If humans had six fingers on each hand, the likelihood is that we would have names for time spans of 12 and 144 years. As it is, by sheer evolutionary chance, we count in decades and centuries. This arbitrariness is then compounded by the fact that we number our years by an entirely accidental system of reckoning. Nonetheless, when the second digit from the right, and especially when the third one from the right, clicks over to the next increment, we tend to feel that some real milestone has been achieved, that somehow what follows will differ palpably from what came just before.

Later, looking back with some sort of organizing narrative in mind, we often find that we have to adjust the transition points a bit. So it is that, for example, “the Sixties,” meaning in strict numerical terms the years 1960–1969 inclusive, now seems to refer to a period that for some began about 1963 or 1964—say, for convenience, with the “British invasion” of pop music, followed by the rest of the Swinging Britain business—but for others didn’t really get underway until 1967 and the rise of psychedelia and all that. Or, since there can be no single authoritative narrative, maybe what happened is that the Fifties culminated in the British invasion, the truncated Sixties died abruptly in the recoil from Altamont, and then we gritted our teeth and got on with the Seventies.

However that may be, with that thought by way of disclaimer, I want to propose that the late and to a surprising degree unlamented 20th century began not in 1900 but in 1890. There are three strands to my argument:

I.

In the introductory summary of the published results of the 1890 census of the United States appeared this almost offhand comment: 

Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent and its westward movement it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.

Three years later a young historian at the University of Wisconsin gave a paper at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, in which he took that comment as his text and proceeded to develop a deep and enduring interpretation of its significance. He said:

This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day, American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development. . . .

American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

This was the “Turner thesis,” named for its author, Frederick Jackson Turner. He concluded his paper with this peroration:

What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that and more the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

The Turner thesis has been disputed but never really refuted. There may be less there than Turner claimed, but there’s something there nonetheless. At some point in history, a point that we may as well place in 1890, a corner was turned and it was no longer a simple matter to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” as Huck Finn was in the end so desperate to do. You’d just as well accept that Aunt Sally, or somebody, was a-going to “sivilize” you, and no matter that you thought you couldn’t stand it.

As if to underscore the point with tragedy, December of 1890 saw the killing of Sitting Bull, the last great unreconstructed Indian leader, followed days later by the massacre of more than 200 Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, putting an end to the last major episode of Indian resistance.

II.

But let’s go back to the census of 1890, for it didn’t only look backward, it pointed forward as well: It was the first to employ electrical machinery in the tabulation of the data collected by census takers across the continent. 

In January 1889 an engineer named Herman Hollerith had been awarded United States Patent No. 395,782 for

[t]he herein described method of compiling statistics which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.

Two months later Congress formally instructed the Census Office in the Department of the Interior to begin planning for the next decennial census, to begin June 2, 1890. The heart of the plan was to use Hollerith’s method and machinery to encode and tally the data gathered by census takers. Coders would transmute written information into holes punched in cards; cards would be fed into a tabulating machine in which the holes would permit an electric current to flow to dials that would cumulate the information that the holes represented.

It had taken nearly eight years to compile, analyze, and publish the data gathered in the 1880 census, and the rate of growth of the nation was such that there was every reason to fear that the old manual methods would drag the 1890 project out even beyond the next decennial count. As it turned out, the new process yielded more detailed results in months rather than years and at a savings of millions of dollars. The census of 1890 was truly a watershed in the science of information processing.

Hollerith’s company, the Tabulating Machine Company, later merged with two others to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (understandably shortened to CTR), which in 1924 renamed itself International Business Machines Corporation.

III.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), born, educated, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of those impatient, energetic, utterly characteristic New Englanders who helped make the middle third of the 19th century a bewildering time of reform, reaction, and ultimately rebellion. He was a clergyman too radical for his liberal Unitarian congregation, an ardent abolitionist who journeyed west to Kansas to meet John Brown. He took up an axe to lead in freeing an escaped slave being held in Boston in 1854, and eight years later, after service with a company of Massachusetts volunteers, he was appointed colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment of black troops in the Union Army. He was every inch a man of his time.

After the Civil War he wrote a novel, histories, biographies, and memoirs and contributed to the leading magazines of the day. None of his writings retain much interest, but one book that he helped edit and see into print was quietly revolutionary. This slim volume was published in 1890 and bore the simple title Poems by Emily Dickinson.

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me

The poet and her future editor had kept up a warm correspondence from 1862, when she first sent him a few of her pieces, until her death in 1886. Throughout that long span he gently dissuaded her from publishing, for though the poems he saw charmed him, they also frequently baffled him with their peculiar syntax and their sheer oddity. Whatever they were, they were not of his time.

The shy, intense maid of Amherst who in adulthood seldom stepped out of her lifelong house and in later years hardly from her room—is it too great a stretch to imagine her as quietly anticipating the century of disillusionment and existentialism and anomie and irony and lonely crowds? Except in this: Her inwardness was saved from both narcissism and despair by a sturdy honesty that rooted her in the homely circumstance of her own century.

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog.
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

So think of her as a Janus figure, a deity of the doorway or of the crossroads, looking forward and back. But mostly forward.

1890: the frontier closed, a course toward the information society was set, and the first hints of a culture of irony (true irony, not the debased kind, the mere facetiousness and sarcasm that would become a shibboleth a few decades later) appeared in the voice of a village poet. I call that an epoch.

Robert McHenry writes the American Civilization column. The former editor of Encyclopædia Britannica, he last wrote for the magazine about technology and anonymity.

Illustration by Edwin Fotheringham.