Bellamy, Edward

BELLAMY, EDWARD (1850–1898). America’s best known and most influential Utopian socialist, author of Looking Backward and Equality, Bellamy was born in the rapidly industrializing village of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, where, except for brief visits to Germany, Central America, Hawaii, and New York, he lived nearly all his life. He attended Union College in 1867 and was admitted to the bar in 1871, but abandoned law as a career after his first case. He made his living thereafter as a journalist and writer of fiction, first on the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post, and in 1872 as editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Daily Union, where he remained for five years. The first of his twenty-two published short stories, “The Cold Snap,” appeared in Scribner’s in 1875; the first of his six novels, Six to One: A Nantucket Idyl, was published three years later. In 1883 he married Emma Sanderson, with whom he had a son, Paul, and a daughter, Marion.

His preeminence as a Utopian social critic has tended to obscure the fact that Bellamy was first and foremost a writer of imaginative fiction—second only to Hawthorne, in the opinion of so demanding a critic as William Dean Howells. Hints of his later radicalism are discernible in some of his lyceum lectures and editorials from the early 1870s, and especially in his novel The Duke of Stockbridge (1879), a markedly sympathetic portrayal of Shays’s Rebellion, the 1786 Massachusetts uprising of debtor-farmers and poor mechanics. But the truly distinctive and even unique qualities of Bellamy’s Utopia were prefigured, rather, in his science-fiction and fantasy tales. These weird stores, most of them involving disturbing reversals of everyday assumptions, often with an unmistakably satirical intent, reveal his abiding interest in the phenomena and problems of abnormal psychology (somnambulism, hypnotism, hysteria, hallucinations, altered states of consciousness, ventriloquism, etc.) as well as philosophical passion for surmounting the contradictions of what he later called the “Jekyll-Hyde existence” of modern capitalist society. In these tales, which were essentially philosophical puzzles—“attempts to trace the logical consequences of certain assumed conditions”—he elaborated elements of a revolutionary critical theory and even a kind of experimental morality. The radical social views advanced in Looking Backward and Equality can be seen, in turn, as the logical consequences of the moral/psychological radicalism of these tales. Central and recurring themes of his non-utopian fiction—supersession of memory by imagination, transcendence of the tyranny of linear time, reintegration of the personality, and the need for wilderness (“I wouldn’t give much for a country in which there are no wildernesses left”) became key notions of his Utopia. This double critique of the mind’s war with itself and of society’s war with itself—a critique resembling, in many respects, that of the much later surrealists and Freud-influenced Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse—constituted Bellamy’s real originality and the essence of his thought.

By far his most famous book, Looking Backward (1888) is the story of a lone survivor of 1880s capitalist Boston who awakens in the year 2000, after more than a century of sleep, to find that a nonviolent revolution has completely changed the conditions of society and therefore the relationships between people. Having abolished private ownership of the means of production, the new society has done away with social classes, exploitation, poverty, starvation, sex slavery, wars, slums, crime, jails, buying, selling, money, banks, censorship, charity, corruption, taxes, custom duties, advertising, housework, air pollution, politicians, merchants, servants, lawyers, the militia, the army, the navy, and the State Department. Government itself, reduced to the coordination of industrial production and distribution, hardly exists. The new society is wholly free of coercion, everything having become “entirely voluntary, the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions.” Starting at twenty-one, everyone works; at forty-five everyone retires. Work has become greatly simplified and even pleasurable. Workplace health and safety are assured for all. Working hours are short; vacations are long.

The social transformation described in Looking Backward has in turn transformed, or rather liberated, the human personality. In Bellamy’s vision of the year 2000, selfishness, greed, malice, insanity, hypocrisy, lying, apathy, the lust for power, the “struggle for existence,” and anxiety as to basic human needs are all things of the past. The new education aspires “to the highest possible physical, as well as mental, development for everyone” and “free play to every instinct.” In contrast to the sickly and downcast wage-slaves of the nineteenth century, the inhabitants of the new society are infinitely freer, happier, healthier, brighter, and friendlier people, enjoying active, playful, adventurous, and creative lives.

Denounced as dangerously revolutionary in daily papers and from pulpits across the land, this “fairy tale of social felicity,” as Bellamy himself called it, became a best-seller and inspired a movement. “Although in form a fanciful romance,” Bellamy explained in a postscript to the second edition, Looking Backward was “intended, in all seriousness, as a forecast, in accordance with the principles of evolution, of the next stage in the industrial and social development of humanity....”In the immediate aftermath of the Haymarket tragedy and America’s first Red Scare, Bellamy proposed what he called “Nationalism” as a peaceful alternative to the ruinous and undemocratic system of private capital or wage-slavery. Without economic (or industrial) democracy, he argued, political democracy is a sham. The aim of Nationalism was to organize the people so that, united and therefore invincible, they could make industrial democracy a reality. Founded on his fundamental principle of “production for use, not for profit,” Bellamy’s Nationalism was a radically egalitarian system of public ownership and operation of industry, a distinctly American variant of the municipalization and nationalization programs advocated by other socialists of the period. As set forth in the form of a dramatic love-story and dream-tale, embellished with colorful touches of science fiction, Nationalism took the public by storm and rapidly became the leading current of social radicalism in the United States.

The Nationalist movement passed through two distinct phases before dissolving into the current of Debsian socialism at the turn of the century. In the comparatively brief initial phase (1889–1890), exemplified by the Boston Bellamy Club, which held its first meeting in January 1889, the movement was almost exclusively middle-class in composition (the Boston Club’s founders included such well-known genteel reformers as Edward Everett Hale, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and retired General Arthur Devereaux, “hero of Gettysburg”), was dominated by Theosophists (Madame Blavatsky had praised Bellamy’s novel and urged her followers to lead the movement), and pursued a purely literary activity consisting of lectures and publication of a ponderously preachy journal, the Nationalist, in which Nationalism tended to be presented as a patriotic, non-revolutionary, explicitly antisocialist solution to the “Social Problem” Bellamy himself was far from happy with the Boston Club and had little to do with it.

The second phase of organized Bellamyism, in which Bellamy played a far more active role, but which has received much less attention from historians, was brought about by the growing participation of working people in the movement. “Debated by all down to the bootblack on the corner,” as Henry Demarest Lloyd remarked, Looking Backward naturally proved attractive to many working-class readers, and quickly won the endorsement of many American Federation of Labor and Knights of Labor officials, some of whom helped found Nationalist clubs. Doubtless workers’ interest was heightened by the fact that, during labor’s mounting crusade for the eight-hour day, the novel took for granted a vastly greater reduction in the hours of labor.

As more and more workers identified themselves with the Bellamyist cause, the movement underwent significant change. Dissatisfied with the pompous dullness of the monthly Nationalist, which specialized in tedious texts of patronizing edification, Bellamy started his own lively activist-oriented weekly, the New Nation (its first issue is dated 31 January 1891), which regularly and prominently featured labor and strike news under such headings as NOTES FROM THE FRONT and GUERRILLA WARFARE BETWEEN CAPITAL AND LABOR. A few weeks later, the Nationalist folded; most of the Theosophists and elite reformers had dropped out. “Nationalism can no longer be twitted as a ‘kid-glove’ movement,” Bellamy declared, “the workingmen are swelling its ranks very rapidly.”

The mass influx of workers changed not only the Bellamy movement but Bellamy himself, who moved steadily Left all through the nineties. He who, in Looking Backward, had written disparagingly of labor parties and “the followers of the red flag,” and who, in pre–New Nation days, had declined to call himself a socialist, now declared Nationalism to be “the only really practical labor party in the world” and “the most radical form of socialism.” The New Nation saluted “Labor’s May Day” as “the most significant and important anniversary of the year,” and welcomed the activity of “nationalist coal-miners in Cherokee County, Kansas.” All through the 1890s, as reported in the New Nation and other movement papers, unions were taking action along the lines Bellamy proposed, especially demanding collective ownership of railways, the telegraph, and utilities.

The impressive rise and ignominious collapse of the 1890s Populist movement, in which Bellamy and his comrades had formed an important part of the extreme Left, confirmed and deepened his growing revolutionary inclinations. His writings of the mid- and late 1890s affirmed the primacy of the working class as the agent of revolutionary social transformation, and the need for a specifically revolutionary party. Increasingly antireformist in his last years, he remained till the end a merciless critic of both the Democratic and Republican parties, which he saw as two pillars of capitalism, and strongly opposed those would-be radicals whose efforts served only “to help capitalism obtain a longer lease on life by making it a little less abhorrent.”

Bellamy’s revised and expanded radicalism was set forth in imposing detail in his last and longest book, Equality, a sequel to Looking Backward published in 1897. The definitive expression of his Utopian vision, Equality shows that this author, who, in the last decade of his life, was unceasingly reviled in the mainstream press, responded positively only to criticism from the Left—from workers, anarchists, Marxists, and feminists. A number of incongruously authoritarian elements that had disfigured Looking Backward—the “industrial army,” for example, which was perhaps borrowed from the Marx/Engels Communist Manifesto or from Fourier, and the weird system of “alumni” voting—virtually disappear in the sequel.

In Equality, moreover, new emphasis is given to the central role of women in radical social change. Feminists had hailed Looking Backward as a book of their own, and were instrumental in organizing the Bellamy movement, but the feminism of Equality was immeasurably deeper. Affirming women’s “absolute sexual autonomy” in everything, the book includes a strong discussion of reproductive rights: “Prior to the establishment of economic equality by the great Revolution, the non-childbearing sex was the sex which determined the question of childbearing.” In the new society, however, women are “absolutely free agents in the disposition of themselves.”

Finally, Equality surpassed all the social radicalism of its time in its bold affirmation of animal rights and wilderness conservation. In portraying the new society “blending with the face of Nature in perfect harmony” in a de-urbanized, decentralized America, utilizing a technology at last brought under human control, and no longer at war with the natural environment, Bellamy was among the first to pose fundamental questions that rank high on radical political agendas of our own time. His pages on “The Reforesting,” urging that wilderness should not only be preserved but vastly enlarged, introduced a theme not found again in socialist discourse until the 1980s.

Equality is, in fact, one of the most forward-looking works of nineteenth-century radicalism. It is not hard to understand why the anarchist Peter Kropotkin found it “decidedly admirable” and even “much superior” to Looking Backward, stressing indeed that he knew “no other Socialist work … that equals Bellamy’s Equality” as a critique and analysis “of all the vices of the capitalistic system.”

Equality was written after the movement had spread across the continent and stirred the American imagination as it had not been stirred since the days of the abolitionists. Altogether some 165 Bellamy Clubs were formed, in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago (where young Clarence Darrow was an active member), and elsewhere throughout the country; in just a few months, seventeen groups were formed in California alone. Scores, maybe hundreds, of newspapers took up the cause. Most of these were short-lived; Bellamy had to give up the New Nation in 1894 because of illness. One cannot, however, gauge Bellamy’s impact solely on the basis of groups and publications that took his name, for in the later period of the movement, Bellamyists tended more and more to call themselves simply socialists. Unlike most Utopians, Bellamy did not regard his own work as an infallible revelation but rather as a contribution to a discussion, definitely subject to change. Notably, in this regard, he recognized many “sequels” to Looking Backward by other authors, some of them featuring views sharply differing from his own on important points, and promoted them in the New Nation as worthy contributions to the movement; two of these, Ludwig Geissler’s Looking Beyond (1891) and Archibald McCowan’s Philip Meyer’s Scheme: A Story of Trade-Unionism (1892), are especially significant for their emphasis on the working class as the vital force of the Revolution.

Every current of American radicalism was strongly marked by Bellamy’s Utopian dream. His influence was unmistakable, in many cases paramount, in the People’s Party, Farmers’ Alliance, trade unions, women’s clubs, several Utopian communities, other socialist groups, and in such papers as the Coming Nation and its successor, the Appeal to Reason. Few social movements have been so heterogeneous. Trade unionists, Unitarians, feminists, populists, Knights of Labor, Christian Socialists, spiritualists, Theosophists, temperance advocates, dress-reformers, vegetarians, antivivisectionists, a handful of communitarians, and many who thought of themselves as Marxists were all able to fight the good fight together under the Bellamy banner. Egalitarian, feminist, nonviolent; an open system, always more counter-institutional than narrowly political; imaginative and undogmatic, one of the all-too-rare combinations of the visionary and the practical; expressing itself largely through poetry, parables, and fiction—Bellamyism was the characteristic American socialism of the 1890s, and exerted an influence on radical thought, on radical lives, and on the broader culture, that in many respects has never been surpassed.

Well into the new century, up to the eve of the First World War, the great majority of those who brought something new and original to the cause of working-class emancipation in the United States—Daniel De Leon, Eugene Debs, Frances Willard, Charles H. Kerr, Julius Wayland, Gaylord Wilshire, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Washington Woodbey, William C. Owen, Upton Sinclair, Austin Lewis, Scott Nearing, Oscar Ameringer, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn are only a few—were those whose first steps as radicals had been guided by what Elizabeth Cady Stanton called “Edward Bellamy’s beautiful vision of the equal conditions of the human family in the year 2000.”

Bellamy’s influence, moreover, has not been confined to the United States. Despite the unfortunate “Nationalist” label that he gave to his movement, which has doubtless injured his reputation among later generations of radicals here and abroad, his perspectives and legacy were truly international. Bellamyism was a major radical current throughout the English-speaking world, especially in Canada, England, and Australia, and played a significant role in the radical and intellectual history of many other countries, including Hungary, Holland, Japan, Indonesia, and Russia, where Looking Backward was a favorite of workers in the Petrograd Soviet during the Revolution of 1905. Bellamy’s impact on the U.S. immigrant community has not been well studied, but the fact that his works were translated into at least twenty-six languages (as well as Esperanto) and praised by such world-renowned foreign radicals as Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, and Jean Jaurès, suggest that this impact may have been considerable.

Bellamy died on 22 May 1898 after a long illness. The movement he inspired largely passed into the Socialist Party (Eugene Debs was one of Bellamy’s most ardent admirers) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). For many years his writings held their high place on radical best-seller lists; Charles H. Kerr’s socialist publishing house in Chicago was still reprinting a pamphlet of The Parable of the Water Tank (a chapter from Equality) in editions of many tens of thousands well into the 1910s. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the new style of Marxism made all forms of Utopian socialism unfashionable, though the Great Depression witnessed a modest Bellamy revival, in which Heywood Broun of the Newspaper Guild took an active part. In the non-Leninist Left, most notably the IWW, Bellamy continued to be appreciatively studied and cited all through the 1930s and 1940s; longtime labor activist Stan Weir recalls that it was an old Wobbly seaman who sparked his own radicalism by urging him to read Looking Backward. Walter Nef, who directed the IWW’s single largest organizing drive—agricultural workers, 1915—later devoted himself to a purely Bellamyist agitation, and was still issuing his Equalitarian Bulletin in the 1950s.

Bellamy’s influence on more recent radicalism is not easily measured, although it is interesting to note that at least one founder of the Students for a Democratic Society, Al Haber, has acknowledged Looking Backward as the book that made him a radical. First published over a century ago, Looking Backward has never been out of print since—seven editions are currently available, four of them inexpensive paperbacks—and never has it ceased to make readers question the dominant values and institutions of modern capitalist society. Earlier American socialists reached thousands. Bellamy reached millions.

Bellamy, Edward. “How I Came to Write Looking Backward.” The Nationalist, May 1889. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/documents/bellamy.htm

Bowman, Sylvia, et al. Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet’s Influence. New York: Twayne, 1962.

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

Patai, Daphne, ed. Looking Backward 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Rosemont, Franklin, ed. Apparitions of Things to Come: Edward Bellamy’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990.

“Edward Bellamy,” Internet Archives.