Assignment Two -- Edward Bellamy
Looking Backward 2000-1887
| Edward Bellamy was born in 1850, the son and granson of Baptist ministers. After abandoning the practice of law, he became an investigative reporter, a predecessor of the muckrakers who were so influential during the first decade of the twentieth century. As he turned 30 Bellamy began to be known as an author of short stories and novels, but his commitment to social reform remained strong. The publication of Looking Backward in 1887 caused a sensation and scores of Bellamy Clubs were founded to advance the form of government that Bellamy called Nationalism. Bellamy spent the last ten years of his life promoting the ideas presented in Looking Backward and published a sequel Equality in 1897, the year he died. |  |
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There were many sources for Bellamy's vision of Nationalism, including Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto (1848), Laurence Gronlund's The Cooperative Commonwealth: An Exposition of Modern Socialism (1884) and Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879). The year before Looking Backward was published, Henry George, who blamed inequality on the private ownership of land, received one third of the votes in the New York City mayoral race as a candidate for the New York Central Labor Union. Working class supporters argued the injustice of unearned income and their political success soon led the major parties to co-opt some of the issues they promoted. Encouraged by the success of the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry (founded in 1867), the Populist movement grew in the late nineteenth century. The People's Party adopted many of the ideas of Bellamy's Nationalism in their 1892 platform, but the influence of Nationalism as a separate political movement declined when both the Republican and Democratic parties adopted Populist planks in their 1896 platforms. |
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Taylor Watkins of San Jose State University has a web page on which he describes how the theory of corporatism developed in the late nineteenth century as a way to advance the goals of socialism without abandoning private ownership. In the second half of the nineteenth century the growth of cities led people to consider the importance of public spaces such as parks. Frederick Law Olmstead , the designer of New York City's Central Park, was America's first great landscape architect. In some ways Bellamy portrayal of women of the future in Looking Backward parallels the ideas put forth by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics (1898). The highly organized and efficient economy that Bellamy envisions in Looking Backward suggests a rational approach to productivity that was later identified with Frederick Taylor, author of The Principles of Scientific Mangement (1911). Bellamy's criticism of the self-interested wastefulness of the upper-classes in the late nineteenth century was famously attacked by Thorstein Veblen in "Conspicuous Consumption" from The Theory of the Leisure Class (1902). The futuristic world that Bellamy envisions in Looking Backward seems to enact Marx's famous ideal of "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" which was putforth as part of the "Critique of Gotha Program" (1875). |
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