Looking Backward Historical Context Flashcards
Describe the events of the late 1800s that influenced the writer
Looking Backward was written in the late 1800s about the late 1800s. America had just been through two very difficult decades: the 1860s brought the War Between the States and Reconstruction; the 1870s saw an agricultural depression, a labor panic in 1873, and a major railroad strike in 1877. The power of corporate trusts and political machines seemed uncontrollable. Banks and railroads exploited western lands and the people who lived there. Coal smoke choked the air and gave miners black lung disease. Anarchists blew up buildings and threatened political stability. The Labor Movement and the Women’s Movement gained momentum as labor problems continued to boil and female suffrage became a major issue. Militant political groups such as the Grangers and the Populists came into being.
How did the demand for labor affect the times
The demand for labor brought many new immigrants to America and many farm families to the cities. The conditions of the urban tenements were horrific. People lived amid filth, noise, and danger. Several families might live in one small apartment with inadequate sanitation. Disease was rampant. With no laws to protect them, women and children, as well as men, worked very long hours under unsafe conditions. Children were sometimes beaten. Eventually, the poor rebelled. For example, in 1886, a rally for an eight-hour workday turned into the bloody Haymarket Riot in Chicago. Boston, the setting of the story, was virtually paralyzed by strikes by the mid-1880s. Bellamy brings this factor into play in the story when he mentions that West’s marriage is delayed by the strikes that prevent workers from finishing his new house.
Discuss the social upheaval of the INdustrial REvolution
It was a time of social upheaval as the Industrial Revolution led to enormous wealth for a few while grossly exploiting the labor force. Working class violence and Gilded Age opulence greatly disturbed the middle class. Americans wanted a better world, and they were in love with utopian stories that gave them hope for a peaceful and prosperous future. Consequently, an eager audience rushed to read Bellamy’s book denouncing capitalism and describing a system that he claimed would lead to equality and contentment.
Discuss the impact of this book
The impact of Looking Backward has never been matched by another American publication. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it touched upon the issues that most deeply disturbed the American public. As a result, Bellamy Clubs organized around the country to discuss the potential of Nationalism. Political party platforms adopted some of Bellamy’s ideas and translated them into legislation that still affects America today. The book was published in millions of copies and translated into all major languages. After Marx’s Das Kapital, it became the most influential book on socialist systems in the world.
Discuss the author’s impact on American culture
Bellamy’s influence on American and world culture has been enormous. A list of those who have acknowledged a debt to Bellamy includes many notables: educator John Dewey, labor leader Eugene V. Debs, politician Clement Atlee, and writers Jack London, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Erich Fromm, H. G. Wells, Leo Tolstoy, and Maxim Gorki. Bellamy’s first biographer was Arthur E. Morgan, an engineer who became chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority under Franklin Roosevelt and later president of Antioch University. Morgan asserted that the creators of the New Deal in the 1940s were also influenced by ideas proposed in Looking Backward.
Discuss utopian and dystopian novels of the time
The popularity of Looking Backward led to a multitude of other utopian novels. Both notable writers such as William Dean Howells (A Traveler from Altruria) and previously unknown writers had their own ideas about what would constitute a utopian society. Dystopian novels also abounded as people began to suspect that the future could be worse instead of better. Even though several of these works are now much better known than Looking Backward, the phenomenal impact of this work on American thought is still given respectful credit.
SOme things he got wrong about 2000
Gail Collins points out in her 1991 article for The Nation that, although Bellamy believed technology would make life easier in the year 2000, he fails to show anything but a few innovative gadgets, and the rest is much the same as it was in 1887. “We learn that factories are no longer dirty but we never see them in action…. The industrial army does the washing and the cooking, not washer-dryers and microwave ovens,” says Collins. Collins also notices that, “Throughout the book, West manages to tour the city . . . without ever speaking to anyone except the Leetes, or encountering any blacks, Catholics or other descendants of the working class.”
Some things he got wrong about human nature
From the beginning, critics have also found Bellamy too idealistic about human nature. An 1889 article by Nicholas Gilman in the Quarterly Journal of Economics thought Bellamy’s futuristic society impossible to achieve as long as human nature remains the same. It is naïvé to think that people will respond en masse to logic and reason or to an altruistic desire to share. While good may be able to overcome evil, greed and the desire to feel superior will live on. In addition, Bellamy underestimates the importance of incentives if he thinks that simple honors or increases in rank will motivate workers to improve their efforts. Furthermore, as Linda Simon asks in a 1999 profile on Bellamy for World and I, “If life became too easy, if one’s needs were met by a paternalistic government, what would motivate men and women to achieve greatness?”
Biggest problem is nothing was voluntary.
Martin Gardner says in an article for the New Criterion that, “though admirable in its indictment of unfettered capitalism and in its enthusiasm for building a better world, it projected a cure as bad as, if not worse than, the disease.” Many critics agree. While Bellamy’s ideas are intriguing and have had sufficient merit to affect the development of socialism, the bottom line is that his system is not voluntary. Everyone attends school until a certain age. Everyone must enter and leave the Industrial Army at a certain age on a certain day, and so on. There is apparently little room for diversity, a limited choice of music and goods, no variety of restaurants, and no change of atmosphere.
Women not equal only economically equal
Another area that is stifling is the choices given to women. Bellamy’s segregation of the sexes is the most controversial topic of his novel. It offends modern readers and was a source of consternation to feminists of his time. Still, his contemporaries hailed the relative freedom and equality that he foresaw for women as a definite improvement over the conditions of the times. They felt that they could work with the idea of economic equality and go from there.
Other criticisms include
In a 2000 article for Harper’s Magazine, Russell Jacoby finds a multitude of faults in Bellamy’s utopian novel: monopolies have merely been replaced by one “gargantuan state trust”; the idea of being mustered into the Industrial Army is not appealing, nor is the argument supporting it persuasive; the idea of marrying for love alone is fine, but not if it is celebrated as a step toward sexual selection to improve the species. Nonetheless, Jacoby forgives Bellamy because he is, like all of us, “a creature of his time, and his willingness to imagine a future radically different from his present did not absolve him of some typical nineteenth-century prejudices. The willingness is what makes him different from us.”
rschen is a writer and public school district administrator. In this essay, Kerschen concentrates on Bellamy’s references to women in his novel and how his attempt to liberate women failed to understand the full extent to which women can participate in the world.
Of the twenty-eight chapters that comprise Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, only one is devoted to the discussion of the role of women in the society of the year 2000, and that is not until the twenty-fifth chapter. This lack of attention to women is somewhat understandable, as the book was mainly intended to promote Bellamy’s ideas on economic reforms. Nonetheless, the lack of inclusion of women in a more substantial manner and the paternalistic elements that Bellamy maintains in his new society indicate that he was limited in his ability to think beyond the tenets established by his breeding, social status, and gender.
Looking Backward is about rebuilding the structure of government and industry in a centralized, nationalized form such that all people would share equally in the nation’s wealth. Bellamy believed that if privation could be eliminated, then the innate good nature of people would lead them to pursue endeavors that would benefit society as a whole instead of constantly pursuing money for personal survival. The connection to women’s rights is that, once the motivation for greed and competition no longer existed, a more generous society would be inclined to treat each citizen equally, even women.
Bellamy supported women’s suffrage, but he contended that, without economic equality, the vote would not have sufficient impact to give women full citizenship. According to Daphne Patai in her introduction to the book Looking Backward 1988-1888, Bellamy repeatedly emphasized in his writings that economic equality was an
indispensable prerequisite for any pursuit of justice
and political equality. For all his lack of attention to
the myriad ways in which women’s subordinate status
vis-à-vis men is articulated, Bellamy noted that
this status rested first and foremost on an economic
dependence that must be abolished.
An important benefit that results from economic independence is the freedom to marry for love instead of wealth and social position. Dr. Leete guesses correctly that the dependence of women “must always have remained humiliating” and resulted, in effect, in women having “to sell themselves to men to get their living.” He questions why it did not occur to the people of West’s time “that it was robbery as well as cruelty when men seized for themselves the whole product of the world and left women to beg and wheedle for their share.”
In addition to being cognizant of the social pressures on upper-class women, Bellamy was aware of the misery suffered by working-class women in the nineteenth century. Thus, his intent was to eradicate all poverty, exorbitant wealth, and class distinctions. Bellamy felt that the new social order must arise from the middle class to combat the excesses of the very wealthy and, in turn, to take care of the poor who did not have the education or the means to effect their own liberation. The feminist movement in Bellamy’s time was comprised mostly of literate, middle-class women, so Bellamy wanted to recruit these other social reformers to his cause with Looking Backward. With that in mind, Sylvia Strauss concludes in her article “Gender, Class and Race in Utopia” that Bellamy cast his socialist program in the form of a conventional romance, to “further attract female readers who, more than men, were drawn to the novel as a source of entertainment and enlightenment.”
Nonetheless, a chauvinistic attitude is evident from the tone of the first mention of Mrs. Leete and Edith. The description is entirely about their attractive appearance and seems more generated by desire than detail. From that point on, Mrs. Leete is almost invisible, and Edith has a place only as the romantic interest. Almost all of the conversations discussing modern society take place with the other male, Dr. Leete. The only thing Edith gets to explain about their way of life is, stereotypically, shopping. Edith is described as an “indefatigable shopper” who prefers to spend her money on pretty clothes, and there is an assumption, on her part as well as his, that women, past and present, did the shopping.
Oddly enough, the clothes that she wears seem to be of the same style as that of the women of the late nineteenth century. Bellamy tells the reader in a note in chapter four that “the differences between the style of dress and furniture of the two epochs are not more marked than I have known fashion to make in the time of one generation.” Why such little change after several generations? Bellamy knew that the feminists of his time wanted to change styles to allow for more comfortable activity. Some were already advocating, and wearing, pants and shorter skirts. Perhaps Bellamy did not want to expend the energy to think of a new style of dress for the year 2000 when his intent was to discuss government and economics. Perhaps he wanted his nineteenth century audience to be able to identify with the characters in his book. Either way, he merely avoided the issue by claiming that styles had not changed.
Another practice that seems not to have changed since the nineteenth century is that of men convening in a room separate from their women to smoke cigars and discuss weighty issues. One has to wonder why the women did not have sufficient intellectual curiosity to ask dozens of questions of a man who came from another century. Early in the novel, “Dr. Leete, as well as the ladies, seemed greatly interested in my account of the circumstances under which I had gone to sleep in the underground chamber. All had suggestions to offer to account for my having been forgotten there.” Beyond the initial excitement of the mystery, however, the women in this novel are dismissed as having interest only in being good hostesses or in a romantic relationship.
Throughout the story, the ladies always retire earlier in the evening than the men. Not only did this traditional practice allow the men to stay up drinking and smoking without interference from the women folk, but it also stemmed from the belief that women, as more delicate creatures, needed more rest than the sturdy men. Consequently, when Dr. Leete explains the differences between the occupations of men and women, he says
Women being inferior in strength to men . . . the heavier
sorts of work are everywhere reserved for men,
the light occupations for women…. Moreover, the
hours of women’s work are considerably shorter than
those of men, more frequent vacations are granted,
and the most careful provision is made for rest when
needed.
The continued existence of male dominance is revealed by Dr. Leete’s explanation that women are “permitted” to work by the men of their day only because it has been found that a “healthful and inspiriting occupation” is “well for body and mind.”
When Julian West inquires about housekeeping, the traditional occupation of women, he exhibits further sexist expectations, in that he turns from Dr. Leete to direct his question to Mrs. Leete. She replies that there is “none to do.” Laundry, cooking, and sewing are all done by public workers. Mrs. Leete adds, “We choose houses no larger than we need, and furnish them so as to involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in order.” Keeping the houses in order sounds like housekeeping. Bellamy does not appear to consider dusting, making beds, mopping floors, washing dishes or the myriad of other tasks that comprise housekeeping. But what would a man of Bellamy’s time and social station know about such things? He’s never done any housework. To him housekeeping is “woman’s work” and a world with “none to do” must be “a paradise for womankind!”
After all, two of the feminist writers of Bellamy’s time, Abby Morton Diaz and Marie Howland, had established freedom from housework as a goal of women’s liberation in their books The Schoolmaster’s Trunk and Papa’s Own Girl, both published in 1874. Patai concludes that their influence caused Bellamy to incorporate their ideas into Looking Backward , believing that they articulated the dreams of all women.
But Bellamy did not give women much scope for the
leisure time they had and which both Diaz and Howland
provided for in their respective books. Dr. Leete,
Bellamy’s surrogate in the novel, does not have a
high regard for women’s intellect, capacity to govern,
or ability to pull their weight equally with men
in the labor force.
West assumes then that, if women do not have housework to do, they must have nothing else to do. He says, “I suppose that women nowadays, having been relieved of the burden of housework, have no employment other than the cultivation of their charms and graces.” Dr. Leete replies, “So far as we men are concerned, we should consider that they amply paid their way . . . if they confined themselves to that occupation.” Neither has any inkling that he is being insulting to women.
In fact, Bellamy departed radically from the others in the suffragist movement, for he believed strongly that the two genders have different talents. Dr. Leete, speaking for Bellamy, tells West that, “The lack of some such recognition of the distinct individuality of the sexes was one of the innumerable defects of your society.” Child care is still the sole responsibility of women in the year 2000. Women in the industrial army are segregated into certain types of work, not only because of supposed physical limitations but also because of assumed differing inclinations. Furthermore, top leadership positions are available to men alone.
Through Dr. Leete, Bellamy advocates “giving full play to the differences of sex rather than in seeking to obliterate them.” To avoid women seeking careers that would put them in an “unnatural rivalry with men,” Bellamy created a society in which women have “a world of their own.” Sadly, the declaration that “they are very happy with it” comes from Dr. Leete and not from one of the women whose testimony would have carried more credibility and less paternalism. To further confuse the situation, neither Edith nor Mrs. Leete ever seems to go to work or do anything more laborious than flower arranging or shopping.
It is to Bellamy’s credit, however, that women are included in the industrial army at all, and that they do not leave upon marriage. The latter factor indicates that Bellamy understood that marriage is no more an occupation for women than it is for men. Nonetheless, what positions of leadership women do have in his 2000 society are reserved for wives and mothers “as they alone fully represent their sex.” To state that a woman is somehow incomplete if she is not married or a mother is as insulting as implying that grace and charm are all a woman needs to succeed. There are many different ways to find fulfillment in life, and all people would have to have the freedom to choose their own path if there is ever to be a Utopia.
Since the beginning of time, there has been a belief among most cultures that it is a law of nature that women are responsible for maintaining morality. As a man, and one with strong moral convictions, Bellamy accepted the primordial notion that the favors of a woman are a reward for a man’s good behavior. Therefore, he incorporates into his utopian society a sexual system of motivation for the laborers. “Our women sit aloft as judges of the race and reserve themselves to reward the winners.” “Radiant faces” are averted to laggards. Celibates are “almost invariable men who have failed to acquit themselves creditably in the work of life.” By this means of sexual selection, as in the animal kingdom, only the hardest working and those with the most admirable attributes become husbands and fathers. Thus, with “a sense of religious consecration,” women serve as the “wardens of the world to come.”
There are multiple flaws in Looking Backward. It is not great literature. It is, however, one of the most influential books in the world, which just goes to show the power of a good idea. Although Bellamy did not really understand women and failed to give them true equality in his book, he did give them an economic equality that has not been achieved to this day. He also caused the people of the late nineteenth century to give new consideration to the role of women in society.
In the following essay, McClay discusses the setting of Bellamy’s utopian Boston, with an emphasis on martial and economic themes.
Given the connection Bellamy made between martial valor and solidarity, it is of considerable importance that the story of Looking Backward opens in Boston on Decoration Day, the holiday honoring the memory of Northerners who fell in the Civil War. Julian West, the protagonist-narrator, has paid his respects at the Mount Auburn grave of his fiancée’s brother, who had been killed in the war, and has returned to dine that evening with his fiancée, Edith, and her upper-crust family, the Bartletts. We soon discern that Julian is a deeply troubled man. Some of his plaints stem from the disordered state of the times, which were marked by increasing class division, accelerating social tension, and labor agitation and strikes. Not that the well-insulated Mr. West Feels any sympathy for the insurgent laboring classes; indeed, at the height of his exasperation, he wishes (as Caligula wished of the Romans) that “they had but one neck that he might cut it off.” He especially resents the strike-related work stoppages that have repeatedly delayed completion of his new house and have thereby postponed his marriage to the lovely Miss Edith Bartlett.
But there are clearly deeper sources for Julian’s trepidation. He has been fighting a battle with chronic insomnia, regularly finding it impossible to sleep for two or more consecutive nights. To combat this problem, he built a secret sleeping chamber beneath his old house, a subterranean refuge into which “no murmur from the upper world ever penetrated,” and which, because of its inaccessibility and secrecy, was also an ideal place for him to protect his valuables from theft or fire. But even with the help of this bunker-like enclosure, wherein he found himself enveloped by “the silence of the tomb,” secure in the knowledge that his hoarded wealth was safe nearby, he still often found himself unable to sleep and frequently had to call on the services of a mesmerist to lull him into slumber. Julian’s unease, then, stems not from a disordered world but from a disordered soul. His dark, private sleeping chamber is a figuration of the deathly grotto of the purely individual life, which cuts itself off from the “upper” world in frantic pursuit of personal peace and worldly ease.
As night falls on Decoration Day in 1887, the agitated Julian finds he must once again go to his mesmerist for relief. But after he finally drifts off to sleep, a fire apparently sweeps through his house and consumes its contents—including, it was believed, Julian himself, in fact, however, Julian survives the inferno and continues to sleep undisturbed until the year 2000. At that time he is finally discovered and is taken into the household of a Dr. Leete, who proceeds to revive him, and then introduces him to the spectacle of a drastically transformed and perfected Boston. Thereafter the book alternates between long, highly didactic discussions between Julian and the Leetes about the operating principles of this radiant new world and the melodramatic episodes in the subplot of Julian’s psychological development. The latter revolves around Julian’s anguish over his now-riven identity and his growing romantic attraction to Dr. Leete’s daughter, who is, like his nineteenth-century fiancée, named Edith.
From the beginning, the descriptions of utopian Boston offered by the Leete family touch characteristic Bellamy themes. He never missed an opportunity to contrast the sordid spectacle of nineteenth-century selfishness and wastefulness with the lustrous twentieth-century ideals of solidarity and efficiency. That contrast is prepared by Bellamy’s justly celebrated comparison of nineteenth-century American society to a “prodigious coach” in which men and women scrambled and clawed at one another for the sake of a few privileged seats on top, where they could be pulled along in airy comfort by the tightly harnessed “masses of humanity,” men and women reduced to beasts of burden. Dr. Leete’s discourses develop that theme: the need to overcome competitive individualism through a spirit of cooperation and combination. When the disbelieving Julian is allowed to view the new city of Boston from Dr. Leete’s rooftop, he finds himself especially astonished by the orderliness and opulence of the city’s streets and buildings. Yes, responded Dr. Leete, he had heard of the squalor of nineteenth-century cities, a result of that era’s “excessive individualism,” which had prevented the sustenance of any meaningful “public spirit.”
The utopia of Looking Backward did not set out to overthrow industrialism to humanize and purify it. Consider, for example, the labor problem that so bedeviled the world Julian had left behind. The great labor disturbances of the nineteenth century, Dr. Leete patiently explained, had merely been inevitable outgrowths of the increasing concentration of capital under a more and more consolidated industrial system. Although that system had resulted in enormous social inequities and degradation of labor, it was also productive of staggering economic efficiencies—efficiencies that made thinkable, for the first time in human history, the universal dispersion of a high level of material wealth. Thus, such a system was not to be abandoned.
The key to managing this problem lay in the very process of economic consolidation that “had been so desperately and vainly resisted” by those who yearned for preindustrial simplicity. Consolidation was not the enemy; it was, in fact, “a process which only needed to complete its logical evolution to open a golden future to humanity.” In other words, the nineteenth century’s enormous pains and dislocations should be attributed, not to the forces of consolidation, but to an unfinished consolidation.
By the early twentieth century, however, “the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation,” whereby the governance of the nation’s industry and commerce was turned over to a single syndicate representing the people and therefore devoted to pursuit of “the common interests for the common profit.” Indeed, the nations itself had become “the one great business corporation … the one capitalist … the sole employer … the final monopoly.” Perhaps most remarkable of all, this colossal transformation had occurred without pressure of violence or coercion; indeed, it had been proposed by the great corporations themselves and was readily accepted by a people who had gradually become convinced of the virtues of large-scale enterprises. The epoch of industrial consolidation, the era of trusts, found its consummation in the establishment of “The Great Trust.”
In this new order, the diffuse energies of solitary selves found a home where they fused with the new social order, coalescing from an aggregation of ordinary men, singly so feeble, into a single magnificent body, a coursing river of blue. And Bellamy could not adequately describe this new order without returning, again and again, to military imagery. Once the nation had come to assume proprietorship of all industrial enterprises, a citizen’s service in “the industrial army” became a universal obligation, precisely analogous to the obligation of universal military service. The industrial army follows a military organizational chart, divided into ten great departments; the chief of each division is comparable to a commander of an army corps, or a lieutenant general, with generals of separate guilds reporting to him. These ten officers form his council for the general in chief, who is the president of the United States. The president is chiefly responsible for administrative oversight of the industrial army and the Great Trust; his political duties (as well as those of the Congress) have dwindled down to few or none.
This military style of administrative bureaucracy had evidently yielded economic advances unimaginable even under the highly productive regime of nineteenth-century capitalism. Bellamy did not hesitate to define those benefits in the language and imagery of warfare. “The effectiveness of the working force of a nation, under the myriad-headed leadership of private capital,” explained Dr. Leete, “as compared with that which it attains under a single head, may be likened to the military efficiency of a mob, or a horde of barbarians with a thousand petty chiefs, as compared with that of a disciplined army under one general—such a fighting machine, for example, as the German army in the time of Von Moltke.” Of course, the mere achievement of such efficiencies, however remarkable, would not have been enough to satisfy Bellamy’s deeper moral concerns, But these concerns, too, were answered by the recon-ceptualization of the nation as an army. The martial virtues of unselfish valor could now be expressed in the ordinary labors of the ordinary civilian. “Now that industry,” Dr. Leete tells Julian West, “is no longer self-service, but service of the nation,” it follows that “patriotism, passion for humanity, impel the worker as in your day they did the soldier. The army of industry is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect organization, but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which animates its members.”
How appropriate, then, that the social-reform ideology and movement to which Looking Backward gave rise adopted the name of Nationalism—even if Bellamy used that term to evade the opprobrium, as well as the unwanted emphasis upon class division and class conflict, attached to the word socialism. But Nationalism was more than just a prudent name; it was also an honestly descriptive one. It acknowledged the degree to which the national principle, victorious over all other contenders in the clash of the Civil War, served as the animating principle for Bellamy’s social vision. The purpose of the “national party,” explained Dr. Leete, “was to realize the idea of the nation with a grandeur and completeness never before conceived”; it was not to be merely “an association of men for certain merely political functions,” but it was to be “a family, a vital union, a common life, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose leaves are its people, fed from its veins, and feeding it in turn.” The national party sought “to raise patriotism from an instinct to a rational devotion,” by making their country into “a fatherland, a father who kept the people alive and was not merely an idol for which they were expected to die.”
With the book’s concluding chapter, the plot suddenly takes a new turn, as Julian finds himself suddenly transported back to the nineteenth century. It appears, for the moment, that his entire experience of utopian Boston has been nothing more than a dream. Now he finds himself cursed by his glimpse of glory, for he must see the social iniquities and horrors of his native century through eyes informed by a vision of twentieth-century perfection.
Julian’s journey backward thus becomes a journey through hell, in which the disparities of wealth, the shameless cynicism of advertising, the programmatic wastefulness of a capitalist economy, the disarray of industry and labor, the “debauching influence” of money and banks, and the “drawn and anxious” faces of the people in the streets overwhelm him with horror and pity. He wanders the streets of the city in a dazed, aimless, disoriented state. The only moment of comfort comes, characteristically, when he happens upon a military parade marching down Tremont Street. He responds to the sight with intense relief: “Here at last were order and reason, an exhibition of what intelligent cooperation can accomplish” through “perfect concert of action” and “organization under one control.” Stumbling upon this small-scale Grand Review reminded him of his own glimpse of the New Jerusalem.
Finally Julian somehow turns up at his fiancée’s house on Commonwealth Avenue and is invited to join the family and its guests for dinner. Like a sonata, Julian’s tale has returned to the place where it began; but the recapitulation has shifted into an agitated minor key. After his experience in the street, he finds himself nauseated by the splendor of the Bartletts’ table and by the jolly spirits of the complacent diners. Like a biblical prophet who cannot contain his disgust, he explodes into a condemnation of them for their indifference to the suffering all around them: “Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death?”
But the stunned company, far from being moved to self-examination by this reproach, becomes impatient and then angry with Julian. Finally Mr. Bartlett has him thrown out of the house. At that climactic moment, Julian awakens and discovers he has been saved: to his great joy, he finds that he is still in Dr. Leete’s house. His harrowing return to the nineteenth century had been the dream; the splendor of the twentieth century was the reality. As the book concludes, a tearful Julian kneels before his beloved Edith Leete and confesses to her his unworthiness “to breathe the air of this golden century.”
Bellamy’s persistent religious sensibilities were especially evident in these final pages. The scene at the Bartletts resounded with biblical overtones, not the least among them being the language and symbolism of crucifixion. (“I have been in Golgotha,” raves the half-mad Julian at his dinner hosts; “I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross!”) But the crucifixion becomes his own, a symbolic death suffered when Mr. Bartlett casts him out of the house; being thus ostracized and forsaken becomes the price of his intercession. But blessed are those persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven; and Julian’s passion is followed by resurrection, in the form of his awakening to the “real” world of the year 2000. His social death fulfills the dictum that one must die to world and self before entering into new life.
This logic also recalled the religion of solidarity, which proclaimed that the infinitude of the “upper world” inhabited by the “second soul” was more real than the finite realm occupied by the ego-personality. Such, too, was the superordinate reality possessed by Bellamy’s cherished vision of the New Jerusalem, a consolidated social order in this world to which the troubled and inadequate ego could turn and yield itself wholly. Yet that last analogizing step, from “upper world” to perfected social world, was a giant one, challenging the essential meaning of the dictum about dying to the world. It was essentially the same step that would be taken by the proponents of the Social Gospel, reform-minded liberal Protestant ministers such as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, who argued that the redemptive mission of the Incarnation had come properly to rest in the social and economic reorganization of this world, the making of an earthly paradise.
To any apprehension that so monolithically centralized a state might be a formula for tyranny, Looking Backward seemed almost incredibly oblivious. At times, Bellamy’s innocence seems so extreme that the modern reader can read them only with a grim smile. To readers in the late twentieth century who know the harm that such fantasies can produce in the hands of an aggrandizing state, Bellamy (and his readers) may seem laughably naive for having failed to ponder the enormous abuses to which Looking Backward ‘s prescriptions could lead.
There are two points to be made in this connection, however. First, there is the obvious fact that Bellamy’s era’s concerns are not ours; the passage of time has dramatically changed our aims and our fears, and it will do so again. Second, and more relevant to the present day, is the fact that the discontents of Bellamy, and perhaps those of his readers, were ultimately far more spiritual than political in character. Bellamy was not merely seeking social and economic justice in proposing the wholesale reconstitution of the social order. He was seeking answers to problems of ultimate meaning in individual lives, answers that would rescue the Julian Wests of the world from their grottoes of sleepless misery. Looking Backward was so wildly popular partly because it was able to trade so effectively upon the fading cultural capital of American Protestantism, even as it was transforming that capital into something new and worldly.
Such a transformation, however, may do justice to neither religion nor politics. In appealing to the idea of the nation as a great community, a great trust, or a great family, Bellamy touched a profound emotional chord in his readers, who longed to see their society transformed into a vessel of connectedness and love. Few of us are immune to such longings, and there is much to cherish in them. But there is also much to distrust. It is surely significant that Bellamy found military images, especially the idea of compulsory national service, to be more compelling figures of solidarity and sacrifice than those of family or community, which compete with the unitary state. It is perhaps a coincidence, but an irresistibly meaningful one, that Bellamy’s perfect solidaritists came from the planet Mars. Bellamy’s redirection of a self-sacrificial imperative toward the reform of the social order ran the risk of corrupting both religion and politics by effacing the line between them.
The desire to find meaning in life by sanctifying one’s social world and the objects of one’s labors should not be scorned. But it runs two risks. First, the risk of making us the self-conscious creators, rather than the discoverers, of what is sacred—a typically modern exercise in narcissism and futility. Second, the risk that, in seeking too ardently for a politics of meaning, it may lose sight of the meaning of politics. Even the founder of Bellamy’s religious tradition insisted upon rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. There is more than one lesson in that.
In the following essay, Abrash looks into the public acceptance of Bellamy’s Looking Backwards.
A certain nineteenth-century writer, also active in journalism, created an extraordinary utopian vision in which all productive facilities were owned by society. Unlike the great majority of earlier utopian proposals, this one was specifically applicable to full-blown industrial technology and organization which, under centralized rational direction for use rather than profit, was presumed capable of providing all the world’s people with the material necessities of a good life. This writer also envisioned an egalitarian incomes policy and the elimination of social classes. His vision spread rapidly and became part of western civilization’s heritage of powerful ideas.
The summary thus far clearly fits Edward Bellamy—and just as clearly fits Karl Marx. But when we move ahead to the reception of their doctrines, a sharp divergence appears. Marx was fiercely attacked, harried out of one country after another, and his name became among respectable people a byword for social and economic iniquity. Bellamy, on the other hand, became an honored citizen, and his formula for utopia was accepted even by its opponents as within the bounds of legitimate American political discourse.
What accounts for so dramatic a contrast in American reaction to visions sharing similarly radical institutional features? To the individualistic American mind, in fact, Bellamy’s regimented industrial army should have seemed more outrageous than the Marxist withering away of the state. But Looking Backward found advocates in factories, farms, colleges, and New England drawing rooms alike. Why should it have commanded respectful attention from such disparate elements of a citizenry notoriously resistant, then as now, to economic or political programs straying very far from the middle of the road?
Obviously Bellamy succeeded in domesticating Marxist ends and means so that they seemed compatible with American ideals and traditions—no mean feat. Even more remarkable is that he apparently accomplished this more or less incidentally. He did not set out to tame Marxist theory as a whole, or to take the sting out of particular fear-inducing elements, for the good reason that he was not a student of Marxism. Surprisingly enough, he had probably not even read Marx at the time he wrote Looking Backward.
Although there is no sure proof of this proposition, we have Bellamy’s own word for it that “I have never been in any sense a student of socialistic literature, or have known more of the various socialist schemes than any newspaper reader might.” This disclaimer receives support (although at a much earlier date) from a line in his review of Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the United States: “The words socialist and communist fall unpleasantly on American ears, being generally taken as implying atheistic and superstitious beliefs and practices and abnormal sex relations” (Edith Leete’s hyper-Victorianism arouses readers’ concerns about any, sex relations in Boston 2000, without worrying about abnormal ones.) Nothing in Bellamy’s writings up to Looking Backward indicates awareness of the subtlety, scope, and intellectual rigor of Marx’s scientific socialism.
The long chapter on Looking Backward in Krishan Kumar’s recent survey of utopias concludes that Bellamy had not studied Marx before writing the book, but did so afterwards. That may be the most plausible scenario. It means, however, that Bellamy, through coincidence or intuition, succeeded in defusing every incendiary feature (in American eyes) of Marxism without any clear idea of what Marxism was. If Bellamy had been an expert on Marx, and had deliberately set out to restate each threatening element of Marxism in a form acceptable to American sensibilities, there is scarcely anything, as will be explained below, that he would have written differently in Looking Backward.
It should be noted first, however, that deliberation does seem likely in the extraordinary care taken not to portray any mass or collective aspects of Boston 2000. Readers get so absorbed in the utopian substance of what Julian West is told that they fail to notice that direct depiction of the society in action is virtually absent. The astonishing fact is that, insofar as Looking Backward tells a story, there are no people in Boston other than the Leetes; the only exceptions are a sales clerk and a waiter, neither of whom has any lines of dialogue or is otherwise individuated. The Leetes seem to have no relatives and no friends. No one ever visits them, even though they have the hottest attraction in town on their premises. When they walk to the dining house—or when Edith and Julian go to the ward store—they do not run into acquaintances. The entire novel takes place, after Julian finds him self in the year 2000, in a city which is, for all novelistic purposes, unpopulated except for the three Leetes.
Bellamy goes to great lengths to maintain this isolation. Julian is taken to a school and a warehouse, but about the former he cautions, “I shall not describe in detail what I saw in the schools that day,” and comments only upon physical culture instruction. The visit to the warehouse receives a single paragraph in which Julian provides an analogy in lieu of description. Typically, the reader gets more information on the subject (not much in any case) from what the Leetes tell him elsewhere than from what he observes on the spot.
Furthermore, the telephone transmission system of which Bellamy makes so much has undermined two important nineteenth-century forms of public social interaction: apparently no one goes to concerts and few to church (the hugely popular Mr. Barton, be it noted, preaches only by telephone). “At home we have comfort, but the splendor of our life is, on its social side, that which we share with our fellows,” says Doctor Leete, but nothing in the novel illustrates this.
It is, in fact, the comfort of home which establishes the tone of the new society for Julian. And a thoroughly bourgeois home it is: father works, mother runs the household with the aid of public facilities and (if necessary) hired help, and daughter shops. Levelling of society? Common ownership? Dictatorship of the proletariat? Free love? Few of the proletarian attributes of Marx’s communism—whether ascribed by boosters or detractors—find lodgement in these benign pages. Not only do the working classes not rule in Looking Backward, they are shunted even further out of the sight of Bellamy’s contemporary middle-class reader than their real-life counterparts of 1888. It is significant that the nearest Julian gets to proletarians is at the warehouse, where the work consists of order filling and distribution rather than production. Of labor or laborers in factories, there is not even a pretence of first-hand description anywhere in the book.
The only scenes with great numbers of people in the novel—in fact, virtually the only ones with more than five—are in the Boston of Julian’s nightmare. Here Bellamy vividly portrays “throngs” and “swarms”—what an ingenious reversal, that it is communism which will obviate mass action and provide the individual with the physical and social space needed for the good life! This is characteristic of the way in which Looking Backward soothes a whole range of fears that assailed most Americans (and to a large extent still do) at the mere mention of Marxism.
For example, the fundamental assumption of unresolvable class conflict is sidestepped by the happy assurance that you can “make ten times more profit out of your fellow men by uniting with them than by contending with them.” This, Doctor Leete explains, failed to be perceived by a nineteenth century blinkered by individualism. Once the principle of maximum efficiency through cooperation is recognized, desire for gain becomes a reason for consensus, not conflict, and the industrial army’s hierarchical organization is deprived of class attributes.
The expropriation of capital, which sent chills down the spines even of many Americans who had little to be expropriated, was rendered benign by two facts: the big capitalists, in the form of corporations, voluntarily accepted the new arrangements, and the arrangements themselves could be expressed in the familiar image of corporation and stockholders, made reassuringly analogous to nation and citizens. After all, captains of industry and industrial army generals share similar executive characteristics, and it is a fair guess that the latter were initially drawn from the former.
The fear of stagnation resulting from the elimination of monetary incentives is combatted with a variety of alternative inducements. Public esteem, wider career choice, prestigious awards, and, most effective of all, the fact that “our women sit aloft as judges of the race and reserve themselves to reward the winners,” encourage excellence in the industrial army. Actually, in this regard Bellamy shrewdly appealed to better instincts than Marx, maintaining that human beings are as capable of responding to considerations of honor and pride as to those of material benefit or historical inevitability.
One of Bellamy’s most successful modifications of what was popularly assumed to be Marxist doctrine was in the matter of uniformity. Satires on Marxism (and, in fact, on Looking Backward as well) make much of a dull sameness descending upon society as a consequence of a single noncompetitive supplier filling the needs of a population lacking differentials in income, education, and basic outlook. Bellamy, however, neatly end runs this by allowing each person to apportion income as he or she chooses, so that equal incomes need not mean uniform patterns of consumption. Furthermore, new products and activities can be introduced by means of clusters of individuals pooling their incomes for whatever joint purpose they please, even to the extent of starting a newspaper or a religious congregation of any persuasion. Looking Backward makes much of the variety of fulfillments among its citizens, as well it might; this was one of Bellamy’s most brilliant strokes in making Americans feel comfortable with goals passionately condemned when championed by Marxists.
Even the regimentation inseparable from the industrial army is lightened by the delightful prospect of complete release at age forty-five from the necessity of making a living. If Bellamy and Marx had run against each other for public office, Karl would have had a lot of trouble topping that one. (“To each according to his needs” is pretty dry compared with—to invent a Bellamyite slogan—”Fully alive after forty-five!”)
But of course Marxism was disreputable less because of its visionary institutional features and social policies than because of its insistence upon materialism, determinism, and political revolution. Materialism gets its comeuppance in Mr. Barton’s sermon, which ends in an evocation of something rather like the culminating starchild in Arthur Clarke’s 2001. “For twofold is the return of man to God ‘who is our home’, the return of the individual by way of death, and the return of the race by the fulfillment of the evolution, when the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded. The long and weary winter of the race has ended. Its summer has begun. Humanity has burst the chrysalis. The heavens are before it.” When Friedrich Engels wrote in 1877 of the Marxist utopia: “It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom”, he coined a neat secular slogan, but not one to soothe the fears of upright citizens who equate materialism with atheism.
Determinism is undercut by Doctor Leete’s pronouncement that the system under which humanity lives in 2000 is “entirely voluntary, the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions.” A “logical outcome” might be considered determinism of a sort, but the role of reason is more decisive than in the case of historical inevitability. Bellamy presents the breakthrough into utopia as the result of intelligent human choice made under the guidance of a benevolent yet practical ethic—all more temperate and flattering than the rigid impersonality implied by historical determinism.
Those attributes of choice and reason also exorcise, in Doctor Leete’s narration, the most immediate bugbear of nineteenth-century Americans in regard to Marxism: the necessary overthrow of the government. Bellamy dismisses the whole issue of revolutionary violence with breathtaking offhandedness. No sooner does Julian West conjure up the specter of the “great bloodshed and terrible convulsions” that must have occurred during the massive transition to the world of 2000, than Doctor Leete, no doubt casually tapping the ash off his cigar, assures him that there was “absolutely no violence.” Everyone—masses and corporations alike—understood that the time had come for the great change; “there was no more possibility of opposing it by force than by argument.” The rest of his little speech—the only time the actual changeover to utopia is referred to—is replete with phrases describing scales dropping from eyes: “they came to realize,” “were now forced to recognize,” “had come to be recognized as an axiom.” The new dispensation, one gathers, was not only not resisted, but was welcomed on all sides as, if anything, overdue. No threat to law and order in this revolution!
Thus were put into acceptable American terms all the major aspects of Marxism likely to arouse unreasoning hostility—”artfully” put, one would say, except that the weight of evidence is that Bellamy was not even aware he was doing it. Then what accounts for the extraordinary aptness of his treatment of the radical themes he shared with Marx? The answer surely lies in the fact that the two men were working within profoundly different traditions, German philosophical systematizing in the case of Marx, American pragmatism in that of Bellamy.
Marx presented his utopian future as the capstone of an ineluctable historical progression fueled by complex interactions between mind and matter. Bellamy’s utopia is simply the outcome of a rational society’s elimination of malfunctions through the logical application of existing organizational techniques, subject to an ethical code that already commanded a consensus. Marxism was, as far as its possibilities of acceptance in America went, mired in abstruse theory promising universal upheaval in practice; Looking Backward, in contrast, is blissfully free of theoretical framing, its communism could be assimilated to American ideals and traditions because it was presented as a platform of pragmatic reform to be acted upon by enlightened consensus. The crowning touch in its appeal, it may be speculated, lay in the fact that it sounded as if it would “work”—not “had to” or “ought to,” but would. With that, Bellamy’s inadvertent Americanization of Marxism was complete.
Possible essay questions
Although the dream structure was only an intermittent part of the novel, the reader is momentarily led to believe that what is happening in the year 2000 is a dream. What other novels or films use the dream structure throughout (Examples: The Man)? Wizard of Oz and The Family
Make a list of the developments, both technological and social, that Bellamy predicts. Note those that have come to pass in some form or another. Why did his other predictions fail to come true?
Compare Bellamy’s proposed economic and governmental system to that of communism. What are the similarities? What are the differences?
How would you rewrite this story to make it a better and more interesting novel? What elements of composition (dialogue, action, characters, scenes, etc.) would you change or add to make this more a work of literature than a social commentary?
Research the labor situation of the late 1800s and compare it to that of today. What improvements have been made? Name some laws that have been passed to protect the workers.
