work by glaciologists, notably by Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, went even further, suggesting that America was in fact the oldest continent of all.

This newfound geological status gave a boost to Americans who had long been shamed by Europeans over their nation’s lack of pyramids, cathedrals, castles or other signs of antiquity. Fossils were one arena in which they could credibly compete with the Old World. The Philadelphia naturalist Jacob Green exulted that “even the remains of Babylon and Egypt” were “infants” compared to his lovingly prepared trilobite specimens. But the real change brought about by the advent of deep time concerned the way Americans regarded the different regions of the United States. As tensions between the North and South rose across the first half of the 19th century, geology provided contrasting visions of the destiny nature intended for each part of the country.

Northerners looked to the Ice Ages to account for their region’s distinctiveness. By mid-century, most were persuaded by Agassiz’s insistence that vast sheets of ice had once covered their part of the country. As those ice sheets retreated, they left behind layers of crushed rock and fertile, wind-blown soil, earth that was now being worked by free (white) men. The South’s story, by contrast, was written in marine strata laid down much earlier, when the region was home to a teeming tropical sea. These Cretaceous deposits were the foundation of the South’s prosperity, and Southern scholars convinced themselves that this was no accident. The prehistoric origins of the Black Belt soils meant that “geology and ethnology were both written into nature.” Combined with the “findings” of craniology, this seemed to prove that “hierarchy was natural and God-given.” The slave economy of the 19th century had been foreordained by events taking place in deep time, and the Earth itself had paved the way for the emergence of the peculiar institution. In the North, Agassiz and others made an equivalent argument. To them, the Ice Ages were an act of providence: “God’s final preparation,” in Winterer’s words, “for a superior white civilization that would triumph in the post-Civil War era.”

On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, learned gentlemen leaned on geology to make the differences between their societies seem like products of God and nature. As Winterer convincingly shows, these were not the only suspect ends planetary history could be put to. Time and again, geologists used the great age of American landforms to undermine any later claims to ownership by their Indigenous inhabitants. In the early 19th century, coal started to support a burgeoning industrial revolution. Coal beds told a story of their own as well. Full of fossils of primitive plants like pendulous tree ferns and towering club mosses, they brought to mind jungle swamps of a bygone age.

Naturalists — most of them amateurs, like the small-town Ohio doctor Samuel Hildreth — amassed great collections of these “fossil vegetables,” some of which they sent east for the delectation of learned professors at Yale and Amherst. These frontier scientists also engaged in a “more macabre traffic” — that of ancient human skulls. Hildreth and his colleagues excavated the many ancient burial mounds which dotted the Ohio landscape and sent the skulls they found to Eastern professors. Winterer sees a clear racial dimension in this simultaneous interest in coal seams and skeletons: “Native skulls and fossil plants could be used to show the inferior cultural capacities of the Indians, exemplified by their failure to exploit the natural resources that lay just beneath them in the coal fields of Ohio.”

Over the course of the 19th century, Americans came to understand the true, immense age of their adopted home. Little good came of this realization. Winterer writes that the discovery of deep time should have freed Americans to “imagine new stories of progress and even perfection.” But it seems that they mostly used it to justify their past crimes and current cruelty. Southern planters, Midwestern savants, and Ivy League divines all joined together to tell a story of America in which chattel slavery was foreordained and the extermination of Native Americans was both inevitable and — given the continent’s immense age — somewhat trivial.

Geology was only one of a number of disciplines used to create this image of an eternal racial order. Craniology, a modish pseudoscience based around the measurement of skulls, was another prestigious scholarly pursuit in this era; often, they were practiced by the same people. As in Ohio, fossil collectors doubled as tomb robbers. The Philadelphia doctor Samuel George Morton spent his early years immersed in paleontology, becoming a renowned expert on fossil shells. Later in life, he amassed the greatest collection of human crania in the United States, which he used to promote his theory of polygenesis, or the separate creation of different races, a founding tenet of modern “scientific” racism.

The prominence of Morton and his acolytes in this book highlights something strange about Winterer’s narrative. Hers is a history of scientific discovery in which very little is actually discovered. Most of the protagonists are collectors and compilers, applying geologic schema imported from Europe to make sense of American data. Their ideas about the bigger picture revealed by the fossil ferns, trilobites, and primitive horses they gathered tended to be pretty muddled, if not downright vile. Many, like Morton and Hildreth, were convinced racists. Few made any truly major contributions to geological or paleontological theory. Even Agassiz, the most prominent of the bunch who made a genuine scientific breakthrough in revealing North America’s glacial past, proved to be dead wrong about evolution, holding fast to creationism and vehemently opposing the theories of Darwin.

Winterer’s story goes against the grain of much of the writing on geology in 19th-century America. As she notes in her introduction, books on the subject tend to focus on the mania for dinosaurs and other prehistoric megafauna that swept the country after the Civil War. The story of the so-called “Bone Wars,” in which rival paleontologists working for big East Coast museums stalked each other across the American West, has been told many times. Its combination of competition, skullduggery, natural and human hazards, and almost comically overstated Americana (just to give one example: The first triceratops fossil on record was discovered by a cowboy when he lassoed it by the horns.) have proved irresistible to historians.

Winterer has given herself a much more challenging task. Her protagonists are not roguish bone rustlers, squaring off against each other and hostile Sioux, but a tribe of Ivy League professors, marking up their copies of Cuvier and Buffon. The fossils they collected are, for the most part, not the giant land animals of the Bone Wars but small, scuttling creatures of the Paleozoic Oceans. The finds they made belong to the nitty-gritty of paleo-taxonomy and stratigraphy and not to the entrance halls of major museums.

But however unflashy (and occasionally wrongheaded) their work, Winterer’s protagonists did accomplish something major: they successfully transformed the American imagination. The point is made by the many superb illustrations which dot her book. Slowly, the silent seas and sketched mollusks of the early 19^th century give way to a teeming menagerie of plesiosauruses and Uintatheres and the many fanged, crawling, gigantic and peculiar animals that continue to populate our dreams.

We may still be waiting for a deeper reckoning, however. If, as Winterer writes, the deep time revolution opened confronted Americans with a “bottomless sea of time,” it seems to have done little to instill a sense of responsibility to the present state of their continent. A century later, we have so altered the atmosphere and oceans that prominent scientists have called for the inauguration of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, to describe the immensity of the change we have wrought on the planet. Many hope this will be spur to finally thinking, and acting, on a global scale. Reading Winterer’s knotty, complex history of a previous intellectual transformation, one gets the feeling that it’s more likely that we’ll continue to do our best to let ourselves off the hook.