Forward and Backward

BRIAN: Each week, of course, we take a topic from the current world and explore its history. And since the beginning of January is a time when so many of us lay down resolutions for the coming year. Peter?

PETER: Eh, I’m a little irresolute on that.

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: We thought it would be a good occasion for bringing you a short history of the future in America. We’ve got stories about life on Mars, 19th century style, and of visions of urban neighborhoods connected by Zeppelins. We’ll also consider the long history of imagining the apocalypse as set in New York City, and we’ll consider the enduring legacy of one of my favorite futuristic visions, The Jetsons.

PETER: We’re going to start in the final years of the 19th century with a vision of future that is without doubt one of the most influential in all of American history. It looked forward just over 100 years to a very futuristic sounding year, 2000. This vision of the future was nothing like the apocalyptic scenarios that were in vogue in 1999 when many Americans worried that Y2K would bring computer networks to their knees and usher in all sorts of mayhem. No, this was a very different Y2K. One that was full of hope. And it originated in the bestselling 1888 novel by Edward Bellamy—a novel called Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887.

ED: The novel is narrated by Julian West, a wealthy young man living in Boston. It begins in 1887, the height of the Gilded Age, when the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown so wide that a lot of people worry that it could become explosive. And these class tensions trouble this character, Julian West, a lot.

MATTHEW BEAUMONT: He can’t sleep. He’s an insomniac.

PETER: This is Matthew Beaumont a scholar in London who has written about Bellamy’s novel. He explains that Julian goes to great lengths to get some sleep. Lengths that include going to bed in a hermetically sealed underground chamber and hiring a hypnotist. The day the story picks up that hypnosis has had its desired effect.

MATTHEW BEAUMONT: So he goes to sleep, but instead of waking up simply after a refreshing night’s sleep the following day, he wakes up more than 100 years later in the year 2000, and gradually, to his horror and ultimately delight, he discovers that Boston’s been completely transformed and that it is this utopian society, not a decrepit capitalist one.

ED: Julian awakes to this perfect world after his sleeping vault is excavated by the Leete family, who are stunned, but pleasantly surprised to find this Rip Van Winkle in their backyard. Throughout the rest of the novel, the Leetes act as Julian’s tour guides to the new Boston. In the many extremely detailed passages, the head of the family, Doctor Leete, explains how their utopia works and how it came to the.

MALE SPEAKER: “The epic of trust had ended in the great trust. At last, strangely late in the world’s history, the obvious fact was perceived that no business is so essentially the public business as the industry and commerce on which the people’s livelihood depends. And that to entrust to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly greater in magnitude, to that of surrendering—”

MATTHEW BEAUMONT: I’m afraid it is a little bit boring.

ED: It is pretty didactic, but basically the story boils down to this. In the 1880s, capital had been concentrated in the hands of just a few powerful men. They reaped capitalism’s rewards while the rest of society suffered. But by the early 20th century, Americans began to realize that big conglomeration of capital were efficient and could be beneficial as long as that capital was under the control of the state.

PETER: Now you may be thinking that that sounds a lot like socialism. And if so, you are dead right. Bellamy’s vision was that the state would eventually run everything, from shopping to housing to how people worked.

MATTHEW BEAUMONT: He was clearly very impressed by the levels of organization in the military in the late 19th century. And he designs what he calls the industrial army, so that work in the future socialist society is very much administered in terms of everyone being given a separate role, there being strict tasks. It’s all extremely carefully disciplined.

PETER: And carefully limited. Men only work from the age of 21 to 45, and during that time, benefit from machines that drastically shorten their own working hours. Money isn’t an issue. In fact, currency doesn’t even exist. Instead, the government doles out credit on something akin to a credit card, so that people can buy whatever they please.

MATTHEW BEAUMONT: In Bellamy’s world in the year 2000, everyone is deeply satisfied and content.

ED: Now it’s important to note that this entire transition from capitalist society to socialist state happened gradually. There was no bloodshed, no violent revolution. And Beaumont says that’s for a good reason. After all, the kind of socialism that Gilded Age Americans were used to reading about was often about anarchists and foreign radicals.

MATTHEW BEAUMONT: And what Bellamy was very consciously I think trying to do was to separate socialism out from that, was to detoxify it, to remove that taint of bombs, of violence, that had got all too tangled up with the term “socialism” at the time.

ED: In fact, Bellamy avoided using the word “socialist” to describe his utopia. Instead, he called it “nationalist.”

MATTHEW BEAUMONT: What he meant by that was that the nation becomes the single owner of all the resources in society. That the nation is, if you like, the one capitalist in town.

PETER: Bellamy’s rebranding effort worked like a charm. Legions of 19th century readers saw Looking Backward as a blueprint for their own political future. Over 150 nationalist clubs sprung up around the country. These Bellamyites included urban professionals and labor activists, and they all wanted to make the gradual peaceful revolution described in Looking Backward a reality. And for decades after Looking Backward‘s publication, many well known American socialist reformers would point to the book as the impetus for their own political conversion.

BRIAN: In fact, the book had a very broad appeal. It sold more copies than any other novel of the 19th century other than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So you may ask yourself: so why isn’t the book better known today? And Beaumont says that a lot of the explanation has to do with sheer bad luck. Bellamy died in middle age in 1898.

So he did not live to see how nationalism— the term he had chosen to sanitize his socialist message would soon take on a more sinister tone in Europe. And that industrial army that every laborer had to serve, Beaumont says that it too took on negative connotations as history progressed into the 20th century.

MATTHEW BEAUMONT: It was authoritarian. And for that reason, he was sort of hemmed in a way— Bellamy— 50 or so years after the publication of Looking Backward by Nazism on the right and Stalinism on the left. And certainly once socialism had become a dirty word throughout The Cold War in the west, and perhaps particularly in the United States, it was regarded I suspect with some slight embarrassment.

BRIAN: Ed, Peter, I’ve actually been paying attention while you’ve been gabbing away here.

PETER: No fair.

BRIAN: And you know, I understand the embarrassment. I think that’s an accurate portrayal of what happened, but I would suggest focusing on the critique embedded in Bellamy’s work here. That critique was aimed dagger like a concentrated capital. Today, we call it the growing inequality. But whatever you want to label it, it seems like a very apt criticism about the heart of a problem that society is facing, whether it’s back then or now.

PETER: Yeah, Brian. And they do call the time we’re living through now the New Gilded Age. And maybe there’s a good reason for us to look backward to Bellamy.

ED: But Peter, though, looking backward, it’s a little saddening to realize how much more hopeful they were 100 years ago in the first Gilded Age. Today, the word utopian is basically a word of dismissal rather than a reason to have a vision for something that might come to pass.

PETER: We got to hope for better gadgets. But beyond that, what kind of future can we imagine?

[MUSIC – LAZY SUSAN, “LOOKING BACKWARDS”]

(SINGING) Looking backwards through my rearview mirror. Oh, everything’s getting clearer—

ED: Helping us tell that story was Matthew Beaumont. He edited a recent edition of Looking Backward and is the author of The Spectre of Utopia— Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin De Siecle.

BRIAN: We’re going to take a short break now. But don’t go away, because our immediate future contains Martians and their lessons for 19th century earth folks.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in the very near future.