Looking Backward

EDWARD BELLAMY--Arthur E. Morgan --Columbia University Press ($5).

Julian West, 30, was intense, nervous, troubled with insomnia. In the old West mansion in Boston, he built a soundproof subterranean sleeping chamber, hired a mesmerist to put him to sleep. On the night of May 30, 1887 he was particularly upset. Strikes in the building trades had stopped work on his new house, delaying his marriage to lovely Edith Bartlett. At 9 p.m. Julian went to his quiet room and was put into a trance calculated to last until 9 the next morning.

He woke up 113 years, three months and eleven days later. At his bedside were a kindly, long-winded physician named Dr. Leete, and his lovely daughter Edith. At first Julian thought a cruel and elaborate practical joke was being played on him. But when Dr. Leete led him to the roof and showed him a transformed Boston, with miles of broad streets, tree-filled squares and majestic architecture unknown in 1887, he turned giddy.*

Romance and Propaganda. This is the opening situation of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, an engaging and still highly readable novel which was also one of the most influential books in U.S. history. Published in 1888, it sold slowly for a year, then suddenly caught on and shortly sold over a million copies. Looking Backward seemed only a sugar-coated romance ; actually, it was propaganda for a Socialist Utopia. Among those who have acknowledged its influence on their thinking have been Mark Twain, William Dean Ho wells, George Bernard Shaw, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Aristide Briand, Ramsay MacDonald, William Allen White, Eduard Benes. Unlike most Utopian outlines, Looking Backward presented a concrete program for the modern world.

In 2000 A.D. Julian West had no criticism to make of the future as he found it. Abounding in creature comforts, filled with music and labor-saving machinery, its principal characteristic was efficiency. All the national income was pooled, and each citizen received an equal share. All industry was run by the national government; state governments had disappeared. Each industry was organized along military lines. Each citizen, from 21 to 45, worked at a trade of his own choosing. (The alternative: bread & water.) At 45, all were retired, and the years thereafter were the best and happiest part of a man's life. The retired workers in each branch of industry elected the managers of it, those still employed having no vote. The ten heads of the different branches of industry formed a council which governed the nation. They elected the President from their own number.

Terrible Incubus. Julian was spellbound at the wonderful simplicity of this social order. Few present-day readers, having observed the results of state collectivism in practice, would be so uncritical. Edward Bellamy's present (and first) biographer. Dr. Arthur E. Morgan, is also a distinguished visionary: former president of pioneering Antioch College and onetime chairman of TVA. He readily admits that Bellamy's projected social system "would result in actual regimentation" and, if administered by the wrong officials, "might be a terrible incubus on society." But Looking Backward was a warmhearted vision which unquestionably speeded social reform in the U.S. and throughout the world.

Dr. Morgan's biography, put together over ten years with the aid of several collaborators, is fact-packed and scholarly. Unfortunately, it is also uneven and undigested. It fails to synthesize the social philosophy which Bellamy scattered through many an article and book. But, until a better biography is written, thoughtful readers will value it for rescuing a fertile U.S. thinker from his half-forgotten reputation as a one-book man.

Pirates and Preachers. Edward Bellamy was born on March 26, 1850, the third son of a Baptist minister in Chicopee Falls, Mass. He was descended from a distinguished line of New England pirates and preachers. His father was "so fat he could not lean over"; his mother was "a piece of frail Dresden china." Edward, slight, studious, with keen, greyish eyes and a musical voice, failed his physical examination for West Point. He studied briefly in Germany and at Union College, read law by himself and set up as a lawyer. In two years he had one case. At 21 he got a job writing editorials for the New York Evening Post, the next year became a book reviewer and special writer for the Springfield (Mass.) Daily Union.

Bellamy was an excellent reviewer. Discussing the works of such contemporaries as Darwin and Oliver Wendell Holmes, he wrote provocatively of strikes, schools, child labor, prison camps, Brook Farm. At 32 he married a 21-year-old orphan whom his parents had adopted at 13, settled down to write short stories and historical novels (Dr. Heidenhoff's Process, The Duke of Stockbridge). William Dean Howells hailed him as a new Hawthorne. Bellamy also put his savings ($1,200) into a new paper, the Springfield Penny News, and made it prosper before he sold it to his brother.

Exercise and Creosote. Never strong (he lived for years on milk, raw eggs and whiskey), he contracted tuberculosis, but refused to go to a healthier climate until he had finished Looking Backward's sequel, Equality. In Colorado, the current treatment--exercise and creosote--further weakened him. He returned to Chicopee Falls, managed to walk from the carriage to the rocking chair on the front porch, slumped into it, said "Thank God I'm home." A month later, on May 22, 1898, he died, at 48.

* A similar situation was later used by H. G. Wells in his dream novel of prophecy: When the Sleeper Wakes.

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