SOURCE: “The Backward Look of Bellamy's Socialism,” in Looking Backward, 1988-1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, edited by Daphne Patai, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 21-36.

[In the following essay, Cantor observes Edward Bellamy's “insular, parochial, Christian, uniquely nineteenth-century American” socialism.]

Edward Bellamy, born in 1850 of a long line of Connecticut and Vermont ancestors, was the frail and precocious son of a New England country parson in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. The father, a Baptist minister, was amiable, indolent, good-natured, of a more liberal religious bent than his strong-willed wife. Maria Bellamy was a religious zealot whose spirit burned with the fires of an uncompromising Calvinism. Possessed of the unbending qualities of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, she dominated the Bellamy household, pressed books—but never useless fiction!—upon her son, and made sure that the daily family prayers, twice-a-day Sabbath devotions, and Sunday school educational requirements were observed. In a sense Bellamy personified the clash between a rigid Calvinism and a Puritanism gone secular and tolerant. This is not to suggest parental conflict. The Bellamy household remained deeply religious. It offered a sense of comfort and security, a warm, affective, nurturing family life. Small wonder Bellamy later observed that love of home “is one of the strongest, the purest, the most unselfish passions that human nature knows”; and he understandably confessed to a “deep-seated aversion to change” (Bellamy 1873, “Home”). Having a deep-rooted sense of place, Bellamy, notwithstanding sojourns in New York City and abroad, was a man who never left home. Nor did he possess a divided religious vision. Calvinism largely won out. He enjoyed “an indescribably close and tender communion with what seemed to him a very real and sublime being … [and] took a deep and awful pleasure” in prayer (Bellamy Folder 19).¹

And yet Bellamy lived in an age of watered-down religion, one increasingly resorting to moralistic strictures and bromides, and his was, as John Thomas aptly termed it, “a profoundly dislocated sensibility” (Thomas 1983, 28). But this dislocation owed much to the age itself. A child of post-Jacksonian America, Bellamy came to maturity not only in an era of religious declension, but also in a region and a nation that remained overwhelmingly rural, a land dominated by farm-sized plots and farm family households. His home was not far from the Connecticut River, surely similar to the Charles that Julian West, the fictional hero of Looking Backward, described as a “blue ribbon winding away to the sunset.” A half-day's ride from Chicopee Falls, Bellamy writes in another account, “the Housatonic crept with many a loving curve … and many a lake and pond gemmed the landscape” (Bellamy 1962 [1900], 3). He described “a smiling, peaceful landscape,” where men wisely left “everything as Nature left it” and where the White Mountains or the Berkshires had shaggier slopes, wilder torrents, loftier forests than in Julian West's own age a hundred years earlier, for the ravages of the late nineteenth century had been corrected (Bellamy 1970 [1897], 296, 297). Idealizing the “changeless frame of nature,” Bellamy's prefactory rural society provided the ecological model for the utopian world of the year 2000.

But in contrast to Julian West's utopia of Looking Backward, and Bellamy's pastoral ideal, there was Chicopee Falls, the first section of his hometown to become industrialized (Shlakman 1935, 48). Here the Belcher factory turned out iron castings, and a paper and cotton mill was built, and the Irishmen who built them and dug the canal moved into the rows of tenements that arose alongside the mills. These were not ordinary homes inhabited by proper Protestant citizens and surrounded by respectable-sized green plots, but stark, yardless block-long buildings pressed closely together into which Irish families were crowded. The first mill operatives were women, some coming out of Springfield, where their fathers worked as skilled mechanics in the Armory, and some arriving in wagons from farms and rural hamlets north and west of Chicopee (Shlakman 1935, 49). This new industrial army entered a rural community in the 1820s and 1830s and transformed it, with the cotton mills becoming the town's economic heart and with many small manufacturers dependent on continuous mill operations. By the late 1840s, Irish women began to replace the Yankee operatives, and in the 1850s, a time of economic slump, complaints of rowdyism in the streets began to be heard.

For farmers, merchants, and professionals, those long familiar with Chicopee's landscape, a marked transformation was underway and usually the Irish were blamed for civic tumult, cholera outbreaks, intemperance—the “rum shop in every fourth house” was noted—and Sabbath desecration, the last further offending Yankee sensibilities (Shlakman 1935, 96). Additional charges occurred when French Canadians began to replace the Irish mill operatives in the late 1850s. By now a permanent factory labor force had been established. Intermittent depression characterized the decade, which produced severe work conditions and, after 1860, very considerable ferment in the ranks of labor. By then the old order had completely changed. Polish Catholics were coming into Chicopee. No longer were there only Yankee workers, speaking the same language, sharing the same cultural traditions as merchant and craftsman, worshipping in the same churches, and holding to a common lingua franca—all of which had lent solidarity and homogeneity to the community. Now the ranks of labor were divided, Catholic churches had been erected, and rising living costs led to strikes and resentment.

Bellamy grew to maturity in the midst of this mounting social and economic crisis. He watched Chicopee Falls shift, as he recalled, from a “thriving village” to an ugly factory city crowded with industry, tenements, and Catholic millhands struggling to survive (Bellamy 1968 [1889]). The Bellamys' unpretentious frame house with its picket fence—a symbol of the besieged old Yankee—was located near the grimy mills, rows of brick tenements, and mansions of factory owners and agents who, Bellamy later observed, shaped the destiny of Chicopee's work force, controlled the churches, and determined the shape of every social and public development in the city. In one direction he could see the smokestacks and hard-scrabble life of factory workers and, closing in upon him, industrial ugliness, labor strife, and social disorder; in the other, an older America that was disappearing under the machine and that he increasingly longed for and idealized. He became aware of “half-clad brutalized children” who “filled the air with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the garbage that littered the courtyards” (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 323). And understandably, and much like the Unitarians and transcendentalists of a generation earlier, he was repelled by the developments transforming America—this urban disorder, the new materialistic ethos, and the greed of the commercial classes. In contrast to it all, he advised readers to “make the most of these few perfect spring days” or to “go afishing” (Bellamy 1874, “Spring Days”; 1873, “Go Afishing”). Also like the transcendentalists, Bellamy found “in observation of nature play alike for the intellect and the heart of a God” (Bellamy, “Unpublished”). Or, in another instance, he conveys the wonder of climbing “these mighty hills,” sleeping “at noon on a sunny sward,” lying “beneath the pines and listen[ing] to the song of eternity in their branches” (Bellamy, “Eliot Carson”). It follows that Bellamy grew nostalgic for the old ways of the New England gentry and the preindustrial small town, wishing to retain the latter's leisurely pace, to be reassured by its quiet routines and order, and to be sustained by its proximity to the world of nature.

As he later recalled, Bellamy grew up in a simple mill village “where there were no rich and very few poor, and everybody who was willing to work was sure of a fair living” (Bellamy 1968 [1889], I). This idealized memoir, similar to many descriptions of small-town rural America, was not greatly overdrawn. Class lines of course existed in such communities but, except perhaps in the South, they were never rigidly fixed and were of necessity often ignored. So, too, was special privilege, which, for those living in the nineteenth-century rural community, was invariably considered a European phenomenon. Composed largely of Protestant, reasonably well-educated, English-speaking, churchgoing families with impeccable Anglo-Saxon credentials, such a town was an organic community, a moral island in a rising sea of strange faces, changing values, and peculiar cultural mannerisms.

For the moment, in Bellamy's youth, this community still stood on the edge of America's industrial revolution. Though social and religious complexity had begun to overtake Chicopee, the town's traditional culture continued to exert great influence and power. For its high-minded and professional citizens, a genuine sense of community remained. The growing city still suggested the small town of a half-century earlier rather than the bustling industrial center to come. Contrasting the old and the emergent, Bellamy continually reaffirmed small-town virtues in an urban society that seemed to threaten values he held dear. He yearned for a time when a feeling for a community prevailed, the spirit of cooperation, not competition, existed, the pandemonium of commerce was remote, class lines were less rigid, moral values were unquestioned, and the beneficent effects of nature were close by. That was the traditionally homogenous society he knew as a child and young adult. His editorials in the Springfield Union understandably deplored the crime and moral corruption of his age, the commercialism that worshipped primitive accumulation and predatory acquisition. “Snobbery and shoddy toadyism and venality, have made such public characters as Franklin and Washington and Lincoln almost an impossible conception, so far,” he wrote, have Americans “drifted from their fast anchorage in unimpeachable integrity” (Bellamy 1877, “Burning”). Although the American yeoman was incorruptible, he could never successfully contend against the forces of degeneracy. Thus Bellamy shared the apprehensions of the respectable elements who were most familiar to him. Like him, they watched the changing world fearfully, the modern industrial city materializing in the mill towns springing up around them. They sympathized with his “feelings of disgust” at urban sights and sounds, the factory “stenches and filth,” “the perpetual clang and clash of machinery,” “the interminable rows of women, pallid, hollow-cheeked, with faces vacant and stolid,” the “festering mass of human wretchedness” (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 323, 324; 1970 [1897], 54-55). And while their reactions were not unmixed, they showed greater concern than compassion toward those around them.

In Bellamy's late adolescence, then, the factory system, its technology and work force, became realities. The future of Chicopee Falls was now ordained. So was his own scenario. Hostility to private capitalism and the competitive system, to the “imbecility of private enterprise,” which—at least on a large scale—had produced an “inferno of poverty beneath civilization,” would have centrality to his two published utopian novels, Looking Backward and Equality (Thomas 1983, 169).² But the anxieties catalyzed by the new industrial system and its emergent proletariat prompted him to avert his eyes when imagining the future society. Hence Boston in the year 2000 was much like pre-1840 Chicopee. Nothing could be seen of 1888 mill towns, the sweatshops, substandard wages, child labor, dreadful home and work environments, or even the “aggressive” and “ubiquitous” drummers. Indeed Boston was much like the Chicopee of his youth—before the mills, before it became a grimy, sprawling city invaded in turn by Irish, French Canadian, and Polish workers, and before the rows of grim tenements in which they lived. It had “miles of broad streets, shaded by trees,” landscaped parks and squares on which fronted homes and cottages with little footpaths and gardens with rustic bowers.

Looking Backward, it comes as no surprise, lacks any description of a factory or workbench. Julian West, Bellamy's autobiographical invention, visits a restaurant, a retail store, and a warehouse, but spare and antiseptic comments about the work force are all that one finds (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 153-57). Utopia's workers in Looking Backward are faceless, having the depersonalized and automatic qualities of soldiers on duty and, whether waiter or clerk, not interacting with those they serve. Those described in Equality are similarly drawn. They may work in “palaces of industry” and have “strong, cultured faces, prosecuting with the enthusiasm of artists their self-chosen tasks of use and beauty,” but they otherwise lack personality or specific characteristics. When Julian West visits one such “palace,” a textile factory, no workers are even present or described. He talks to the factory manager and later in the novel to a woman at a plow rather than to a man at a lathe. In neither book did he meet a male industrial worker (Bellamy 1970 [1897], 155-61). His encounters, instead, are almost always with professionals of one kind or another: doctors, ministers, teachers, or managers.

Bellamy's imaginative projections—people, buildings, and society itself—are unsurprising. After nearly a year in New York City, within the “four walls of his Brooklyn apartment,” where he engaged in a “profound” spiritual meditation, he had withdrawn to Chicopee in 1872, thereby tacitly admitting defeat in the big league world of Manhattan journalism. Recoiling from the failed adventure, he would never again confront the new urban order for any length of time. In 1894, over twenty years later, he did visit New York, where, witnessing a strike, he reacted with considerable repugnance—hardly the response of a loyal soldier in the cause of socialism (Wilson 1977, 53). Bellamy, in effect, returned to his home town, married the girl next door (or, more accurately, in the next room, for she had been raised in his parents' home), and softened and glossed over his recent urban failure, transforming it into something of a success. For in lieu of defeat he substituted loyalty to a calling higher than mere self-serving careerism. “Let others count gold,” he rationalized, “Let others number the tongues that echo their name. For me, I prize more the vague and wavering images that visit my soul in hours of revery than any other excitations of the mind. Every one to his taste. Mine runs rather to dreaming than dollars, rather to fancy than fame” (Wilson 1977, 52).

Back in Chicopee, Bellamy also took on the pose of young Werther. Convinced of the insufficiency of the ideals in which he was raised,

the young man … casts them aside and with soul wide open goes through dry places seeking everywhere to find God. He carries his loyalty in his hand anxious only to find some fitting shrine where he may lay it down and be at rest. Then, indeed, as the hopelessness of his search is borne in upon him come days and nights full of bitterness and blasphemy, of recklessness and at last of profound life weariness. (Bellamy Notebook I, 38-39)

But world weariness and spiritual malaise were merely the ephemeral posturings of a young man. Bellamy would soon replace them with a “religion of solidarity.” It was, in effect, a self-denying ethic that sought, in the Emersonian sense, to recover a communion with “eternity,” that fashionable romantic conceit that ran riot in New England from the days of Jonathan Edwards and that was not far removed from the oversoul, the Wordsworthian landscape of Tintern Abbey, or Thoreau's experiences at Walden Pond. Emphasis on the individual, which he brooded upon in New York, had, like Minerva's owl, taken flight at the dusk of his urban days, being replaced by an escape from the “prison” of self into the transcendence of personality.

These transcendental resonances have saliency to Bellamy's responses to nature. “The Religion of Solidarity,” for example, at times reads like a transcendental tract: the “desire after a more perfect communion” with the landscape, the “lust after natural beauty amounts to a veritable orgasm,” “under its [nature's] influences that senses are sublimed to an ecstasy” (Schiffman 1955, 3). Bellamy's references to the “All-Soul” and the “universal,” his feeling “‘most intimately, tenderly’ the presence of the universal spirit in all things in the Spring” inevitably call up the oversoul and that saturnalia of feeling that the Concord group had aspired to (Bowman 1958, 28-30).³

Out of the New York year came the “Eliot Carson Notebook,” a rough draft that, internal evidence suggests, was written shortly before Looking Backward (Bellamy Notebook 3, 4; “Eliot Carson”). A fictional vehicle for the religion of solidarity, this unfinished autobiographical novel suggests that Bellamy himself considered living the solitary life in the manner of Thoreau, whom he much admired. This novel also depicted the pastoral landscape as the beneficent foil for the evil city. But it was more. Nature was also the agency that awakened “the desire for a more perfect communion” and prompted man to identify with the oversoul, the cosmos, infinity, that is, those vague spiritual forces that, in the lexicon of the pantheists and transcendentalists, underlay the universe. In effect, nature—with or without reference to the growing industrialization—had centrality in Bellamy's thought. His fictional hero, Eliot Carson, it is also instructive to note, had been a disillusioned lawyer and journalist who abandoned his position as mill superintendent in Hilton, a factory town, and chose a Thoreau-like withdrawal into nature. Thus Bellamy's reclusive hero reflected his creator's vocational crisis, equally intent upon a life of reading, philosophizing, walking in the woods, and seeking, like Thoreau, the rock-bottom essentials of existence. In successive drafts, Bellamy first placed Eliot Carson in the family home on the town's outskirts, then at a “farmhouse” outside of Hilton, later in a forest “cabin,” and finally in the forest, “with the free swing of a hunter, carrying a rifle” (Bellamy, “Eliot Carson”).

Carson's escape into nature as relief from urban society differed from the romantics' search for paradisiac fulfillment, from seeking submission in nature, from Thoreau's theme of renewal and Edenic return, and from Emerson's pantheism, which offered an escape from the gloomy framework of history or of contemporary life. Bellamy, after all, did project a highly developed social and economic order, a golden age of industrial technology and future social harmony that the Emersonian man never contemplated. Yet for them all there was a reach after the infinite, and Bellamy had something of the transcendentalist yearning for a monism of soul and nature in the dream of his “spirit as something interfused in the light of the setting suns, broad oceans, and the winds” (Bellamy, “Eliot Carson”). For them all, the untrammeled beauty of the landscape served, at a minimum, as counterpoint to the marked factory and urban growth, and to the corruption and materialism that came in the wake of such grim developments. Nature offered relief to those apprehensive about the social dislocations produced by these changes and longing for the freshness of an earlier and greener world. Such a world was predictably one in which there were no banks and the farmers had abundance.

For Bellamy, the yeoman, living close to the soil, was the last defense against the materialism and selfish individualism then overtaking the republic. To be sure, the yeomen of The Duke of Stockbridge were “uneducated, … wholly lacking in social vision, and capable of being mean spirited and surly,” as well as possessed of “inherited instincts of servility.” But “they had felt much and keenly,” were a “simple, true-hearted people,” and existed in an age when men were their own masters and the better for it (Bellamy, “Eliot Carson”; 1962 [1900], 63). Identifying with the yeomen, though in guarded fashion, Bellamy urged—in one Springfield Union editorial—that young men remain at their rural firesides where they might yet attain a true independence. He also endorsed their causes, those of an older agrarian America and of the Populism to come: opposition to monopolies and the “great wastes” of competition, suspicion of trade and banking, faith in the work ethic, and the producerist ideology (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 230).⁴

Similar sentiments were attributed to craftsmen, whether in towns or rural communities, and they received a like-minded sympathy and idealization. Recalling the pre-factory era when artisans dominated, Dr. Leete, in conversation with Julian West, provides an appealing reminder of a past simplicity, when “commerce and industry were conducted by innumerable petty concerns with small capital,” when “the individual workman was relatively important and independent in his relations to the employer, … when a little capital or a new idea was enough to start a man in business for himself, … and there was no hard and fast line between the two classes” (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 52). Bellamy here echoed the Mugwump line, the elite nostalgia for an older America and for the small manufacturer and businessman, the groups “suffering quite as much and [having] quite as much to dread from monopoly as has the poorest class of laborers” (Bellamy 1937, 56). He lamented the obvious decline of the “businessmen with moderate capital” who had conducted the nation's trade before the emergence of the corporation and the trust. “There is now almost no opportunity left for starting in business in a moderate way; none, indeed,” he deplored, “unless backed by large capital” (p. 57).

Dr. Leete, continuing, fondly reminisces about the good old days: “labor unions were needless then, and general strikes were out of the question.” Regarding the latter, Bellamy's views were known long before his alter ego rejected working-class militance. Strikes were another instance of social disorder. Bellamy, to be sure, had supported the 1892 strikers at Homestead, Pennsylvania, and two decades earlier acknowledged the right to strike when it was the only way to “redress … [a] crying injustice.” But it always produced a growing unease: it was a “blundering instrument” and it “injures society for the sake of individuals.” Advising “strikers to act with much circumspection,” Bellamy admitted that “strikes may be justifiable, but the presumption is against them” (Bellamy 1875). And unlike his response to 1892, he had condemned the bloody violence of 1877, called for its “crushing” and assailed the destruction of railroad property (Bellamy, 1877, “Who Has”). And in an attendant observation, he generally found that unions were of little use (Bellamy 1892, “Homestead Tragedy”).⁵ He had always maintained that “no mere organization of labor … will alone solve the problem of securing permanent employment on favorable terms” (Bellamy 1892, “Trade Unionism”).

In contrast to the sturdy yeoman and proud artisan, there were Chicopee's textile operatives. Eliot Carson's escape into nature was also an escape from those who worked in the mills. Returning from one of his many forest strolls at the end of the day, he watched Hilton's mill hands pass by: “Some with stolid, godless, patient faces, mere human oxen, others flippant, exchanging coarse jests, voluble with vulgarity. ‘To think,’ said Carson, ‘… each of those narrow foreheads is a prison to the dark soul within it, and what a prison, what a dungeon dark’” (Bellamy, “Eliot Carson”). The snobbishness and elitism of Julian West, limned as a wealthy Brahman, is obvious. At the outset of Looking Backward, he exhibits the conventional attitudes of his type: holding a loathing for workers, perturbed that the nation is drawing into the vortex of class war and chaos, and fearful that society trembles at the abyss. Likewise, Dr. Leete later affirms as much. Julian West, he recounts, had once lived in an era troubled by strikes, lockouts, slums, and starvation. Both men share Carson's mix of pity, contempt, and fear of the Hilton mill hands. Julian West scornfully dismisses both workers who would “follow anyone who seemed likely to give them any light on the subject” of how to obtain better wages, hours, and working and living conditions and their “many would-be leaders” (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 16). Discussing “The Strikers,” a sculptured group of bareheaded laborers of “heroic size” on a pedestal in the Boston Common, he tells Dr. Leete that the strikers of his era, the 1880s,

had not the slightest idea of revolting against private capitalism as a system. They were very ignorant and quite incapable of grasping so large a conception. They had no notion of getting along without capitalists. All they imagined or desired was a little better treatment by their employers, a few cents more an hour, a few minutes less working time a day, or maybe the discharge of an unpopular foreman. The most they aimed at was some petty improvement in their condition, to attain which they did not hesitate to throw the whole industrial machine into disorder. (Bellamy 1970 [1897], 208)

And the latter occurrence, almost needless to add, would produce that social turbulence which left the upper class disquieted and distraught. Dr. Leete confirms his observations: “Look at those faces. Has the sculptor idealized them? Are they the faces of philosophers? Do they not bear out your statement that the strikers, like the workingmen generally, were, as a rule, ignorant, narrow-minded men, with no grasp of large questions?” (p. 208).

Bellamy leaned toward environmentalism as explanation of human behavior. He believed the unspeakable conditions of workshop and tenement shaped the brutalized workers who walked the city streets. Human nature was inherently good, he was convinced, or, as Dr. Barton sermonized, “men in their natural intention and structure are generous, not selfish, … godlike in aspirations, instinct with divinist impulses of tenderness and self-sacrifice …” (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 287-88). Nonetheless, as Julian West notes with distaste in Looking Backward, workers' aspirations were “chimerical,” their “bodies were so many living sepulchres,” and “on each brutal brow was plainly written the hic jacet of a soul dead within” (p. 324). As Dr. Leete laments in Equality, “the masses of mankind” in the late nineteenth century “accepted servitude to the possessing class and became their serfs on condition of receiving the means of subsistence” (Bellamy 1970 [1897], 80). Circumstances, then, made workers what they were, but such recognition hardly mitigates the responses of these upper middle-class observers.

Mingled disdain and pity, hostility and sympathy find voice in Bellamy's writings. Edith Leete, who is invariably depicted in affectionate terms, asserts, “Those who tamely endure wrongs which they have the power to end deserve not compassion but contempt” (Bellamy 1970 [1897], 15). Her creator understandably expressed an antidemocratic bias, one common to a raft of genteel Christian reformers across the nineteenth century. Like such Mugwumps, reformers, and contemporaries as George Ticknor Curtis, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Charles Eliot Norton, Richard Watson Gilder, and Henry Demarest Lloyd, Bellamy also worried over the entry of new immigrants into the political culture and held serious reservations about the efficacy of labor parties. About the latter, and speaking through Dr. Leete, he asserted that they “never could have accomplished anything on a large or permanent scale” (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 253).

Bellamy also looked at reformers with a critical eye. The “self-styled ‘reformer’ of this day,” he charged, “is everywhere recognized as a politician who relies upon slander and hypocrisy as his sole weapon” (Bellamy 1970 [1897], 80). The nation had sunk into a morass of “low principles,” he grieved, much as had such Mugwump reformers as Norton, Curtis, Gilder, Aldrich, and, belatedly, Henry Adams, with bribery, deceit, and “traditions of dissimulation worthy of a Metternich” (p. 15). Typical of this circle of genteel reformers, Bellamy felt personally violated by the innumerable strikes, mass organizations of labor, and class conflict. Workers, he concluded, were not fit to govern, themselves or society, and would make “a sad mess of society” were they in a position to do so (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 170).⁶ Bellamy thus shared Mugwump elitism, its paternalistic view of the workingman, its antidemocratic cast of mind and doubts about representative government. Even the Duke of Stockbridge, which also sympathized with the downtrodden yeomanry, was hedged in by a cautionary lesson designed to avoid the emergence of a rural organization of protest. Looking Backward makes it indisputably clear that “the fittest may lead and rule” and that a new elite of skill and talent would administer society (Lipow 1982, 77).⁷ Elsewhere Bellamy noted that the “men of education and position” would run things (Schiffman 1955, 139). “We shall take this subject,” he wrote, “out of the hands of the blatant blasphemous demagogues and get it before the sober morally minded masses of the American people”—code words for the respectable middle class rather than the “population of ignorant, boorish, coarse, wholly uncultivated men and women” whom Dr. Leete derided (p. 138).

Bellamy thus echoed the genteel reformers' disconsolate criticism of political corruption and unscrupulous competition in the Gilded Age. Typical of them, he attacked the “monstrous grab game … the clutching fist … thrust into the spoils,” with “the worst feature of this whole matter,” referring to the Grant era scandals, being “that a class of men has come to the front with whom office holding is a profession—a means of support and enrichment” (Bellamy 1874, “Serbonian Bogs”).⁸ Condemnation of their artifice and amoral moneymaking was inextricably enmeshed with antagonism toward their political loyalties, which flowed into reservations about politics, even about labor parties, and which sought a substitute for them, as Looking Backward implicitly discloses (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 253).

Though ideologically related to these civil service and political reformers, Bellamy usually dismissed them, because they were limited to monotonously voiced jeremiads about “these dreadful days,” the current civilization and its discontents. Indeed he confessed that before publication of Looking Backward he had no affiliations with or “any particular sympathy” toward industrial or social reformers (Bellamy 1968 [1889], 1). Naysayers and one-idea men, they were roughly equivalent to millennialists and Marxists in their inconsequential effect upon American life. Bellamy wanted meaningful reform, finding its possibility limited, given the terms of contemporary debate. Such reform was understood only by a saving remnant of the reform movement that recognized that a benevolent solidarity, or nationalism—“the express doctrine of Jesus Christ”—offered the only effective and long-term solution.

Bellamy had even less ambivalent feelings about radicals and revolutionaries than about reformers; he recoiled from the disorderly and destructive possibilities that they offered. “There is a vague discontent with the present state of affairs,” he observed worriedly, “a chafing under the restraints of society and a disposition to disregard the rights of others that is neither American nor manly and that too often finds expression in indiscriminate acts of violence and crime” (Bellamy 1874, “Crime and Its Causes”). The timing and inclusiveness of these sentiments warrant mention. Written in 1874, in the midst of a protracted depression, they appeared three years before the bloodiest strikes in our history and fourteen years before publication of Looking Backward, and they attacked meliorists as well as revolutionaries. For the “discontent,” Bellamy observes, “is largely the outcome of pernicious communistic teachings” of demagogues and so-called social reformers, whose chief object is to tear down the present fabric of society (Thomas 1983, 93).⁹ In a letter to William Dean Howells, his literary mentor, he also dismissed socialists. Admitting to an inability to “stomach” the word “socialist,” he asserted: “It smells to the average American of petroleum, suggests the red flag, with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion” (Bellamy to Howells, July 17, 1888). In notes written after Looking Backward, he reaffirmed the conservative provenance of his collectivism and anticapitalist bias: “When I came to consider what could be radically done for social reorganization, I was helped by every former disgust with the various socialist schemes” (Bellamy, “Notebooks”). Believing revolution to be invariably unsuccessful—witness the Shaysites!—he argued that its followers had no moral foundation on which to build a better world (Thomas 1983, 100).¹⁰ The new society would, for him, unfold in an epiphany of moral revelation that made drastic social upheaval unnecessary. Revolutionary change, moreover, was inevitably accompanied by violence and hence would be un-Christian. Rejecting such means, Bellamy considered socialism an ideal of eternal peace. It could only be achieved by nonviolent means, since means devolved into and were inseparable from ends (Bellamy 1891).¹¹ In sum, public ownership and control of industry was attainable by nonviolent change. The new social order, he affirmed, would evolve out of that “most bloodless of revolutions” (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 57, 285).

Likewise, as observed, Bellamy feared the “yawning” chasm between labor and capital, rejected class appeals as futile, abhorred the idea of class war, and obliquely attacked German socialists, who “lay undue stress on Socialism being a class movement” (Thomas 1983, 93).¹² He editorialized:

The cure-all for our labor and capital frictions and smash-ups seems, then, to be this, to put into the hands of government all the carrying, transfer, exchange, productive industry of the country, its manufactures, agricultures, trade and its entire use of capital; permitting no private employment of this for personal profit. … Now go to, ye dreamers. … For a man to neglect his business and his family to study up such a scheme as this, is lunacy or worse. (Bellamy 1877, “Communism Boiled Down”)

Equally suggestive of Bellamy's antipathy to socialists, as his contemporaries understood them, Dr. Leete also alludes to the “followers of the red flag,” the revolutionists, and claims they had no role in “the new order of things”: all they did was “hinder it” and “their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered projects for social reform of a hearing.” Bellamy even asserted, again speaking through Dr. Leete, that “the great monopolies” subsidized radicals “to wave the red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real reform” (Bellamy 1926 [1888], 252). So much for Bellamy as a revolutionary socialist.

Finally, Bellamy's nationalism, like his utopian state, depended upon a central unitary government, which was yet another deviation from the orthodox Marxist view of the state as withering away. Yet this government, as projected, was founded on traditional agrarian values consistent with the small-town heritage in which he had been raised. On virtually every count, therefore, Bellamy's socialism, insular, parochial, Christian, uniquely nineteenth-century American, was far removed from the conventional definition and the great theoretical graybeards of European revolution.

Notes

1. All Bellamy's original writings, notebooks, manuscripts noted below are deposited in the Bellamy collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cited as Notebook, “Unpublished,” “Eliot Carson,” “Memorandum,” “to Howells,” Folder.

2. For differences and similarities between Looking Backward and Equality, see Arthur Lipow (1982, 279-82 and passim). Equality, Lipow believes, reflected marked changes in Bellamy's views, especially the departure from the authoritarian and antidemocratic perspective of Looking Backward.

3. Bellamy, however, rejected any appeal to individualism—whether transcendental or entrepreneurial. Rather he sought to eliminate personality, to subordinate selfish individualism to some all-inclusive social order (see Lipow 1982, 43, 161). Further rejecting emphasis on the worth of the individual, he would join personality to “impersonal consciousness”: “Spread your wings … the higher universal life is at once realizable” (Bellamy, “Religion of Solidarity,” in Schiffman 1955, 11).

4. On the “imbecility of private enterprise,” see Bellamy 1926 [1888], 240.

5. On labor and labor unions, see Bellamy 1892, “Trade Unionism”; “The Homestead Tragedy”; “Labor, Politics and Nationalism”; “A Nationalist View of the Homestead Situation”; and “The Trials of the Homestead Men.” By 1891 Bellamy urged readers to “forget … what class you belong to,” and spoke of the “common ancestry and inheritance” that emphasize each individual's status as “co-heir and brother of all other men” and sees “true patriotism” as “an enthusiasm for humanity” (Bellamy 1891).

6. Although admittedly sympathetic to the struggle of labor, Bellamy nonetheless asserted that workers “knew nothing of how to accomplish” the changes needed by society: “The result of their efforts would be a descent into chaos.” Bellamy denied that he advocated socialism (Quint 1953), and his cautious anti-capitalism and his nonviolent collectivist solution were the primary reasons for his appeal to a traditional middle-class readership. Here was an alternative to the violence of the 1871 Paris Commune, the bloody railroad strikes of 1877, the violent class conflict inherent in the doctrines of the First International, and the anarchist values of the Haymarket defendants of 1886.

7. See also Bellamy 1899.

8. See also Bellamy 1874, “The Head and the Tail Changing.”

9. See also Bellamy 1892, “Some Questions Answered,” 499, and “The Progress of Nationalism,” 743; “Memorandum on Nationalism” (1889), manuscript, Bellamy Papers; and Morgan (1944, 87).

10. John Thomas's wise observations on Bellamy in Alternative America (1983) are reflected here and elsewhere in this essay and have influenced me.

11. See also Bellamy 1938, 190; and 1889, “Looking Forward,” 4.

12. See also Bellamy 1892, “Some Questions Answered” and “The Progress of Nationalism,” 743; “Memorandum on Nationalism” (1889), manuscript, Bellamy Papers; and Morgan (1944).

Works Cited

Bellamy, Edward. 1873. “Go Afishing.” Springfield Union, May 20.

———. 1873. “Home Sweet Home.” Springfield Union, September 27.

———. 1874. “Crime and Its Causes.” Springfield Union, February 19.

———. 1874. “The Head and the Tail Changing.” Springfield Union, April 3.

———. 1874. “Serbonian Bogs.” Springfield Union, April 7.

———. 1874. “The Spring Days.” Springfield Union, May 28.

———. 1875. “The Ethics of the Strike.” Springfield Union, April 15.

———. 1876. Untitled Editorial. Springfield Union, November 17.

———. 1877. “Burning the Candle at Both Ends.” Springfield Union, April 8.

———. 1877. “Communism Boiled Down.” Springfield Union, August 3.

———. 1877. “Who Has Got to Pay.” Springfield Union, July 25.

———. 1889. “Looking Forward.” The Nationalist 2 (December).

———. 1889. “Memorandum on Nationalism.” Manuscript, Bellamy Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

———. 1891. “Several Questions Answered.” The New Nation 1 (July 11): 374.

———. 1892. “The Homestead Tragedy.” The New Nation 2 (July 16).

———. 1892. “Interview with Edward Bellamy.” The New Nation 2 (July 16).

———. 1892. “Labor, Politics and Nationalism.” New York Herald, August 28; reprint, The New Nation 2 (September 10): 568.

———. 1892. “A Nationalist View of the Homestead Situation.” The New Nation 2 (July 16).

———. 1892. “The Progress of Nationalism in the United States.” North American Review 154 (June): 742-52.

———. 1892. “Some Questions Answered.” The New Nation 2 (August 6): 499.

———. 1892. “Trade Unionism: A Bird with One Wing.” The New Nation 2 (October 1).

———. 1892. “The Trials of the Homestead Men.” The New Nation 2 (October 8).

———. 1899. “Brief Summary of the Industrial Plan of Nationalism Set Forth in Looking Backward for Class Study.” The Dawn (September 15).

———. 1926 [1888]. Looking Backward. Reprint. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

———. 1937. “Nationalism—Principles, Purposes.” In Edward Bellamy Speaks Again! Kansas City: Peerage Press.

———. 1938. Talks on Nationalism. Chicago: Peerage Press.

———. 1962 [1900]. Duke of Stockbridge: A Romance of Shays' Rebellion. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

———. 1968 [1889]. “How I Came to Write ‘Looking Backward.’” The Nationalist: A Monthly Magazine 1. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.

———. 1970 [1897]. Equality. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, Inc.

Bowman, Sylvia E. 1958. The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy. New York: Bookman.

Lipow, Arthur. 1982. Authoritarian Socialism in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgan, Arthur. 1944. Edward Bellamy. New York: Columbia University Press.

Quint, Howard H. 1953. The Forging of American Socialism. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Schiffman, Joseph, ed. 1955. Edward Bellamy: Selected Writings on Religion and Society. New York: Liberal Arts Press.

Shlakman, Vera. 1935. Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts. Northampton, Mass: Smith College Studies in History, vol. 20, nos. 1-4.

Thomas, John L. 1983. Alternative America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Wilson, R. Jackson. 1977. “Experience and Utopia: The Making of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.” Journal of American Studies 11 (April): 45-60.