Part One/Week One. The Book That Launched a Movement (Chapters 1 through 7)
(The book is available for download free from Project Gutenberg and other online sources, or you can pick up a physical copy from your favorite bookseller, or by clicking on the cover picture above.)
When Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward came out in 1888, nobody expected much of it. Bellamy was a mild, sickly newspaperman from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, and he’d written an utopian romance about a Bostonian who sleeps for a century. But Jules Verne had been writing futuristic fiction for most of the 19th century, and the public more than warmed up to Bellamy’s book.
Within a decade after its first publication (it’s still in print) it had sold nearly a million copies in the United States and England, been translated into German, French, Russian, Italian, Arabic, and Bulgarian among other languages, and become the third best-selling American book of the entire nineteenth century, trailing only Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.
It also inspired the modern progressive movement: more than 160 “Nationalist Clubs” sprang up across the country to turn the book’s vision of a possible American future into political reality. Its ideas inspired the Populist Party platform of 1892, energized the early Socialist Party, and were foundational to the Progressive Era’s fights over public ownership of utilities and railroads, and eventually FDR’s New Deal.
Bernie Sanders’ hero Eugene Debs, socialist leader Norman Thomas, and a generation of reformers said publicly that this was the book that first opened their eyes to the possibility of a new and progressive America. In 1935, when a panel of scholars was asked to name the most influential books published since 1885, Looking Backward came in second, behind only Marx’s Das Kapital.
This novel, my book club book for September, about what life could be in the year 2000 in America hit 1888 like a thunderclap that resonated for, literally, more than a century.
The book’s plot device is simple. Julian West is a rich young Bostonian born in 1857, living comfortably on inherited money, rendering, as he puts it, “no sort of service in return.” He’s engaged to Edith Bartlett, and the only cloud on his horizon is that the strikes of the 1880s keep delaying the construction of his new house.
West suffers from insomnia and has a Mesmerist — hypnosis was a huge fad in Europe and America during that era, as I’ve written in detail in my book Walking Your Blues Away — put him to sleep in a sealed underground chamber beneath his home.
He goes under on the night of May 30, 1887 but doesn’t wake up until September 10, 2000, in the house of Dr. Leete, a retired physician who has been digging a laboratory foundation in his garden and discovered the still-sealed vault. West had slept 113 years, three months, and eleven days.
Before any of that happens, though, Bellamy gives us the single most quoted passage in the book, West’s description of the society he left behind:
“I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents.”
The people on top, West admits, felt sympathy for the people in the harness, “especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road.” But it was a distant form of sympathy, and it came bundled with a “singular hallucination” that they “were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay.”
Anyone who’s watched one of today’s pampered billionaires explain why he deserves his wealth and power will recognize the type.
Once West accepts where (and when) he is, he asks Dr. Leete the obvious question: What happened to the labor question that had been tearing apart the 1880s with strikes and the murdering of union leaders, what he called “the Sphinx’s riddle of the nineteenth century.”
Leete’s answer about how America works in the year 2000 is the heart of the book, and it’s an extraordinary vision that goes well beyond even Marx’s imaginings. There was no revolution. The trusts and monopolies that terrified Americans in the 1880s simply kept consolidating until it became obvious to both America’s voters and politicians that industry organized on a national scale was more efficient than industry scattered among thousands of competing firms.
The only question left was who should own the monopolies:
“The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust. In a word, the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely the same grounds that they had then organized for political purposes.”
Bellamy has Leete put it even more sharply. It was finally understood:
“[T]hat no business is so essentially the public business as the industry and commerce on which the people’s livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles.”
When West objects that this is a frightening extension of government power, Leete turns it around. Nineteenth century governments seized men by the hundreds of thousands and sent them off to die in wars, he says, and nobody called that an overreach:
“And, in heaven’s name, who are the public enemies? Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and nakedness?”
The mechanism for this transformation of the fundamentals of our economy is what Bellamy calls the industrial army. Every citizen serves (works) from age 21 to 45, then retires. Unlike Marx’s vision, nobody is assigned a job: people choose their own work according to aptitude, and the administration equalizes the attractiveness of different trades by adjusting hours.
Miners gets short hours, pleasant work gets longer ones, and if a job is so awful nobody will volunteer even at ten minutes a day, “it would remain undone.” Leete adds a line that could come from any progressive politician today:
“The nation does not maim and slaughter its workmen by thousands, as did the private capitalists and corporations of your day.”
That’s where the first quarter of the book leaves us, with West still asking
