57 pages • 1 hour read
Edward BellamyLooking Backward
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Nineteenth-Century Alternatives to Capitalism
Toward the end of the 19th century, labor unrest replaced slavery as the greatest perceived threat to the United States. After the Long Depression of the 1870s, recessions continued to plague the 1880s as corporations and monopolies grew unchecked and the 14-hour workday continued unchallenged. An angry public began lashing out. Stagnate wages led to increases in anti-Chinese riots and the lynching of free Black Southerners, while labor strikes often escalated to violence. One year before Bellamy began writing Looking Backward, a labor strike for an eight-hour workday by McCormick Harvesting Machine Company workers at Haymarket Square in Chicago turned into a massacre; a bomb thrown at the police and the retaliatory gunfire led to 11 deaths and dozens injured. The 1886 Haymarket affair, because it was perceived to be the act of anarchists, represented an existential threat to law and order and an imperative for reform to happen before the nation fell into chaos.
In Looking Backward, Bellamy’s response to the labor crisis is the invention of an alternative economic system all together. Though familiar with socialist ideas, Bellamy was not a political scientist. He was an American Romantic author more influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson than Karl Marx. Instead of imagining a worker revolution, Bellamy was inspired by the history of radical planned communities. In the 1840s, New Harmony, Indiana, and Brook Farm, Massachusetts, followed the teachings of Transcendentalism, building towns where education was free and class divisions and personal wealth were eliminated. Around the same time, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community and Mother Ann Lee’s Shakers experimented with community property and free love. These communities and many others lasted for decades and inspired writers of utopian fictions like Bellamy. Looking Backward in turn inspired the founding of more planned communities and the writing of more utopian fictions looking for alternatives to laissez-faire capitalism.
Critical Context: Bellamy Clubs and Nationalism
Bellamy’s vision of a utopian future was influenced by the political movement known at the time as “Nationalism.” Not to be confused with nation-first ideologies like Nazism (although Bellamy does suggest a kind of nationally organized and nation-focused socialism, as opposed to the international communism advocated by Karl Marx), the now archaic term Nationalism refers to the nationalization of industries such as railroads, telegraphs, telephones, postal services, coal mining, and other utilities. The premise was that, if the government seized these utilities from corporations and made them “quasi-public services,” the state would be able to dictate top-down a fair labor structure. What made Nationalism particularly attractive to Americans was that, counter to socialism, Nationalism was believed to be achievable through government legislation rather than violent revolution. Bellamy even suggests that the natural inclination of corporations to grow into monopolies over time will provide opportunities for the government in the future to forcibly purchase said monopolies and thereby incorporate entire industries as public services one by one.
After the publication of Looking Backward, Nationalism became a popular and politically influential reform movement. Two major journals were founded that continued developing the cause: The Nationalist (1889-1891), edited by Henry Willard Austin and John Storer Cobb, and The New Nation (1891-1894), which Bellamy founded himself. At the same time, the founding of Nationalist Clubs (known colloquially as “Bellamy Clubs”) proliferated across the country. Their purpose was to educate the public on Bellamy’s plans for a new social order, first articulated in his novel and then elaborated on in the journals. Only two years after the publication of Looking Backward, there were over 50 Bellamy Clubs in the United States from Boston to Los Angeles. The movement had enough momentum for politicians to begin running under the Nationalism banner, leading to the emergence of the short-lived People’s Party.
