SOURCE: “Early Fictional Futures: Utopia, 1798-1864,” in America as Utopia, edited by Kenneth M. Roemer, Burt Franklin & Company, 1981, pp. 254-91.

The earliest utopian visions in and of America were of millennial expectations fulfilled: Columbus saw on the shores of the New World a stage upon which would be acted out Saint John's great prophetic drama; John Winthrop's “Citty on a Hill” was to be a society of godly men waiting for, and working to bring about, the final apocalyptic defeat of the forces of Satan; John Eliot's missionary work with the Indians (in his view the Lost Tribes of Israel. …) was an attempt to fulfill scriptural prophecies leading up to the Second Coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth; and the earliest speculative writings portraying spiritual and material progress were exclusively by men who saw America's manifest destiny in terms of a cosmic struggle between darkness and light culminating in a secular millennial age spreading from American to foreign shores.

Beginning in the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, American utopists turned from optimistic millennial speculation about America's future to severe criticism of the present situation. Expressing itself predominantly in satiric and antiutopian attacks, this critical attitude seems to have precluded any positive visions of what actually might have been done to improve matters.

EARLY PROGRESSIVE EUTOPIAS

Before this post-War of 1812 disillusion set in, however, two fictional eutopias made their appearance—Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin (1798) and James Reynolds's Equality—A Political Romance (1802).¹ Even though its appearance was considerably later, another work, David Stirrat's A Treatise on Political Economy (1824), should also be included in our discussion here; not only does it focus, like Equality, on economic paths to utopia, but it also represents a positive vision of a significantly early date.²

Although Alcuin represents an important break in American utopian writing with the millennial tradition, its progressive vision, like that of many subsequent works, no doubt owes much, at least indirectly, to the temporal millennial hopes encouraged by the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his followers. It is the complete secularization of utopia (for the first time really distinct from the Millennium). Equipped with a new “assumption that there exists a ‘natural order,’ the workings of which can be understood by man's reason,”³ men no longer have to allow utopia to happen to them; rather, they can now make utopia happen.

Differing in focus from most of the utopian visions preceding it, Alcuin stresses the use of the social sciences of economics and politics to effect the ideal society; scientific advances—Edwards's “contrivances and inventions,”—are never mentioned. This new focus is both necessary and logical in Alcuin, for it is primarily concerned with social issues—specifically, women's rights.

Modeled in form after Plato's dialogues, Alcuin hardly has a plot at all. At a series of soirées at the home of the widowed Mrs. Carter, Alcuin, an indigent school teacher, engages in a continuing debate with his hostess on the question of the proper place of women in American society. Touching on such subjects as women's rights to vote and hold property and their subjugation within marriage, Alcuin is an economic and political novel in that it focuses on power—in the marketplace, at the polls, and in the home.

After debating with Mrs. Carter throughout the entire first half of the book—her main argument against the conservative views of Alcuin being that mere sexual identification is no rational basis upon which to assign or take away rights—Alcuin visits (but only in his imagination) the Paradise of Women, a utopia created entirely in his own mind from the mortar and boards of Mrs. Carter's arguments. In his vision, the ubiquitous utopian guide shows him a society in which all citizens are treated as rational beings with a basic nature unaffected by gender; environment, not sex, determines aptitudes and prejudices. Marriage, however, does not exist; some other (never specified) arrangement takes care of procreation.

Alcuin illustrates an important aspect of the American character that will be stressed time and again in the utopian literature under discussion—the search for the practical. There is a tension between Alcuin's theoretical ideal society and Brown's belief that it can never really exist. In an act that certainly has a symbolic import, Alcuin travels to utopia only on the wings of fancy; Mrs. Carter's scorn for his Paradise plummets him back to earth. What Alcuin does, however, is give respectability to the imagination in the face of cold reason. When it comes time to change the world, Brown implies, we should imagine the best (even the most farfetched) and then let reason cut the image down to size. Rationality is not all: Both the logical arguments of Mrs. Carter and the fantasy utopia of Alcuin are ideally right—but not practically correct, because neither will work in the everyday world where the two of them are trapped.

Utopia for Charles Brockden Brown, then, is an imaginary land (a work of art) created by fancy feeding on reason—or vice versa; it is a land in which social changes can be tested by visualization; it is itself a means of persuasion, as it shows concretely the absurdity of present-day practices. Ready to be brought forth in time from the soil of the here-and-now, it is not a place to be reached by an outward journey to some distant land; rather, it is to be reached by an inward journey into man's mind.

James Reynolds's Equality—A Political Romance is the first fully developed fictional portrayal of utopia in America that utilizes from beginning to end the setting of a distant, mysterious land.⁴ Located in the allegorical “regions lately discovered by political philosophers” (p. 1), the island of Lithconia reveals to the nameless sailor who sojourns there numerous reforms, practices, and attitudes that will become common fare in later American utopian fiction. Equality, in other words, is a prototypical work—the grandfather, perhaps of Looking Backward. There is, however, in spite of the reprints published in 1847, 1863, and 1947, no evidence that it was actually read by any subsequent utopist.

As the title indicates, Equality portrays a society in which economic and social differences have been leveled or at least minimized—a society in which the citizens (all of whom dress alike and live in identical houses) lead outward lives cut from the same pattern. Because money and trade are prohibited, and the products of both field and factory are equitably distributed by law, there is no strife, poverty, or greed—in short, no unhappiness whatsoever. Human needs are reduced pretty much to the level of economics and—to ask a question implicitly posed by most modern, progressive utopias—if material needs are satisfied, can perfect bliss be far behind?

Equality is primarily a paean to the ability of man to make a better world for himself by controlling his own economic, political, and physical environment. Whereas in the work of the early millennialists God worked through man, in Reynolds's utopia men, having the necessary tools, work more or less alone. According to Lithconian history, “God delegated to man a certain power of directing the principal operations of nature on this globe of the earth”—that is, He furnished “the means of knowledge, whereby [man] may discover the road to happiness” (p. 16). The watch, in other words, now runs without the watchmaker in attendance. Interestingly enough, the only hint of a Fall (Lithconian history teaches that man's nature is not innately corrupt) is an early failure, because of a life of ease and abundance, to inquire sufficiently “into the operations of nature” (p. 17) in both the political and physical sciences. The Lithconians, however, were given a second chance to earn a kind of secular salvation and through eons managed to regenerate themselves by using reason to change man's temporal condition. Men thus finally learned that their happiness depended solely on how they themselves organized their communities; foolish and dangerous institutions such as private property, they discovered, needed to be, and could be, overthrown.

What the Lithconians learn is a fledgling lesson in bureaucracy, which, it would seem, they managed to pass on to their utopian and real-life descendants right down to the twentieth century—that nature's orderly and regular operations can be reduced to systems that, in turn, can control both machines and men. Not only do technological marvels abound, making work enjoyable by eliminating drudgery, but “order and regularity … worthy of being recorded for the instruction of our modern politicians” (p. 1) is what first impresses our narrator. The “whole country,” he notes, “has the appearance of one vast manufactory, conducted by one mind”—an “immense machine” that is “much more simple [that is, understandable and efficient] than any other form of government in the world” (p. 7).

Equality is especially noteworthy for being the first American utopia to portray in some detail the garden-city. With typical Jeffersonian bias, the Lithconians have abandoned “large towns, as in Europe” with their “concomitant” “evils, natural and moral” (p. 3). In what will become an increasingly typical attempt by American utopists to combine the best of pastoral and urban life, Reynolds has the Lithconians embrace the order and regularity of civilization and progress while still honoring the virtues of agrarianism. They build a city that is not really a city: “The whole island may be compared to a city spread over a large garden: not a spot can be seen but what is in a high state of cultivation” (p. 10).

This nostalgic-progressive tension—this desire for a new beginning as well as a return, a holdover from, and an extension of, early paradisiacal-millennial dreams associated with America⁵—will be evident, even dominant, in much of American utopian fiction throughout the nineteenth century. … It is, indeed, a theme seemingly inherent in the American experience itself: nature versus civilization—the natural desire to return to an Edenlike state of simplistic purity versus the cultural drive to “progress” to an “improved” state of grace earned by mastering, and imposing order on, the environment.

In light of Lyman Tower Sargent's assertion in “Capitalist Eutopias” that too frequently it has been erroneously assumed that utopias, as if by definition, uphold a socialist point of view, it should not be surprising that the early American eutopia most obviously designed to make capitalism work is almost completely unknown. The obscurity of David Stirrat's A Treatise on Political Economy (1824) is, in fact, ironic, for this thinly fictionalized tract speaks more directly to us today, in terms we still understand, than almost any other utopia.

In simplest terms, Stirrat proposes a kind of Works Progress Administration in order to bolster a sagging economy, assure the undertaking and completion of great public works, and provide adequately for those who cannot provide for themselves.

Recognizing early, as so many did not, that America is entering a new era when the economic ethic of rugged individualism will often prove irrelevant, Stirrat boldly faces the problem of how to maintain the prosperity the country has enjoyed from the beginning. Growing continually in area and population, America, he maintains, can no longer be a nation only of landowning yeomen. The history of the utopian society of Oceanus, visited in a dream, makes quite clear Stirrat's commitment to a mixed economy; at the very founding of the country, all men would have chosen farming as their profession had not the Governor advised them to divide themselves into farmers, manufacturers, and laborers—such an arrangement promising to be “more congenial for improvement and refinement” (p. 136). This vocational diversification—not unlike that suggested later on by George Tucker in A Voyage to the Moon (1827)—naturally led to a relatively complex economy, which, while containing a marvelous potential for a rich life for all, needs to be first understood and then mastered before its inherent benefits can be spread over the entire population instead of being concentrated in the hands of a few.

Although Stirrat's social conscience dictates that it is one's Christian duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves, it is a kind of self-interested altruism—“the interest of every individual is the interest of the whole” (p. 58)—that moves him to propose a plan suggestive in many ways of the New Deal. Aware that “the foundation of the wealth of all nations” (p. 43) is the increasing value—that is, the buying power—of the surplus labor, Stirrat recognizes that all men must have employment so that the “surplus produce” and the “surplus population” can be brought together. His solution to a stagnant economy is to have the government use the surplus produce to employ the surplus population in order to prosecute “useful national improvements” (p. 23) and “put in motion national industry” (p. 46).

The most impressive result of this national industry is the capital of Oceanus with its technological marvels. Set in the middle of a “green verdant carpet” with lakes, streams, and “shady bowers” (p. 13), yet arranged with “exact regularity” (p. 17)—an orderly, balanced mixture of domes and spires, gardens and baths—the city, like its prototype in Equality, renders that nostalgic-progressive tension symbolized by the settings of so many American utopias. Even so, the city is decidedly progressive; the garden images are basically elements of embroidery on a forward-looking fabric. Machines (hydraulics and steam engines) build and regulate the city and perform the mundane labor while men merely supervise.

As if a more efficient model of Reynolds's prototype, the government itself is the greatest machine. It alone has the power to undertake grand projects, such as uniting the Atlantic and Pacific, subduing the wilderness, and building canals and changing the courses of rivers. Most important, as the first American bureaucratic machine that openly approximates God as the dispenser of blessings (p. 94), it alone can organize, distribute, control—in short, regulate. Stirrat already knew what America would only partially learn, much later, that Adam Smith's “invisible hand” does not exist;⁶ government intervention is necessary at times to assure that “by regulation … all may have a share” (p. 93).

Although Stirrat's project would distribute the wealth of the country more evenly, it is definitely not intended to promote economic or social equality; rather, it aims at promoting what we would call equality of opportunity. Given the new, deviously complex economic forces of the time, it is vain to say “that man [can always] earn a living if he chooses to be industrious” (p. 73). Treatise is a capitalistic eutopia whose aim is to use the benefits of capitalism to raise the living standards of all. To say that every man has a right to the surplus produce is not to claim that some men may not rightfully become richer than others. Stirrat fully supports “the honest and industrious speculator” (p. 85) and finds “no fault with the division of property amongst individuals … that naturally has taken place in the various societies of man” (p. 148).

SATIRIC UTOPIAS

Few American millennialists or utopists prior to Stirrat seem to have lacked positive, progressive visions; few later utopists until after the half-century mark seem to have possessed them.⁷ If we wish to account for this dearth, we may point to an age of disillusionment and confusion—an age in which sectional contention and factionalism in general abounded to the extent that the survival of the Union itself was in doubt. It was also a time of shifting values and shifting power, of speculation and new, unconventional enterprise replacing plain, old-fashioned work, of wealth and status passing slowly but surely from one level of society to another. It was a time when Americans sensed, but did not really understand, that agrarianism was inevitably giving way to industrialism. It was, in short, a time in which many felt that the so-called golden age of the post-Revolutionary years—that very age eagerly looked forward to by the poet utopists such as Joel Barlow and, later, nostalgically recalled by Cooper—had been betrayed. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that most American utopists found fault with the existing state (always the easiest thing to do) rather than build ideal ones. One typical form that their writings took was the satiric utopia, a work, such as most of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, rendering a negative vision that indirectly presents an improved or ideal society by portraying an imaginary one as an absurd reflection of the author's own.

The tradition of the fantastic voyage—which was, of course, utilized earlier by Daniel Moore, Reynolds, and, to a lesser extent, Morgan—becomes especially popular in the first half of the century; it is as if American utopists have just discovered Gulliver's Travels, for every one of the satiric utopias we shall now consider is influenced to some extent, either in form or in content, by that work—Jonas Clopper's Fragments of the History of Bawlfredonia (1819), Adam Seaborn's Symzonia (1820), George Tucker's A Voyage to the Moon (1827), James Fenimore Cooper's The Monikins (1835), Timothy Savage's The Amazonian Republic (1842), and Elbert Perce's Gulliver Joi (1851).⁸

Of these satirical fantastic-voyage utopias, Jonas Clopper's Bawlfredonia has by far the least literary merit. Purportedly a portion of a longer chronicle of the early years of a previously unknown country in the East Indies, the work is full of such bombast and superficial allegory (Thomas Paine becomes Tom Anguish and the southern province of the country, Blackmoreland, is infamous for growing and exporting the noxious “stinkum weed”) that it soon begins to wear our patience.

As Vernon Louis Parrington, Jr., has pointed out, Clopper's history is concerned with “debunking tradition”⁹—specifically the tradition that the founding fathers of the Republic were all great and honorable men. Clopper, harking back to early millennial expectations, is certain that America has failed in its mission as God's instrument; irreligion and debauchery have replaced the virtues of early Puritan New England.

The slow drifting apart of God and His commonwealth has been due, according to Clopper, to “the impiety of our great men” (p. 24), and his most vicious satirical barbs are reserved for Jefferson, Paine, and the entire membership of the American Philosophical Society, all of whom are portrayed as being not only an irreligious lot but also drunkards and libertines.

Truly a negative vision, more than is the case with most other American satiric utopias, Bawlfredonia is more concerned with attacking the follies of the present (and their historical roots) than with indicating how men may create a better future.

By contrast, Adam Seaborn's¹⁰Symzonia, besides taking Swiftian broadsides at American society, renders a positive vision of an ideal state—albeit one in which the citizens are not quite human and whose virtues and institutions, therefore, seem only obliquely applicable to real men and women. Symzonia portrays an ideal society, on the underside of the earth's crust, in which the old Puritan virtues and the old Puritan practicality hold sway—although these have been filtered through the Enlightenment until they are little more than Doing Good and Being Useful.

Ruled by a Best Man and a Council of Worthies (comprising three classes, the Good, the Wise, and the Useful), the citizens of Symzonia reflect Seaborn's simplistic notion—one hauntingly and naively present in much of American utopian fiction—that if only men are right-minded, even potentially complicated matters, like government and economics, will somehow work themselves out properly; “purity of life, usefulness in society, and goodness of heart” (p. 125) are everything. At the root of America's problems, Seaborn believes, are the philosophers (representing everything abstract and impractical) “who have the control of the government” and who becloud the simple truth with arcane and dangerous theories. In Symzonia,

The community is not bewildered by a voluminous and complex system of political economy, consisting of abstract principles, buried in abstract and unintelligible words, and rendered too intricate to be understood by those who have common sense, or too inapplicable to civilized society to be adopted by those who have any sort of sense—invented by the Wise men of one country to mislead the politicians of another, and to depress the Good and the Useful. [pp. 160-61]

The Symzonians are nearly perfectly rational and hence, according to the logic of the book, nearly perfectly virtuous beings. More than the Lithconians and less than the Lunarians in George Fowler's A Flight to the Moon (1813)—an antiutopia to be discussed later—they represent the utopist tendency to dichotomize flesh and spirit: “The enjoyments of this refined people were intellectual and pure—not the debasing gratifications of animal passions and sensual appetites” (p. 182). Seaborn attributes this perfection to the Symzonians' “conformity to the law of their natures” (p. 176), thus seeming to hold out the hope that we may emulate them.

Upon witnessing the perfection around him, Captain Seaborn, like Gulliver in Houyhnhnmland, is tempted to make invidious comparisons between Symzonian and American societies. We are thus presented with direct attacks on cupidity in business, the accumulation of wealth, inequality of station, and complex political and economic systems.

Symzonia—part pure imaginary voyage, part satire, and part eutopia—is a hybrid work. Our discussion of it could just as easily have fallen under the heading (which I shall come to later) of progressive eutopias. Yet the author's obvious interest in casting Seaborn in the mold of Gulliver and his use of the fantastic voyage to show us a mirror image of ourselves seem to beg us to consider this work as a satiric utopia.

George Tucker's A Voyage to the Moon is more obviously a satiric utopia, even though it, too, in a relatively brief section, portrays an ideal state, the “Lunar Paradise” of Okalbia. The plot of Voyage is a simple one, in no really important way distinguishable from those of many other fantastic voyages. Joseph Atterley, cast up by a shipwreck on the shores of Burma and held prisoner by the Burmese, is befriended by a Brahmin priest. In a spacecraft utilizing the power of a chemical that is repulsed by the earth and attracted to the moon, Atterley and the Brahmin, who has made the journey before, visit the moon. Their subsequent adventures in various Lunarian countries, obviously derivative of Gulliver's, show that institutions and practices on the moon are merely reflections of absurdities on earth; some Lunarians, born without any “intellectual vigour” but “illuminated with the [shared] mental ray of some earthly brains,” have a sense of “understanding” that is divided between two beings whose “modes of thinking” necessarily conform (p. 38).

In episodes closer than any of those in other American satirical utopias—with the possible exception of Cooper's The Monikins—to matching the verve and cleverness of similar ones in Gulliver's Travels, Tucker sticks his rapier to a variety of earthly follies: the ostentatious display of wealth; grotesque “female fashions”; ridiculous and hypocritical religious practices; impractical inventions (applied science gone mad); irrational quarrels over whether agriculture or industry should be the basis for the national economy; and the poles of abstract philosophy not rooted in experience and empiricism carried to extremes.

It is only when Atterley and the Brahmin visit the isolated country of Okalbia that we have a chance to see a positive vision of Utopia Americana. While journeying to the moon, Atterley and the Brahmin discuss the cause of differences among the races. Because the Brahmin, echoing Tucker, believes that it is more “reasonable to impute the changes in national character to the mutable habits and institutions of man, than to nature, which is always the same” (p. 56), it is not surprising that we are presented with a utopia illustrating that rational, humane institutions will produce rational, humane citizens.

Like America, Okalbia, founded during a time of “religious fervour” (p. 185), is separated from the rest of the world (in this case by huge mountains); thus the Okalbians, who carry their isolation so far as to have no foreign intercourse except a tourist trade, are uncontaminated by the absurdities plaguing the other Lunarians.

The economy of Okalbia, unlike the economy of Stirrat's Oceanus, works itself out naturally, with a minimum of government intervention. First of all, population control—“the most important of all sciences” (p. 189)—holds the population at a level the land can ideally support; the control is left to “individual discretion” (p. 190). Second, the Okalbians have made sure that individual initiative in the economic sphere is interfered with as little as possible; one citizen—as in Stirrat's Treatise—may rise above another (although there are no privileged classes), for their “institutions have only tempered” ambition (p. 192), not done away with it. By means of equal distribution of land, they “tried first to preserve … equality; but finding it impracticable,” with typically good Okalbian sense, they abandoned it (p. 186). No problems arise, however, from the fact that not everyone owns land; nonlandowners happily cultivate someone else's soil or practice some “liberal or mechanical art” (p. 194).

Like most other American utopists, Tucker attempts to sketch in a more or less complete society. Thus, we find a number of other positive attributes that make Okalbia the “Happy Valley”: Newspapers contain only objective reporting; capital punishment has been outlawed; property qualifications for voting do not exist; women are “under few restraints” (p. 201), just to mention a few.

The American garden-city also makes its appearance in Voyage. Although cultivated verdure (as in almost all American utopias, there is no wilderness) and settlements are not homogeneously blended, the yearning to retain a sense of the pastoral is very strong. Atterley's first glimpse of Okalbia is of a “whole surface … like a garden, interspersed with patches of wood, clumps of trees, and houses standing singly or in groups”; off to the side, on the edge of a lake, is a town, the road to which is lined by “rows of trees” and paralleled by a “rivulet … bubbling along one side or the other” (p. 185).

While the satirical thrusts of Voyage are many, one of Tucker's main concerns is the absurdity of certain economic theories and practices prevalent in America. The main attack in this direction comes when Atterley visits a farm family where the husband and wife allegorically represent, in a quarrel over whether their daughters will work in the family garden or make their own clothes, the basic arguments in the American debate over the respective virtues of an agrarian versus an industrial economy. The absurdity, we are clearly shown, lies in the belief that either extreme position—rather than a commonsense middle ground—represents the most viable economic base for an America that is, Tucker feels, inevitably progressing from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban state.¹¹

James Fenimore Cooper's The Monikins, on the other hand, while allegorically satirizing many economic (as well as social and religious) absurdities, finally focuses on a political question: Who should rule? Although three-quarters of this utopian animal fable is devoted to presenting the protagonist's background and his adventures in Europe and in the kingdom of Leaphigh (England), we feel, at the end of our visits to these Swiftian lands, that the portrayal of life in the republic of Leaplow (Jacksonian America) should, because of its relevancy, command most of our attention. If, after all, the institutions of American republicanism contain such dangerous absurdities, the degeneration is doubly tragic, for America probably represents man's last chance to found a government devoid of the chicanery, dishonesty, ineptitude, and general foolishness of European monarchies and aristocracies.

Son of a self-made multimillionaire who believed that states exist solely for the protection of property, Gulliver-like John Goldencalf develops his own theory that only those who have a “stake in society” are fit to rule. In his attempt to gain an economic interest in all parts of the known world in order to make himself the most fit of all men to rule, he encounters a group of intelligent monkeys (the monikins) who have been enslaved as street performers and returns them to their native land of Leaphigh, a kingdom hidden behind a ring of ice in the region of the South Pole. After being rudely treated by these aristocratic monkeys, Goldencalf and his crew set sail for republican Leaplow, a country founded many years earlier by those fleeing Leaphigh and now representing, supposedly in all respects, everything antithetical to Leaphigh.

Although many faults—political, social, and religious—are found in republican Leaplow, The Monikins is not an antirepublican work. Quite the contrary; in the spirit of all relevant satire, we are asked to laugh at Leaplow's republican excesses so that we—Americans living in the Age of Jackson—may make amends. Goldencalf's “social stake” theory of government—whether embodied in English or Whiggish aristocracy—is debunked insofar as it demands a propertied ruling elite; all men (or monkeys), merely by being human (or monikinian), have a sufficient stake in society. The narrative interest of The Monikins, in fact, focuses on Goldencalf's gradual conversion from commercial aristocracy (as bad as, and similar to, the social aristocracy in Leaphigh/England) to republicanism.

There are, however, dangers inherent in republicanism—party politics, for instance. The perils of politics loom as large here as they do later in Timothy Savage's imaginary voyage to the land of the Amazons. Party politics is depicted as depending for its existence on a selfish disregard of principle. Before Goldencalf departs for home he is forced to contemplate the possible alternative to a Whiggish commercial aristocracy—a Democratic state of “political chaos” (p. 350). Later, the faults of republicanism will bulk even larger to Cooper; while The Monikins ends on a happy and generally hopeful note. The Crater, as we shall see, can only promise the apocalyptic destruction of republican America.

Timothy Savage's The Amazonian Republic, even though devoting much time to attacks on Jacksonian economic institutions and practices—bankruptcy laws, rampant speculation, and the new economic power of the masses—also focuses on the question of who will run the country.¹²

Savage, the probable author and implied narrator, discovers in Peru a remote Amazonian republic that embodies the political as well as the economic and social follies of America. The title of the work focuses our attention on its most important theme—the weaknesses of republicanism. That women govern is not the problem in the republic of Amazonia; the problem is that power is in the hands of officials who must prostitute themselves in order to win votes from the masses. Savage's thrust is clear: Universal suffrage—described as an excess of republicanism and “the greatest defect … in the [American] political constitution” (p. 157)—is responsible for sending uncultured, quarrelsome individuals to the legislature, where they have little to do but debate too much over matters that are essentially simple, pass superfluous laws to win the votes of their constituents, subvert the Constitution by stretching its meaning when convenient, and, through legislation designed primarily to keep themselves elected, encourage an unhealthy and dangerous dependence of the people on government.

Savage is a worried man voicing the objections of one side in an old quarrel when he speaks of the dangers of “vagabonds and ruffians” holding power over “those who have an interest in the country” (p. 157). This—the foundation of John Goldencalf's “social stake” theory—is the main fear of an American aristocracy of property living in the new age of Jacksonian democracy, an aristocracy that sees its power and position being eroded and feels its foundations being shaken by a social upheaval that it is unable either to understand or to accept.

While the main theme of The Amazonian Republic is anti-egalitarianism in politics, Savage's antagonism toward the rise of the common man does have an economic basis as well. What Savage fears as much as anything else is new money. The love of wealth—a “natural instinct” (p. 170) in republics, where gold and silver are fashioned into a new kind of social ladder—is “one of [America's] chiefest faults” (p. 163), says Savage. Money is worshiped, and men who wish to be admired must devote themselves entirely to acquiring property. Especially upsetting to Savage are the new ways of acquiring wealth, such as by declaring bankruptcy and speculating.

In spite of the author's concern with economic matters, however, The Amazonian Republic is a political rather than an economic utopia. The question indirectly addressed throughout this satirical work is not which economic system will lead to Utopia Americana, for, as in the case of many of the pre-Civil War utopias, capitalism is a given; rather, the question addressed is which political system will lead there. The answer is only partially indicated, and even then only in negative terms: Universal suffrage, if left unchecked, will probably lead to Dystopia Americana. What the alternative system might be (or how it could be implemented) is left in the vaguest of terms.

Elbert Perce's Gulliver Joi is certainly the least interesting and least important of this group of satiric utopias. While style makes Bawlfredonia tedious reading, that work at least renders the honest vitriol of a staunch anti-Jeffersonian, anti-deist, and dyed-in-the-wool conservative on many important matters both secular and religious. Gulliver Joi, on the other hand, in its satirizing of relatively minor aspects of American society, hardly seems to come to grips with major issues or with much of anything that would interest a reader today. After dressing his work in fantastic garb—a Merlin-like old magician-scientist on a small island in the middle of the ocean invents airships of various kinds to transport Gulliver to distant lands—Perce settles down to presenting pretty much the kind of utopia that Mrs. Trollope might have written in one of her more petulant and less inspired moods. Dealing almost entirely in social criticism, Gulliver Joi does not go beyond such things as castigating young women for hurrying into society and becoming old before their time.

Women, in fact—their place and behavior—occupy much of Perce's interest. In Ejario, for example, where Gulliver is largely responsible for returning the legitimate male ruler to the throne of a country disastrously ruled by usurping women, the deposed Amazon-like queen thanks Gulliver for putting her and the other ladies back in their proper places at home with their families.

Among other contemporary aspects of society that Perce attacks are slavery, imperialism, and crime in the streets; but these and other themes are taken up superficially, are dropped suddenly, and furnish no coherent pattern in this rather wild-eyed work.

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PROGRESSIVE EUTOPIAS: SECULAR, RELIGIOUS, AND HYBRID

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the main thrust of American utopian fiction during most of the first half of the nineteenth century was antiprogressive. But even while such negative visions held sway, a few noteworthy positive ones made their appearance—John Adolphus Etzler's The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men (1833), Mary Griffith's “Three Hundred Years Hence” (1836), and Sylvester Judd's Margaret (1845); these were followed in the next decade and a half by David A. Moore's The Age of Progress (1856); Alexander Lookup's three works, The Soldier of the People, Excelsior, and The Road Made Plain to Fortune for the Millions (all 1860); Calvin Blanchard's The Art of Real Pleasure (1860); and Thomas Low Nichols's Esperanza (1860).¹³

Of special importance is the fact that these eutopian visions, harking back to earlier ones near the turn of the century, prefigure what will become the mainstream of American utopian fiction. Consciously or unconsciously carrying on the millennialist tradition—both religious and secular—these inward utopias suggest that “the better life must be carved from out of the existing human conditions” and that “existing society must be transformed for man to live the good life.”¹⁴ They look forward to the fulfillment on the shores of the New World of the Biblical promise of an improved spiritual and material life on earth. Expanding and embellishing the edenic image of America—until in some instances the paradisiacal garden and the city of the New Jerusalem become one—and capturing once again the essential optimism of Brown, Reynolds, and Stirrat, these eutopists generally see science as one of the keys to the gate of Utopia Americana. In most of these works—the exceptions are Judd's and, to some extent, Moore's and Nichols's—Millennium has become Eutopia; the ideal state, even while trailing clouds of paradisiacal and millennial rhetoric behind it, has become almost entirely secular.

The first complete manifestation of the secular, progressive eutopian spirit after the eighteenth-century millennial visions of men like Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, and some of the Connecticut Wits, and the eutopian visions of Stirrat and Reynolds in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, is a work of nonfiction¹⁵ by a German immigrant who came to the New World to spread the gospel of science and build the garden-city of the New Jerusalem in the West. Divorced entirely from outright religious concerns, John Adolphus Etzler's The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men is a natural extension and development of the religious-become-secular faith in spiritual and material progress of the Joachim tradition.

More than merely a manual on the proposed application of technological speculation, Etzler's work is also a philosophic treatise; not content with gadgets (though there are plenty of those), Etzler sees himself not only as the inventor of mechanical marvels to make life easier, but even more important, as the creator of “a superior and more systematic order” of civilization (I: 62). What at first glance may seem to be only a grandiose version of Popular Mechanics turns out to be also a manual for the construction of utopia. Etzler is like a god who wishes to create a New Eden. The organization of the book, in fact, is indicative of this dual concern—invention and creation. The first volume discusses the harnessing of the powers of nature—the wind, the tides and the waves, sunlight, steam, falling water—and the resultant technological advances; the second volume details how such inventions can be economically feasible and how they can best be utilized to establish and run planned communities, suggestive of (and certainly influenced by) both the form and content of Fourier's phalanxes, where “a new state of society” will inevitably develop.

It is instructive to read Etzler after having read Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden, for he would use the machine to manipulate “Any wilderness, even the most hideous and the most sterile,” until it has been “converted into the most fertile and delightful [of] gardens” (I: 67). Etzler, in fact, goes about as far as one can in proposing a radical transformation of nature into art, for he goes on to propose the construction of covered aqueducts and canals, irrigated gardens, and “enchanting sceneries,” which will give “the relief of a paradise” in which one can glide on gondolas (I: 69). There would seem to be no more violent wrenching of nature into man's image in American literature. Etzler sees the wilderness—which he seems to equate with the West in general—as existing solely for man's use; it will furnish space for the American destiny to realize itself and also function as a safety valve for the bloody revolutions in Europe.

Etzler's evocation of the paradise of Genesis is different in kind from the evocations of most other utopists, who, as we have seen, hope to reach the future by returning to the past. Etzler hopes to reach the past by plunging headlong into the future. Embodying the progressive spirit at its highest point of intensity, he will not find paradise—he will make it. An inward utopist, he is convinced that he can “change the world into a most delightful paradise” (I: 60). Prepared as he is “to relinquish entirely all our customary notions of human wants” (I: 62), he will also change men into New Adams; earlier paradisiacal-millennial expectations are brought up to date by the proclamation that we “may henceforth cause a regeneration of mankind to a far superior kind of beings with superior enjoyments, knowledges and powers” (I: 118).

Mary Griffith's “Three Hundred Years Hence” seems to be the earliest work in which a Utopia Americana existing in the more or less distant future is reached by means of a dream. Edgar Hastings falls asleep and dreams—the reader does not learn until the end of the story, however, that it is only a dream—that an avalanche of ice and snow preserves him in slumber until he is discovered by his own descendants in the year 2135. He awakens to a world changed radically from that of the mid-nineteenth century: Women have assumed an equal status with men; science has made possible a neater, safer, more comfortable world; and society has finally adopted many of the sensible minor reforms that Mary Griffith evidently advocated, such as the elimination of dangerous steamboats, the education of orphan girls, the “cleansing” of literature, and the prohibition of dogs and loose livestock. The author makes it clear that this “new era,” as prim as a proper lady can make it, is due entirely to the improved status granted to women. Because they are, we are somehow not surprised to learn, higher-minded, more sensitive, and more humanitarian, they have dragged the rest of the country, the men, upward with them.

Stressing some of the same issues as Alcuin, “Three Hundred Years Hence” is, to a great extent, an economic novel, for it is of paramount importance that women are economically independent and “equal as to property” (p. 87). The work fits into a common pattern discerned by one student of American utopian fiction who has noted that American utopists have “commonly assume[d] marital unhappiness to be the effect of woman's financial dependence”; in “Three Hundred Years Hence” women have generally been made financially independent of their husbands, either by means of “the same competence” from the state as their husbands or by means of “the prevailing wage” for the duties they perform.¹⁶

Technology plays a relatively important part in Griffith's ideal society—as it will increasingly in later versions of Utopia Americana. As Hastings is taken on the standard tour by his utopian guide, he notes that “New wonders sprung [sic] up at every step—vessels, light as gossamer” (p. 46) and “curious vehicles that [move] by some internal machinery” (p. 33). Most important, as if Griffith is taking a cue from Etzler, the machine has found its way into the garden. Machines help the farmer by mowing, raking, and gathering hay; by threshing, storing, and grinding the grain, and even distributing it to the merchants. Machines also manipulate the landscape by uprooting trees, leveling hills and filling in gullies, and turning streams in their courses. Readers familiar with late-nineteenth-century utopian fiction will recognize here a prototype for many of the utopias discussed in Donald Burt's essay in Part III of this collection.

Two other pre-Civil War utopias that carry on the theme of science and technology as the key to utopia—David A. Moore's The Age of Progress and Calvin Blanchard's The Art of Real Pleasure—present diametrically opposed views of the place of religion in the ideal American society. Moore contends that Utopia Americana can be built only if science and religion work hand in hand; Blanchard vitriolically attacks all of “that mystical and moral savagery, our Puritan forefathers cursed America with” (p. 108) and proclaims that “the Good Time” can come only if scientific positivism completely replaces religious supernaturalism.

Blanchard's work is both confused and confusing. Almost plotless, it bespeaks the author's inability to explicate clearly his social and political theories, and his attempts to do so only make apparent the unsettled morass of half-digested ideas that passes for his mind. He bases his social theories on Fourierism and his political theories on Comte's positivism—and then treats both kinds of abstract constructs as if they are subject to the physical laws of the Newtonian universe as he dimly understands it!

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Real Pleasure is Blanchard's open advocation—an offshoot of his Fourieristic belief that men must be true to their nature—of complete sexual freedom. Because man has a nature that demands, among other pleasures, those of the flesh, he must have unlimited access to sexual intercourse.

Blanchard's importance as an American utopist, however, rests not only on his sexual theories but also on his positivistic vision of utopia—a state made possible by man's dedication to the understanding of the laws of nature and his harnessing of the powers therein in order to abolish the drudgery of work, transform America—especially the West—into something suggestive of Etzler's paradise, and, ultimately, enable him to live a life that actually becomes surfeited with pleasure. Like Etzler and Griffith, Blanchard carries on the tradition of the manipulated landscape and the controlled environment. “Palatial residences” (based on Fourier's phalanxes) spring up in the “semi-deserts” of the West, storms and volcanoes are controlled, and “marshes and deserts are [put] in a state of high cultivation” (p. 18).

Blanchard, who speaks of a world run by “majorityism” as “dreadful” (p. 44), has created one of the most undemocratic of American utopias. Reigning in “the Good Time” is an ostensibly benevolent dictatorship of “scientists and artists, whose business it is to discover the best solutions” to problems such as “who will reproduce or what the people will wear” (p. 50). Blanchard, however, assures us, in positivistic fashion, that his social organization is devoid of any real totalitarian threat: “The masses follow the leaders, as inevitably as the planets revolve around the sun's centre” (p. 61); after all, a “reciprocalness of interests” means that the people “know [that their leaders] cannot betray them” (p. 47). The leaders, in turn, in their omniscient benevolence, not only make it “impossible for the people to do wrong” (pp. 49-50) but also make sure that all citizens of Eutopia experience the utmost happiness and pleasure.

Not every progressive utopian work of the time, however, was as secular as Blanchard's and Etzler's. David A. Moore's The Age of Progress, for example, a series of four dreams projecting us 2,000 to 3,000 years into a perfected future, has as one of its themes the belief that “true Science is a ladder which reaches to heaven; and faithfully pursued, it can lead only in that direction” (p. 33). This intimate linking actually makes of science a means of grace. Moore, in fact, always subordinates science's secular applications to its religious and moral ones. While carefully delineating science's relative importance in aiding man's progressive journey from the imperfect but promising nineteenth century to “a glorious harvest of Progress in the Future” (p. 215), he is careful to emphasize that the road to utopia begins at Moral Education; only then, with no shortcuts, does it pass through Good Character, the Study of Books, the Study of the Bible, and, finally, the Study of Nature where the secrets of power lie.

Moore's work, however, does not imply that heaven on earth—in either a religious or a secular sense—can be achieved without spiritual and physical struggles. Although showing the same spirit that enabled Samuel Hopkins and others to proclaim confidently that “knowledge, mental light, and holiness, are inseparably connected,”¹⁷Progress also pays tribute to the image of Armageddon. Harking back to earlier millennialists who saw much darkness before the Dawn, Moore—evidently a reader of current millennial literature—picked up the common feeling of the times that violence and revolution would be requisite to bring about the Millennium. Although an evolutionary process will help, natural development will not suffice to rid the world of its evils.

Keeping in mind both the full title of this work—The Age of Progress; or, A Panorama of Time. In Four Visions—and the fact that its “plot” encompasses the final apocalyptic battle in which the forces of Satan are “defeated and driven … from the earth” (p. 12), we find it instructive to discover the following passage in an 1853 issue of Presbyterian Quarterly Review:

When the visions of the far distant future pass before the ancient seers like panoramic processions, almost invariably scenes of terror and desolation, falling dynasties and crumbling thrones are precursive of the glorious close. Along the strings of the harp of prophecy swept by the Almighty, there is a wail almost like agony, preceding the Hallelujah of consummation. These views do not accord with the usual tone of uninspired prophecy that peals out perpetually from the press, grounded on the wonderful physical and mechanical triumphs of these last days.¹⁸

We are witnessing a backward glance in history, not only to the apocalyptic theories of the Jews, which “envisioned a final battle between the armies of God and those of the enemies of the chosen people,”¹⁹ but also to their spiritual heirs, the Puritans, who frequently used the language of war to describe the cosmic struggle between God and Satan. In this way, then, Progress is primitive as well as progressive; not supernatural in the way to which Hopkins objected, Progress yet portrays the necessity of heaven's intervention in man's affairs. The line between temporality and spirituality is finely drawn—as is the boundary between Millennium and Eutopia.

The Age of Progress illustrates so well the two central themes of this and my previous essay in this volume that it could pass for a classroom illustration written according to formula. First of all, its amalgamation of religious and secular concerns renders the slow and subtle historical merging of Augustine's City of God and City of Man until there exists a new entity, the City of Godly Man—a city in which the Joachim tradition can, and does, thrive. Second, its fusion of paradisiacal and millennial images—its first vision is of a “state analogous to that of our primitive Parents in Eden” (p. 11), its last of “SATAN, with all his Legions, [being] shut up in the prison of HELL, to remain forever” (p. 13)—makes it a logical sequel to Columbus's vision.

If there is one image that links early American utopian literature with what came later, it is that of the garden-city, that paradoxical amalgam of progress and nostalgia which represents the American psyche's timid longing for the future with vestiges of the past still clinging to it. To leap into the future by stepping into the past has long been part of the American Dream, and building the New Jerusalem in the Garden of Eden has seemed a good way to realize this dream. From James Reynolds's “city spread over a large garden” (p. 10), through Etzler's fantastic palaces in man-made Edens in the West, to the myriad garden-cities in late-nineteenth-century utopian works, American utopian literature abounds with “scientific paradise[s] modified by beautiful parks and gardens.”²⁰

The Age of Progress contains the quintessential image of this complex paradisiacal-millennial urge. As in so many other utopian works, the protagonist is given a bird's-eye view of Utopia Americana, enabling him to see “one continuous, interminable city” with “every area of ground … covered with verdure” (p. 20). Not content with placing gardens in the city, however, Moore is compelled to go even farther in revealing that the fruits of the Millennium will be brought forth in an urban context; in the “GARDEN of the NEW EDEN” he places “the earthly TEMPLE of the ALMIGHTY” (pp. 30-31)—a temple whose walls have the “appearance of massive glass” and whose “domes and spires … and towers and collonades” nearly touch the clouds (pp. 28-29). This is the Holy City of Augustine come down to earth. No longer, in fact, do the two cities of God and Man exist in parallel; they have merged. The City of Godly Man has sprung up in the New Eden of the New World; the cycle of history has been completed with the advent of the Millennium; the end is like the beginning; Revelation and Genesis have been linked.

Sylvester Judd's long and often tedious novel Margaret shows us Utopia Americana through Emerson's transparent eyeball, the key to earthly perfection being transcendental knowledge, especially as it operates through Unitarianism. Margaret, differing in emphasis from most other utopias in that it focuses on the individual instead of on the state, proposes that the transformation of society into heaven on earth cannot take place until all men as individuals have accepted the long-buried truth of Christ—that they in themselves have worth and potential as children of God. In the process of accepting this truth, they must reject “the ridiculous enginery of God's wrath and eternal damnation” (p. 424).

The bulk of the work traces the spiritual growth into a state of true Christianity of Margaret, a young New England girl born into poverty and ignorance. The last section of Margaret illustrates how the love of Christ and a clear, simple, intuitive knowledge of His teachings, working through the agency of Margaret and her husband, transform the community of Livingston into an ideal Christian society.

Love—physical as well as spiritual—is all. Margaret's husband, who, along with Margaret, represents the kind of hero figure who frequently leads Americans into utopia, teaches her that “the Fall, consist[ed] in this, that men ceased to love” (p. 249) and thus to know how to govern themselves properly. The formalized social, moral, and religious systems—the intellectual residue of the centuries—used by most men as a basis for their communities make it difficult to establish an original relationship with the world. Such a relationship can be established only when men learn to love, when unnatural, man-made laws give way to natural, God-originating love—a transformation symbolized near the end of the book by the erection of a statue “representing Moses kneeling to Christ and surrendering the Book of the Hebrew Code” (p. 457). Old law is thus replaced by new love.

As with other utopian works that fall directly in the millennial tradition, Margaret portrays America as the place intended by God to give man a fresh start. Although it is clear to Judd that so far New England, having succumbed to the debased and corrupt teachings of Calvin and Wesley, has failed in its mission of establishing the Millennial Age, hope for the future lies in those who, like Margaret, know that men “are ever-living as the Divinity himself” (p. 243). Being new Adams because “our ancestors were very considerably cleansed by the dashing waters of the Atlantic” (p. 266), we have every right to expect the road to the Millennium to begin eventually in New England. As Margaret's husband puts it,

“I think [New Englanders] might lead the August Procession of the race to Human Perfectibility; that here might be revealed the Coming of the Day of the Lord, wherein the old Heavens of sin and error should be dissolved, and a New Heavens and New Earth should be established, wherein dwelleth righteousness.” [p. 268]

Although Margaret is a progressive eutopia and “modern” in its view of human potential, science and technology are not of major importance in establishing Utopia Americana. Judd is primarily interested in spiritual, not material, progress. In the tradition of transcendentalism, however, spiritual progress is reflected in material progress in the form of a better life for everyone: “High calculation [science], which is only the symbol of a higher Moral Sense, is even now at work; and they are ripping up the earth for a Canal from Worchester to Providence; and what shall next be done, who knows” (pp. 268-69). It is a natural progression—from Idea to Act—which Emerson and Thoreau would approve, though they might not approve of the specific application. As it turns out, however, Judd does not dwell much on specific applications; we learn only that “Waste lands have been redeemed; sundry improvements in agriculture and mechanical arts adopted, whereby at once is a saving, and a profit” (pp. 443-44) and that the roads are the best in the state. The focus instead is on moral improvements, and in this respect Margaret deviates from most other progressive eutopias. The deviation, though, is one of emphasis, not exclusion. In all progressive eutopias written in America (and in this they take their cue from the early millennial tracts and sermons), moral improvement and technological advances leading to material abundance are linked by a cause-effect relationship—though which is the cause and which the effect is not always made clear.

Alexander Lookup's three chaotic, illiterate utopian works—two allegorical closet dramas in the supposed style of Shakespeare, Excelsior and The Soldier of the People, and a dramatic (though essentially nonfictional) monologue, The Road Made Plain to Fortune for the Millions—share with The Age of Progress the distinction of being the most millennial of all fictional American utopian visions.

Lookup must be thought of paradoxically as a religious writer with essentially secular concerns: He fully utilizes the millennial and paradisiacal language that evidently was part and parcel of his own intellectual background to translate religious allegory into historical events that focus on “Humanity's prime era” (Excelsior, p. 60); and his complaint that all governments “postpone [the Kingdom of God] to another existence” (Road, p. 6) shows that his sense of priorities places the earthly present over the heavenly future.

As in The Age of Progress, there is no distinct boundary between Eutopia and the Millennium; Utopia Americana, ultimately extending itself throughout the world, is Biblical prophecy coming true in a way in which no one supposed. Most important, apocalyptic events can be triggered by human action; “the enlightened future” is easily attainable once the “Sovereign people” transcend what only seems to be reality and realize that “heaven is perpetually about them” (Soldier, pp. 16, 32). The ideal state can then be brought about by mere acclamation. All that is needed is for all men to determine at once not to abide by the old rules and be led astray by the deliberate distractions—“furious wars, intrigues, and elections”—of the “Tyrants and Pharisees.” Immediately, Enlightened Law—God's great plan—will descend and ravish “all the earth” (Road, pp. 32, 57, 29), “magnetically elevat[ing], raptur[ing] and unit[ing]” all men (Soldier, p. 16) according to a “perfectly heavenly pattern” (Road, p. 29) intuitively available. This rule of Enlightened Law is the literal meaning of the allegory of the millennial reign of Christ; “Enlightment,” says Lookup, “… is the New Messiah” (Soldier, p. 17), the “Son of Man” coming to rule the earth during the Millennium (Road, p. 55). As anxious as was Samuel Hopkins to encourage millennial expectations divorced from supernaturalism, Lookup confidently proclaims that the prophesied reign of Christ on earth will be in spirit, not in flesh; there will be a momentous change in the way men think and feel about themselves and their institutions. Once Enlightened Law has been inaugurated—an act likened to “the White Horse of Revelations” (Road, p. 18)—the further prophecies of Saint John will be fulfilled; “the New Jerusalem [will descend] from God out of Heaven,” and all “Tyrants and Pharisees” will be brought to justice and removed from power—an “obscurity” allegorically equated to “the lake of fire and brimstone of the Scriptures” (Road, pp. 93, 57).

Whereas previous utopists have attacked particular aspects of contemporary society—Savage, for example, the influence of political parties, and Blanchard the hindrance of religion to progressive thinking—Lookup is the first to attack the entire social-political-economic system. The problem with America is not that any particular interest group has temporarily achieved extraordinary influence, but that everyone in power is corrupt and in league to squeeze the blood out of the common man; “Caesars and Saints [are] in collusion” (Soldier, p. 20).

Lookup's three utopian works, in fact, are certainly among the earliest documents to put forth the conspiracy theory of American politics. Not only have “tyrants … converted the direct resources for Paradise to their own purposes,” but they have also deliberately interfered with the functioning of the “natural straightforward Enlightened Law of God” (Road, pp. 21, 28) which, if allowed to operate without interference, would obviously spread the blessings of this potential paradise among all men. The symbolic Armageddon in these works is, in fact, the culmination of the battle between the Enlightened Law of God and the “inventions” of the “Pharisaic confederates of the Prince of Darkness” (Road, pp. 5-6). This battle—emphatically nonviolent, culminating in victory by an acclamation of the people—will have the result that each man, previously victimized by “tax grinding courts” (Soldier, p. 19), will become his own landlord, an event symbolically representing “the angel with the seals, chaining down asperant Lucifer in the Bottomless Pit of his own iniquitous invention” (Road, p. 176).

Lookup, like Stirrat, is one of the strongest advocates of capitalism among American utopists and certainly the strongest advocate of rugged individualism. A lack of property, he says, is responsible for all crime; when men have no stake in society, they will attack it. His aim is to see that “the middle class” and the “mechanics and laborers” enjoy the fruits of capitalism (Road, p. 16), not just the “cutthroats of trade, business and population” (Soldier, p. 83)—to see that capital is circulated among all men to stimulate manufacturing. After all, “whatever will realize a countless harvest of cash customers is the desideratum before all else” (Road, p. 147).

Certainly the least readable of all American utopias—some passages literally defy all principles of English syntax—these works are, at the same time, among the richest of documents in the tradition of American millennial-utopian literature. Lookup, like so many before him, steps backward to the beginning of time as he steps forward to the end of time; his “Diamond America” (Excelsior, p. 84) is a Jeffersonian eutopia of small landowners—a nostalgic return to an economic Eden, a place-time before things got complicated. Not only does the establishment of Enlightened Law cause “the New Jerusalem [to descend] from God out of Heaven,” but also “inaugurates a Western Hesperides, or Garden of Eden in every country” (Road, pp. 93, 65). Echoing the utopist Connecticut Wits, Lookup predicts that under Enlightened Law America will “[merge] the nations in a glorious republic of the globe” (Road, p. 20). Thus Lookup, perhaps unknowingly, reiterates the vision of Columbus and the related sense of manifest destiny that has been part of the Anglo-American intellectual baggage for centuries.

Even though the apparent themes of Thomas Low Nichols's Esperanza (1860) are myriad (eugenics and human sexuality, a modified Fourierism, individual rights and freedom—especially of women—in a patterned and controlled society, the economics of selflessness, and Spiritualism), its main focus, too, is on the vision of Columbus.

The novel takes us down a tributary of the Mississippi River to a “Land of Promise in the Far West” (p. 7), where a group of devotees have founded a harmonist community isolated from the world's influence until it can change the world and merge the nations into Nichols's version of a glorious kingdom of heaven on earth. Like Samuel Hopkins, Nichols is concerned with historicizing this kingdom and debunking any suggestions that it will be supernatural in origin and primarily spiritual in essence; he, in fact, repeatedly makes it clear that the coming paradise will be an earthly one brought about through the efforts of men and women, working within a Fourieristic system of harmony and brotherhood, to change the world around them. Although the pattern of this system has descended from heaven (pp. 128-29) and although aid is given by “angel friends, in the land of Spirit life” (p. 311) who “retain [their] sympathetic connection with the human race” (p. 323), Esperanza is constantly held up as the prototype of a world-wide community that will arise in the here-and-now of the future and fulfill the prophecies of Saint John. There is “a whole planet to be transformed” (p. 123). “Earth [is] our home,” proclaims one of the members of the community; men have foolishly “grow[n] faithless of [the Millennium's] possibility on earth” and “have either prayed without faith, or looked forward to some mystical and illy [sic] conceived millennium” (p. 64). The spirit of Christ, not Christ himself, will reign on earth because of the sacrifices and industry of a select few who have banded together. Nowhere in American utopian fiction are the visions of Augustine and Joachim more directly opposed.

Through all of this, of course, peeps the specter of America's manifest destiny to be the beacon to the world. As strongly as in Margaret (though not so regionally chauvinistic), the city-on-a-hill syndrome is clearly evidenced: “It has been our high mission to show mankind the possibility of a harmonic society, free from all the cares, discords, and miseries of civilization” (p. 131).

The clearest of all points, of course, is that because man “has the power of making his own conditions, and therein is the possibility of his destiny” (p. 232), temporal progress is possible. Temporal progress is, in fact, not only possible, but ordained by God, for “the divine energy that resides in humanity, struggling ever upward to light and life, [is the only thing] that has prevented the utter depravation and annihilation of the race” (p. 194).

Finally, it is clear also that progress means setting the Millennium in the New Jerusalem, not in the Garden of Eden; nostalgic dreams may dictate where it all begins—in “this truly Arcadian scene” (p. 117)—but, in spite of the surface agrarian bias, not where it ends. “All art,” says our narrator, “seems to me the expression of hope, or aspiration, of an idealization which looks forward into the future of our destiny, rather than back into the past” (p. 236). The complex Fourieristic phalanstery; the bureaucracy inherent in family planning; the emphasis on the cultural and spiritual benefits of opera, ballet, painting, and music; the deliberate cultivation of intellect and taste; and the continual paeans to organizational and social principles that are (paradoxically) both organic and mathematical—a “beautiful and perfect order” like “the controlling forces of the planetary systems” (p. 286)—all these foreshadow a life fully realized only in the complexity of the city.

A SUMMARY

The early years of American utopian fiction—from the appearance of Joseph Morgan's The History of the Kingdom of Basaruah in 1715 to what may be a rather arbitrary cutoff point near the end of the Civil War—divides into three periods, which somewhat overlap. During the first, a period of optimism in utopian thought lasting roughly a century, most American utopists, inspired by expectations of a millennial period in the New World and by faith in the saving grace of God, created imaginary ideal societies along essentially religious lines; they portrayed a religious utopia as accessible to all, either an otherworldly one (Heaven) after death for those who truly strove to reach it or a thisworldly one during the millennial reign of Christ on earth.

As the ideas of the Enlightenment struggled successfully for a place alongside the tenets of Calvinism, fictional portrayals of the fulfillment of Saint John's prophecies took on a more temporal nature as some utopists, motivated primarily by confidence in the survival of the Republic, pictured the Millennium not only as a period of prosperity for the church but also as one of ease and material abundance for America. This emphasis on earthly progress was not long in producing what can be called the first “modern,” progressive eutopias—that is, works showing man in control of his own destiny. From mere hints at the potential of scientific and technological progress in the essentially religious An Account of Count D’Artois and His Friend's Passage to the Moon it was only a few short steps to detailed portrayals, by the Connecticut Wits and others, of an America (and, ultimately, a world) transformed into a progressive paradise in which the spirit of Christ descended not only to change men's hearts, but also to build cross-country canals and tame the West. Near the turn of the century, this developing temporal utopian spirit finally manifested itself in works wholly devoted to proclaiming man as the maker of his own world—Alcuin and Equality.

Shortly after the conclusion of the War of 1812, a four-decade period of national disillusionment and confusion set in. Sectional strife, factionalism, and a general social unrest generated by expanded suffrage and concomitant shifting economic and social prestige led many Americans to lose what had been, during the early days of the Republic, faith in the future of their country. By 1825 the “heady nationalism of the immediate postwar years had broken down … into sectional contention. The idealism of Jefferson had now become a self-interested struggle for wealth; the old dependence upon Europe, a new and aggressive form of isolation.”²¹ By 1836 a French observer of the American scene could write that the “American system no longer works well” and could fear for the preservation of the Union.²² Some men who saw the need for an offensive against what they believed to be dangerous social, economic, and political forces in Jacksonian America took to creating imaginary societies that were absurd reflections of the one they saw around them. Many of these works, as we have seen, manifested both a general lack of faith in human potential to perfect, or even drastically improve, the world and a specific lack of faith in the common man—that very creature usurping, in the market place and at the polls, the rights and privileges traditionally held by his betters.

Whereas the main concern of utopists of the late nineteenth century would be the economic reconstruction of American society, the main one of those of the Age of Jackson was political reconstruction. Most American utopists, in attempts to confront the problem most often singled out as the most serious—the political and social leveling inherent in Jacksonian democracy—were content to emphasize the limitations of the masses who threatened to overrun things. There were exceptions, of course, in this general pattern of pessimism; we therefore must speak of these periods as overlapping one another. Stirrat, Griffith, and Judd, for example, during these years saw great potential in man; even such satirists as Adam Seaborn and George Tucker, in the midst of rendering America's and man's follies, briefly depicted the ideal society America might become.

Near the middle of the century a third period began as these few earlier hopeful visions of Jacksonian utopists were reaffirmed in a series of works produced during the decade and a half prior to the end of the Civil War. Science and technology especially seemed to be the keys to utopia—whether entirely divorced from the supernaturalism of religion or merely accepted as a tool given man by God to be used in good faith. The headwaters of the scientific-utopian stream which flowed out fully developed from Equality, in which God was reported as having given man reason and the fruits thereof in order for him to reshape his environment, split into two streams somewhere along the way. One led through Etzler's completely secular realm to Blanchard's positivistic utopia; the other, through Griffith's pious society and Judd's transcendentally revitalized community, to Moore's scientific New Jerusalem and Nichols's isolated society watched over by heaven's angelic representatives.

The millennial image of the New Jerusalem, in fact, became, more and more, the utopian image of progress—the technologically and culturally rich city. Though not without some sense of the dangers of industrialization and urbanization and not without a great deal of nostalgic backward-looking at the imagined pastoral simplicity of America's supposed golden age, American utopists from Reynolds and Stirrat to Moore, Blanchard, and Lookup happily embraced the kind of progress necessarily embodied in the city; for most, however, it was a garden-city, looking forward to the many nostalgic-progressive garden-metropolises of later utopias.

In almost all of these early works, there is, as we have seen, the sense—many times explicit, sometimes implicit—of America as the stage upon which God has chosen to act out the final (or the advanced) stages of his great drama. Whether this nation is thought of as fulfilling its duty or as failing to perform up to its potential, the feeling is always present that upon America's shores the fruits of the Millennium will, or at least should, come forth, whether spiritual or material, or (more likely) both. Utopia Americana has a worldwide, even cosmic, role to play and is waiting anxiously in the wings.

Notes

1. Charles Brockden Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue (New York: T. & J. Swords, 1798). The second dialogue—parts three and four—was published posthumously in William Dunlap's The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the Rarest of His Printed Works, from his Original Letters, and from His Manuscripts Before Unpublished, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815), I:71-105; reprint of complete work, with an afterword by Lee R. Edwards (New York: Grossman, 1971); [James Reynolds], Equality—A Political Romance (first published in eight installments in The Temple of Reason, 1802). Page references to these, and to all subsequent primary sources, will appear in parentheses within the text.

2. [David Stirrat], A Treatise on Political Economy; … (Baltimore: n.p., 1824).

3. Martin G. Plattel, Utopian and Critical Thinking (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1972), p. 32.

4. Daniel Moore's An Account of Count D’Artois and His Friend's Passage to the Moon (1785), discussed in the preceding essay, “From Millennium to Utopia Americana,” neither qualifies as a fully developed utopia nor has as its entire setting the imaginary lunar society.

5. For an incisive discussion of this paradoxical progressive-regressive urge, see the first three chapters of Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), pp. 1-55.

6. It is possible to view Treatise as a direct response to Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), especially in light of Stirrat's use of the phrase “the foundation of the wealth of all nations” (p. 43).

7. This shift from the term millennialist to utopist is a calculated one; it denotes a shift from primarily religious visions to primarily secular ones—a shift in emphasis, in other words, from God to man, from primary causes to secondary ones.

8. Jonas Clopper [Herman Thwackius], Fragments of the History of Bawlfredonia: Containing an Account of the Discovery and Settlement, of that Great Southern Continent; and of the Formation and Progress of the Bawlfredonian Commonwealth ([Maryland]: American Booksellers, 1819) Capt. Adam Seaborn (pseud.), Symzonia; A Voyage of Discovery (New York: J. Seymour, 1820); George Tucker [Joseph Atterley], A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science, and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians (New York: Elam Bliss, 1827); [James Fenimore Cooper], The Monikins, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1835); Timothy Savage (pseud.?), The Amazonian Republic, Recently Discovered in the Interior of Peru (New York: Samuel Colman, 1842); Elbert Perce, Gulliver Joi: His Three Voyages; Being an Account of His Marvelous Adventures in Kailoo, Hydrogenia and Ejario (New York: Charles Scribner, 1851).

9. Vernon L. Parrington, Jr., American Dreams: A Study of American Utopias (Providence: Brown University Press, 1947), p. 13.

10. See R. D. Mullen, “The Authorship of Symzonia,” Science-Fiction Studies, 3 (March 1976), 98-99. Mullen undermines the assumption that John Cleves Symmes wrote Symzonia.

11. This sense of America progressing from a rural-centered to an urban-centered economic and cultural base is the main theme of Tucker's Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in Fifty Years as Exhibited by the Decennial Census from 1790-1840 (New York: Press of Hunt's Merchant's Magazine; Boston: Little, Brown, 1843). The “town population,” says Tucker, not only determines a country's “capacity for manufactures” but also “marks the progress of intelligence.”

12. In this discussion of The Amazonian Republic I have borrowed heavily from my introduction to the Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints edition.

13. J[ohn] A[dolphus] Etzler, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery. An Address to All Intelligent Men, 2 vols. (Pittsburgh: Etzler & Reinhold, 1833); [Mary Griffith], “Three Hundred Years Hence” in Camperdown; or, News from Our Neighborhood: Being Sketches, by the Author of “Our Neighborhood,” &c. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836), pp. 9-92; [Sylvester Judd], Margaret, A Tale of the Real and the Ideal, Blight and Bloom: Including Sketches of a Place Not Before Described, Called Mons Christi (Boston: Jordan & Wiley, 1845), David A. Moore, The Age of Progress; or, A Panorama of Time. In Four Visions (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1856); [Thomas Low Nichols], Esperanza; My Journey Thither and What I Found There (Cincinnati: Valentine Nicholson, 1860); Alexander Lookup (pseud.?), Excelsior; or, The Heir Apparent. … (New York and London: Kennedy, 1860); idem, The Soldier of the People; or The World's Deliverer. A Romance (New York and London: Kennedy, 1860); idem, The Road Made Plain to Fortune for the Millions: or, The Popular Pioneer to Universal Prosperity (New York and London: Kennedy, 1860); [Calvin Blanchard], The Art of Real Pleasure: That New Pleasure, for Which an Imperial Reward Was Offered (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1864).

14. Harold V. Rhodes, Utopia in American Political Thought (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1967), p. 20.

15. Etzler, Paradise. The grounds upon which I have elected to include this nonfictional work in a discussion of utopian fiction are many; its more or less total view of an improved society, for example, and its secular millennial vision are only two. In 1977 Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints issued a facsimile edition of Etzler's collected works, with an introduction by me. The definitive study of Etzler is an unpublished dissertation by Patrick Ronald Brostowin, “John Adolphus Etzler: Scientific-Utopian During the 1830’s and 1840’s,” New York University, 1969.

16. Margaret Thal-Larsen, “Political and Economic Ideas in American Utopian Fiction, 1868-1914,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1941, p. 215. Financial independence is given partial credit for women's having obtained equal rights in Jane Sophia Appleton's “Sequel to the ‘Vision of Bangor in the Twentieth Century,’” in Voices from the Kenduskea (Bangor, 1848). Its companion piece, Edward Kent's “A Vision of Bangor, in the Twentieth Century,” had reduced women's rights to an absurd, abstract theory unable to stand the test of reality.

17. Samuel Hopkins, A Treatise on the Millennium. Showing from Scripture Prophecy, That It Is Yet to Come; When It Will Come; In What It Will Consist; Events Which Are first to Take Place, Introductory to It (Boston: Isaiah Thomas & Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793).

18. “Laws of Progress,” Presbyterian Quarterly Review, 2 (December 1853), 433; quoted in Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 78.

19. Tuveson, Redeemer, p. 2.

20. Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), p. 186. Although Sanford's description is of the Boston of Looking Backward, it can apply equally well to many other fictional utopian cities of the time.

21. Charles M. Wiltse, The New Nation, 1800-1845 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1961), p. 76.

22. Michael Chevalier, Society, Manners and Politics in the United States: Being a Series of Letters on North America, ed. T. G. Bradford (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1839), p. 394.