The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950)—the creator of Tarzan—and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935). These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution. Both men created and drew on science and fiction to produce vraisemblance in their reconstructions of human prehistory, and thus to achieve suspension of disbelief. Their main tools were arguably very different: one organized expeditions to collect fossils and installed a staff of artists and technicians at the museum to reconstruct the fossil creatures; the other turned himself into a writing-factory, producing as large an amount of words per day as possible. As is shown, the two cultures nonetheless interacted on the level of structure as well as content when bringing the dinosaurs and cavemen to life in fully equipped prehistoric worlds. The resulting windows into the human deep past were meant to educate the public through entertainment. Osborn and Burroughs engaged in “interesting experiment[s] in the mental laboratory which we call imagination” when they made different races, sexes, and national types compete in prehistoric struggles for existence. The laboratory setups were to reveal natural hierarchies, but they were also intended to transform the reader/viewer. The verbal and visual reconstructions of lost worlds served Burroughs’s and Osborn’s conservatism: the true American/Anglo-Saxon type had to be preserved, if not recovered.