Review of *Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America*

What is certainty? That is the question at the heart of this richly informative and powerfully researched book. Is certainty the same as regularity—does it have to do with the periodicity of cycles, of orderly ebbs and flows? Or is it the absence of doubt and the presence of conviction—an internal sensation rather than a pattern discoverable in external phenomena?

Jamie L. Pietruska notes these dual shadings by reconstructing a “late nineteenth-century America [that] was haunted by a crisis of certainty at once economic and epistemic” (2). Pietruska deftly fits her study into a fertile intellectual space where the history of science and the history of capitalism overlap, but Looking Forward will also speak to intellectual historians precisely because of the way she is attuned to the broader epistemic implications of her subject. She makes clear the debts that her study owes to previous interpreters of the fin-de-siècle, such as her Rutgers colleagues Jackson Lears and Ann Fabian, as well as, further back, Robert Wiebe.^[i]

Looking Forward reassembles the messy but often surprisingly surprising histories of such relatively mundane things as crop estimates and weather forecasts. Pietruska is ever mindful of issues of scientific legitimacy and professionalization—one critical contrast developed during the period was between forecasts and prophecies—and this boundary work is most apparent (but still quite ineffective) in the development of more rigorous laws for the practice of fortune-telling and ostensibly more scientific methods for long-range economic forecasting.

Although the book speaks confidently to a number of core questions from the history of science regarding the production of forecasts, Pietruska tends to emphasize the cultural work that took place at the point of reception of these predictions.

Although the book’s subject is by nature relatively abstract, Pietruska confidently guides the reader toward a richly grounded examination of the reception of new ideas about markets, meteorology, and probability. The history of science is usually (and reasonably) biased towards descriptions of the actions of practitioners rather than laypeople, but Pietruska spends as many pages analyzing the newspapers which responded to the new forecasts as she does explaining the mechanics of how those forecasts were formulated. This is a great benefit to the reader, and especially to the intellectual historian, who can learn much from Pietruska’s ability to pluck relatively obscure figures from the archive and use them to demonstrate how large intellectual concerns translated into the intricate problems of the workaday world.

An excellent example comes from the last full chapter, “Promises of Love and Money,” which is about the ways that traditional anti-divination laws shifted to accommodate the very practice they were designed to forbid: fortune-telling. But this shift was not a capitulation to clairvoyance: fortune-telling was permitted only under the condition that fortune tellers did not claim to actually know the future. In order to accept money, fortune tellers had to warn their customers that their purchase was made under the more general commercial rule of caveat emptor—if the customer believed wholeheartedly in the veracity of the fortune, that was their responsibility (and possibly their misfortune). The fortune teller must claim only to know what might happen, what the stars or the tea leaves or the palm “indicated.”

Pietruska illustrates this new prophetic paradigm through a few case studies, including histories of two quite remarkable women who (mostly) managed to skirt along the edges of this new interpretation of their trade. Adena Minott was an African American woman who billed herself as a master of phrenology and a “character analyst and metaphysician.” Minott’s work seems to have involved more instruction than prediction, showing customers how to “read” heads and faces for character and destiny rather than drawing astrological charts or taking calipers to anyone’s head, but she pursued this trade in the teeth of white hostility. Arrested under anti-divination statues, she was released due to her scientific credentials; smeared by the New York Times for being the wrong kind of “madam,” she sued the paper for libel and won. More famous in her day was Evangeline Adams, a fortune-teller who turned the art into something almost bureaucratic, and defying numerous attempts to shut her thriving business down by insisting upon her own judicious allowance for uncertainty.

Adams in particular seems to have mastered the crucial bit of epistemological footwork that Pietruska sees as typical of this moment’s drive to “rationalize uncertainty”—not so much to tame chance but to find its outer perimeter—to grant chance its place in human life, but to surround that place with a powerful (but ordinary) armature of routine and methodicality that proceeded as if chance did not exist. Risks became not things one took but possibilities one hedged; one learned not to trust the weather forecast but not to defy it either. If it called for rain, one took an umbrella to work, no matter that one expected it to remain dry.

Pietruska excels in showing how this general logic of rationalized uncertainty worked itself out in all these different fields of prediction, and how that working out process was the product of tricky contestations over the authority of experts and the desires of consumers. But there was a sense, as I read, that the larger meaning of this transformation was being deferred or evaded, that Pietruska was hesitant to add up the long column of numbers she had recorded.

Perhaps this is due to how Looking Forward fits in among its peers. Many of the books that have been written about the topics of chance and risk, of calculation and gambling, of prognostication and prestidigitation, have strong—occasionally even moralizing—points of view. The question of authenticity or genuineness has often overwhelmed histories written about people who claim to know something—what is good for you, what must be done, what will happen—who pretend to knowledge. One thinks (again) of Jackson Lears’s work, but also of Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted Women, of Stephen Mihm’s A Nation of Counterfeiters, and of almost any history of advertising, and even of some of the more recent scholarship on insurance, salesmanship, and consultant agencies.^[ii] All these works share a troubled awareness of the long history of American humbuggery.

Pietruska’s work is scrupulously noncommittal regarding the interior states of her subjects—whether they believed in the guesses they sold, whether they would buy the predictions they hawked.^[iii] That neutrality, in turn, blocks off some of the deeper questions that her project naturally raises by virtue both of its subject and its periodization.

One of those deeper questions I raised at the beginning of this review—what is certainty?—and it is doubled by the question, what is pretension? Pietruska notes that one of the reasons why many fortune-tellers were able to avoid a guilty sentence under anti-divination laws was because of the ambiguity of the official charge against them, that they had been “pretending to tell fortunes.” A 1926 Congressional hearing (which involved testimony by Harry Houdini) on a bill that would have more clearly defined fortune-telling dissolved into uncertainty as the problematic nature of the verb became clear. If pretending was the offense, the problem was less about whether one claimed to “see” the future and more about whether one claimed to see it clearly enough to act upon one’s vision or to recommend that another person act upon it. One’s legal fate might hang upon the mood of a verb: the conditional could let you off the hook.

It was not so much “pretending” as “pretension” that was targeted, then: bluster more than bunk. It wasn’t that you were trying to fool someone, but that you were trying to convince them, to remove their doubts. Both the law and science had to settle for honest cons—for persuading people to act in a certain manner without wholly robbing them of their suspicions. The Weather Bureau might be full of horse puckey, but if they told you this was a good week to plant your wheat, well, why not?

Pietruska at one point says about one of her characters—an Ohioan who sold long-range commodity price forecasts named Samuel Benner—that his “public reputation hinged perhaps more on this predictive certainty than on the accuracy of his predictions for any given year.” At the end of the book Pietruska leaps ahead to the election of 2016 and to the chaos of forecasts that probably exacerbated the agony of that November for many supporters of Hillary Clinton. But perhaps just as appropriate an endpoint might be found not in a spectacular failure like November 2016 but in the continuous failures of sports prognosticators, from scouts and talent spotters to the talking heads that asseverate their “takes” in an uninterrupted stream of error and bravado. No one pays a Steven A. Smith or a Skip Bayless to be right; there are never any consequences for being wrong. They are paid to be certain, inflexible, arrogant even.

Pietruska placed her book at the intersection of STS and the history of capitalism and she shows her readers how a general transformation of people’s behavior under uncertain conditions took place. But perhaps there is another story to be told that looks not toward science but towards some of capitalism’s other partners—rhetoric and entertainment. Regardless, intellectual historians will find in this book an excellent example of how to tell lively and lucid stories about ideas without, necessarily, relying on lengthy expositions of the formal thought of well-known intellectuals. That is a skill well worth acquiring as we continue to stretch and enlarge the canvas of intellectual history in the United States.

^[i] Pietruska is critical of the general outlook of Wiebe on this period, aligning him with the “organizational synthesis” of some of his contemporaries like Samuel Hays. That synthesis sees the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as a time characterized by the establishment of new institutions and new forms of authority designed to stabilize the prodigiously expansive energies of American capitalism. That way of characterizing the “GAPE,” Pietruska argues, needs to be revised: if men and women of the late nineteenth century did search for order, their quest carried them into “just the opposite: acceptance of the uncertainties of economic and cultural life.” Nevertheless, the influence of Wiebe on Looking Forward—as with any book on the period—is marked.

^[ii] I’m thinking in particular of books by Dan Bouk, Jonathan Levy, Walter Friedman, and Christopher McKenna.

^[iii] Take the case of Willis L. Moore, for instance, who, as a chief of the Weather Bureau, fought vigorously against the “charlatans” who claimed to be able to formulate accurate long-range (i.e., longer than one week or so) forecasts. Only a few years after leaving the Weather Bureau, however, Moore began trading on his credentials in order to sell (not very successfully) his own long-range weather predictions. Pietruska quotes a Weather Bureau official who, she writes, noted the “irony” of this development, but leaves untouched the starker possibilities of hypocrisy or deception.