Looking Backward 2000 - 1887 by Edward Bellamy (nonfiction book recommendations txt) 📕

INTRODUCTION

BY HEYWOOD BROUN

A good many of my radical friends express a certain kindly condescension when they speak of Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward."

"Of course you know," they say, "that it really isn't first-rate economics."

And yet in further conversation I have known a very large number of these same somewhat scornful Socialists to admit, "You know, the first thing that got me started to thinking about Socialism was Bellamy's 'Looking Backward.'"

From the beginning it has been a highly provocative book. It is now. Many of the questions both of mood and technique are even more pertinent in the year 1931 than they were in 1887. A critic of the _Boston Transcript_ said, when the novel first appeared, that the new State imagined by Bellamy was all very well, but that the author lost much of his effectiveness by putting his Utopia a scant fifty years ahead, and that he might much better have made it seventy-five centuries.

It is true that the fifty years assigned for changing the world utterly are almost gone by now. Not everything which was predicted in "Looking Backward" has come to pass. But the laugh is not against Bellamy, but against his critic. Some of the things which must have seemed most improbable of all to the _Transcript_ man of 1887 are now actually in being.

In one respect Edward Bellamy set down a picture of modern American life which is almost a hundred per cent realized. It startled me to read the passage in which Edith shows the musical schedule to Julian West, and tells him to choose which selection he wishes to have brought through the air into the music room. It is true that Bellamy imagined this broadcasting to be done over telephone wires, as is indeed the case to-day in some phases of national hook-ups. But consider this quotation:

"He [Dr. Leete] showed how, by turning a screw, the volume of the music could be made to fill the room, or die away to an echo so faint and far that one could scarcely be sure whether he heard or imagined it."

That might almost have been lifted bodily from an article in some newspaper radio column.

But Bellamy did see with clear vision things and factors much more important than the possibility of hearing a sermon without going to church. Much which is now established in Soviet Russia bears at least a likeness to the industrial army visioned in this prophetic book. However, Communism can scarcely claim Bellamy as its own, for he emphasizes repeatedly the non-violent features of the revolution which he imagined. Indeed, at one point he argues that the left-wingers of his own day impeded change by the very excesses of their technical philosophy.

There is in his book no acceptance of a transitional stage of class dictatorship. He sees the change coming through a general recognition of the failings of the capitalist system. Indeed, he sees a point in economic development where capitalism may not even be good enough for the capitalist.

To the strict Marxian Socialist this is profound and ridiculous heresy. To me it does not seem fantastic. And things have happened in the world already which were not dreamt of in Karl Marx's philosophy.

The point I wish to stress is the prevalent notion that all radical movements in America stem from the writings of foreign authors. Now, Bellamy, of course, was familiar with the pioneer work of Marx. And that part of it which he liked he took over. Nevertheless, he developed a contribution which was entirely his own. It is irrelevant to say that, after all, the two men differed largely in their view of the technique by which the new world was to be accomplished. A difference in technique, as Trotzky knows to his sorrow, may be as profound as a difference in principle.

Bellamy was essentially a New-Englander. His background was that of Boston and its remote suburbs. And when he preaches the necessity of the cooperative commonwealth, he does it with a Yankee twang. In fact, he is as essentially native American as Norman Thomas, the present leader of the Socialist Party in this country.

I cannot confess any vast interest in the love story which serves as a thread for Bellamy's vision of a reconstructed society. But it can be said that it is so palpably a thread of sugar crystal that it need not get in the way of any reader.

I am among those who first became interested in Socialism through reading "Looking Backward" when I was a freshman in college. It came in the first half-year of a course which was designed to prove that all radical panaceas were fundamentally unsound in their conception. The professor played fair. He gave us the arguments for the radical cause in the fall and winter, and proceeded to demolish them in spring and early summer.

But what one learns in the winter sticks more than words uttered in the warmth of drowsy May and June. Possibly I took more cuts toward the end of the lecture course. All I can remember is the arguments in favor of the radical plans. Their fallacies I have forgotten.

I differ from Bellamy's condescending converts because I feel that he is close to an entirely practical and possible scheme of life. Since much of the fantastic quality of his vision has been rubbed down into reality within half a century, I think there is at least a fair chance that another fifty years will confirm Edward Bellamy's position as one of the most authentic prophets of our age.


THE AUTHOR OF "LOOKING BACKWARD"


"We ask
To put forth just our strength, our human strength,
All starting fairly, all equipped alike."

"But when full roused, each giant limb awake,
Each sinew strung, the great heart pulsing fast,
He shall start up and stand on his own earth,
Then shall his long, triumphant march begin,
Thence shall his being date."

BROWNING.


The great poet's lines express Edward Bellamy's aim in writing his famous book. That aim would realize in our country's daily being the Great Declaration that gave us national existence; would, in equality of opportunity, give man his own earth to stand on, and thereby--the race for the first time enabled to enter unhampered upon the use of its God-given possibilities--achieve a progress unexampled and marvelous.

It is now twelve years since the writing of 'Looking Backward' changed one of the most brilliant of the younger American authors into an impassioned social reformer whose work was destined to have momentous effect upon the movement of his age. His quality had hitherto been manifest in romances like 'Doctor Heidenhof's Process' and 'Miss Ludington's Sister,' and in many short stories exquisite in their imaginative texture and largely distinguished by a strikingly original development of psychical themes. Tales like 'The Blindman's World' and 'To Whom This May Come' will long linger in the memory of magazine readers of the past twenty years.

'Doctor Heidenhof' was at once recognized as a psychological study of uncommon power. "Its writer," said an English review, "is the lineal intellectual descendant of Hawthorne." Nor was there in America any lack of appreciation of that originality and that distinction of style which mark Edward Bellamy's early work. In all this there was a strong dominant note prophetic of the author's future activity. That note was a steadfast faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature, a sense of the meaning of love in its true and universal sense. 'Looking Backward,' though ostensibly a romance, is universally recognized as a great economic treatise in a framework of fiction. Without this guise it could not have obtained the foothold that it did; there is just enough of the skillful novelist's touch in its composition to give plausibility to the book and exert a powerful influence upon the popular imagination. The ingenious device by which a man of the nineteenth century is transferred to the end of the twentieth, and the vivid dramatic quality of the dream at the end of the book, are instances of the art of the trained novelist which make the work unique of its kind. Neither could the book have been a success had not the world been ripe for its reception. The materials were ready and waiting; the spark struck fire in the midst of them. Little more than a decade has followed its publication, and the world is filled with the agitation that it helped kindle. It has given direction to economic thought and shape to political action.

Edward Bellamy was born in 1850,--almost exactly in the middle of the century whose closing years he was destined so notably to affect. His home has always been in his native village of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, now a portion of the city of Chicopee, one of the group of municipalities of which Springfield is the nucleus. He lived on Church Street in a house long the home of his father, a beloved Baptist clergyman of the town. His clerical ancestry is perhaps responsible for his essentially religious nature. His maternal grandfather was the Rev. Benjamin Putnam, one of the early pastors of Springfield, and among his paternal ancestors was Dr. Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Connecticut, a distinguished theologian of revolutionary days, a friend of Jonathan Edwards, and the preceptor of Aaron Burr. He, however, outgrew with his boyhood all trammels of sect. But this inherited trait marked his social views with a strongly anti-materialistic and spiritual cast; an ethical purpose dominated his ideas, and he held that a merely material prosperity would not be worth the working for as a social ideal. An equality in material well-being, however, he regarded as the soil essential for the true spiritual development of the race.

Young Bellamy entered Union College at Schenectady, but was not graduated. After a year in Germany he studied law and entered the bar, but never practiced. A literary career appealed to him more strongly, and journalism seemed the more available gateway thereto. His first newspaper experience was on the staff of the New York 'Evening Post,' and from that journal he went to the Springfield 'Union.' Besides his European trip, a journey to Hawaii by way of Panama and a return across the continent gave a considerable geographical range to his knowledge of the world at large.

It is notable that his first public utterance, made before a local lyceum when a youth in his teens, was devoted to sentiments of social reform that foreshadowed his future work. When 'Looking Backward' was the sensation of the year, a newspaper charge brought against Mr. Bellamy was that he was "posing for notoriety." To those who know the retiring, modest, and almost diffident personality of the author, nothing could have been more absurd. All opportunities to make money upon the magnificent advertising given by a phenomenal literary success were disregarded. There were offers of lecture engagements that would have brought quick fortune, requests from magazine editors for articles and stories on any terms that he might name, proffered inducements from publishers to write a new book and to take