With the onset of social distancing, Zoom has suddenly become the essential medium for stitching together the fabric of modern society.
Three months ago, I had never heard of Zoom and now it is the “Ma Bell” of the COVID-19 era. The relentless and accelerating pace of technological innovation is taken for granted today. A world without social media would be as unimaginable to my grandkids as delivering goods by horse-drawn wagon or using carrier pigeons to deliver messages would have been to generations of yesteryear.
The enforced slowing of daily life imposed by the pandemic “lockdown” has ironically heightened my awareness of the velocity of technological change. Even while communicating with family and friends instantly via the web, I have spent hours delving into a trove of Platt family archives –– relishing those quaint remnants of pre-internet correspondence: letters, cards, photographs and newspaper clippings. Apart from the minutiae of daily life, these archives collectively manifest how swiftly and profoundly the world has changed since my father’s birth in 1894.
For most of human history, technology advanced glacially, if at all. Stephen Ambrose, in his account of the 1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific Northwest (“Undaunted Courage”), writes that at the dawn of the 19th century people “could not move goods or themselves or information by land or water any faster than had the Greeks and Romans.”
Shortly after Lewis and Clark reached the mouth of the Columbia River, my New England ancestors set forth to Ohio by wagon –– a 49-day journey from Brattleboro, Vermont in 1817 for members of the Hayes family, and an equivalent ordeal for a contingent of Platts from Lanesboro, Massachusetts soon thereafter.
Even as my father’s paternal grandparents — William A. Platt and Fanny Hayes, and Fanny’s brother Rutherford B. Hayes — were raised in pre-industrial Ohio, the advent of steam power would soon transform life for their generation as quickly as the internet has for mine. Soon after their seven-week hegira to Ohio, the same journey was shortened to about 10 days with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, and to a couple of days with the advent of railroads a few years after that.
An 1845 map in my collection is titled: “The United States and Texas With All the Railroads and Canals.” The spreading networks of steam-powered railroads and telegraph transmission lines revolutionized military strategies for both sides in the Civil War.
After the war, railroads –– newly endowed with vast federal land grants –– invented a phony slogan to lure gullible settlers to the semi-arid Great Plains: “Rainfall Follows the Plow.” It worked: in 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously proclaimed the “Closing of the American Frontier” as settlements dotted rail lines from coast to coast. That same year, the Chicago Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair) showcased the wonder of electricity that powered its lighting systems, machinery, exhibits, fountains and the world’s first (and largest ever) ferris wheel –– all activated by a touch of a telegraph key by President Grover Cleveland to the roar of 100,000 spectators.
My Dad was born in Columbus, Ohio in August, 1894, just three decades after the surrender of the Confederacy and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Like his father (and myself), he was named Rutherford Hayes Platt in honor of his great-uncle President Rutherford B. Hayes, a wounded Union Army general and three-term Ohio governor, who died in 1893.
The Civil War still loomed large during my father’s youth: I came across a 1911 letter from his maternal grandfather recalling a glimpse of General Philip Sheridan “galloping down the Winchester Pike” (as commemorated in Thomas Read’s poem “Sheridan’s Ride”).
The Great War that broke out in 1914 introduced the horrors of tanks, poison gas, aerial dogfights and submarine warfare. But when the U.S. joined the Allies in 1917, my father’s artillery battery –– like those of Napoleon and Grant –– still relied on horses to maneuver their cannon on the battlefield. In a post-armistice letter to his mother in 1919, he compares his own “poor nag” with the fine white horse bearing Gen. John J. Pershing at a military review.
Just two decades later, radio was a staple in every “modern” home and television was introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I was born in New York City in 1940 as the Blitz rained death and destruction on London. I was nearly 5 when the U.S. dropped two atom bombs on Japan. Seven years later, the U.S. first tested a hydrogen bomb, soon followed by the Soviet Union. I was part of the “duck and cover” generation when –– like today’s gun massacre drills –– kids were told to hide under their desks to escape Armageddon.
Fifty years after mounting his “poor nag,” my Dad witnessed the Apollo astronauts land on the Moon in July, 1969. As a noted natural history writer and photographer, he welcomed the first Earth Day in 1970 and the wave of bipartisan environmental reforms before he died in 1975. How shocked he would be today to see his beloved Republican Party declaring war on the environment and science, and the U.S. withdrawal from nuclear arms agreements and the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement under Donald Trump.
We are now threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic, by climate change, and by the growing risk of nuclear war. Just as the pandemic was initially belittled by many national leaders, authoritative warnings of the second and third perils are sadly ignored. According to David Wallace-Wells, the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” “Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization.”
He refers to the build-up of greenhouse gasses since “pre-industrial” levels of the 1880-1900 period –– in other words, since my Dad was born. In November 2019, more than 11,000 climate scientists from 153 countries published a statement in BioScience declaring: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”
On Jan. 23, 2020, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset its famous “Doomsday Clock” to 100 seconds before midnight –– the highest level ever — with the dire warning that “humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers — nuclear war and climate change — that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.”
My ancestors who spent 49 days traveling overland to Ohio had it easy. They at least knew where they were heading, and why.
Rutherford Platt is a emeritus professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.