Benjamin McArthur, “Millennial Fevers” Reviews in American History, September 1996, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 369–382 (Johns Hopkins University Press)
A historiographical review essay on Millerism and its place in the writing of American religious history. Journal page numbers are given in brackets.
PDF p. 1 — JSTOR cover page Standard JSTOR front matter identifying the essay, its author Benjamin McArthur, the journal issue, and the stable URL (jstor.org/stable/30030673). It notes that Johns Hopkins University Press published the piece and collaborates with JSTOR to preserve access to Reviews in American History. The page carries the usual terms-of-use and contact information rather than substantive content.
PDF p. 2 [p. 369] — Opening: the unnoticed sesquicentennial McArthur opens on the approaching year 2000 and the media’s appetite for apocalypticism — UFO believers, New Agers, conspiracy hounds, David Koresh, and darker secular fears of environmental collapse and viral outbreaks like Ebola. Against that noise, October 22, 1994 — the 150th anniversary of the Great Disappointment, when perhaps 50,000 people awaited Christ’s return — passed almost unnoticed by the secular press, despite Millerism being called “America’s most significant millenarian expression.” He argues that Millerite interpretation has matured over a century and a half, and that its changing fortunes illuminate broader trends in how historians treat America’s evangelical and sectarian heritage.
PDF p. 3 [p. 370] — Miller and the rise of the movement William Miller (1782–1849), a Low Hampton farmer, War of 1812 veteran, and former Deist, began studying prophecy in 1816 and concluded Christ would return around 1843, but sat on his findings until 1831 before reluctantly spreading the message. The turning point came in 1839 when Joshua V. Himes, abolitionist minister of Boston’s Chardon Street Chapel, became Miller’s publicist and the movement’s driving force, taking it into cities with conferences, camp meetings, and an ambitious publishing program. By 1843 lecturers reached as far west as St. Louis, notables like Sojourner Truth and Whittier attended, Horace Greeley devoted an entire Tribune issue to Millerism, and the public — delighted by challenges to its credulity — treated Miller’s prophetic puzzle as a democratic exercise in calculation and detection.
PDF p. 4 [p. 371] — Disappointment, fragmentation, and the historiographical question When Christ failed to appear in spring 1844, Samuel S. Snow supplied a revitalizing reinterpretation — the Jewish Day of Atonement antitype pointing to October 22, 1844 — and between 50,000 and perhaps 200,000 people waited through that day and night. Bitter disappointment followed (“We wept, and we wept, till the day dawn”), thousands defected, but a resolute remnant including Miller and Himes persisted; in the following months Adventists sorted into factions, one of which — holding that the 2300-day prophecy ended on October 22 but marked a pre-Advent judgment in heaven — became Seventh-day Adventism, the largest inheritor of the Millerite legacy. McArthur then turns to historiography, noting the progression from apology to analysis is recent but resisting a simplistic whiggish reading, since each phase of writing served its own legitimate purpose.
PDF p. 5 [p. 372] — Insider histories: Litch, Miller, Wellcome The first Millerite history, Josiah Litch’s “The Rise and Progress of Adventism” (1844), was polemic and evangelistic tract but surprisingly moderate, and its care for factual accuracy shows that present-minded history need not be inferior history. William Miller’s memoirs — most fully the posthumous Memoirs of William Miller (1853) by Sylvester Bliss — reveal a Jacksonian confidence in the common man’s ability to read scripture without churchly authority and a calm rationalism at odds with the fanaticism usually ascribed to him. Isaac Wellcome’s History of the Second Advent Message (1874) remains one of the best apologetic histories, legitimating Millerism by placing it within the wider premillennial tradition, and along with the Adventist scholars Loughborough and Olsen it sought respectability through compelling narrative — a virtue historians have lately rediscovered.
PDF p. 6 [p. 373] — Sears, Dick, and the apologetic reply Outside interest lagged until Clara Sears’s Days of Delusion (1924), which showcased ascension-robe stereotypes yet was more useful and more respectful of Miller than its title implies, and which dominated scholarly discussion for decades despite being strong on evocation and weak on analysis. Quietly in the 1920s a few historians began asking penetrating questions, most importantly Everett Dick, a devout Adventist whose 1930 Wisconsin dissertation on “William Miller and Advent Crisis” managed the difficult confessing-scholar feat of being supportive yet probing. Neither his church nor the historical profession was listening, and as the 1944 centennial approached the public instead got screeds like “Gabriel, Blow That Horn!”; Francis D. Nichol’s meticulously documented The Midnight Cry (1944) answered them, persuading most academics that Sears and others had exaggerated the sensational.
PDF p. 7 [p. 374] — Entering mainstream histories, then the 1970s renaissance Millerism reached mainstream American history through Alice Felt Tyler’s Freedom’s Ferment (1944) and Whitney Cross’s landmark The Burned-Over District (1950), the latter accepting Nichol’s defense and concluding the movement developed “in a specific atmosphere of deep pessimism” among those who had abandoned meliorative reform. Cross understood Millerism as the logical culmination of religious orthodoxy, differing from postmillennial Christians only in its literalistic reading of last-day prophecies. Two more decades passed before the early-1970s renaissance, driven by Adventist scholars newly willing to study their tradition critically and by the general efflorescence of social history; Ernest Sandeen’s The Roots of Fundamentalism (1970) inaugurated it by placing Miller in the transatlantic story of Darby’s dispensationalism and Miller’s historicism.
PDF p. 8 [p. 375] — The Rise of Adventism, The Disappointed, and Millerite social profile A 1972–73 Loma Linda conference organized by Vern Carner and Ronald Numbers produced The Rise of Adventism (1974), the first time so distinguished a group of church historians attended to the tradition; Sandeen argued Millerism was closer than supposed to its postmillennial evangelical cousins, while David Arthur showed the Millerites’ refusal to withdraw drove them toward creedal rigidity and near-inevitable expulsion. Millerite studies peaked in the mid-1980s with the 1984 Killington conference, published as The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (1987), which established that Millerism belongs closer to — though still on the margins of — the evangelical mainstream rather than being a fanatical sideshow. David Rowe found that unlike most millenarian groups the Millerites were not economically marginal or dispossessed, while Graybill documented abolitionist credentials among leaders and Foster and Barkun traced connections among Millerites, Shakers, Fourierists, Owenites, and Oneida.
PDF p. 9 [p. 376] — Himes’s media blitz, Doan on hostility, and causal explanations Millerism did not depend on a charismatic center: Wayne Judd portrays Miller as an uncomplicated believer, and Nathan Hatch credits Himes with an “unprecedented media blitz” of four million pieces of literature in four years — otherworldly message, cutting-edge technique. Ruth Alden Doan’s The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture (1987) explains the hostility Millerites met: their biblical literalism and radical supernaturalism grated on a religious culture drifting toward divine immanence and gradual social improvement, and their nerve in naming a date placed them, like the Mormons, outside the boundaries of a new orthodoxy. On why the movement caught fire at all, Michael Barkun’s Crucible of the Millennium (1986) points to New England’s natural calamities and the economic distress after the Panic of 1837, while Jonathan Butler reads Millerism as an extension and redirection of flagging Finneyite revivalism.
PDF p. 10 [p. 377] — Knight’s Millennial Fever and the neglect question George Knight’s Millennial Fever and the End of the World (1993), the most recent and complete Millerite history, refocuses on the movement’s own people and message rather than social causation, and — though published by an Adventist press — frankly admits the “preaching frenzy” and outright fanaticism that peaked around and after October 1844. McArthur summarizes the resulting portrait: a movement sharing in antebellum revivalistic culture yet rejecting the postmillennial creed of progress, whose celebration of God’s purging judgment put it beyond the evangelical pale — “the Millerites could not be tamed.” Invoking Christopher Hill on each generation rescuing its predecessors from the “lunatic fringe,” he notes Millerism’s rehabilitation is incomplete but real, and asks why America’s sectarian tradition was neglected so long, offering George Marsden’s indictment of the secular university in The Soul of the American University (1994) as one answer.
PDF p. 11 [p. 378] — Outsiders, postmillennial bias, and the social-history turn A second answer is church historians’ own indifference: R. Laurence Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (1986) showed how Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons were slighted as embarrassing departures from mainstream Protestantism’s civilizing and ecumenical spirit. The dominant American millennialist tradition since Jonathan Edwards has been the gentler postmillennialism that people can help bring about, so millenarians like the Millerites were easily classed as dysfunctional dissenters from a more attractive Christian idea of progress. That has changed — Martin Marty observed the margins have moved to the historians’ center, with Mormons displacing Methodists in the scholarly imagination — thanks partly to social history’s sympathetic turn toward popular religious protest, exemplified by Wilentz and Johnson’s The Kingdom of Matthias (1994) and Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More (1992).
PDF p. 12 [p. 379] — Evangelical scholars and religious self-scrutiny The efflorescence of sectarian history also owes much to an aggressive circle of evangelical scholars — Hatch, Marsden, Noll — who trade the academy’s usual detachment for a confessed allegiance to the Christian tradition while maintaining critical inquiry. Homegrown religious groups have meanwhile developed their own historical sophistication: Mormon historiography evolved from polemical apologetics to the secular standards of the “New Mormon history” of Arrington and Bushman, without abandoning quiet confidence in the church’s mission. Adventist historiography has followed roughly two decades behind, with 1970s Ph.D.s recasting early Advent history amid a decade of controversy and Knight’s Millennial Fever marking a mature stage that, as David Rowe puts it, “does not buy devotion” at the price of historical accuracy.
PDF p. 13 [p. 380] — Why Millerism still matters; author note and notes 1–7 McArthur answers his own closing question affirmatively: Millerism deserves fuller integration into surveys of American life because of its reach as a social movement and because Miller’s premillennial apocalypticism anticipates today’s prevailing evangelical eschatology. More existentially, we live in an age with little confidence in progress, where the narrative romance of nineteenth-century history and metahistories generally have lost persuasiveness, yet the public still craves a coherent story with meaning and an ending — something apocalypses of nuclear fire, environmental decay, or pandemic cannot supply. Quoting Perry Miller’s “Catastrophe, by and for itself, is not enough — there must be judgment,” he concludes that William Miller knew this, and his insight outlasts facile notions of human perfectibility; an author note identifies McArthur as a historian at Southern College of Seventh-day Adventists, followed by the first endnotes.
PDF p. 14 [p. 381] — Endnotes 7–26 The notes document the essay’s bibliographic backbone, beginning with Gary Land’s historiographical essay introducing Everett Dick’s William Miller and the Advent Crisis (1994) and Miller’s own memoirs and apologies from 1842–1853. They list the Adventist apologetic tradition — Loughborough, Olsen, Nichol’s The Midnight Cry, Froom, Spalding — and note that Dick’s frankness led church leaders to squelch publication of his dissertation until 1994, posthumously. Further notes cover Reuben Harkness’s 1927 Chicago dissertation, Cross’s use of Dick, the 1942 American Mercury screed, Rowe’s Thunder and Trumpets, Sandeen’s and Arthur’s essays in The Rise of Adventism, the roster of The Disappointed contributors, and the sesquicentennial broadcast from the Miller farm watched by an estimated 30,000–50,000 Adventists.
PDF p. 15 [p. 382] — Endnotes 27–38 The remaining notes cite the sesquicentennial documentary featuring Knight, Rowe, and Doan; Gary Land’s and Eric Anderson’s exhortations that historians take the “scandal” of Millerism seriously; and Christopher Hill’s line as quoted in Barkun. Others point to Marty’s decade survey in Church History, Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity, Paul Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Harrison’s The Second Coming, and Leonard Sweet’s review essay on millennialist studies. The final notes cover the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton, Bringhurst on Fawn Brodie, Numbers’s Prophetess of Health and its fallout, Rowe’s review of Millennial Fever, and Dorothy Ross, Novick, and Bernstein on the decline of grand narrative and apocalyptic