This best-selling book turned socialism into a middle-class trend in the 1880s
And not just in Brooklyn
Edward Bellamy didn’t intend to start a movement. Born in Massachusetts in 1850, he was a journalist through most of his twenties, before tuberculosis turned him toward the more restful life fiction writing. It was one of his novels, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, that became the cornerstone of a nationwide movement, energizing thousands of members in 165 groups across the country.
Bellamy, in the words of historian Arthur Lipow, rose as “the first critic of laissez faire capitalism in America advocating a collectivist alternative to find a large and enthusiastic audience.” His 1888 novel, though little read today, became a runaway success, selling 210,000 copies in its first year, reaching a peak rate of 10,000 volumes per week. It became the third-best selling American book of the century, behind Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
But not only did Looking Backward, with its vision of a blissful, leisurely utopia resonate with thousands of readers: it galvanized them.
Looking Backward, 1887–2000 tells the story of Julian West, a Bostonian of noble birth, who wakes from a Rip van Winkle-esque slumber in the year 2000. “Living in luxury,” West explains of his old life, “I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return.” But this old and unfair world is long behind him. Society has done away with the tensions between labor, capital, and inequality by adopting a collectivist world order. There are no warring political parties, and elections held every five years serve as a sort of legislative maintenance. Citizens work from age 21 to 45, then retire. Everyone is given an equal stipend, regardless of profession, to eliminate the tensions of material inequality.
A character named Dr. Leete takes West in—Virgil to his Dante—to guide him through a brave new world whose fundamental principle is “that all who do their best are equally deserving, whether that best be great or small.” Though there is equal pay to all, there are distinctions and rank of position that citizens may aspire to within the main body of society. This massive collection and coordination of labor is in charge of farming, as well as running public laundries and kitchens and other programs that eliminate the need for domestic servants. By the end of 1891, Looking Backward had sold 500,000 copies.
“When the Golden Century arrives,’’ a California reader wrote Bellamy, “your name will receive the homage of the human race of that period as being the only writer of the 19th Century capable of seeing, feeling and portraying ‘the better way.’”
The first organization dedicated to Bellamy’s utopian socialism was established in 1888, called the Boston Bellamy Club №1. Members included veterans like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, leader of the Union’s first black regiment.
Bellamy, whose primary ambition was to create “a fairy tale of social felicity,” took some time to warm up to his new role as a political and philosophical leader, but he eventually made the business of reform his new trade.
As Bellamy admitted, names mattered very much. Looking Backward referred to its solutions of the “essential cruelty and unreason” of the current system as “reforms,” and never once mentioned socialism. Indeed the author knew it was a dirty word and steered clear of it, preferring to put on the cloak of patriotism and Americanism, while rejecting the free market. He chose Nationalism, with a capital “N,” and the more 162 groups, with more than five thousand members, were called Nationalist Clubs.
Heated debate and criticism helped elevate the visibility of the new socialist movement. Some took it as a mere welfare swindle to support the idle. “Mr. Bellamy’s ‘nationalist party’” wrote a New England newspaper in 1891, “is a mere passing fad, of no practical significance to the American people.”
The clubs themselves were predominantly for an intellectual middle class, and at the founding of the first club in Boston, Bellamy wrote to one club organizer, “I thoroughly approve of what you say as to directing your efforts more particularly to the conversion of the cultured and conservative class.”
Members of Nationalist Clubs were often veterans of high rank, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, artists, journalists, teachers, and politically active women—and for the most part they intended to keep it that way.
With the rare exception of labor leader P.J. McGuire, secretary of the AFL, Nationalists kept away from the typical veins of radical, working-class-forward socialism. The English socialist William Morris said that Bellamy had concocted a socialism for the palate of the “industrious professional middle class men of to-day.” The District of Columbia’s sixty members included doctors, lawyers, clergy, and some artists. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a somewhat more diverse showing was cataloged, consisting of “four teachers, a merchant, three master iron workers, several ladies, and the public librarian.”
The movement blossomed and faded quickly. The official magazine, The Nationalist, folded after crumbling under debts, and failing to reach a subscriber base in line with expectations. (With a first run of 35,000 copies, the magazine’s subscriptions peaked at 9,000.) The Nationalist Clubs dissolved soon after Bellamy died in 1896 of tuberculosis.
Still, the intellectual legacy of Bellamy’s book lived on. In terms of working-class socialism, Bellamy’s regimented vision leant momentum to the ideology. “Although not an exposition of scientific Socialism,” said Eugene Debs, “Thousands were moved to study the question by the books of Bellamy and thus became Socialists and found their way into the Socialist movement.” Edward’s son Paul was later appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to head a war committee in World War II, while the likes of Arthur Ernest Morgan, a civil engineer behind the Tennessee Valley Authority, was influenced heavily by the utopianism of Looking Backward. In a 1945 biography of Bellamy, he would give credit to his writings for bolstering the New Deal, writing “Some of the men directly responsible for that legislation are in direct line of descent from the first Nationalist Club of Boston.”
Even so, 120 years later, history has dealt Bellamy the most glaring damnation of all: he is no longer read.
