One hundred and thirteen years ago, the American novelist Edward Bellamy wrote “Looking Backward,” a forecast of the world in the year 2000.
Its fate was as fabulous as his vision of the future. Many books have their fans. A few acquire cultlike audiences. But Bellamy’s novel turned readers into political activists. By the tens of thousands, they pledged themselves to help realize his blueprint for a more just society.
More copies of “Looking Backward” were sold than of any other novel since “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
At least 165 Bellamy Clubs were formed in cities across America. The first was in Boston, the setting of the novel — the story of a man from 1887 capitalist America who miraculously wakes up after more than a century of sleep to find the world transformed by a non-violent revolution.
The Chicago Bellamy Club attracted a young attorney named Clarence Darrow, inspiring him to turn away from corporate law and become instead America’s most celebrated defender of the underdog. Eugene Victor Debs, who a few years later led the first nationwide strike, wrote a glowing review of “Looking Backward” for the magazine of his railroad workers union. “Trusts will go,” said Debs, summarizing Bellamy’s vision, “syndicates and monopolies will follow.” The American Federation of Labor pronounced the book must reading for working men and women.
The French socialist leader Jean Jaures hailed “Looking Backward” as “an American masterpiece.” Yet not all of Bellamy’s followers were on the Left. They also included such respectable middle-class types as novelist William Dean Howells; Frances E. Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; and Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Bellamy died in 1898 and not long afterward his followers ceased to be an organized group, many passing on into other reform movements. Yet his book never went out of print. His words never lost their magic.
Two friends of mine became high school sweethearts upon discovering their mutual love for Bellamy’s book. Life carried them into others’ arms. Yet decades later, mates having died and marriages dissolved, they found each other again. “Do you remember,” they said almost in unison, “how we felt about `Looking Backward’?”
So when we presently cross over into the year 2000, we’ll be carrying with us all the hopes and dreams of that legion of Bellamy’s readers. Compare, then, our world with his prophecy.
Julian West, Bellamy’s protagonist, is a Boston brahmin about to marry. He also suffers from chronic insomnia, and employs a hypnotist to give him a night’s sleep. The fellow does his job only too well, putting West into a 113-year-long trance. Meanwhile, West’s home burns down that same night, and his fiance and friends don’t realize what has happened.
Neither does he, until a subsequent occupant of the same plot of land goes poking around in his sub-basement in the year 2000, and finds and revives West. His rescuer, Dr. Leete, shows West around a Boston that has been totally remade from the one he recalls. All the mess and clutter of 19th Century city life has been replaced by order and decorum: Instead of thousands of stores, the people of 2000 order what they need from one central warehouse. Pneumatic delivery tubes run from there to every home.
Strife and strikes are ancient history because society is no longer divided into haves and have-nots. Everybody draws the same pay, no matter their vocation. A citizen’s working life is limited to the years between age 21 and 45.
After 45, having made their contribution to the common good, citizens are free to cultivate a life of the mind, or whatever pursuits please them.
The world of 2000 seems like such a heavenly paradise that West thinks he must be dreaming. Then one night he has a dream: A nightmarish return to a Boston of 1887, plagued with pollution, poverty and class warfare.
He is only too happy to wake up again in Dr. Leete’s home, especially because the good doctor has an equally good daughter. She bears the same name, Edith, as West’s 19th Century fiance. But the 21st Century Edith is free from the limitations that her 19th Century namesake bore. Women have been emancipated; they no longer have to sit quietly as menfolk dispose their fates. Dr. Leete’s daughter tells West that she loved him at first sight. He confesses to the same reaction upon seeing her face as he was roused from his long slumber.
Think of how that scene must have affected my adolescent-sweetheart friends, sitting on the steps of Senn High School in the 1940s.
In Bellamy’s book, society has made such blissful progress because mankind finally took a lesson from history. In time of war, citizens serve their country; the government, not corporations, calls the shots.
Why should it be any less so in time of peace, the citizens of Bellamy’s utopia asked themselves. Also, small business was being eaten up by larger and larger corporations. So it made sense to have the corporations taken over by the government, to be operated for the common good, not stockholders’ greed.
In some ways, our world has become that of “Looking Backward.” In both, money largely has been supplanted by wallet-sized replacements.
“An American credit card,” Dr. Leete explains, “is just as good in Europe.”
Though living in a gaslight era, Bellamy anticipated a function radio now performs, envisioning music coming into every home via telephone lines. He even forecast how many of us now arise.
“By a clock-work combination,” he wrote, “a person could arrange to be awakened at any hour by the music.”
Yet much of Bellamy’s dream has not yet been realized. The citizens of his 2000 enjoy national health-care insurance.
“Instead of collecting his fee for himself,” Dr. Leete explains, “the doctor collects it for the nation by pricking off the amount, according to a regular scale for medical attendance, from the patient’s credit card.”
Nor has our political system evolved into anything like that of Bellamy’s 2000, where politicians aren’t greedy since everyone is economically equal. As we cross the millennium, our system looks more like that forecast by poet Vachel Lindsay in “The Golden Book of Springfield,” one of the scores of utopian novels inspired by Bellamy’s.
Lindsay envisioned his hometown in the midst of a cultural renaissance in the 21st Century. Honors would be accorded local artists, even as he had been snubbed. But Lindsay was sure that the same pack of courthouse politicians would still be lunching at the public trough.
In our world, ever more of us are ending our careers short of an older benchmark retirement age, just as in Bellamy’s 2000. But for many, that’s not by choice but because jobs are being eliminated through corporate mergers. To judge by the public’s suspicions of recent free-trade agreements, many Americans fear that globalization is much better for the multinational corporations than for the little guy.
In our darker moments, H.G. Well’s utopian forecasts have more of the ring of truth than Bellamy’s. In books and stories such as “The Time Machine” and “A Story of the Days to Come,” Wells, too, saw ever larger corporations taking over. But the English science-fiction writer thought that wouldn’t lessen class divisions. In Wells’ future, mankind is permanently divided into a technocrat elite and a mass of miserable serfs who enjoy little of science’s Buck Rogers-like marvels.
Yet for all that our world isn’t that of Bellamy’s novel, our vision ultimately isn’t so different from his. Consider those tens of thousands of protesters who took to Seattle’s streets during the World Trade Organization’s recent meetings. They’re still convinced that the individual ought to come before corporate profits. As for the rest of us, why have we made such a fuss about the year 2000? We seem to need mileposts like a millennium so we can measure how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go. Aren’t we, then, still children of Bellamy’s belief in the inevitability of progress? When a newspaper criticized his book as pie-in-the-sky thinking, he replied in a letter to the editor:
” `Looking Backward’ was written in the belief that the Golden Age lies before us and not behind us,” Bellamy said. “Our children will surely see it, and we, too, who are already men and women if we deserve it by our faith and by our works.”
