an american utopia and its global audiences: transnational perspectives on edward bellamy’s...

7/29/2019 An American Utopia and Its Global Audiences: Transnational Perspectives on Edward Bellamys Looking Backward*

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An American Utopia and Its Global Audiences: Transnational

Perspectives on Edward Bellamys Looking Backward*

CARL J. GUARNERI

Looking Backward, Edward Bellamys socialist utopia of 1888, has been celebrated as an

American bestseller and has been extensively analyzed in relation to late nineteenth-

century American culture and society.1

Much less discussed, although well documented,

is the fact that Bellamys novel enjoyed a huge success beyond Americas borders.

WhileLooking Backwardtook its final shape as a romance of the ideal nation, Bellamy

intended it as a romance of an ideal world (Bellamy Speaks 200). Because global

readers were able to separate the books message from its American origins,Looking

Backwardbecame an international sensation. It sold more than half a million copies in

the United States in its first two decades, a quarter million in England, and perhaps two

million elsewhere. Translated into many languages, it appeared, often in multiple

editions, throughout Europe, in Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and even Japan

(Bowman, Year 2000, 121). Thousands of readers in these places testified that Bellamys

utopia changed their lives, and leaders of many social and political movements credited it

with spreading their doctrines successfully. In 1935, when they were asked to name the

ten most influential books worldwide of the previous fifty years, the philosopher John

Dewey and historian Charles Beard placedLooking Backwardsecond only to MarxsDas

Kapital. (Sadler 553) If an analogous survey were taken in Britain or Germany, the

results would probably have been similar.


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Little about Edward Bellamys biography beforeLooking Backwardpresaged

such global influence.2

Sickly, introspective, and bookish, Bellamy grew up in an

established middle-class household in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts and spent most of

his adult life within walking distance of it. Many commentators have detected strains of

nostalgic anti-urbanism in this village utopian; fewer have noticed that Bellamys

village became an industrial city during his youth and that Bellamy hungrily absorbed

worldly ideas and information from his travels to Boston, New York, and Germany.3

Ambition, curiosity, and a lifelong habit of detachment made Bellamy a cosmopolitan

even in his provincial location. After a year of college Bellamy spent the winter of 1867-

68 in Dresden, which introduced him to European urban life. In 1871 he took a job as a

reporter for the New YorkEvening Post, where he filed stories about Tammany Hall and

striking workers and met veterans of the antebellum Fourierist movement. When

Bellamy returned to Chicopee Falls in 1872 he saw its industrial transformation through

new, more critical eyes. That year he gave an admiring address on Socialism to the

local lyceum and became the literary editor of the Springfield Union, a post that allowed

him to read widely in British and American social literature. Bellamys own literary

career began with psychological tales modeled on Nathaniel Hawthornes short stories,

but privately he longed to write a great book that would address the broadest questions

of social organization. By 1886 the impact of the Haymarket Riot and concern for his

young childrens future made his fictional treatise an urgent priority. When Bellamy

described the hero of an unfinished story that year, he was really describing himself:

Cured once and for all of Hermitism and self-absorption, he plunges with enthusiasm,


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with tremendous earnestness into the study of social conditions and develops

nationalism (qtd Thomas 168). Looking Backwardwas the result.

Bellamy harbored hopes that his book would give the voters ... a platform worth

voting for, and he took an immediate interest in stimulating foreign sales (Thomas 265).

Still, he was unprepared forLooking Backwards overnight success at home and abroad.

Hundreds of thousands of readers in North America, Europe, and Australasia were

moved, outraged, and inspired by Bellamys utopia. Three examples suggest the depth of

their engagement. The first is one among dozens of conversion stories, so numerous that

they almost constitute a genre. Philip Winser, a landowner in Kent, England, was the

eldest son of a dissenting Unitarian family. By his own account Winser had been

pondering the anomalies of society, and how it was that the hardest workers seemed

to get the worst of it. The answer came to him when he read Bellamys book. He wrote

immediately to the Boston Bellamy Club and was informed about a utopian colony

already underway in California, the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth. Dropping

everything, Winser sold the family farm and sailed from Liverpool. In Boston he met

Bellamy, who tried to talk him out of the colony scheme. The time for such small

escapist colonies was past, Bellamy announced; the best way to revolutionize society was

to work directly through national politics toward a socialist state. Undeterred, Winser

crossed the continent, climbed on a Sierra Nevada stagecoach, and arrived at Kaweah in

1891 (Hine 85-6).

The second example comes from Italy. In the city library of Ferrara, there is a

heavily marked copy of the ninth edition of an Italian translation ofLooking Backward.

On its front pages and throughout its margins, half a dozen readers from the year 1913


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signed their names and heatedly debated the book. Some welcomed Bellamy as a

socialist comrade, others endorsed or questioned features of his utopia, and each argued

vehemently in the margins with other readers over the books merits (Fink 346-8). These

readers anticipated by nearly a century the impassioned and often contentious responses

that readers post today on bookstore and interest-group websites.

A third, much smaller set of readers prefigured a different response that has

become common today: they glimpsed the specter of Americanization haunting

Bellamys promised land. Although Bellamy projected Boston of 2000 as a socialist

utopia, he visualized it as an extension of an American consumer-style society.Looking

Backwardanticipated modern capitalisms mail catalogs, shopping malls, and credit

cards as well as its labor-saving gadgets and electronic entertainment. One early

twentieth-century French critic complained that Bellamy, like the American corporate

plutocrats he claimed to oppose, dreams of rebuilding the world on the model of an

American general [i.e., department] store (Victor Dupont, qtd. in Levin 297).

Such passionate responses were not uncommon. Looking Backwardprompted the

publication of more than forty utopian novels as rejoinders in the United States and at

least a dozen more in Europe. Its appearance led to long book reviews that warned

potential readers away from its allegedly dangerous messages. And although Bellamy set

out to attract readers to his specific state-socialist creed, his utopia produced an

amazingly diverse cohort of converts. Crusading Protestant ministers, American

feminists, Australian trade unionists, British town planners, Bolshevik propagandists,

French technocrats, German Zionists, and Dutch welfare-state advocates lavished praise

uponLooking Backward, and each group claimed to realize its ideals. Against the limited


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national horizons of much American literary scholarship, these responses affirm that

Looking Backwardbecame a transnational intervention, a treatise in the form of fiction

that joined an ongoing international debate about the future of industrial society. Bellamy

was no doubt surprised by the books global reach, but he welcomed opportunities to

publish translations ofLooking Backwardand to address foreign events and audiences in

the pages of his Nationalist periodicals.

Why wasLooking Backwardso popular throughout the western world between

1888 and the outbreak of World War II? How did its construction as a literary utopia

inspire widely divergent responses among reviewers and activists? Where did readers

position Bellamys book in debates over socialist internationalism and revisionism?

What role did different national contexts and conversations play in filtering the global

reception of Bellamys utopia? What resonances didLooking Backwardhave for

audiences in different social and national settings, and why?

Asking such questions moves us away from the insularity of traditional American

studies scholarship and its obsession with uniquely American literary traits and points

toward transnational contexts and themes. In the second half of the twentieth century, as

Looking Backwardtransitioned from political influence to scholarly consideration,

commentary inside the U.S. initially adopted the dominant exceptionalist premises of the

American studies movement. Beginning in the 1950s several studies featuring myth-

and-symbol approaches or more traditional literary history methods located Bellamys

utopia in pre-eminently American traditions such as Puritanism, Transcendentalism,

Progressive liberalism, and technological optimism. Most of these studies analyzed the

genesis and content of Bellamys views, not their impact. Some examined how


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Bellamys utopia attempted to reconcile his American cultural inheritance with modern

American lifePuritan guilt with democratic free will, individualist initiative with

Darwinian evolution, agrarian values with industrialism.4Others explored the internal

tensions and contradictions of Bellamys vision and those of other American utopian

writers.5

This kind of commentary continues to appear, but since the 1980s it has

overshadowed by more internationally-informed and ideologically explicit perspectives.

One approach has been to revive intramural socialist debates in more sophisticated form

In a study by Arthur Lipow Bellamys Nationalist creed is fingered as the ideological

precursor of authoritarian socialists in America and Europe, while Matthew Beaumont

reducesLooking Backwardin orthodox Marxist fashion to a reformist anodyne. But the

dominant thrust of recent scholarship takes aim at the messianic nationalism and

consumerism that are said to undermine Bellamys utopia and to prefigure the ills of

todays U.S.-led globalization. Studies by Thomas Peyser and Philip Wegner suggest

that Bellamy envisioned--and probably approved--the impersonal consumer culture that

America is now spreading around the world. Analogous studies by Susan Matarese tie

Bellamy to the missionary impulse of U.S. foreign policy, discovering inLooking

Backwardthe nave and potentially dangerous confidence that American society

represents universal ideals which should be imitated globally. These books flesh out a

version, specifically centered on Bellamy, of the cultural imperialism argument that

critics have adopted to denounce the imposition of American capitalist and consumerist

values abroad (Tomlinson). Yet none test such claims against the actual reception of the

book within or outside the U.S.


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Kenneth Roemers Utopian Audiences addresses this shortcoming by offering a

multi-faceted interpretation ofLooking Backwardbased on reader-response theory. This

intriguing and playful study explores various readings ofLooking Backwardin the past

and present, ranging from Bellamys commentary on his own book and reactions by

reviewers in the 1890s to the impressionsLooking Backwardmakes on college students

today. Although Roemer includes only snippets of commentary from readers outside the

U.S., his book offers two important insights conducive to a transnational approach. First,

he embeds his work in textual analysis by discussing the particular qualities of the literary

utopia as transnational genre. Second, by examining a multiplicity of responses to

Looking Backward, Roemer shows how readers use their social contexts and personal

lives to locate, interpret, and transform cultural products they encounter. Both of these

insights can assist us as we followLooking Backwards international career.

The argument presented here attempts to bring a genre-based approach to literary

utopias into dialogue with specific information about readers responses toLooking

Backwardduring its international run. Two bodies of scholarship have done much of the

theoretical and factual groundbreaking that makes this synthesis possible. Roemer,

Darko Suvin, Gary Morson, Peter Ruppert, and others have dissected the hybrid nature of

utopian fictions and offered explanations for how literary utopias narrative tensions help

both to disorient and to engage their readers. Meanwhile, scholars interested inLooking

Backwards reception can draw upon detailed accounts in biographies of Bellamy,

several studies of Bellamys influence on American politics and reform, and an excellent

but neglected collection of essays edited by Sylvia Bowman,Edward Bellamy Abroad.

My indebtedness to these works should be apparent in this essay and bibliography.


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My presentation is arranged in three parts, each reflecting different but related

angles of approach. The first centers on qualities of the text. By consideringLooking

Backwardas a contribution to utopian fiction rather than as a characteristic product of

American culture, I suggest how literary utopias like Bellamys lend themselves to

multiple readings and sketch out some of the resulting divergent responses to Looking

Backward. The other two sections focus on context more than text. By situatingLooking

Backwardin the debate over industrial capitalism, socialism, and the state that occupied

the industrialized West between 1890 and World War II, I discuss how Bellamys novel

helped create a transnational literature that shaped an international socialist community.

Finally, I examine briefly the comparative reception of Bellamys novel in several

western countries. This reveals some collective patterns in the process by which readers

located, rejected, and transformed the books message according to local debates and

national cultural understandings. In an informal way each section of this essay is meant

to showcase a different transnational approach to the reception of Bellamys utopia, and

to others by implication: first a genre-based approach, then a transnational history of

ideas, and finally comparative analysis. It may be true, as Kenneth Roemer writes, that

we will never know exactly whyLooking Backwardbecame so influential (Text and

Context 206). But I believe that internationalizing our frame of analysis and linking the

qualities of the text to the historical record of its reception can give us a fresh response to

this question, one appropriately scaled to Bellamys era of economic and cultural

globalization, and our own.

Four Elements of Utopia and Their Impact


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Like many modern utopias,Looking Backwardis a hybrid literary form, blending

separate but related projects, sometimes quite awkwardly, into a single tale. Analysis of

utopias as hybrid constructions has been developed in works by Morson and Ruppert,

who emphasize their jarring but often effective juxtaposition of disparate narrative forms.

Suvin introduced the concept of cognitive estrangement to capture the techniques of

distancing and disorientation that detach readers of utopias and science fiction from their

own society and prepare them to accept its inversion. Suvin, Kumar (Utopia and Anti-

Utopia), and others have emphasized Bellamys skill at portraying the daily detail of life

in utopia, giving readers a comfortable feel for a future that seemed both desirable and

plausible. Roemer has insightfully counterposed this familiarization with Suvins

estrangement in his discussion ofLooking Backwards appeal (Contexts and Texts 216-

23; Utopian Audiences 111-12).6

This essay offers an alternative synthesis of text and context, one that absorbs the

analysis of estrangement and familiarization into a framework that considers four

intentional components of Bellamys utopian hybrid, and that links each with specific

responses in the historical record. Looking Backwards tremendous popularity broadcast

four related but different utopian projectsa social critique, a tale of social

transformation, an organizational blueprint for the ideal society, and a futurist picture of

daily life--in an attractive fictional package. Readers who unpacked Bellamys narrative

could select, argue with, endorse, or extend any one of its elements, or even combine

them in new ways. Whether open-ended, radical, reformist, or conservative, the four

components of futurist utopias include a variety of arguments, ideas, and images to nudge


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readers in various directions, to provoke their agreement or disagreement, to encourage a

selective reading, or to inspire them to follow their own course.

As Frank and Fritzie Manuel demonstrated, when the idea of progress spread in

the eighteenth century the emblematic Western utopia shifted from description of a

Golden Age or faraway land to a visit to the blissful future, often in the same place

centuries later (4). In the nineteenth-century wake of revolution and industrialization,

utopias, whether embodied in early socialist tracts or fictional fantasies, became

blueprints for an ideal society and programs of social transformation. Looking Backward

was among the first literary utopias to take this path. Bellamy claimed that he initially

imagined his novel in traditional utopian terms as a fairy tale of social felicity (Bellamy

Speaks 199). As the project developed, he became convinced that the seeds of future

happiness were visible in the present beneath the surface chaos of industrial capitalism.

The same processes of mechanization and centralization that capitalists were deploying

could be harnessed to the public good. In an appendix toLooking Backward, Bellamy

called it a forecast, in accordance with the principles of evolution, of the next stage in

the industrial and social development of humanity (312).

Exactly how would society pass from the misery of extreme inequality to the

felicity of Boston in the year 2000? In the novel Bellamy used a version of the

traditional magic-trick voyage to utopia: he has his hero Julian West fall asleep under the

influence of a mesmerist and wake up 113 years later. But commitment to genuine social

transformation required a specific and plausible scenario by which an entire society might

become utopian. In Bellamys collective magic trick, the gigantic corporate trusts

become the publics Great Trust when the people stage a nonviolent coup, taking over


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consolidated business and capital and organizing them as an enormous public operation.

Because the change was seen as rational and in everyones interest, it was not opposed by

the capitalists or the result of class warfare, but arrived peacefully when all groups rallied

to the National Party.

Looking Backwardwas short on the details of this transformation, as many critics

noted, but Bellamy made it clear that a chain of individual conversions had prepared the

way for a social miracle. Despite the environmental determinism implied by Bellamys

utopia, in which new economic arrangements induce changed behavior, Bellamy traced

the origins of the Great Change to a religion of solidarity that had replaced the

individualist ethos of capitalist society. He presented the redeemed Boston of 2000 as a

secularized version of Christs second coming, underscored by the fact that Julian West

woke up on the day after the first Christmas of the third millennium. InEquality (1897),

his sequel toLooking Backward, Bellamy made Nationalisms religious underpinnings

even more explicit by describingthe final phase before the Great Change as a

spontaneous religious outpouring called The Great Revival.

Much of the structure and drama ofLooking Backwardis designed to promote

among readers a conversion experience akin to this collective transformation. Bellamy

intended Julian Wests pilgrimage from confused traveler to appreciative guest and then

full-fledged convert as a model for readers. He used several devices to deepen readers

identification with Julian, including describing in intricate psychological detail Wests

disorientation as he threw off his old beliefs, charting his growing euphoria as he took on

the new, and playing on Wests and the readers guilt over not doing more to hasten the

millennial day.


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In another, quite different story he told of the books origins, Bellamy explained

that his romantic plot was meant to sugarcoat a definite scheme of social reorganization

(Bellamy Speaks202). In the fall or winter of 1886, he wrote,

I sat down to my desk with the definite purpose of trying to reason out a

method of economic organization by which the republic might guarantee

the livelihood and material welfare of its citizens on a basis of equality

corresponding to and supplementing their political equality. (Bellamy

Speaks 223-4)

The arrangements of Boston in 2000 followed as logical consequences from the

principles of equality and collective ownership. In Bellamys centralized economy

industry has been nationalized and the equal distribution of its products rationalized. All

able-bodied Bostonians serve from young adulthood until age forty-five in the industrial

army and receive the same annual income. Because the army is so productive there are

enough goods to sustain everyone in comfort, to construct magnificent parks and public

buildings, and to guarantee sustenance and leisure to retirees. Leaders of the productive

force are elected from men who have advanced through the army hierarchy, and the

nations president is selected among them by vote of retirees. Since the system functions

so smoothly there is no need for politics, legislation, or a criminal system.

Bellamy made this schematic and rather rigid plan for the future comprehensible

and inviting to readers by extrapolating several of its features, from its modes of

production to its household conveniences, forward from the world of the 1880s. Although

Julian Wests guide Dr. Leete tells him that the Bostonians organizational plan is meant

to settle the major questions of social order for all time, Julian also learns about


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labor-saving devices, schemes of mental and physical improvement, and other inventions

that are being developed by the utopians (230). Bellamy incorporated predictions of

radios, credit cards, airplanes, and pneumatic-tube transport systems into his utopia of

2000. Yet for all these innovations Bellamy was intent on reassuring middle-class

readers that their way of life would not have to change substantially. Culturally, Boston

of the year 2000 remains astonishingly Victorian, and Julians hosts still dress, speak, and

act like proper nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans. Julian engages in a chaste ritual of

courtship that conformed to middle-class conventions in 1888 but would seem quaint or

even ridiculous to actual audiences a century later.

Unlike the social blueprint ofLooking Backward, which is deduced from

principles about the good society, its predictive features are inductive and provisional, the

result of the authors scanning of present society and projecting current trends forward.

In the novel a different narrative technique accompanies each element: the blueprint is

explained through conversation while the predictions are demonstrated in details of

everyday life. In this game of show and tell prescription and prediction embody

opposing ideological tendencies. The prescription radically inverts the wrongs of present

society and appeals to readers desire for change, while the prediction portrays a future

only incrementally different from the present, reassuring readers that the coming change

will not be jarring. Because it shows how close the real and ideal worlds are, utopian

prediction performs a more conservative function than utopian planning.

Looking Backwardthus offered a scenario for social change, an organizational

blueprint for utopia, and a predictive, reassuring speaking picture of the future. Still,

the most widely acclaimed aspect of the book was its fourth feature: its critique of


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nineteenth-century competitive capitalism and the ideologies that legitimized it. Since

Bellamy rehashed themes that were common currency among socialists and other

commentators, his novel included little original social criticism. Instead, it was the way

his book indicted present society that compelled readers and demonstrated the distinctive

power of literary utopias. Roemer (Contexts and Texts), Kumar (Utopia and Anti-

Utopia, 167), and others have described the techniques of contrast and distancing that

made the critical dimension ofLooking Backwardso effective: its narrative inversion of

telling people of the future about the readers world instead of the conventional opposite;

its dramatic and simple contrasts between then and now; and its frequent use of

analogies and parables.

The novels most famous passage offered an extended metaphorical riff on

competitive capitalism. InLooking Backward, Bellamy compared nineteenth-century

society to a coach being driven by hunger on a sandy road. Its passengers range

themselves in seats on levels reflective of their class situation. The wealthy ride

comfortably on top but are periodically disturbed by bumps in the road that might throw

them off, or by complaints from the workers who pull the coach, who threaten to stop.

Generally the rich mollify the workers by pep talks, religious consolation, philosophical

justifications, and other salves and liniments, even as they solidify their position

through inheritance and come to believe themselves naturally superior. Most sincerely

believe that the situation cannot be helped. In this compact analogy Bellamy managed to

condemn capitalist inequality, to satirize the use of class, religious, and economic

ideologies to legitimize it, and to mock the prevailing fatalist sentiment that there was

no other way in which Society could get along (98).


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This indictment, likeLooking Backwards tale of transformation, its prescriptive

blueprint, and its futurist projections, contained enough details and ambiguities to prod

readers in many different directions. Capacious and paradoxical, utopian fictions like

Looking Backwardpresent readers with an attractive but often confusing mixture of the

novel and familiar, challenge and comfort, criticism and hope. How audiences absorb or

select these messages--a process that is mediated by their understandings, interests, and

commitments--conditions their response to the book.

Because Bellamys indictment of late nineteenth-century society was couched in

both structural and moralistic terms, for example, it appealed to a range of social critics.

Dispassionate analysis and extended metaphors lentLooking Backwardan air of

authority and impartiality. No particular group was responsible for the coachs bumpy

ride, and all were victimized by it in different ways. Detached and impersonal,Looking

Backwardindicted a flawed system rather than its builders or upholders. This especially

pleased educated middle-class readers, who expressed relief not to find class hatred in

Bellamys story; army veterans, who praised the application of military discipline to

peacetime production; and professionals, who seconded Dr. Leetes detailed indictment

of the wastes of capitalism rather than its injustice. We make no war upon individuals,

declared the manifesto adopted by American Nationalist Clubs. We do not censure those

who have accumulated immense fortunes simply by carrying to a logical end the false

principles upon which business is now based (Bellamy Speaks 23).

Ironically, Bellamys emphasis on capitalisms inefficiencies and structural

inequalities also attracted committed revolutionaries. Looking Backwards coach analogy

was widely approved by socialist reviewers, whose commitment to the scientific (i.e.


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Marxist) approach favored structural critiques and discouraged ad hominem attacks on

capitalists. The Parable of the Water Tank, a pseudo-biblical story that Bellamy

inserted inEquality,was read as an allegory of Marxs theory of surplus value and an

indictment of worker exploitation under capitalism. Produced in pamphlet form, the

Parable proved tremendously popular during the Russian Revolution of 1905. After

the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 Soviet authorities distributed over 250,000 copies

(Nikoljukin 71-3).

On the other hand, the novels moralistic indictment of capitalist competition

attracted readers moved by ethical concerns to question their society. Julian Wests

nightmare return to the inhumanity of nineteenth-century Boston mesmerized Leo

Tolstoy, who heavily marked the passage in his copy ofLooking Backwardin 1889 and

immediately arranged for the first Russian translation (Nikoljukin 67-8). The Dutch poet

and idealist Frederick van Eeden, the founder of a short-lived cooperative agricultural

colony called Walden, dismissed Bellamys future as impossibly perfect and ...dull but

found his criticism of contemporary society clear and penetrating (Zylstra and Bogaard

223). Not surprisingly, readers who fixed upon one version of Bellamys social critique

disagreed not only with each other but took issue with other parts of Bellamys book.

Moralists like van Eeden tended to find Bellamys blueprint too mechanical and

deterministic while structuralists criticized Bellamys gradualist scenario as

implausible, whether too fast (from a realistic standpoint) or toopeaceful and

bourgeois (from a Marxist revolutionary perspective).

Still, the idea of a gradual and peaceful social revolution had a seductive appeal.

Bellamys specific contribution to reformist socialism in the industrialized West will be


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discussed in the next section of this essay. Meanwhile, a related theme that emerges from

reader responses is Bellamys ability to imbue socialism with religious significance, a

feature that helped to produce many reader conversions.

Bellamys message of collective responsibility through the religion of solidarity

and his absorption of Christian millennialism into socialist teleology madeLooking

Backwardcompelling reading to adherents of new religious creeds that promoted this-

worldly utopias. Looking Backwardwas recommended by Helena Blavatsky, the founder

of the eclectic East-West creed Theosophy, and her followers played prominent roles in

the New England and California Bellamy associations. The British Theosophist Annie

Besant championed Bellamys book among the Fabians. Theosophists identified

Bellamys beliefs with their own goal of universal brotherhood, their faith in social

change through consensus, and their merging of individual identities with all of

humanity. In their eyes, both Theosophy and Bellamys Nationalism were religions of

solidarity (Morgan 260-75; Bowman,Bellamy Abroad385-405).

There was an especially productive synergybetween Bellamys socialist

millennialism and the left wing of the Anglo-American Protestant Social Gospel

movement. Advocates of Social Christianity believed that society could be as sinful as

individuals, that the Bible foretold a kingdom of heaven on earth, and that Christian

socialism offered a godly solution to social problems. In 1889 W. D. P. Bliss and other

Social Gospel ministers who belonged to Nationalist clubs founded the American Society

of Christian Socialists, and six years later they formed the American Fabian League.

Through Blisss evangelizing a branch ofLooking Backwards American progeny can be

traced that led to the ministry of Americas most influential Social Gospel preacher,


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Walter Rauschenbusch, to Christian socialist support for Eugene Debss Socialist Party of

America, and to the reforms of the Progressive movement, the first phase of the

American welfare state (Bowman,Bellamy 116-9; Hopkins; Phillips).

Progressive reformers and parliamentary socialists shared with Christian socialists

the belief that individual conversion could be the linchpin of social transformation.

Bellamy succeeded to a remarkable degree in inducing conversion experiences. Philip

Winser was not alone in havingLooking Backwardchange his life. Readers testimonials

aboutLooking Backwardinclude dozens of striking conversion stories, some from

prominent American socialists like Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, others from

journalists and academics around the world, and many from ordinary men and women,

students and workers. In memoirs, reviews, and letters, these readers reported being

shaken, startled, awakened, and inspired by Bellamys tale. This testimony may

exaggerate in retrospect the novels impact, but there is no denying its ability to win

readers hearts. Henry Holiday, a British artist, first readLooking Backwardwhen

pressed by one of his students.

On finishing the book I experienced a sensation unlike anything I had

known before. It was the sense of a strong hope, of a gleam of light

where all had been gloom, a feeling of exaltation, and a consciousness

that life offered something indeed worth living for. (214)

Winser, Holiday, and other readers reenacted the conversion of Julian West from horror

and guilt to hope, elation, and ultimately action. Bellamy had tremendous faith in the

power of books to effect social change. ThroughLooking Backwardhe succeeded not


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only in illustrating but in creating the intoxicating effect of hope on minds long

accustomed to despair (280).

Of allLooking Backwards features,the books organizational blueprint drew

perhaps the widest range of reader responses. Modern critics have noted the lack ofpictorial detail inLooking Backward, and such objections were also voiced in the 1890s.

One Italian reviewer complained that the author keeps us ...on the threshold of his

world, whose structure and regulations were described only summarily (Fink, 336).

But the generic quality of Bellamys utopia probably helped it to travel well. Looking

Backwards plan is universally applicable, not the product of a particular national context

or socialist sect. Its implementation is not conditioned by local or national traits, and the

ideal city of the future is abstract and placeless: Bellamys Boston, unlike William

Morriss London, is described so generally that it could be any city at all.

Freed from its specific locale,Looking Backwardcould easily be cleansed of its

superficial plot andread simply as a tract. By making his blueprint explicit and by

demonstrating its logic through Dr. Leetes explanations, Bellamy lent his novel the

authority of a textbook or treatise. Julian West functions as a stand-in for the reader by

asking questions and voicing doubts, while Dr. Leete provides clear responses and

effective counter-arguments. This catechistic question-and-answer mode persuaded at

least some readers who followed its logic. Alfred Russel Wallace, the British proponent

of evolutionary theory, testified that the logical power of Bellamys presentation

eliminated his doubts about socialism:

Every objection, every argument I had ever read against socialism was

here met and shown to be absolutely trivial or altogether baseless, while


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the inevitable results of such a social state in giving to every human being

the necessaries and enjoyments of life were made equally clear. (326 -7)

Not all were convinced. Wherever it appeared, Bellamys blueprint inspired

many types of literary and political responses and rejoinders. Although professional

reviewers, and many of the books translators, appraised the books literary qualities,

most spent more time evaluating its detailed plan of a working socialist future. The key

issues they discerned in Bellamys planthe viability (or desirability) of collectivized

wealth and equal distribution, the impact of a high degree of social organization on

individuals, the notion that social reconstruction or religious regeneration could change

human behavior, and the idea that family, church, and state would evolve into new

formsbecame the grist for approving or disapproving reactions. Literary responses to

Looking Backwardoften took the form of utopian fictions, and the book triggered a

decade-long surge in this genre. Solomon Schindlers Young West(U.S., 1894), Charles

Caryls The New Era(U.S., 1897), and Hansel TruthsAm Ende des Jahrausends

(Germany, 1891) sketched additional features of Bellamys new world. Arthur Birds

Looking Forward(U.S., 1899), William MorrissNews from Nowhere (Britain, 1890),

and S.F. SharapovsFifty Years Later(Russia, 1902) were among many direct responses

that offered alternative visions of the future. Richard Michaelis,Looking Further

Forward(U.S., 1890) and Ernst MuellersEin Rueckblick aus dem Jahre 2037 auf das

Jahr 2000 (Germany, 1891) were anti-utopian fictions that aimed to show the

impossibility or danger of Bellamys plan. Many more novels, including H. G. Wellss

When the Sleeper Wakes(Britain, 1899) and Theodor HertzlsAlteneuland(Austria,

1902), were prompted by the appearance ofLooking Backwardand sometimes borrowed


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its literary effects and character types. Among political activists, socialist and non-

socialist comentators in several countries staked out their positions, whether negative or

positive, on the books portrayal of life a century hence. In Dr. Leetes tours and lectures

these activists found enough particulars of the socialist future to select aspects of life in

2000 of which they approved or to single out specific features for criticism.

Among those who approved, Bellamys influence on feminism and urban

planning was particularly notable. These demonstrated how, when the books

dissemination coincided with nascent reform movements,Looking Backwards abstract

blueprint for the utopian future could inspire specific, practical ideas for change.

Bellamys feminism was limited and patronizing, steeped in Victorian stereotypes

about womens physical limitations and separate spheres. Despite its traditional ideas

about women, nearly every important American feminist of the 1890s praisedLooking

Backwardand affiliated with Bellamys Nationalist movement. What attracted them was

the way Bellamys economic guarantees promised to free women for independent

decisions about occupations and marriage (although such liberated women were not

among the books characters) and especially how Bellamys public laundries, central

kitchens, and communal dining houses (which were in fact described inLooking

Backward) freed women from household drudgery.

The feminist possibilities of Bellamys arrangements were sensed by Charlotte

Perkins Gilman and other advocates of cooperative housekeeping. Gilman made

apartment hotels, kitchenless dwellings, and housework by trained professionals part of

her influential feminist/socialist program for guaranteeing womens independence and

equality in practical terms. Other American feminists detached such features from


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socialism and linked them to various reform agendas, from the pure food crusade and

womens education to the settlement house movement and concerns for domestic

efficiency. As result, Bellamy was credited by turn-of-the-century feminists for such

measures as home economics curricula in schools, municipal kitchens and public

laundries, and cooperative boarding clubs (Hayden 134-49).

A similar convergence took place between Bellamys blueprint and new

developments in urban planning. AlthoughLooking Backwardprovided few details

about urban design in 2000, Bellamys generalized conception of the new Boston as a

composite of country and city life inspired Ebenezer Howard, founder of the Garden City

movement in England. Howard was fairly carried away byLooking Backwardand

arranged for a British edition to be published. Howard developed his plan for a British

Nationalist colony into Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898), a treatise that brought him

fame and influence on both sides of the Atlantic. His vision of medium-sized satellite

cities extending into the countryside, community control over property rights, communal

dining halls, and a balance between rural and urban environments owed a strong debt to

Bellamys utopia (Macfayden 21). These conceptions returned across the Atlantic to

shape the agenda of American regional planners in the 1920s. (Thomas 361).

Finally, there is the quite different impact of Bellamys futurist extrapolations,

especially the technological inventions of 2000 that Bellamy described with obvious

delightradios, videophones, catalog stores, credit cards, airplanes, and pneumatic

transport systems. These predictive aspects ofLooking Backwardmade the future

attractive to many readers, but they also undermined with concrete details the collectivist

pieties voiced by Dr. Leete and linked Bellamy, despite his socialist objectives, to the


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dominant capitalist mores of his time. By leaving Victorian conventions of gender and

family untouched and by offering readers a world of corporate production and privatized,

abundant consumption, Bellamy portrayed a future in tune with the technological

advances and consumer capitalism of his day. It is not surprising that this aspect of the

book entranced many middle-class readers; it is equally unsurprising that it appalled

cultural radicals like William Morris, who deridedLooking Backwardas a materialistic

paradise whose middle-class preferences exposed its author as interested only in half

change: Bellamys socialism reorganized the economy, Morris wrote, but in other areas

of life, peoples ways of life and habits of thought will be pretty much as they are now

(Morris II: 50; Political Writings 336-7).

Looking Backwards influence among capitalists originated from Bellamys praise

for mechanized production and corporate organization, which some enthusiastic readers

simply detached from Bellamys program ofstate supervision. Arthur Lipow has

detected a thread of influence that passed from Bellamys followers to the scientific

management of Frederick W. Taylor, which was obsessed with efficiency through

specialization, and also to General Electrics Charles Steinmetz and other corporate

spokesmen who promoted their organizations as models for social progress (90-3).

More than Bellamys fascination with efficient production,Looking Backwards

portrait ofthe Bostonians life ofleisure and consumption gave readers a vivid,

reassuring, andin the industrialized West--accurate glimpse of their future. Instead of a

life that integrates work and play, the public and private, as envisioned by Morris and

radical cultural utopians, Bellamy presents a compartmentalized world where work and

leisure are kept apart and Victorian middle-class privatism prevails. Labor, considered


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inherently disagreeable, ends when Bellamys utopians reach age forty-five, followed by

decades of leisure, self-improvement, and consumption. Housework is simplified by

electric cooking, mechanical vacuums, and washing machines. Radio and videophones

offer in-home entertainment, and credit cards, covered streets, and mechanical delivery

make consumption pleasant. In line with the gendered conventions of his day, Bellamy

declared shopping one of womens special interests; his heroine, Edith Leete, admits to

being an indefatigable shopper (156). And like modern advertisers, Bellamy made the

taste for consumer goods an important badge of self-expression. An enormous

neighborhood emporium plays a central role inLooking Backward. Its luxurious domed

space is the first public building Julian West visits and the only one he describes in detail.

Its centralization of shopping exemplifies the efficiencies of utopia as does the

transmission of sales orders and goods via pneumatic tubes.

One of Bellamys American disciples, Maine businessman Bradford Peck,

developed a plan for enormous co-operative stores in his own utopian novel, The World a

Department Store (1900), and tried it out in a short-lived experiment in his hometown

(Davies). From Bellamy and Peck through the socialist muckraker Upton Sinclairs

campaign for governor of California in 1934, a direct current of influence extended that

created a chain of cooperative grocery stores in northern California (which lasted until

the 1980s), and a host of similar enterprises elsewhere (Neptune).

Another line of influence fromLooking Backward, less distinct but in the long run

more powerful, led not to consumer cooperatives but to corporate consumerism. Once

removed from the socialist blueprint that created it, Bellamys utopia of consumption and

leisure was invoked by advertisers of ovens that promised to relieve overworked


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housewives and replicate the ideal life of the twentieth century, as shown by Bellamy

(qtd. in Hayden 148). Directed at such audiences, Bellamys consumerist vision made his

utopia less an alternative to capitalist practice than an alternative version ofit. Eventually

Bellamys accommodation of socialism to nineteenth-century middle-class norms,

especially evident in his consumerist fantasies, helped to prepare readers for the capitalist

futurism ofthe early twentieth centurys worlds fairs, with their promise of better living

through technology and their unveiling of houses, cars, and worlds of tomorrow that

were only incrementally different from the present (Corn 61-86).

Evolutionary Socialism, the Welfare State, and Globalized Dissent

While the varied components ofLooking Backwardevoked an impressive range

of responses internationally, among social activists the dominant reading of Bellamys

program was its promotion of evolutionary socialism.7

Given the social and economic

crisis that provoked Bellamys switch from a writer of psychological tales to a social

commentator, it is not surprising that Looking Backwardwas interpreted as a foray into

the debate over capitalist industrialism. In this context its most powerful practical effect

was to offer support to new labor and socialist parties committed to a gradualist

revolution.

Writing in 1887,Bellamy pressed his publisher to put the book out quickly

because the time was ripe for a publication touching on social and industrial questions to

obtain a hearing (qtd. in Bowman, Year 2000, 115). The year before, the Haymarket riot

in Chicago opened an era of intense polarization between American capitalists and


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workers that continued through dramatic strikes in the 1890s and the rise of a viable

socialist political movement by the turn of the century. As Bellamy himself was aware,

such developments were not limited to the United States. Economic crises and

depressions, the emergence of large corporations, the increased frequency of strikes and

pitched battles between business and workers, the new imperialism and the growth of

militarized states, the rise of socialist, feminist and reform responses, and government

suppression of dissenters were common patterns in the industrialized West between 1888

and World War I. They underscore the transatlantic relevance of Bellamys anticapitalist

critique and his socialist solution to what was commonly called the labor problem or

the social question.

As the debate over socialism and the emergence of the welfare state played out

across a transnational field, Bellamys book was enlisted as a prominent intervention. In

most cases it helped thatLooking Backwardwas a novel, for Bellamys hunch that

socialist ideas embodied in fictional form would meet less resistance proved prescient.

Looking Backwardpassed unscathed through Russian censors, whereas Bellamys sequel,

Equality, a more overt socialist textbook, was banned by Czarist authorities, who labeled

it far removed from a harmless and safe Utopia (qtd. in Nikoljukin 70). Still,Looking

Backwardwas widely understood by reviewers to be a treatise cast in fictional form, one

that provided an everyday picture of the socialist future and disguised its arguments

rather thinly in dialogue.

It also mattered little to many readers that Bellamy was American. A survey of

notices published abroad shows that most reviewers responded directly toLooking

Backwards economic and philosophical arguments without commenting on its supposed


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Americanness. Because Bellamy did not clutter his utopia with specifically American

allusions, the book placed few stumbling blocks in the way of foreign readers.Looking

Backwardpassed over immigration, race, and the closing of the frontier, topical issues

that preoccupied many ofBellamys American contemporaries, in favor of a class- and

morality-based language that set aside regional or national peculiarities. The novels

generic description of strikes and its coach metaphor for capitalism made them

recognizable elsewhere.

Perhaps most important,Looking Backwardstood out among American utopias of

its timeand even among Bellamys writingsfor its lack of exceptionalist views about

the uniqueness or superiority of American institutions. Bellamy saw the growing power

of capitalist monopolies in America and Europe as a common process; in the second

edition ofLooking Backwardhe even excised the explanation that in the United States

this tendency was later in developing than in Europe (125). And nowhere inLooking

Backwarddid Bellamy attribute Bostons transformation by 2000 into a socialist utopia

to the influence of special American ideals or conditions. This internationalist neutrality

contrasts dramatically with the books sequel,Equality, where Bellamy retreated

wholesale to the conventions of American mythology. InEquality and in several

Nationalist writings of the 1890s, Bellamy, intent upon building an American political

movement, took conservative positions on race and immigration and wrote long

explanatory passages that aimed to align his program with the revolution of 1776,

distinctive features of the U.S. Constitution, and the Founders republican ideology.

Looking Backwardwas different. In contrast to most American utopian authors of

his time, Bellamy expected that the coming revolution would not find its sole refuge in


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America but would course around the globe. Like socialists elsewhere, Bellamy

premised his alternative to capitalist organization on a scientific analysis of global trends

and endorsed theories that, with adjustments for local conditions, were meant to be

applied everywhere. In an article on Why I WroteLooking Backward, Bellamy

revealed that his initial premise was global rather than national. In the first draft of

Looking Backwardthe United States was merely an administrative province of the great

World Nation, whose affairs were directed from the World Capital of Berne, Switzerland.

Only after Bellamy hit upon the idea of nationalizing industry as the lever of change and

moved the arrival of utopia forward from 3000 to 2000 did he substitute the program of

separate national evolution for the original idea of a homogeneous world-wide social

system (Bellamy Speaks 200-3). In the final version ofLooking Backwardthe movement

toward federalized global socialism began in the United States, then spread to Europe,

Australia, Mexico, and South America. As Dr. Leete explained to Julian West, once the

more advanced nations reached the heights of utopia they helped the backward ones

climb up after them (103).

Recent critics, most notably Susan Matarese, have highlighted the echoes of

Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy and missionary nationalism in this statement. But the faint

overtones of American messianic nationalism that can be heard in a few passages of

Looking Backwardare drowned out by the books insistent internationalist message. By

lumpingLooking Backwardwith all utopias that portrayed the United States as a moral

exemplar to the world, Matarese fails to distinguish between the exceptionalist version

of American nationalism and Bellamys American version of socialist internationalism

(40-46). The first dwells upon Americas unique development andprojects a providential


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mission based on its special qualities; the second merely depicts it as the first nation to

evolve toward a common socialist future.

Bellamy chose the label Nationalism to avoid the alien associations of socialism

in American readers minds: socialism, he told the writer William Dean Howellsa

fellow Christian socialistsmells to the average American of petroleum, suggests the

red flag, with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion

(qtd. Morgan 374). But inLooking BackwardBellamy identified Nationalism not with

any special American ideals but with the nationalization (that is, government ownership)

of industry, and he hoped to link his program with the patriotic aspirations of readers

everywhere.

In Bellamys view and that of many contemporary activists, national pride and

patriotism were consistent with socialist solidarity across national boundaries. It is

important to recall, as C.A. Bayly points out, that for many nineteenth-century

movements, from the Red Cross to feminism and socialism, national organization was not

the enemy but the precursor to international cooperation (239-43). Looking Backward

can be read in transatlantic context as one of several national expressions of the dream of

socialist internationalism, each of which asserted the relevance of socialist ideas and class

solidarities across national lines, and mostbut not all--of which envisioned that its

home nation would lead the way to a global socialist utopia. (In a Bellamyite utopia that

was serialized in The Nationalistthree years after the publication ofLooking Backward,

Henry Barnard SalisburysBirth of Freedom (1890), AmericafollowsEuropes example

in adopting the Nationalist program.) Other national versions of socialist

internationalism were expressed in France, Germany, Russia, and even New Zealand.8


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These national variants, which became mixed with transnational currents such as

reformism, anarchism, or syndicalism, proved hardy enough to survive hard-line

Marxists domination of the Second International in the 1890s (Wright 10).

Of course, Bellamys dream of a world union that was cemented by his

Nationalist system never materialized, just as other socialist sects or nationally-based

movements failed to capture lands beyond their place of origin between 1890 and 1914.

Various ripostes toLooking Backwardpredicted that its Nationalist program would create

international global chaos, not harmony. In John BacheldersA.D. 2050 (1890), the

Nationalists takeover of America led to a decline that was ended through a successful

invasion led by exiled businessmen and technocrats, who then kept international peace

through military deterrence. Arthur Vinton, inLooking Further Backward(1890),

foresaw that the Bellamyites open borders and pacific ideals would weaken the United

States so badly that it would succumb to invasion and occupation by China. These anti-

utopias formed American additions to the hundreds of future war stories catalogued by

I.F. Clarke that were published in England and on the European continent between the

late nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War I. This sensational genre

addressed popular alarm that militarism, imperialist rivalries, and conflicting class

ideologies would explode into a global conflagration. These authors fears proved more

accurate than the Bellamyites hopes, forWorld War I famously shattered the dreams of

leftists who predicted that global socialist or working-class solidarity would prevail over

national loyalties.

Nevertheless, Bellamys bookhad a discernible impact in shaping an international

community of reformist socialists in the two decades after its publication. Globally,


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Looking Backwards strongest and most coherent influence was to offer support to new

labor and socialist partiesor factions of existing ones--that were committed to a

gradualist program. The ingredients of an evolutionary version of socialism, whether

Marxist or non-Marxist, were coalescing just as Bellamys utopia circulated in several

Western nations. Orthodox Marxists repudiated the idea that revolution could come

without conflict and working-class leadership; their reading of history was dialectical and

materialist. By the 1890s, however, more idealistic, revisionist forms of socialism

were developing in Western Europe and the U.S. as Marxist splinter groups, religious

liberals, and parliamentary socialists gravitated toward social democracy. Their

promotion of near-term reforms and gradual constitutional change kept socialism as the

ultimate goal but advocated long-term, consensual strategies for achieving it. Through

different national versions of revisionism developed by the exiled German Eduard

Bernstein, Frances Jean Jaurs, British Fabians, and the American, Dutch, and New

Zealand Socialist Parties (among others), important segments of the international socialist

movement were transformed into cross-class coalitions that adapted utopian socialist

ideals to the industrial age. Where such reformist versions of socialism became popular

Looking Backwardoffered inspiration and ideas.9

In England, Bellamys influence became entwined with Fabianism, which shared

his professional-class detachment and his evolutionary socialist agenda. H.G. Wells,

whose utopias owed a strong debt to Bellamy, recommendedLooking Backwardto

George Bernard Shaw, who eventually adopted Bellamys commitment to strict

economic equality. According to the historian R. C. K. Ensor, the trajectory of nearly all

British socialist propagandists of the 1890s was to move from Henry Georges land


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reform program to Bellamys state socialism (334). Through veterans of land reform

organizations as well as the Fabians, Bellamys ideas coursed into the British Labour

Party (Marshall 103-7; Manton 326-47). In New Zealand, where a Labour Party had not

yet been organized, a Bellamy admirer, the Fabian socialist William Pember Reeves won

appointment as a Liberal Party minister in 1891 and enacted laws encouraging union

organizing, establishing minimum working standards, and imposing state arbitration of

lengthy labor disputes (Coleman 31-35). Francis Shor argues that the statist beliefs of

Reeves, union leaders, and other New Zealand liberal collectivists paved the way for

Bellamys influence on national legislation there (39-42).

In the U.S. of the 1890s the antistatist views of many labor leaders, as well as the

absence of a viable national labor or socialist party, led Bellamy and his followers into a

brief alliance with the mainly agrarian Populist Party, one that proved disastrous for

Bellamyites after the Populists electoral defeat in 1896 (MacNair). Yet remnants of the

Nationalist Clubs remained politically active. The establishment of the Socialist Party of

America (SPA) in the following decade relied heavily in regions like Boston and

California on Bellamyites. Job Harriman, Debss vice-presidential running mate in 1900,

was one of hundreds of Nationalist Club veterans who played leading roles in the early

SPA. Bellamy proposed to use civil service, cooperative stores, and municipal ownership

of transport and utilities as first steps toward the Nationalist utopia, and his American

followers helped to inject these gradualist measures into the Socialist Party platform by

1912.10

World War I interrupted this trajectory of influence, but the global crisis of the

Great Depression reactivated it. In the 1930s a revival among Bellamys followers


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influenced movements in industrialized nations where socialists and social liberals were

seeking alternatives to fascism or communism. An International Bellamy League was

organized with clubs in New Zealand, Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, South

Africa, and Uruguay (Bowman,Bellamy Abroadxx, 379) Some of Bellamys

Depression-era disciples in the U.S., Canada, and these nations were socialist, others

were not, but most adopted specific schemes from Bellamys book, such as centrally

planned production, subsidized worker cooperatives, regional development schemes,

public works projects, and publicly-funded retirement plans, to construct what came to be

known as the welfare state.

Nonpartisan Bellamy Associations established in the U.S. and the Netherlands in

the early 1930s favored a general turn to government planning. The Utopian Society of

America, which claimed 700,000 members by 1934, advocated a literal version of

Bellamys vision: an end to private ownership, the establishment of a priceless,

profitless system, and the creation of a great cooperative commonwealth with only

those between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five called upon to work (qtd. in

Bowman,Bellamy 121). Other clubs engaged in party politics. In New Zealand, the

crusading publisher Alexander Scott put his Bellamyite followers to work for the Labour

Party, which won the general elections for the first time in 1935 (Roth 239-56). Bellamy

enthusiasts were among the founders of Canadas Cooperative Commonwealth

Federation in 1932, a farm-based nationalization movement reminiscent of the American

Populist Party (Fraser 145-6).

Bellamys legacy can also be traced among elitist movements of the 1930s that

championed a thoroughgoing application of technology to production and distribution. In


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the U.S., the Technocracy movement, inspired by the maverick economist Thorstein

Veblen as well as Bellamy, rallied professionals around its vague promises of scientific

breakthroughs and control over production by top engineers. By 1933 the movement

split. One faction, calling itself Technocracy, Inc., combined militaristic uniforms and a

rigid hierarchy with mounting anti-Catholicisma combination that struck some

commentators as proto-fascist. The leftist faction, led by Bellamy admirer Harold Loeb,

formed the Continental Committee on Technocracy, which called for a Bellamy-style

industrial democracy before succumbing to factionalism itself in 1936 (Segal 120-8).

The main effect of the American Bellamy revival of the 1930s was to shape and

support Franklin Roosevelts New Deal program. Roosevelt enlisted several second-

generation devotees of Bellamy in his so-called Brains Trust, including Adolphe Berle

and Rexford Tugwell, the latter the head of FDRs Rural Resettlement Administration,

which constructed a handful of greenbelt cities based on Garden City ideals (Morgan

xii; Arnold). Arthur Morgan, Bellamys biographer, became the first director of the

Tennessee Valley Authority. According to Morgan, the TVAs comprehensive planning

and conservation programs reflected utopian visions of an integrated social and

economic order adapted to the realities of regional development (Bowman, Bellamy

128).

Roosevelts Social Security system was a less obvious Bellamy legacy. After

readingLooking Backward, Francis Townsend, a retired California doctor, published his

plan in 1933 for an Old Age Revolving Pension whose automatic monthly payments to

persons over sixty would sustain the elderly and generate jobs. The Townsend Clubs

enrolled nearly 250,000 members by the time their plan was introduced in Congress in


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January 1935. Public pressure to enact Townsends plan helped Roosevelts more

modest pension program pass through Congress later that year (Bowman,Bellamy 123-

24).

The New Deal illustrated how even during the turbulent 1930s the reformist

dimension of Bellamys program continued to outweigh the revolutionary design of his

blueprint. In orthodox Marxist circles where the welfare state and reformist socialism

were repudiated, Bellamys book became a spur to debate and a benchmark for clarifying

where activists stood on the leftist spectrum. In the Soviet Union communist authorities

denounced Bellamys program as bourgeois socialism,but they also promoted his

indictment of capitalist competition and his glowing picture of socialist abundance. In

short,Looking Backwards international vogue circulated a toolbox of arguments,

programs, and images, which socialists, communists, and social liberals drew upon to

validate a gradualist path to revolution or to confirm their opposition to it.

The fact that Bellamys book was a novel added a new dimension to the debates,

forLooking Backwardrepresented a landmark convergence between global literature and

globalized dissent. Viewed as a transnational phenomenon,Looking Backwardembodied

simultaneously two competing features of late-nineteenth-century globalization. On one

hand, it was an example of what Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto called a

world literature of bourgeois hegemony, especially as demonstrated by global diffusion

of the novel:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a

cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.

... And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual


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creations of individual nations become common property. National one-

sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and

from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world

literature. (Marx 10-11)

On the other hand,Looking Backwarddid as much as any work of nonfiction to articulate

and spread a global socialist alternative. Bellamys utopia, with its dozens of fictional

imitators and thousands of real-world disciples, united a transnational band of social

dreamers and dissenters in an imagined community of progressive activists. In a

publishing venture analogous to the reports of the socialist Second International or the

international womens rights organizations of its day,11

but without their conventions and

collective discipline,Looking Backwardhelped energize the international socialist

community in the pre-World War I era to counteract the spreading global capitalist nexus.

National Patterns of Reception

It should be obvious by now, however, that not all readers ofLooking Backward

drew a socialist moralor even the same message--from it. A third transnational

perspective on Bellamys book concerns the way people in different settings related it to

pre-existing traditions, local problems, and ongoing debates. Many such contexts,

including religion, race, class and gender, could be analyzed to discern patterns of

reception;but because translations of Bellamys appeared in many nations and because

national literary and political contexts so clearly shaped its reception, I have chosen


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national comparisons as the focus of this essays concluding section. In what ways did

Looking Backwardresonate in different national settings?

One conclusion hinted at earlier bears repeating. In Europe, North America, and

Australasia, readers and reviewers who were engaged in discussing social problems

appraisedLooking Backwardlargely according to their preconceived opinions.

Bellamys book staked out positions on issues that became central to the contest between

capitalism and socialism: Should industry and the means of production be nationalized?

Can a society governed by strict equality function without traditional economic

incentives? Is there an unchanging, imperfect human nature, or are humans capable of

being perfected by their surroundings? Such questions preoccupied reviewers in all

western countries, and how they weighed in on them largely determined their assessment

of Bellamys book.

A second clear pattern was that activist readers (as opposed to journalistic

reviewers) readily took fromLooking Backwardpermission to champion their own

schemes as the most promising levers of social change. Like Philip Winser, those

inspired by Bellamys vision often chose other ways to implement it, even methods that

Bellamy himself rejected. For many, the atmosphere of hope (in the words of John

Dewey) that permeated Bellamys tale became the books dominant impression, and his

program was not a final destination but a stepping-stone to other creeds and

commitments. (qtd in Bowman,Bellamy 125) Looking Backwardinfused social

activism with moral sentiment, proclaimed that humans could control their own destiny,

and emphasized genuine possibilities rather than distant dreams.12

The books appeal


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across sectarian religious and socialist lines testifies to activist readers hunger for

encouragement, whatever the precise nature of their social program or cause.

Thirdly, individual responses tended to cluster into patterns that demonstrated

Looking Backwards different resonance in different national contexts. In the English-

speaking world, including Britain, its settler colonies, and the U.S., a political culture of

broad suffrage and legislative reform made Bellamys scheme for ballot-box socialism

plausible. There too, Bellamys utopia found fertile soil in traditions of labor unionism,

utopian colonization, and Christian socialism that had developed prior to and often apart

from the Marxist strand of socialism.

13

Thus, despiteLooking Backwards stricture that

labor unions were committed to a narrow, class-based agenda, worker groups from the

U.S. and Britain perceived Bellamy as their ally. Prominent American labor leaders such

as Terence Powderly of the Knights of Labor, Peter J. Maguire of the American

Federation of Labor, and Eugene Debs of the American Railway Union praised

Bellamys book. These men injectedLooking Backwardinto ongoing intramural

struggles between narrow craft and broader reform unionism, drawing upon Bellamy

to argue for a version of the latter: a labor coalition that organized industry-wide and

pursued much wider changes than eight-hour laws, such as nationalizing the railroads,

telegraph, and mines. Looking Backwardplayed a key role in pushing union officials like

Debs and Burnette Haskell of the Seamans Union toward larger social aims (Rosemont

159-61).

Bellamys impact on the Australian labor movement was especially profound.

Promoted by William Lane, Australias most prominent labor journalist,Looking

Backwardwas presented as the natural [con]sequence of unionism and union


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federation as the germ of the new socialist society. Bellamys book arrived on the island

continent in time to galvanize worker support for the huge Maritime Strike of 1890, and

in the wake of the strikers defeat to legitimize the birth of an Australian Labour Party

(Gollan 130).

Similarly, despite the fact that Bellamy himself repudiated communitarianism as

outmoded and escapist, the British socialists, California Bellamy Clubs, Christian

socialist ministers in several U.S. states, and even Australian emigrants to Paraguay used

his book to establish cooperative community experiments. The British Nationalization of

Labour Society formed plans for a cooperative colony that would serve as an object

lesson of Bellamys principles and spread nationally (Marshall 99-102; Manton 345-6).

In the U.S., the tireless labor journalist Julius Wayland founded the Ruskin Colony in

Tennessee as a practical demonstration of the Bellamy plan of social organization

(Brundage 31). The Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, which Philip Winser joined,

drew a large proportion of its members from Nationalist Clubs, and advertisements in The

Nationalistpromoted the colony as Bellamys Dream Realized! Kaweah was one of

several California utopian colonies inspired byLooking Backward.14

Eugene Debs

interpretedLooking Backwardto endorse his plan to raise funds to establish cooperative

colonies for unemployed workers in the Pacific Northwest. Only when this scheme

foundered in 1898 did Debs join the socialist splinter group that rejected utopian

colonization, ran him for President in 1900, and formed the Socialist Party of America

the next year (Bell, 48-53, 57-58). Unlike most Marxist socialists, activists in Britain and

its settler societies drew few rigid lines between socialist political work, labor union


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activities, and experimental colonies, and they moved back and forth among these

strategies depending on opportunities and circumstances.

By contrast, in Germany, Russia, and to a lesser extent Italy,Looking Backward

fit readily into well-developed sectarian debates among socialists, controversies that were

decisively shaped by advocates of various shades of Marxism and their capitalist or

monarchist enemies. (It is significant that none of these countries had a vital Christian

socialist movement.) Consequently,Looking Backwardexerted little independent

influence among intellectuals or activists but was used by ideological spokesmen to

confirm their position on key socialist issues or on the question of socialism generally. In

Germany, interest in Bellamy was probably greater than anywhere outside the English-

speaking world. Numerous editions ofLooking Backwardwere published in at least

seven different translations, one by Clara Zetkin, a prominent socialist feminist.

Responses to the book were registered in book reviews, essays, lectures, and in a wave of

counter and alternative utopias. Seven translations ofLooking Backwardalso appeared

in Russia between 1898 and 1918, including the initial one arranged by Tolstoy.

Bellamys popularity among Russian readers, especially in intellectual and worker

circles, escalated with the agitations that preceded the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. In

Italy,Looking Backwards three translations went through several editions, and

Bellamys book became a political football kicked between conservative and socialist

journals.

All three nations had strong monarchist or authoritarian traditions that were

upheld during the 1890s in condemnatory reviews ofLooking Backward. The dominant

antisocialist response blamed Bellamy for subverting the family, religion, and property as


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well as ignoring human imperfection. In contrast, the dominant Marxist socialist response

was that Bellamysbook was useful for demonstrating the evils of capitalism but

hopelessly utopian in its plan to enlist the middle class in collectivizing production.

German Social Democrats such as Auguste Bebel and Karl Kautsky shared Bellamys

hopes for socialist electoral victories, but they insisted that working-class struggles were

the engine of social change and denounced Bellamys Boston of 2000 as a bourgeois

fantasy. (Toth, 166-72). Not surprisingly, anarchists in Italy condemned Bellamysplan

as a statist dystopia.

Amid the polemics there were occasional voices that offered a balanced

appraisal. One moderating factor was that socialists of many stripes recognizedLooking

Backwardspropaganda value. As one of Bellamys Italian publishers shrewdly noted,

the merit of Bellamys work lies in the fact that the book is good propaganda, supremely

and deeply socialistic, and yet it neither provokes nor disgusts the upper classes (qtd.

in Fink 330) Others recognized that Bellamys book, however flawed, won over many

working-class readers to socialism. One Russian economist claimed in 1906 thatLooking

Backwardhad provided more effective propaganda of the ideas of socialism among the

broad masses than any other book during the past thirty years (M.I. Tugan-Baranovsky,

qtd. in Nikojulin 72). Certainly some of the Italian readers of the 1913 edition ofLooking

Backwardfelt this way. Comrade Bellamy, one wrote in the books margins, I cannot

tell you how impressed I was when I read your book.... I think that if socialism were

practiced in the manner you propose, it might bring about a golden age.... Hurray for

Socialism! (Fink 347)


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Among the responses in major European nations the most intriguing and

exceptional was France. Although four translations ofLooking Backwardappeared in

France in the 1890s and some critical commentary ensued, Bellamys book stimulated

surprisingly little journalistic interest and debate. In theory, Bellamys book should have

had great traction in France. French socialism derived from utopian and romantic roots as

much as from Marxism. French journalists of the 1890s wrote influential books and

articles about American trusts and monopolies, opening a controversy among socialists

about whether the centralization of capitalist business was a step away from or toward

nationalized industry.Looking Backwardarrived amid French socialist debates over this

possibilist scenario as well as Eduard Bernsteins revisionism (Roger 219-53).

Yet there were important filtersblocking the books favorable reception. One

was French socialists preference for theoretical treatises over speculative fiction: it was

not a complement when one reviewer called Bellamy the Jules Verne of socialism (qtd.

in Levin 287). The biggest obstacle was that the French fit Bellamys utopia into existing

fears of Americanization, a word the French had invented in the 1860s not to describe

the actual invasion of American ways and products, but as a shorthand for modern

developments they deplored and which they attributed to the U.S., especially its

technological prowess (Kroes 153-4; Roger Global Anti-Americanism) Some French

critics found that far from portraying a generic socialist future, Bellamy forecast the

spread of American-style technological production and middle-class consumerism. The

world of 2000 had been rebuilt on the model of an American general store, and

Bellamy had corrupted socialism with fordism by stressing mechanical efficiency and

material abundance (qtd. in Levin 297). A few French critics linkedLooking Backward


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to an Anglo-Saxon fascination with efficiency and consumption that Americans shared

with the British and Germans (Levin, 282). But much more readily than other European

readers, the French viewedLooking Backwardas a specifically American cultural

product and used the trope of Americanization to critique it.

There was, to be sure, real evidence that a capitalist camel that had stuck its nose

in Bellamys capacious tent. French critics of the early twentieth century, like literary

critics of the 1990s, were right to spot Bellamys obsession with efficient production and

to see prophecies of an impersonal consumer culture inLooking Backward. Where they

erred was in identifying these modern capitalist trends as uniquely American rather than

emergen

an american utopia and its global audiences: transnational perspectives on edward bellamy’s...

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