PART FOUR. Stood Up Straight Before God (Chapters 22 through 28)
The final quarter of Looking Backward is where Bellamy makes his economic case, preaches his sermon, and lays out his ending and its suggestions for the future.
Keep in mind, the book begins — and was written — in 1887, and is entirely speculating about 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. If you only read one section closely before we meet, make it this one.
Chapter 22 answers the question “Where does all the money come from to run the 2020 American economy?” Leete notes that there’s no longer any national debt, no “idle rich” people, no “army of men employed in finance,” and thus no meaningful criminal class.
He says that the four greatest mistakes of the 19th century had been the result of unrestrained and unregulated capitalism that produced both idle capital and labor as well as periodic financial crises. Any one of them, he says, “would suffice to make the difference between wealth and poverty on the part of a nation.”
His description of the way companies try to monopolize markets could have come from this week’s Financial Times:
“The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied. This, Mr. West, is what was called in the nineteenth century a system of production. I will leave it to you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great deal more like a system for preventing production.”
On credit, which he calls “the sign of a sign,” Bellamy writes that nineteenth century businessmen “were in the plight of a man building a house with dynamite for mortar.” Anyone who lived through Bush’s housing crash in 2008 (and his absolute refusal to hold even one single billionaire banker to account) will instantly recognize the situation.
And Leete’s summary of the whole system is one of the sharpest lines in the book: “Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production selfishness is suicide.”
Chapters 23 through 25 turn to the personal and to women. West learns that women serve in their own branch of the industrial army with their own officers, that they are economically independent of husbands and fathers, and that motherhood, far from being penalized, is honored. Bellamy’s feminism is real but dated: it was still considered radical in 1887 when women couldn’t vote, hold an independent job, or sign a contract and was generally embraced by the suffrage movement.
Chapter 26 is the sermon. On Sunday the Leetes stay home and listen over something curiously similar to a radio to Mr. Barton, who preaches to huge national audiences (keep in mind, this book was published in 1887 and the first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air on November 2, 1920).
Barton’s subject is the moral transformation of humanity that brought us to this enlightened year 2000, and his explanation is that it wasn’t human nature that changed but, instead, the environment and culture of the nation.
A society “founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness” was, he says, replaced by one appealing “to the social and generous instincts of men.” He compares the old order of the 19th and early 20th centuries to the Black Hole of Calcutta, “where good men trampled each other for air,” and he insists the fault lay in the political and economic system, not in the people.
His parable of the rosebush planted in a swamp, blamed by generations of gardeners for failing to bloom until someone finally moved it to dry ground, is the moral center of the book. And his description of the change itself gives the novel its most famous sentence:
“The means of subsistence no longer doled out by men to women, by employer to employed, by rich to poor, was distributed from a common stock as among children at the father’s table.
“It was impossible for a man any longer to use his fellow-men as tools for his own profit. His esteem was the only sort of gain he could thenceforth make out of him.
“There was no more either arrogance or servility in the relations of human beings to one another. For the first time since the creation every man stood up straight before God.”
Chapter 27 delivers the romance that’s necessary to any good novel. Edith Leete confesses that she’s the great-granddaughter of Edith Bartlett, that she grew up reading West’s love letters, and that she had fallen in love with him before he ever woke. It’s sentimental, and Bellamy handles it well for the era, as it ties the two centuries together with a single thread of human feeling. It’s sweet.
Then comes Chapter 28, the finest writing in the book. West wakes in his underground chamber, Sawyer standing over him with a glass of sherry. It’s May 31, 1887, and he discovers that the whole thing was a dream.
He reads the morning paper, a catalogue of war scares, strikes, embezzlement, coal barons cutting production, an old couple in New Jersey killing themselves rather than enter the poorhouse, and at the bottom, “Professor Brown’s oration on the moral grandeur of nineteenth century civilization.”
He gets up, goes out, and walks through Boston with new eyes. Washington Street, with its ten thousand competing stores, makes him laugh out loud. The bank, which a director calls “the heart of the business system,” looks to him like “an abscess.” He ends in the South Cove tenements, seeing the poor not as creatures but as “my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh of my flesh.”
That night, when he goes to dinner at the Bartletts, he tries to tell them about his dream:
“’I have been in Golgotha,’ at last I answered. ‘I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross! Do none of you know what sights the sun and stars look down on in this city, that you can think and talk of anything else?’”
(That phrase, humanity hanging from a cross, is another indicator of how influential this book by Bellamy was: William Jennings Bryant used it in his famous 1896 Cross of Gold speech, as did Dwight Eisenhower for his 1953 Chance for Peace speech.)
They call him a madman and a fanatic, and Edith’s father orders him thrown out, provoking the twist on the twist: he wakes up, sobbing, in Dr. Leete’s house in 2000. The twentieth century was real: the nightmare was 1887.
But even at that, Bellamy doesn’t let him off easy. West’s last thought is his shame, brought on by his knowledge of how society could be. He’d lived through the cruel years and done nothing, and now he’s “drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose husbandmen you stoned.”
That’s the question Bellamy leaves with every reader, and it’s the one I’d like us to start with when we meet today:
We’re the ones living in the years West thought would one day characterize a new and better, more egalitarian America. What happened, and what are we going to do now?
Next month we’ll be reading my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich. You can find it at most bookstores, online, and in most public libraries.
When doing the research for this book I encountered the most shocking story I’ve discovered in decades about how and why white supremacists have fought single-payer healthcare for over a century and why they forced LBJ to put a 20% hole into Medicare to discourage Black people from using the system.
If you can’t get one from a library and can’t afford to buy a copy, drop me a note by replying to this email and I have about a dozen copies here and can send you one, as long as my supply lasts. See you in a few hours!
Hard not to read today's post and not have Michael Douglas's speech in the movie "Wall Street" pop into mind; "Greed, is good!" his character said. While most Americans would reject such an assertion, find a billionaire who is not living that worldview. In fact, find a working-class family who is not living indentured paycheck2paycheck so they can pay for the $80,000 pickup, RV or trailered speedboat, motorcycle, and a car or two parked in the driveway of their 1,400 sqft houses every night.
America's version of capitalism promotes the notion that "he who dies with the most toys wins." Yet billionaire or worker, most Americans live like their next acquisition (company, house, or spouse) will finally make them happy.