For much of the history of the United States, Europeans have stereotyped Americans as being annoyingly optimistic. Americans described their new era of democracy as a novus ordo seclorum—a new order for the ages—as the US one-dollar bill states. When he visited the United States in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by how Americans “have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man. . . . They admit that what appears to them to be good to-day may be superseded by something better to-morrow.” A century later, the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair offered exhibits like Homes of Tomorrow that cast a vision for an art deco future built with prefabricated materials and equipped with personal helicopter pads.
Underlying this American optimism was a complex array of trends and influences. Prominent among them was the theological belief in postmillennialism coupled with the modern Enlightenment notion of progress. Postmillennialism, the Protestant eschatological view that the kingdom of God would be brought about through the perfection of society, was embraced by American elites and commoners alike. The increasing complexity of technology, communication, social organization, and scientific knowledge through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all fit a common interpretation of the world. In the words of historian James Moorhead, this interpretation allowed for the dual accomplishments of “the gradual evangelical conquest of the world and the triumph of secular progress.” Likewise, the Enlightenment notion of progress regarded history as containing a linear arc that tended toward freedom.
Because of the unprecedented superiority of the US military and economy after World War II, American belief in progress continued to increase, and in some places the belief persists. For example, the Harvard professor Steven Pinker has argued in the helpfully titled Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress that almost all macro trends about life expectancy, war, technology, and wealth are moving upward just as the Enlightenment philosophers predicted they would.
Yet even as progress has animated much of American culture (and elsewhere), it has a long history of being questioned as well. W.E.B. Du Bois, for instance, was attuned to how African Americans did not fit into—and suffered at the expense of—many arguments for progress. In his famous The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, he wrote that when he returned to a log schoolhouse he once taught at after ten years, it was gone. “In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.” Later he explained, “So woefully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of ‘swift’ and ‘slow’ in human doing, and the limits of human perfectibility, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.”