Although the utopian novelist Edward Bellamy
guessed right on some things - credit cards, mass media,
working women - he was no more prescient than a psychic hotline
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Looking back at 'Looking Backward'
By Daniel Golden
Wake up, Julian West. It's over.
Next year, the hero/narrator of one of the 19th century's most popular and influential novels, ''Looking Backward: 2000-1887,'' is supposed to snap out of a 113-year trance to find the United States transformed into a socialist utopia, and his hometown rejuvenated as a ''glorious new Boston, with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains, and its universal reign of comfort.''
Nobody locks their doors, West discovers, because there isn't any crime. There are no lawyers for the same reason. Gone are State Street banks and Washington Street stores, because interest rates and retail markups have been abolished as exploitive.
Prisons have shut down for lack of clients, but colleges are overflowing. Higher education - terribly expensive in 1887 - has become so affordable that everyone attends school until age 21, followed by a suitable job, and retirement at age 45. The remaining half of the average 90-year lifespan is devoted to ''guild yacht races'' off Marblehead and other pastimes.
There is no legislature to bicker on Beacon Hill, and Congress only meets once every five years. Political parties have vanished. The president is a technocrat, more like Alan Greenspan than Bill Clinton. A United Nations-like federation actually prevents wars.
West doesn't wake up to a city rejoicing over a Red Sox world championship, but that's about the only miracle he misses. Author Edward Bellamy's vision outsold every other 19th-century novel except ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' and ''Ben Hur.'' Yet, it has proven as accurate as Dionne Warwick's psychic hotline.
Bellamy did get some things right: credit cards, mass media preachers, working women. And the Clinton administration has fought for two of his pet causes: socialized medicine and national service. But his cloudy crystal ball reminds us that it's easy to underestimate the stamina of the status quo. The lesson for today's prognosticators: The next century may not be as different as you think.
If Bellamy could see America today, he would recognize the same flawed society that his protagonist was delighted to escape. Only the names and prices have changed. Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller begat Microsoft and Bill Gates. The railroad strikes of the 1880s foreshadowed the American Airlines pilots' sickout. And, instead of athletes competing solely for glory, as Bellamy hoped, professional sportsmen vie for ever-larger money prizes.
Contrary to the expectations of Bellamy, a Chicopee Falls native and Springfield journalist whose manuscripts and notebooks are kept in Harvard's archives, Americans preferred the devil they knew to the paradise he promised. Ever since, the middle-class audience he sought to convert has tolerated strikes and recessions rather than scrapping everything and starting over.
Yet it is his novel, rather than capitalism, that now seems outdated. Although the social injustices that appalled Bellamy are as bad as ever, few people seem to care. And those that do care aren't pushing ''Looking Backward'' as a blueprint for solving them. After inspiring a grass-roots political movement at home, and celebrity blurbs abroad (''Exceedingly remarkable'': Leo Tolstoy), Julian West's excellent adventure is now relegated to occasional high school and college reading lists.
''It's a really terrible book,'' says Stanford historian Richard White, who teaches ''Looking Backward'' in his undergraduate course on 19th-century America. ''It's badly written, artificially plotted, and heavily didactic.'' But it remains accessible after more than 100 years. There's no missing Bellamy's point.
''What you see in Boston today is exactly what Bellamy was reacting against. There are still sharp divisions between rich and poor. There is still fear of violence, and a feeling that people inhabit different worlds that will never meet. Social inequality, Bellamy's target, is starker now than at any time since the Great Depression.''
Bellamy (1850-1898) may have anticipated social upheaval because his generation had known little else. After the Civil War, torpid towns mushroomed into industrialized cities teeming with immigrants. The new urban slums shocked middle-class Americans like Bellamy, while boom-and-bust business cycles and frequent strikes alarmed them.
''Strikes had become so common during that period that people had ceased to inquire into their particular grounds,'' West recalls in ''Looking Backward.''
As an editorial writer and book reviewer for the Springfield Union, and cofounder of the Springfield Daily News, Bellamy tracked this widening chaos. By the mid-1880s, the American economy was sliding toward the panic of 1893, the biggest depression of that century.
In the 1886 Haymarket riot, seven Chicago police officers were killed while breaking up an anarchist meeting. That same year, Bellamy began writing his fantasy in the futuristic genre popularized by Jules Verne. At first, he set it in Asheville, N.C., in the year 3000. Then he moved it up 1,000 miles and 1,000 years.
The son of a Baptist minister, Bellamy became the apostle for a new, secular religion. Socialism had swept through Europe and sailed with the immigrants across the Atlantic. Substituting the patriotic-sounding Nationalism for the inflammatory foreign term, Socialism, Bellamy repackaged Karl Marx's ideas for a mass audience, with a blue-blooded American hero and a sugarcoated plot.
West, a wealthy Brahmin, is engaged to the breathtaking Edith Bartlett. She refuses to marry him until their dream house is ready, but the contractors are on strike. Frustration aggravates West's insomnia. He tosses and turns in the secret, soundproof vault he has converted into his bedroom except when mesmerized by Dr. Pillsbury, ''a professor of animal magnetism'' who can induce deeper slumber than an Al Gore speech.
On Memorial Day, 1887, West visits Mt. Auburn Cemetery to lay wreaths on the graves of Civil War dead before dining with his fiancee and going home to receive Dr. Pillsbury's ministrations. That night, West's house burns down, and his friends and fiancee assume that he perished in the blaze.
Instead, he makes Rip van Winkle's 20-year snooze look like an afternoon nap. When the eminent Dr. Leete accidentally unearths him while excavating for a laboratory on Sept. 10, 2000, West awakens as if from an ordinary sleep.
The trance, anticipating cryogenics, has preserved him in suspended animation. He believes himself the victim of a practical joke until a rooftop panorama convinces him otherwise.
''At my feet lay a great city,'' he says. ''Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before.
''Raising my eyes at last toward the horizon, I looked westward. That blue ribbon winding away to the sunset, was it not the sinuous Charles? I looked east: Boston harbor stretched before me within its headlands, not one of its green islets missing.''
Dr. Leete guides West through this brave new world. It turns out that the giant corporations, or trusts, of the 19th century have voluntarily merged into one public company. Freed from destructive competition, economic productivity has multiplied, eliminating poverty and unemployment. ''What impresses me most about the city is the material prosperity,'' West says.
Everyone is allotted the same annual stipend, and gladly enlists in the ''industrial army'' of workers. ''In their lucid intervals,'' Dr. Leete says, ''even our insane are eager to do what they can.''
Apparently, nationalization even cures insomnia. No longer sleepless in Boston, West woos Dr. Leete's daughter - conveniently, the granddaughter of West's long-deceased fiancee - and settles down as a history professor at Shawmut College.
''Looking Backward'' sold 10,000 copies in its first year of publication - and skyrocketed to 300,000 the next. It was translated into dozens of languages, from Danish to Hungarian. More than 150 Nationalist Clubs sprang up across the country, publishing newsletters and advocating public takeovers of utilities. Bellamy continued propagating his ideas through speeches and articles in The New Nation, a magazine he founded in 1891.
The novel was heralded by trade unionist Samuel Gompers and Socialist leader Eugene Debs, but according to White, the Stanford historian, its appeal extended well beyond workers and leftists. Bellamy's painless revolution, White says, was ''deeply reassuring'' to a middle-class fearful of European-style class warfare.
''It's a strange book,'' White says. ''It calls for radical reform, but nobody has to do anything to bring it about.''
Economic nostrums thrive in hard times. ''Looking Backward'' enjoyed a resurgence during the Great Depression, influencing futuristic comic strips such as ''Buck Rogers'' (1930). In 1935, a panel of intellectuals named it the second most important book of the previous 50 years, behind only Marx's ''Das Kapital.''
Its vogue would not last. The barbarism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia soon exposed the threat of centralized planning to individual freedom, while the struggling Soviet economy contradicted Bellamy's dictum that workers did not need the profit motive to be productive. To paraphrase the Communist journalist Lincoln Steffens, Bellamy had seen the future - and it didn't work. Except for a brief revival among 1960s radicals, ''Looking Backward'' was history.
Yet one could argue that capitalism only endured by co-opting much of Bellamy's socialist agenda. Although its role falls short of Bellamy's vision, the US government is far more active in regulating the economy and providing social services than in his time. If Dr. Leete ever tires of medicine, he could work as a White House speechwriter: ''No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.''
Aware of early feminist currents, Bellamy anticipated working wives and mothers, although he paternalistically segregrated women into a separate labor force, with lighter occupations, shorter hours, and more vacations.
''Our girls are as full of ambition for their careers as our boys,'' Dr. Leete proclaims. ''Marriage, when it comes, does not mean incarceration for them.''
Bellamy's throw-away details are often more prescient than his broad vision, perhaps because they are less dictated by ideology. Everyone shops with a universal ''credit card'' at huge outlet stores not unlike B.J.'s Wholesale Club. (Leete's boast sounds like an advertising slogan: ''An American credit card is just as good in Europe as American gold used to be.'') Bostonians listen to concerts and sermons over the musical telephone, which functions like a radio, and can even be set to wake them up in the morning. One minister, a Mr. Barton, preaches over the phone every Sunday to ''audiences approaching 150,000.'' Unlike Jimmy Swaggart, he doesn't beg. After writing an unsuccessful sequel, ''Equality'' (1897), Bellamy died of tuberculosis, his vision never to be realized. Yet, in the end, ''Looking Backward'' remains relevant and readable precisely because Bellamy was so wrong. If Boston were now a socialist paradise, he would have been right, but boring. Instead, the poverty and injustice that aroused his conscience still challenge our society, demanding new visions from new dreamers, lest we succumb to terminal complacency.
In the novel's most vivid scene, West returns to the Boston of 1887 in a nightmare. ''The glaring disparities in the dress and condition of the men and women who brushed each other on the sidewalks shocked me at every step,'' he observes, ''and yet more the entire indifference which the prosperous showed to the plight of the unfortunate.''
Sadly, no Bostonian today need look back in time to see exactly the same thing.
Daniel Golden, a member of the Globe staff, is currently a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University.
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