We only have one day before the anniversary of the Great Disappointment. Although to everyone except the one group that at least claimed to be disappointed, the rest of the population generally continues to be not disappointed at all over how things turned out.
It all goes back to October 22, 1844, in Low Hampton, Vermont. William Miller was a 62-year-old minister in the Baptist church there. He was also the leader of Millerism, a religious movement that had begun about ten years before when Miller started publishing tracts he wrote. The tracts were long (the first one ran to 64 pages) and complicated. The basis of Millerism was a sort of numerology where you take something like a phrase from the Bible, assign numbers to the letters, add, subtract, or otherwise manipulate the numbers, then arrive at another number. You decide that derived number is significant in some other way, such as looking it up in an obscure calendar (one popular source was the calendar of the Karaite Jewish people). In its own way, it was the QAnon of the 1840s.
Millerism was a nationwide movement, but nobody is quite sure how many Millerites there ever were. It might have been 50,000 or 500,000. Anyway, all of these folks were looking forward to October 22, 1844, which Miller had worked out — throughout thousands of pages of detailed numerological tracts — was the day the world was going to end. Like practically all groups that convince themselves of something like that, the end of the world was going to be a good thing for them and a bad thing for everybody else. That’s why, when they unexpectedly woke up the following morning finding everything the same as the day before, it was The Great Disappointment.
It was probably made worse because October 22 hadn’t been the first end of the world Miller had predicted. It had been supposed to happen on February 28. Then when that came and went, he picked April 18. That day came and went normally too, darn it. Then in August, Miller announced October 22 as his new prediction, and this time, double-pinkie-swear, for sure! But once again, nope. Miller just went back to his numerology, convinced he was essentially correct, but there must be a minor error somewhere. Most of his followers just got fed up and quit, although those who had gotten rid of their houses and all their belongings had a bit of work to do. A few of them founded other religious movements, including the Seventh Day Adventist church. And then there was Clorinda Minor.
Clorinda Minor was a Millerite, but she wasn’t dissuaded by The Great Disappointment. Instead, she convinced six companions to join her and travelled to Palestine to get ready for the real end of the world. Miller never published another potential date, so Minor set to work anyway and helped found the Mount Hope Colony, where they tried to introduce new farming techniques to the inhabitants. She lived there the rest of her life (the world hadn’t ended), along with some settlers originally from Germany. After she died in 1855, the colony — which had been struggling to survive — was closed and the remaining few people left emigrated to the US. Among them were Elmira and Johann Großsteinbeck, originally from Germany. When they arrived in the US, Johann adapted their surname to a more American spelling and pronunciation: Steinbeck. They eventually settled in California and started a family. Their son John Ernst Steinbeck became the treasurer for Monterey County. And his son, John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr, went on to write Of Mice and Men, along with a few other books you may have heard of.
Steinbeck’s writing presented Depression-era life so starkly that it made many people uncomfortable. Although The Grapes of Wrath, for example, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize (and Steinbeck later won the Nobel Prize for Literature), it was banned in various libraries and communities around the country. Steinbeck had been born into another economic crisis, too. On October 22, 1907, when he was just five years old, one of the largest banks in New York, the Knickerbocker Trust, failed, and the Panic of 1907 began. The NY Stock Exchange lost 50% of its value in a day. And the economy — which had just gotten over the recessions of 1899, 1900, and 1902-1904, was once again spiraling into collapse. This is the norm for our “system,” by the way; it’s happened over 50 different times. If only Miller had tried to predict economic crashes, he would have had more success.
At the beginning of the 20th Century the Federal Reserve didn’t exist yet (the Panic of 1907 was the reason it was established), and thus there wasn’t any way to shore up the banking system around the country so every bank wouldn’t crash. But there was a guy. J.P.Morgan was one of the super-wealthy plutocrats of the day, and he personally shored up the whole banking system with his own money. And, of course, ended up with even more money as a result.
Just to complete the list of influences on John Steinbeck, there were severe recessions in 1913-14, 1918-19, a depression in 1920-21, again in 1923-24, and one in 1926-27 attributed to Henry Ford himself, whose factories all closed for six months because Ford Model T production had ended and they were retooling to make the new Model A. And then of course the Great Depression; the one you’ve actually heard about. The ones in 1937 and 1945 aren’t mentioned quite as often. If you look carefully, though, there have been eleven more since, not including the most one, which economists are calling the COVID-19 Recession.
But you don’t always notice economic downturns, even when they’re pretty severe if you look at the numbers. It’s really all a matter of perception. Something has to be pretty extreme to be noticed, and even more extreme to be noticed more. There’s actually a law about stimuli and perception: the Weber-Fechner law. It points out that for a perception to increase by any particular amount, the intensity of the stimulus has to increase by a multiple of that amount. In other words, experiences have to increase geometrically for your perception to increase linearly.
The Weber-Fechner law, which has a huge amount of experimental evidence behind it by now, applies to all of our senses. If you look at two sheets of paper, one with 10 dots (placed at random) and one with 20, the difference is obvious. But if the first sheet has 110 dots and the second has 120, even though the difference — the stimulus — differs by exactly the same number of dots, you have to pay close attention to see any difference at all. It’s one of the findings of psychophysics, the study of perceptual systems. The whole field came into being as a result of the work of Gustav Fechner, whose work was so fundamental that he has a crater on the moon named after him. He has a day named after him too — and it’s today, the anniversary of the day in 1850 that he reported waking up with a brand-new idea about how to study the mind. Unlike some ideas connected with October 22, Fechner’s didn’t result in any disappointment at all.
