Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 15 through 21)

September’s book for Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers’ Book Club

PART THREE. A Society That Rests on Its Base (Chapters 15 through 21)

This is the part of the book where Bellamy stops dazzling Julian West with inventions and gadgets and starts filling in the civic machinery of America in the year 2000. Keep in mind, the book begins — and was written — in 1887, and is entirely speculating what life in our country will be like in the year 2000. It became the foundation and inspiration for most of the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Chapter 15, Leete takes West into his library and shows him that Dickens is the country’s favorite author, even years after his death, because he always cared about the fate of the poor. He lays out the economics of publishing books and newspapers (subscribers elect their editors!), and most of the system is what today we’d call reader-supported media.

From there, he lays out how American industry works. Management within companies and within the “industrial army” rise strictly on merit; the heads of the ten great “industrial departments” and the president of the United States are all chosen by workers, both currently employed and retired. To deal with corruption, most everything is taken out of the hands of politicians and put into the hands of career civil servants (the Pendleton Civil Service Act had only been passed in 1883, most likely around the time Bellamy was writing this book). The result is a government that runs on competence and the needs of average people rather than one that’s powered by campaign money.

In Chapter 19, West takes a walk through old Charlestown and notices that the old state prison has vanished. Leete explains that Americans finally figured out that the reason crime was a big deal in poor areas and relatively rare in upscale neighborhoods was because it was almost always driven by inequality. It was “fully nineteen twentieths of the crime” caused by that, so solving inequality became America’s biggest project.

“Want tempted the poor, lust of greater gains, or the desire to preserve former gains, tempted the well-to-do,” Bellamy writes. Remove the want and cap the accumulation of wealth, and, Leete told West, the crime withers “like Jonah’s gourd, in a day.”

Those who still insist on breaking the law are considered mentally ill and treated with “compassion and firm but gentle restraint.” The prisons are all gone, although there are secure mental hospitals. “’We have no jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals.’”

“Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. … Now society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills.”

That’s the basic argument of the whole book in one paragraph. Most law is simply the capitalist scaffolding that props up inequality. Take away the inequality and you take away the need for most of that scaffolding.

In Chapter 20, Edith takes West down to the excavated chamber where he slept for a century, and Bellamy lets the love story move forward. West is falling for her, and he can’t quite understand why she seems to know him so well. Hold onto that thread: it pays off in the final section.

Chapter 21 is all about the schools, and it may be the most quietly radical chapter in the book. Everyone is educated to age twenty-one, at public expense, and given “what you used to call the education of a gentleman.”

West asks about cost of going to school or college. “If it took half the revenue of the nation, nobody would grudge it,” Leete says.

West suggests that education is wasted on the dull, and Leete answers that we mow lawns and plant gardens even though they yield nothing, because untended land is an eyesore to everyone around it, and the same is true of untended minds.

“If, indeed, we could not afford to educate everybody, we should choose the coarsest and dullest by nature, rather than the brightest, to receive what education we could give.”

Then he lays out the three rights on which the American system of the year 2000 rests:

“First, the right of every man to the completest education the nation can give him on his own account, as necessary to his enjoyment of himself; second, the right of his fellow-citizens to have him educated, as necessary to their enjoyment of his society; third, the right of the unborn to be guaranteed an intelligent and refined parentage.”

On schooling, Bellamy he was a century ahead of us, and we still haven’t caught up. Who in your community is being told they’re not worth educating?

The final quarter of Looking Backward that we’ll visit next Sunday is where Bellamy makes his economic case, preaches his sermon, and springs his ending. If you only read one section closely before we meet, make it this one.