The desire to know the future is written across human history. So too is the tendency to seek predictions from those who seem possessed of special knowledge. In the second half of the nineteenth century, new predictive techniques born of the Enlightenment began to displace older vernacular practices on a mass scale. Many of the new prophets who promoted these techniques wrapped themselves in the authority of science and technology. In Looking Forward, Jamie L. Pietruska digs deep into an eclectic set of case studies to show this process as rife with conflict. Forecasters argued with each other about the limits of prediction while their audiences dismissed caveats and clambered for more complete and accurate information. Those who expected that better collection and analysis of data would yield absolute certainty suffered disappointment. Instead, Pietruska argues, “the search for predictability yielded just the opposite: acceptance of the uncertainties of economic and cultural life” (2).
Crop forecasting using quantitative data about historical yields and weather patterns was new in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Almost immediately, it offered a tempting tool for speculators. The example of the battles over cotton crop predictions provides the first illustration of the book's themes. Here, the prophets involved include both earnest bureaucrats from the Department of Agriculture and commercial forecasters evocatively described as “market-manipulating statistical middlemen” (29). Southern growers found themselves caught in the middle facing ruin from unrealistically optimistic estimates of bumper crops and low prices. Ultimately, the growers fought back by wielding their own statistics and probabilities.
The author then moves on to weather forecasting. Two of the book's strongest chapters explain how the U.S. federal government entered into the business of predicting the weather. Through the use of telegraph and later Rural Free Delivery and rural telephone networks, the U.S. Weather Service provided short-term forecasts they believed would be of more help to farmers than the traditional tools of observation of weather signs and almanacs. But what farmers really wanted were long-term forecasts, which Weather Bureau scientists viewed as unscientific and unreliable. In 1908, public demand and competition from commercial “weather prophets” resulted in the Bureau issuing the first longer-range forecasts featuring the now-ubiquitous device of percentages to signal the probability of meteorological events—an example, the author says of “an institutional acceptance of more uncertainty” (25).
The Gilded Age's indispensable utopian, Edward Bellamy, puts in a second appearance (or third, if you count the book's title—a play on Bellamy's 1888 speculative work Looking Backwards) in a middle chapter about economic forecasting. Bellamy's vision of a future of absolute economic security keeps company with the more prosaic vision of his lesser-known contemporaries. In the narrative arc of the book, this chapter turns away from the particular toward the question of the cultural influence of prophets wielding pens to address the anxieties of a society undergoing rapid change.
To round out this wide-ranging tour, Pietruska takes us to Coney Island, a stronghold of an alternative mode of prediction. Here and elsewhere, an increasing number of Americans sought certainty about their romantic and financial futures from fortune tellers and other occult practitioners. At the same time, reformers sought to banish this particular kind of prophecy as fraudulent. Ultimately, professional fortune tellers survived legal attacks by making the case that they weren't selling certainty, but rather a kind of psychic comfort in a world in which even science could not provide all the answers.
This is a conceptually and historiographically ambitious book. By now, studies of what is sometimes called the “probabilistic revolution” are a familiar genre among historians of science and technology. Americanist cultural historians have also tackled the search for certainty in the years after the Civil War. Readers interested in familiarizing themselves with these literatures could very profitably work through the rich footnotes that the University of Chicago Press has wisely chosen to put at the bottom of the page. Pietruska places her work at the intersection of these fields as well as the history of capitalism. It is a lot to manage.
For this reader, the book's ultimate contribution is not in the author's efforts to synthesize or historiographically contextualize. It is in reinserting people in all their complexity, incomplete knowledge, and mixed motives, back into our understanding of the social, economic, and epistemological shifts that accompanied the probabilistic revolution. The nuanced, insightful, and engaging portraits of the various prophets who people its pages make clear that contingency and social construction are at work even when scientists and other experts might claim otherwise. Is it any surprise then, that the best the prophets of probability could do was to replace one form of uncertainty with another?
