[In the essay that follows, Lipow locates the popularity of Bellamy's anti-democratic ideas in more general political trends among the middle class of the late nineteenth-century, particularly in the desire for economic reform of “big capital.”]

The response to Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy testified, was “most general and enthusiastic” in the trans-Mississippi states, the newly admitted states, the territories and the far West¹—that is, those areas outside the South where the populist movement, the chief expression of middle-class discontent in the 1890s, had its greatest support. In 1894, after the organized Nationalist movement had declined and many of the individuals involved in it had become active in the People's Party, Bellamy claimed that about half of the farmers' weeklies in the West “not only support the St. Louis Platform, but take every occasion to declare that the adoption of the whole Nationalist plan, with the industrial republic as its consummation, is but a question of time.”² John D. Hicks notes that copies of Looking Backward were frequently offered by radical farmers' periodicals as premiums to prospective subscribers.³ The People's Party convention in 1892 publicly acclaimed Bellamy while the various Nationalist periodicals and clubs were officially invited to participate in the founding of the new party. Yet, why should Bellamy's collectivist utopia have evoked such an enthusiastic response from people primarily concerned with saving small property from the onslaught of corporate capitalism? How did they understand the manifestly anti-democratic elements in Looking Backward?—if, indeed, they did. What was it in their situation that made it possible for Bellamy's message to touch them so deeply?

The most obvious explanation of Bellamy's appeal is that the radicalized farmers of the 1880s and 1890s were experiencing a deteriorating economic situation and found in Bellamy's energetic indictment of the cruel and barbaric nature of capitalist society confirmation of their own hatred of the middlemen, the banks, railroads, and the corrupt politicians who served them. The successive crises in the agricultural economy throughout the last three decades of the nineteenth century profoundly stirred the victims to seek an explanation of their fate and a way out. One observer reported:

People commenced to think who had never thought before, and people talked who had seldom spoken. On mild days they gathered on the street corners, on cold days they congregated in shops and offices. Everyone was talking and everyone was thinking. … Little by little they commenced to theorize upon their condition. Despite the poverty of the country, the books of Henry George, Bellamy, and other economic writers were bought as fast as the dealers could supply them. They were bought to be read greedily; and nourished by the fascination of novelty and the zeal of enthusiasm, thoughts and theories sprouted like weeds after a May shower. … They discussed income tax and single tax; they talked of government ownership and the abolition of private property; fiat money, and the unity of labor; … and a thousand conflicting theories.⁴

Looking Backward's indictment of iniquities of capitalist society touched a popular nerve. It condemned the plutocracy and it voiced outrage at the new economic and political system, and it offered an easily understood explanation which helped people to fill the need to “theorize upon their condition.” The collectivist society it pictured, in the world of 2000 a.d., the harmonious, materially abundant and worry-free world, contrasted sharply with toilsome lives and hard times. Under the circumstances, Bellamy's orderly society had an obvious appeal. Its manifestly authoritarian character could be ignored or not fully grasped as people were carried away by the contrast between the dark present and the bright future. The vision of a bureaucratically organized collectivist society was not reflected directly in populist politics. Only in the Nationalist movement proper, which drew upon nonentrepreneurial middle-class elements for its early membership, was Bellamy's authoritarian utopia taken, as he had meant it to be, as an explicit blueprint for the future.

Agrarian radicals could be enthusiastic about Looking Backward without adopting its perspective of an inevitable collectivized future because the problems of crop prices, credit, mortgages, and railroad rates forced farmers to search for an immediate program of practical reform to relieve immediate hardship. The long-run development of the great corporations and monopolies might bring utopia ultimately, as Bellamy thought. But although they might find it pleasant to contemplate the coming of the new order over the haze of more than one hundred years, the hard-pressed farmers could not resign themselves to waiting for a victory after they had themselves been vanquished by the trust. It would have been difficult for them to summon up the same sense of optimism as Bellamy's New Nation when it dismissed the resistance of small retailers to the new department stores as “useless”: “The small retail shopkeeper, like the small manufacturer, is doomed. In the great cities he will soon become as extinct as the fabled dodo. … But let him be comforted. The triumph of his conquerors will be brief. As the mammoth store is bigger than his shop, so is the nation bigger than the mammoth store.”⁵ Unwilling to be comforted by history, farmers and small businessmen instead organized to prevent monopoly from swallowing them up.

Thus of the several levels on which Bellamy's tract could be read, Looking Backward's indictment of the horrors of “plutocratic” capitalism has a strong claim, perhaps the strongest, as an explanation of Bellamy's popularity. However, there is good reason to look deeper, to see whether Bellamy's collectivist ideology with its explicit elimination of politics and democracy, as well as its radical anti-individualism, did not find an echo in some aspects of middle-class protest and reform in the 1890s.

THE DILEMMA OF LIBERAL REFORM

By the 1870s, the middle class found itself confronted by an extraordinary concentration of wealth and power which seemed to overshadow their own. Some suitable instrument was needed to restore to the “producers” the power and independence that was being stolen by the “plutocracy” and eroded by the new large-scale industrial society that had come into being. The difficulty of creating such an instrument and ensuring that once created it would be wielded effectively in their interest posed the central dilemma for the middle-class reform movements throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth.⁶ Richard Hofstadter, in writing of the Progressive movement, defined the dilemma well: “The American tradition has been one of unusually widespread participation of the citizen in the management of affairs, both political and economic. Now the growth of the large corporation, the labor union, and the big impenetrable political machine was clotting society into large aggregates and presenting to the unorganized citizen the prospect that all these aggregates and interests would be able to act in concert and shut out those men for whom organization was difficult or impossible.”⁷ The changing conditions of American life made it necessary for members of a class whose everyday mode of existence was characterized by independence and individualism to seek a collectivist solution for their problems, and yet to act in concert was not only difficult but dangerous.

The root dilemma of the reform movement was that in order to counter the social and economic power of other classes and interests the middle class was required to turn to the state as a collective instrument to aid the unorganized individual—in the rhetoric of populism, to protect the “producers” and shore up small property against the onslaught of monopoly. The state, they hoped, could become an instrument above classes. And yet there were grave dangers: a centralized state could be used against them by those better able to organize politically. The goal, therefore, was to take the state out of the hands of the capitalists and their servants and make sure, somehow, that it stayed out of their control, without at the same time setting the workers independently into motion, thereby giving over the state to them. Only by reforming the political system for the benefit of the unorganized citizen could this be achieved. Hence the characteristic demands of middle-class reformers in this period for direct legislation, direct primaries, civil-service reform, “non-partisan” administration: all devices aimed at supplanting or supplementing organized political parties, changes that were a political precondition for transforming the state into a “classless” instrument of the middle class.⁸

Thus the very inability to organize themselves and to institute reforms had led urban and rural middle classes to turn to the state to secure their interests against big capital. This contradiction was the essence of their dilemma. How to break out of this vicious circle was the continual problem facing middle-class reform politics in this period. To the degree that people found it difficult or impossible to organize themselves, they became disenchanted with organized politics, even with the idea of democracy. But this manifestation of the “populistic” mentality to which Hofstadter and other neo-conservative historians attributed so many of the ills of American democracy does not support the denigration of democracy and democratic movements. It only points, instead, to the limits of a democratic reform movement based primarily on the petty bourgeoisie. It is for this reason that in the politics and programs of the heterogeneous and atomized middle class, as Hofstadter correctly observes, the “complaint of the organized against the consequences of organization” is a constant refrain.⁹

After the Civil War, corruption without previous parallel permeated American political life. Politics increasingly became the province of professional politicians allied with the rising industrial capitalists; the older, established middle class found itself driven out. Efforts by the middle class to reform politics were frustrated at every turn by the “machine” and the “boss”—institutions that served the plutocracy yet rested on the support of the growing numbers of propertyless urban voters. Reform organizations, as Ostrogorski demonstrated, were often captured by the very machine that they were intended to destroy, or else became the basis for a new machine and a new boss.¹⁰ Even when after “herculean efforts,” one prominent proponent of direct legislation pointed out, “good” men were elected to office, nothing was accomplished by forces of reform because “these men often failed to remain good.”¹¹

Such experiences produced despair and discouragement that honest men could ever win the political battle by the methods of organized politics. Many reformers openly expressed doubts about democratic, representative government. Henry Demarest Lloyd, half-liberal and half-socialist in the manner of Bellamy, expressed dramatically the conclusion many others had reached:

Two classes study and practice politics and government: place hunters and privilege hunters. In a world of relativities like ours size of area has a great deal to do with the truth of principles. America has grown so big—and the tickets to be voted, and the powers of government, and the duties of citizens, and the profits of personal use of public functions have all grown so big—that the average citizen has broken down. No man can half understand or half operate the fullness of this big citizenship, except by giving his whole time to it. This the place hunter can do, and the privilege hunter. Government, therefore—municipal, State, national—is passing into the hands of these two classes, specialized for the functions of power by their appetite for the fruits of power. The power of citizenship is relinquished by those who do not and cannot know how to exercise it to those who can and do—by those who have a livelihood to make to those who make politics their livelihood.¹²

This feeling of being overwhelmed by the complexity of industrial capitalist society, of being incapable of affecting the course of events through politics—a feeling, in short, that participation in and even passive comprehension of politics was beyond the “average citizen”—underlies the “populistic” distrust of organized politics and political parties, and the proposals of Populists and Progressives for “direct democracy” by the unorganized citizenry as a panacea to cure the ills of American democracy.¹³ Others, following the line of thought indicated by Lloyd, rejected the idea of placing any more political burdens on the citizen. Rather than seeking changes in the political system or society that would allow the individual to participate more effectively in the political process, they looked to the creation of a strong executive power, a reformed civil service, and a “non-partisan” administration by specialists or at least by honest individuals able to rise above class or party. The sphere of “politics,” their formula ran, was to be sharply delimited, and to be strictly separated from “administration.”¹⁴ Lloyd himself concluded that it was necessary to do away with democratic decision making and politics altogether and to substitute for them the rule of the educated experts.¹⁵

Bitter experience taught reformers that their attempts at sustained, organized, political action invariably resulted in failure because of the operation of a kind of “iron law of oligarchy.” Rather than an abstract sociological theorem, however, it was a common-sense conclusion or feeling that was the sum product of many weary years of unsuccessful attempts to reform the political system and to put the “individual”—the honest middle-class man—back into the center of the political process.¹⁶

Most historians, in attempting to place Bellamy in the context of American reform thought, have primarily stressed the important role of Bellamy's advocacy of an expanded social and economic role for the state.¹⁷ This side of Bellamy's thought does, of course, provide a link to the contemporary programs of reform and explains the general appeal of his views to these elements. But it was Bellamy's special solution to the dilemma of those “for whom organization was difficult or impossible” as they faced the rise of collectivist institutions that provides an explanation of Looking Backward's appeal that goes beyond the obvious. The feelings of impotence produced by their inability to alter or control political and economic events opened up such people to Bellamy's vision of a totally organized society. Atomistic individualism in an age of collectivism and bureaucratization turned into its opposite: atomistic collectivism. For the lonely crowd, whose instincts of individual virtue made all partial organization seem like a jail, only total organization from above could offer a utopia that would be bearable. It was Bellamy's genius in Looking Backward to have offered such a dream of the future at a time when the fortunes of the unorganized, individualistic middle classes seemed to be at their lowest ebb.

THE NEW LIBERALISM AND THE POSITIVE STATE

In advocating state intervention in the economy, either in the form of extensive regulation or outright ownership of monopolies, middle-class reformers broke sharply with the liberal tradition of laissez faire that, in theory at least, had been the cornerstone of the American middle-class political outlook. But by the late 1870s when industrial capitalism had already developed enormous strength, the old liberalism was no longer serviceable to the small entrepreneur, farmer, merchant, or manufacturer. As Vernon Louis Parrington observed, “The great principle of laissez-faire that had proved so useful in the earlier struggles against aristocratic paternalism, had become a shield and a buckler for the plutocracy that was rising from the freedom of a let-alone policy.”¹⁸

Into the old bottle of liberalism new wine was poured: for the old laissez faire policy, the new liberalism substituted a kind of middle-class collectivism. The farmers and other sections of the entrepreneurial middle class, Lewis Corey writes,

demanded legislation to avert the doom of small property. The state was to regulate the freedom of enterprise and competition to assure freedom of enterprise and competition; to limit the rights of property in the interest of small property. This was a formidable shift on the part of the middle-class radicals. They now urged limitation of the economic freedom which they formerly believed was sufficient in itself to realize the economic equality of a society of small producers. Where formerly they demanded abolition of all political privileges, they now wanted them restored in the interest of the small enterpriser.¹⁹

To the degree that any departure from the laissez faire, any encroachment by the existing state upon the rights of private property, or any measures taken to soften the harshness of economic life, were seen as “socialist,” then in this sense the new statist liberalism was a kind of socialism for the middle class.²⁰ It was a period of social ferment and political groping, a period in which both modern liberalism as well as the native socialist movement were being formed, and it was inevitable that the line between the two was often very indistinct. Individuals, especially in the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century, crossed from one to the other quite freely and unconsciously, and many, like Henry Demarest Lloyd, were as much part of the new liberalism as they were socialists. From the standpoint of the native socialistic radicals, the major problem in the crucial decade of the nineties lay in differentiating socialism from statist liberalism.

Once this popular equation of socialism with any incursions into the sacred rights of private property or challenges to the shibboleths of social Darwinist doctrine is recognized, then it is possible to understand, in part, the reception accorded Looking Backward's collectivist message by elements still strongly rooted in small property. Socialism of this sort held less terror for the small entrepreneur or farmer than the juggernaut of triumphant plutocratic rule. Even Bellamy's projection of an all-embracing state that would own all property could be accepted as one possible outcome of the very politics they were advocating. From the vantage point of the 1890s, who could be so bold as to predict with certainty that any small property, especially the small farm, would be able to resist the superior power of big business and modern technology? If the choice were between the government of the plutocracy and state ownership, it was obvious which was preferable. And, to a degree, one could correctly read into Looking Backward the idea that the new society would be something like a joint stock company in which all would be shareholders.²¹ Bellamy himself described his utopia as “one vast business concern,” in which every citizen would be an equal partner.²² Thus, the entrepreneurial elements who were turning to the state for protection against monopoly capital could regard Bellamy's ideas with favor, and believe that their own program was a kind of socialism. Indeed, that was what many who called themselves socialists told them, and, even more important, that was what their enemies called it.

However, despite the interpenetration of middle-class reform politics, and especially the politics of the “new liberalism,” with those of the emerging socialist movement, Bellamy and the Nationalists as well as other middle-class socialist groups of the 1890s were more than variant strains of statist liberalism. On the contrary, even when Bellamy and the Nationalist clubs, and the various other socialistic elements, elaborated a “practical program of step-by-step nationalization,” a program that coincided in part with the People's Party's platform, allowing the radicals to march for a time with the Populists, they still maintained their distinct identity. When they recognized the limitations of their allies, they parted company with the Populists. Unlike their liberal allies, they intended that the nationalization of the railroads and other monopolies lead to the total collectivization of the economy, not merely constitute bulwarks to preserve property.²³

ORGANIZATION FOR THE UNORGANIZABLE: THE UTOPIA OF ATOMISTIC COLLECTIVISM

Merely to have found in the state the collective power greater than the sum of their own individual powers with which to turn back the plutocracy and restore to the “producers” their rightful place in American society, was not sufficient for the reform movement. The middle class still faced the problem of its inability to organize for the kind of collective political and economic action needed to transform the state—an inability that stemmed from the very individualistic, atomized nature of their existence as a class.

For the middle-class readers of Looking Backward, Bellamy's utopia with its theory of self-socialization of capital offered a collectivist solution tailored to an individualistic psychology and outlook. In classical liberal theory, society consisted of a collection of atomized individuals, for whom “the common interest was only the sum of individual interest,” and “the common welfare was to be attained through the pursuit of each of his individual welfare.”²⁴ Individual freedom and reason were anchored in the widespread distribution of property. With the disintegration of the material underpinnings of the liberal theory of society, that is, with the disintegration of the old, propertied, middle classes and the concentration of capital which, in turn, brought into being a permanent class of propertyless proletarians, the theory itself became more untenable and it therefore became necessary to find a means of reconciling the undeniable collectivist tendencies of society with the old individualistic liberal values. For any solution to remain within the limits of the old liberal middle-class outlook, however, meant that it had to attempt to build upon the kind of asocial or atomistic individualism that was characteristic of the middle class.

Bellamy's “unitary democracy” discussed in the previous chapter was one solution within the limits of this atomistic outlook. Bellamy hoped through the “religion of solidarity” to reduce society to pure individuals—individuals unfettered by other bonds. The atomization of all social relationships would pave the way for “all existence under the sole aspect of the one universal and the many individuals.”

Thus Bellamy's version of socialism solved the riddle of “organization” that confronted the middle class by constructing a collectivism premised upon its asocial or atomistic individualism. Necessarily it was a nonpluralistic, atomistic collectivism. In the framework of this atomistic-collectivist solution, the question of social order in a society without private property would be solved by the erection of a total bureaucratic state and the elimination of all intermediate associations. All that would remain would be the individual on the one side, and “society” on the other. Community would derive from the relationship of all individuals, equally, to the impersonal state, rather than in and through free association with other individuals. The individual would be “free” in the negative or laissez faire sense. At the same time, people would not need to be powerful, for in the establishment of a totally harmonious society run by a bureaucratic elite, the whole basis or need for a free public life would have been abolished.

Sylvester Baxter, close collaborator of Bellamy and a founder of the Nationalist movement, summed up the essential elements of this atomistic-collectivist outlook in an article that first attempted to define Nationalism. With the complete nationalization of the economy, Baxter wrote,

we shall … reach the higher and perfected simplicity. The intricate complexity of multitudinous industrial antagonisms, keeping the national body in a chronic state of disease through the incomplete working of its various functions, will be reduced to simplicity by bringing all the diversified interests into harmonious and mutually helpful action under one central authority, while preserving the many separate fields of action suitable to differing individual capacity. An industrial army, more completely organized and disciplined than is the best of war today, will thus be necessitated for the operation of the vast national service.

With all transactions confined to the individual on the one side and the nation on the other, the individual is thus dealing with himself in the higher aspect—the great entity composed of himself blended with all his fellows.²⁵

The bearing of these ideas upon the dilemma of organization and reform is clear when considered in connection with Bellamy's theoretical postulate of the automatic emergence of the new noncapitalist order through the self-socialization of capital. The organizational demiurge would bring ultimate salvation for the individualistic middle class rather than ruin and destruction. The very process that produced the clotting of society into aggregates was inevitably establishing the basis for a new kind of collectivist community: a “community” composed solely of atomized individuals, in which the individual could lay down the burden of political association and individual freedom.

Looking Backward's theory offered the middle class a magical way out of their disheartening situation. Rather than being crushed between capital and labor, rather than being a class without a future, as the radical socialists claimed (and as events seemed to confirm), Bellamy pointed to a road by which they might triumph. The theory of the self-socialization of capital and of the general movement toward a stronger and all-embracing state, offered salvation without the difficult and perilous effort to organize a political movement to transform the present order. For, even if organization of the middle class had been possible, there was always the danger that in creating a popular political movement the workers might become an independent force not dependent upon the middle class. While they were in theory willing to admit the workers into the camp of the “producers” and to form alliances with workers' organizations, it was only on condition that they subordinate themselves.²⁶

The state was conceived of both by Bellamy and the new liberalism to be an institution above particular classes. The more powerful the state grew, the more it could act as a counterweight to those classes and interests whose capacity for the organized pursuit of their narrow class interests threatened to tear society apart. Thus, those who had demonstrated their capacity for organization would be reduced to the same state of relative impotence as the middle class.

Implicit in this conception of a neutral, nonclass state was the idea that its growth would be marked by the gradual emergence of nonpartisan, expert administration, representing the interests of the “community,” as over against politics, which to Bellamy, as well as to many middle-class readers, was the product of class conflict. And, as the state was forced to take on more functions, to absorb class conflict, the unorganized individual would benefit from more and more “organization.” Even if the middle class could not or would not achieve organization through its own efforts, then, even if it could not or would not cohere together in the kind of mass organizations made necessary under the changed conditions of industrial capitalism, it would nevertheless gain salvation from above by the strengthening of the overall social organization, the state.

Bellamy's socialism from above thus magically bypassed the dilemma of self-organization, and it also got rid of the politics that were so hateful and burdensome, while averting the danger of the development of a movement for social change involving or issuing from the workers.

Paradoxically the more highly organized society became—as it “reached toward the higher perfected simplicity” described by Baxter—and as the partial and special associations were absorbed into the general association, the state, the “freer” the individual would become. A contemporary observer of Nationalism noted this central component of its doctrine:

The progress of civilization has been through association to produce greater liberty and responsibility. The Nationalists believe that the extension of this principle will continue to produce greater liberty and responsiblity on the part of the individual, and thus tend to the perfect individuality of the individual citizen … the principle involved in all these schemes, the principle operating in all the imperfect methods of today, must ultimately organize itself in some form of a State where the power now centralized in parties, capital, monopolies, will be thoroughly decentralized and diffused throughout the nation.²⁷

The perfect individuality of the individual citizen: here lay the promised land of Looking Backward. The individual would be released from the anxiety of individual existence through the creation of a totally organized society, and yet remain an “individual.” The final outcome of the gradual socialization of society would cure the powerlessness of the unorganized individual because, rather than some classes having the advantage of organization, all would be organized, equally. Paradoxically, once all were organized, none would be organized. The need for selfish partial associations would be eliminated by the fact that every person would have the place and the function accorded to him by merit. If capitalism represented imperfect organization, a semi-anarchic state of affairs in which the isolated individual did as well as he could for himself, while those who could organize furthered their selfish ends, then in the new order no one would be left unorganized. Through the simultaneous dissolution of society into its constituent atoms and the creation of the omnicompetent bureaucratic state, every individual would stand united with all, and yet with no one or others in particular.

Moreover, with the interest of every individual made theoretically the same and with the proletarians who were engaged in the vital productive work of society specifically excluded from any voice in determining how society would be run, there was no possibility for individuals to coalesce into separate selfish groups or classes. Hence, there would be none of the “politics” that was (by definition) the expression and necessary outcome of such organized class selfishness. In this way, the unity of every individual atom with all, within the framework of the total bureaucratic state, combined with the elimination of or need for democratic control and participation from below—a participation made possible only through the kind of associative activity that was so difficult and perverse from the standpoint of the middle class—would raise every individual to the same level of organization while at the same time relieving him of any need or chance of assuming the impossible burden of associational activity. The breakdown of the “average citizen” that Henry Demarest Lloyd had worried about would not be a problem in an atomistic-collectivist society that had abolished the possibility and the need for a democratic public life.

Thus Bellamy's anticapitalist utopia attempted to weld the atomized individual of the older liberal society into a collectivist framework and thereby appealed to the undersoul of a frightened and fragmented middle class. The more difficult it was for the middle class to organize itself in order to restructure a political system that favored the rule of the “plutocracy” and the “bosses,” and the more probable it seemed that there would occur an ugly, destructive upheaval from below by the increasingly mutinous working class, the more attractive Bellamy's collectivism from above must have seemed to an anxiety-ridden middle class.

N. B. Ashby, a leading Populist organizer, enthusiastically embraced Bellamy's utopia for precisely these reasons. Ashby had been a key figure in the struggle to establish the National Farmers' Alliance in the 1880s, and was perhaps best known for his widely read book The Riddle of the Sphinx (1890)²⁸ analyzing the economic and political situation of the farmers. In it Ashby offered an explicit argument for Bellamyism as the only remedy for the organizational dilemma of the middle class, particularly the farmers.

“The characteristic of the present epoch,” Ashby lamented, “is organization and centralization.” The downfall began with the “organization of capital and its centralization.” In self-defense, “labor was compelled to organize.” Now the farmers' turn had come: they must also organize if they were to survive. And yet, Ashby acutely observed, the farmers' capacity to organize, to discipline themselves in the face of superior forces, was low or nonexistent.²⁹

Pessimistically, Ashby admitted that to the degree “reform is imperatively demanded,” as indeed it was, given the pressures which the farmer-producers faced from big capital and the labor movement, there could be “no adequate reform” achieved “without the concentrated efforts of those who are in need of the reform.”³⁰ Here the dilemma of middle-class reform is captured in a few words: only the “mystic power of organizations” may achieve such reforms.³¹ But, as Ashby despairingly realized, organization is the weak point of the middle class. Rather, it is their enemies who are able to summon up the “mystic” ability to organize and thus to forward their class interests. The inability to solve this dilemma, to overcome the contradiction that faces them, has the most dire consequences:

Equilibrium in the distribution of the profits arising from productive toil has been destroyed by well-organized and well-disciplined forces among the classes which draw their subsistence from the farmer, working for a common purpose while the farmer has been unorganized. The conditions which oppress the farmer are the results arising from these well-organized efforts having appropriated too large a portion of the profits arising from the capital invested in and the labor expended upon the farm. The organized effort outside the farmer, having men to counter movement from the farmer, has imposed burdens upon the farmer that should have been borne by other classes. These well-disciplined organizations of capital and handlers have forced the farmer to sell his products to them at prices fixed by themselves, and to buy his commodities of them at prices again fixed by themselves.³²

The immediate solution which Ashby urged upon his readers was the formation of producers' cooperatives. But the plutocracy's superior efficiency and economies of scale arising out of centralization, not to mention its capacity to organize, led Ashby to conclude that the only real solution for the middle class in the long run was Bellamy's Nationalism. The present attempts to organize the farmers could only be “for the purpose of restoring the equilibrium” that had been upset by the concentration of capital. “It is a strife—a necessary strife, under prevailing conditions” which the farmers must undertake, if only to prevent their immediate obliteration. But insofar as it merely aims “to set all in equilibrium,” it is a solution that cannot succeed because the superior organized force of capital will soon reassert itself. Nationalism, in contrast, did not seek to restore the lost equilibrium between parasitic capital and the producing classes, but proposed instead “to put all in harmony.”³³

That harmony could only be achieved through the dissolution of all partial class organization and the constitution of Bellamy's atomistic utopia:

Nationalism recognizes the beneficence of organization and centralization. It is a protest against the clash of private interests. It would organize and centralize to the extreme limit of organization and centralization, but with a perfect adjustment which would bring the varied and conflicting interests into a grand harmony. For the selfish and individual centralization of the present, it would substitute the State. It would destroy political government and substitute industrial government; or, rather, it would make politics the science of government, instead of the art of party management, and the science of government the science of properly developing the industries of the country. Nationalism is scientific State Socialism.³⁴

Ashby here succinctly reveals the spirit and the real meaning of Bellamy's anticapitalist utopia and the reasons for its appeal. The only way out of its dilemma for the atomized middle class in the new era of industrial capitalism is the abolition of political government—that is, of democracy itself. Nationalism will do away with the possibility and need for self-organization on the part of those classes and individuals who find such efforts beyond their ability, by reducing all to the atomized state of the middle class. The very fact of organization on the part of any group or class is evidence of an imperfect, inharmonious society. Now, however, all intermediate organizations will be dissolved into the one grand organization, the State. In this vision of a “unitary democracy,” the Populist publicist Ashby correctly understood the secret of Bellamy's message as did thousands of others readers of Looking Backward. They found in it the secure, authoritarian social order in which the individualism and negative freedom of capitalist society that had become so burdensome could be buried.

Bellamy's views were not the isolated expressions of a lonely novelist. Gronlund, Lester Ward, and many others marched to similar tunes.³⁵ Ward, a key figure in the elaboration of the new, statist liberalism, condemned capitalism in terms similar to those espoused by Bellamy and Gronlund. At the center of Ward's opposition to capitalism was a hatred of its unplanned and chaotic character. His “sociocratic” solution embodied the same atomistic-collectivist vision and expressed the same hostility to politics and politicians as Bellamy's utopian tract. Rejecting democracy, Ward projected a new social order that would be run by an elite of Comtean-style sociologist-scientists. Under the rule of the sociocrats, Ward proposed that “an educated mankind will necessarily think and act only for the welfare of the social whole. Classes, parties, and all self-interest groups will vanish; there will be left only the individual on the one side, and society on the other, interacting in the interests of a harmonious sociocracy.”³⁶ Ward's views make it clear that this extreme anti-individualistic, antidemocratic reaction was in the air, and it is hardly to be wondered at that Bellamy's skill in “sugar-coating” this message elicited a sympathetic response from those who felt themselves excluded from organization.

Bellamy's vision of a collectivist utopia in which society would be composed solely of atomized individuals is thus also the utopian counter-part of the reformers' demands for direct legislation and the various proposals for “nonpartisan” government and civil service reform.³⁷ Both were designed by middle-class reformers to wrest government from the hands of the bosses by strengthening the position of the unorganized—the middle class—at the expense of those classes or interests whose capacity for organization was superior or whose numbers were greater.

Advocates of direct legislation, for example, saw this device as a way of returning to unorganized individuals the power stolen by those organized conspiracies, the political parties—“organized” and “conspiracy” being, of course, almost a redundancy for them. Rather than form their own political parties, or even enter into the existing parties and attempt to fashion an instrument that would be a collective, organized means for the restoration of democratic self-rule, the proponents of direct legislation directed their efforts toward the dissolution or weakening of existing political parties and the negation of the advantages of permanent political association. This was the meaning of the movement for such panaceas as the initiative and the referendum.

This strategy became popular among discontented and disaffected middle- and working-class elements in inverse relation to their ability to play a role in organized party politics. Thus, as Hicks has noted, the “middle-of-the-road” Populists, that is, those who had opposed fusion with the Democratic Party, believed the People's Party had been stolen from them by “politicians” and other supposedly corrupt elements from within their own ranks, and became enthusiastic supporters of direct legislation as the single solution to the helplessness of the “individual” and his incapacity for organized political action.³⁸ Similarly, the proponents of various conceptions of “nonpartisan” government—whether they advocated direct legislation or consciously counterposed it to the latter—solved the problem of reestablishing the role of the “individual” by proposing to sharply restrict the sphere of public life in which partisan politics could play a role.³⁹

In his conception of a utopia for the middle class, Bellamy drew upon the hatred and fear of organized politics and politicians and the feelings of impotence that underlay the demand for direct legislation. And he combined its appeal for a return to the unassociated individual with the idea of a society in which politics and public life would have been eliminated. In this respect, Bellamy's early ideas were much closer to the more conservative reformers who advocated a strengthened civil service, government by “experts,” etc., as the antidote to the rule of the plutocracy. Later, in Equality, in which Bellamy presented a less authoritarian vision of utopia, he added provisions for the exercise of the referendum. This alteration was motivated by an accommodation on Bellamy's part toward democratic rule. However, political associations of any kind still were not to be allowed to play any role in utopia. Such a system of plebiscitarian rule by dissociated individuals, a kind of “polling democracy,” would not be incompatible in the least with a bureaucratized society, presided over by a technocratic elite.

CONCLUSION

Bellamy's message—that the tide of organization contained its own immanent solution to the dilemma of the middle class—was an over-whelmingly hopeful vision which did not require that one accept Bellamy's collectivism in its entirety. The increasing recognition by large sections of the urban and rural middle classes that state intervention was necessary on behalf of the “individual” and small property was an admission that the individual of the older liberal ideal could no longer hold his own without some kind of collective power coming. Why not, then, share for a moment Bellamy's dream of a collective power that would rescue them without requiring them to do what had proven so difficult—to attempt to organize themselves into a political party for the purpose of transforming the political structure and reforming society? In the same fashion, some twenty-four years later, a leading Progressive wrote of a utopia in which the middle class would be saved by a social reformer who, after abolishing all parties and politicians, makes himself dictator in order to institute the program of the new liberalism.⁴⁰ The goals were somewhat different, but the same feelings of political impotence on the part of the same type of people underlies both utopian fantasies. Above all, in a time when the situation of the individual seemed to be so perilous, threatening both from above and “below,” how could they fail to pay attention to a message that pointed to a way of regaining by collectivist means a community composed solely of individuals?

Clearly, Bellamy's message foreshadowed tendencies in modern American statist liberalism: the subordination of the individual to a bureaucratic state, and the elimination of individual reason and freedom were the essence of the new liberalism too. If Bellamy resorted to the idea of a bureaucratic state to hold together his “classless” society in which the workers were to be locked up under the tight discipline of a technical-industrial elite, and in which “administration” by experts took the place of politics and democratic decision making, he was only reflecting the development of statist and antidemocratic tendencies within liberalism. To save the individual from the twin evils of big capital and big labor, the new liberalism bowed down lower and lower before the bureaucratic state, convinced that the instrument it was forging was capable of being “neutral” and above politics. “One of the ironic problems confronting reformers around the turn of the century,” Richard Hofstadter observed, “was that the very activities they pursued in attempting to defend or restore the individualistic values they admired brought them closer to the techniques of organization they feared.”⁴¹ The status of “prophet” accorded to Bellamy by many liberals has its foundation in the bold and unequivocal way in which he seized upon these “techniques of organization”—the corporation, the trust, and the bureaucratic state—and found in them salvation for the middle class.⁴²

Certainly Bellamy's authoritarian and antidemocratic doctrine, alluringly set forth in the dream world of Looking Backward, as well as the popular response to it, was, at very least, indicative of a drift toward an authoritarian politics on the part of substantial segments of the middle class. It was a solution toward which such elements were most strongly drawn, of course, when their situation looked darkest. Yet what was at most a mood among discontented middle-class people at large, was a strongly developed element in the Nationalist movement itself.

Notes

1. Edward Bellamy, “Progress of Nationalism in the United States,” in Edward Bellamy Speaks Again!, p. 144.

2. Ibid.

3. John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (1931), p. 131.

4. Elizabeth Higgins, quoted in Hicks, Populist Revolt, p. 132.

5. The New Nation 1, no. 2 (1891), p. 21.

6. The following discussion of middle-class reform draws heavily upon Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, both for general inspiration as well as the main argument concerning the dilemma of organization which the heterogeneous middle classes faced. With many qualifications, Hofstadter's book remains one of the most important and seminal works on the reform tradition, largely because it was an attempt to break out of the sterile progressive historiographic tradition. One need not accept the more preposterous implications of Hofstadter's treatment of the populists—that there was a “straight line” from populism to McCarthyism, as some of Hofstadter's neoconservative co-thinkers so crudely postulated during the 1950s—to be able to examine the “underside” of a lower middle-class protest against capitalism such as populism represented. Neopopulist critics such as Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America (1962), and, most recently, Lawrence Goodwin, Democratic Promise (1976) have attempted with partial success to overturn Hofstadter's view of populism, particularly the charge of “anti-Semitism” (see Norman Pollack, “The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism,” American Historical Review 68, no. 2 [Oct. 1962]: 76-80). But even here it is an example of asking the wrong question. Instead of examining the nature of lower-middle-class anticapitalism, of which anti-Semitism is only one expression, an ideology in which the “producing” classes are counterposed to the “parasitic” capitalists and middlemen, examples of anti-Semitic stereotypes are counted. A brilliant but neglected article by Kenneth Barkin, “A Case Study in Comparative History” (1970): 373-404, draws attention to this aspect of populism. For a radical analysis of farmers' movements which supports, indirectly, Hofstadter's key point, the one argued in this chapter, about the organizational incapacity of these elements, see Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure (1976).

7. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 213-214 and chapter 6 passim.

8. Ibid., p. 254—265 for a discussion of the meaning of direct legislation. See also Lipow, “Plebiscitarian Politics and Progressivism: The Direct Democracy Movement.” S. M. Lipset writes of the lower-middle-class reform movement's demand for direct democracy: “On the political level they showed a strong distrust of parliamentary or constitutional democracy and were particularly antagonistic to the concept of party. They preferred to break down the sources of partisan strength and create as much direct democracy as possible through the introduction of the initiative and referendum, and through easy recall elections. Parties, politicians, big business, bankers, and foreigners were bad, only the people acting for themselves were good” (“Social Stratification and ‘Right Wing Extremism,’” British Journal of Sociology 10, no. 4 [1959]: 26). Cf. Michael Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (1967), p. 197.

9. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 214. On the neoconservative argument see idem, chs. 1-3; Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1953); and Edward Shils, The Torment of Secrecy (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1955). Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, is a devastating reply to this literature. The view taken in this chapter is based on an historical estimate of the middle classes' position in relation to big business, labor, its internal cohesiveness, degree of heterogeneity, economic role, etc. Whatever the ideals of the middle class, even if “democratic” abstractly, the attempt to actualize these ideals and at the same time to preserve small property forces them either to give up the ideals or to modify their content. In the case of populism, then, the ambiguity in their political program and the later “souring” of its tradition, stemmed not from the infirmity of democratic ideals or of mass democratic movements in general, but rather from the inherent weakness of a movement and program based on small property owners, especially an extremely heterogeneous and geographically dispersed grouping. The middle class is pulled toward socialism and toward the working class organized into its own party (which it was not, of course in the United States, then or now) to the degree that it sees no future for itself within the framework of monopoly capitalism, and it believes that a socialist reorganization of society offers them as individuals the chance to create a new, happier existence, free of the anxieties of middle-class existence, including private property itself. It is in this sense that one of the souls of American liberalism (and this is the positive side of the populist tradition to which Goodwin and others correctly point) is both democratic and “socialist”: the striving for a democratic, rational society in which the individual may realize his potentialities. But as in the case of the populists and of the popular side of “progressivism,” as long as that ideal remains within the limitations of the middle class, it constantly suffers defeat and produces solutions which are democratic in name only, hence the sham, plebiscitarian democracy of the initiative and referendum and the direct primary. When the situation of the middle class deteriorates and the working class fails to offer it an alternative, the need to find a way out grows, and it is here that “socialistic” movements of the right—i.e. anticapitalist collectivist ideologies which are also anti-working class and authoritarian—flourish. Thus the fascist movement gains its mass base among the lower middle classes by offering a kind of socialism: against big business, against big labor, for the “little man” who is crushed by both. (See Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business [1939]). On the prefascist period see Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction; Lebovics, Social Conservatism and the Middle Classes; Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (1964). In the native-American fascism of William Dudley Pelley, this appeal for a middle-class “socialism” is central. Significantly—for what it demonstrates about the “left” and “right” appeal of Bellamy's collectivism—Pelley's call for a “Christian Commonwealth” (No More Hunger, 1939) offers as its centerpiece on the “iniquities” of “predatory” capitalism the well-known “Parable of the Water Tank” from Equality.

10. M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1902), vol. 2, chs. 8, 9, and 10.

11. John R. Haynes, quoted in Key and Crouch, The Initiative and Referendum in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939), p. 425.

12. Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), pp. 519-520.

13. Cf. Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 254-261.

14. On the “politics vs. administration” dichotomy, and its significance in the emergence of the statist liberal outlook, see Dwight Waldo, The Administrative State, ch. 1, esp. pp. 17-18, and Hofstadter, Age of Reform, p. 262.

15. See Lloyd's posthumously published collection of essays, Man the Social Creator (1906), esp. ch. 7 on the new spirit in politics. Lloyd proposed to do away with parties altogether, substituting “education” for election. He saw in the Boss and the Machine the prototype of the future political system—run “for” the people (pp. 170-173).

16. Robert Michels, in formulating his famous, if dubious, “iron law of oligarchy,” drew very heavily upon M. Ostrogorski's treatment in Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties in order to provide comparative confirmation for his own study of the German Social Democracy. Ostrogorski's masterful account and analysis of the efforts of the American reformers, to whom he was sympathetic, to overcome the “machine” led him to conclude that in order for the “individual” to come into his own it would be necessary to eliminate political parties, and to substitute for them limited-purpose, temporary organizations. Yet, so convinced was Ostrogorski after his analysis of previous attempts to organize middle-class reform groups and parties that the middle class could not govern its own organizations if they allowed them to become mass, democratic organizations, that he advocated that these single-purpose, temporary parties themselves be organized on a thoroughly undemocratic, authoritarian principle:

    The adhesion of the citizen to a single issue organization will naturally be undivided and unreserved; limited to a particular cause, it will be more intense; his gaze fixed on the one object in view, the adherent will follow the leader without looking to the right or to the left. The subordination of the ego, which is the end of discipline and the basis of all association will be fully exhibited here, and yet it will be for the citizen a sacrifice as easy as it will be little degrading. The absolute subordination of the ego is attainable only in an angel or an animal. … The new political method will enable the citizen to subordinate his ego as a man. It will never insist on the total deposit of his personality in the common stock. (vol. 2, p. 661; my emphasis)

    Freely given loyalty, self-discipline without completely losing “ego,” the exercise of individual intelligence, and the ability and willingness to replace or criticize “leaders,” that is, the foundation stone of democratic organization, are thus in Ostrogorski's view impossible. “Democratic” and “organization” are contrary terms; therefore, at best only the fragmenting of groups can guarantee to the “individual” his liberty. Cf. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 308, on “political belonging.”

17. E.g., Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3, pp. 309-312.

18. Ibid., p. 283.

19. Lewis Corey, The Crisis of the Middle Class (1935), pp. 129-130. See also Arthur Ekirch, The Decline of American Liberalism, chs. 10-11.

20. The Coming Nation, founded by J. A. Wayland, who was later to found The Appeal to Reason, was the main expression of populistic socialism. Beginning in 1894, every issue carried a box in the upper lefthand column entitled, “Webster's definition of Socialism.” It read: “Socialism—A more precise, orderly and harmonious arrangement of the social arrangements of mankind than that which has hitherto prevailed.” With this kind of definition, anyone who favored state control—even a Bismarck—was a “socialist.”

21. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), p. 233.

22. The Nationalist 2, no. 6 (January 1891): 407.

23. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism, ch. 7, on Socialist-Populist relations.

24. R. M. MacIver, The Web of Government (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 187.

25. Sylvester Baxter, “What Is Nationalism?” The Nationalist 1, no. 1 (1889): 11.

26. See Chester McArthur Destler, American Radicalism, 1865-1901 (1966), chs. 8 and 9, on labor-Populist relations in Illinois.

27. H. H. Brown, from the Christian Register, reprinted in The Nationalist 2, no. 4 (1890): 145.

28. N. B. Ashby, The Riddle of the Sphinx (1890).

29. Ibid., p. 233.

30. Ibid., p. 388.

31. Ibid., p. 390.

32. Ibid., p. 388.

33. Ibid., pp. 235, 236, 237.

34. Ibid., p. 235.

35. Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), ch. 10. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, chs. 4 and 6. Hofstadter notes that Bellamy and Gronlund were both aware of Ward's work, and that the latter drew upon it for his own books (pp. 114-115). See also Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York: Ronald Press, 1940), p. 222. Gabriel characterizes Ward's views as “non-Marxist socialism resting on a foundation of democracy.”

36. Charles H. Page, Class and American Sociology: From Ward to Ross (New York: Dial Press, 1940), p. 64.

37. See Hofstadter, Age of Reform, pp. 259-263.

38. Hicks, The Populist Revolt, p. 408. This is not to suggest that there is something inherent in the farmer's condition that made them incapable of effective organized class action. This passage refers only to the consequence of their experiences of political frustration, without discussing the particular sociological circumstances that made them politically subordinate to other classes and their political representatives. In this regard, the discussion in S. M. Lipset, Agrarian Socialism (1950) is very illuminating. Among other things, Lipset points out, the wheat farmers of Saskatchewan who were successful in organizing themselves were an especially homogeneous group, with little internal competition, and a clearly recognizable dependency on the world market which made the formation of a clear program especially easy. See Lipset, pp. 47-48, 67 and 70. See also Hicks, The Populist Revolt, p. 147, on the Farmers Alliance in the Northwest, which was able, for similar reasons, to organize effectively for its goals. Cf. Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure, on the Southern Alliance, to see how the opposite conditions produced organizational incompetence and oligarchical control (pp. 277-278).

39. Lloyd fell into this category, as did a whole wing of the socialist movement of the 1890s, the so-called “nonpartisan” socialists. Many of these were Nationalists and most of them opposed the founding of the Socialist Party. For an account of these currents, see Quint, Forging, ch. 8.

40. See Col. Edward Mandell House's novel, Philip Dru: Administrator (New York: Huebsch, 1918).

41. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 5-6.

42. See Thurman Arnold's statement in The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 221, that Bellamy was the forerunner of the National Recovery Administration because he saw in the corporation a step toward “socialism.” In A. N. Holcombe's defense of the N.R.A., Government in a Planned Democracy (New York: Norton, 1935), a book concerned to find some foundation for “the ascendancy of the middle class in a class-conscious state,” there is an explicit discussion of the need that the middle class has, if its hegemony over American society is to be maintained, for a bureaucratic elite to stand between it and other classes. Holcombe writes:

    Experience with the N.I.R.A. has clearly shown the importance of a competent body of technical experts and public business administrators for executing a middle-class program in American politics … the assistance of a body of technicians and administrators is invaluable in maintaining the balance between the upper and lower classes which the practitioner of middle-class politics seeks to establish. Properly organized and directed, such a body can stand against an undue preference for upper or lower-class interests, if the special representative of either class fail to supply the appropriate check upon the other. It can help to stabilize the equilibrium of classes, even if the balance between them is not exactly struck by the measures of the program. In short, an impartial body of competent technicians and administrators is certain to be a favorite instrument of middle-class politics in a class-conscious age. (p. 147)

    The similarity of Holcombe's outlook, expressed here, with that of Bellamy is too obvious to require discussion. It should be noted that Holcombe, like Bellamy, when forced to cite some model for the organization of a planned society under the domination of the middle class, cites the General Staff of the Army (p. 153).