Bellamy, Edward (1850–98)

IN 1888, EDWARD Bellamy, an American journalist and author, published a utopian novel entitled Looking Backward: 2000–1887, which significantly influenced the social reform movement throughout the Western world. Bellamy, the son of a Baptist minister, was born in 1850 and raised in predominantly rural Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. In 1871, he was admitted to the bar but left the legal profession after a single case to take up journalism.

Bellamy's early works, particularly The Duke of Stockbridge (1879), reflect a concern with the nature of society and the need to protect farmers and workers from the “greed” of capitalists. Looking Backward represented a technological-utopian solution to the impending crisis that many social commentators believed was inevitable and the book was a success, selling 300,000 copies by 1890 and over a million copies worldwide by 1898. It propelled Bellamy to the forefront of the social reform movement in the United States. One indication of the depth of Bellamy's influence is seen in the fact that between 1889 and 1900, 46 utopian novels were published in the United States either as responses to or elaborations on Looking Backward.

Bellamy argued that the development of industrialization and urbanization had destroyed the tradition of individualism and economic self-reliance, as “plutocrats” and “monopolists” had taken control of the political process and used their economic power to [Page 76]dominate the lives of their workers. Bellamy believed that the continued amalgamation of business into ever larger monopolies, and the concurrent creation of a disenfranchised industrial proletariat, would ultimately result in a wave of popular unrest that would force the state to nationalize all industries, a process that Bellamy conceptualized as the replacement of private capitalism with public capitalism.

Bellamy's economic, social, and political views were based on the combined concepts of social contract and social inheritance. According to this synthesis, all members of society had specific rights and duties and all shared an equal inheritance of the social and economic resources of society. This inheritance was manifested both in terms of material wealth and through intangible elements such as scientific knowledge and cultural traditions. Bellamy rejected traditional arguments against collectivism, which emphasized the unjustness of equal distribution when individuals produced at different rates, by emphasizing the interdependence of all individuals. He argued that the “achievements” of industrialists and wealthy businessmen were only possible because they benefited from the social resources created by previous generations.

In the United States, the popularity of Looking Backward translated into direct political influence through the formation of Nationalist clubs and the publication of two journals: The Nationalist, from 1889 to 1891, and the New Nation, published under Bel-lamy's editorship from 1891 to 1894. Although scholars disagree concerning how many Nationalist clubs were established and how long they remained active, conservative estimates indicate that over 150 clubs were established by the early 1890s and that as many as 500 clubs may have been created. While this Nationalist movement never became an independent political force, the Nationalists and Bellamy's vision had a significant influence on the platform of the People's Party (1891–1906).

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