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Title: Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 by Edward Bellamy, Alex Macdonald ISBN: 1-55111-406-2 Publisher: Broadview Press Pub. Date: 02 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Looking Backward at totalitarianism
Comment: The author Edward Bellamy was the cousin of Francis Bellamy the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, which expresses the ideas Edward Bellamy's socialist utopian novels. Both cousins were self-proclaimed socialists and members of the "Nationalism" movement and its socialist auxiliary group, whose members wanted the federal government to nationalize most of the American economy. They saw government schools as a means to their socialist "Nationalism." Francis wrote the Pledge of Allegiance to promote socialism in the most socialistic institution -government schools. The original Pledge of Allegiance had a straight arm salute, not the modern hand over the heart.
Francis Bellamy lived long enough to see a similar salute and a similar philosophy espoused by the National Socialist German Workers'Party. As the only person on the internet who collects, exposes and writes about historical photos of the original socialist salute to the U.S. flag, I find the ominous parallels in Edward Bellamy's book terrifying.
Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" is about a man who sleeps from 1887 until the year 2000. The United States has become one giant socialist monopoly. The book openly portrays men treated as military draftees, from the age of twenty-one until the age of forty-five, in the U.S.'s "industrial army." Bellamy's glorification of the military includes government assignment of all jobs. Everyone is issued ration cards which are used to draw goods from government storehouses. Everyone is permitted the same amount in value annually.
Of course, all of the preceding is portrayed as a dandy utopia just as it was portrayed by so many apologists for the military socialist complex of the socialist trio of atrocities (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (62 million killed), the People's Republic of China (35 million), the National Socialist German Workers' Party (21 million) and elsewhere.
Did Bellamy foresee soviet-style rationing, or did he inspire it?
Bellamy's is the same socialist naivete that resulted in 7 million persons who perished from 1932-33 in the famine that resulted in Europe's "breadbasket" after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics imposed collectivist land management in the Ukraine. By the spring of 1933, an estimated 25,000 people died every day in the Ukraine. It is the same socialist naivete that resulted in 27 million people starving to death in 1958 in the so-called "Great Leap Forward" in China. Was the "Great Leap Forward" inspired by "Looking Backward"?
Rating: 5
Summary: Edward Bellamy's classic utopian novel and other writings
Comment: Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward 2000-1887" remains the most successful and influential utopian novel written by an American writer mainly because the competition consists mostly of dystopian works, from Jack London's "The Iron Heel" to Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," or science fiction works like Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed." Still, I do not mean to give the impression that Bellamy's 1888 novel gets this honor by default. Magazine covers in 1984 were devoted to judging the track record of George Orwell's dystopian classic and I would argue that Bellamy deserves the same sort of consideration now that we have reached the 21st century. I certainly intend to use him to that end in my upcoming Utopian Images class.
At the end of the 19th century Bellamy creates a picture of a wonderful future society. Bellamy's protagonist is Julian West, a young aristocratic Bostonian who falls into a deep sleep while under a hypnotic trance in 1887 and ends up waking up in the year 2000 (hence the novel's sub-title). Finding himself a century in the future in the home of Doctor Leete, West is introduced to an amazing society, which is consistently contrasted with the time from which he has come. As much as this is a prediction of a future utopia, it is also a scathing attack on the ills of American life heading into the previous turn of the century. Bellamy's sympathies are clearly with the progressives of that period.
"Looking Backward" does not have a narrative structure per se. Instead West is shown the wonders of Boston in the year 2000, with his hosts explaining the rationale behind the grand civic improvements. For example, he discovers that every body is happy and no one is either rich or poor, all because equality has been achieved. Industry has been nationalized, which has increased efficiency because it has eliminated wasteful competition. This is a world with no need of money, but every citizen has a sort of credit card that allows them to make individual purchases, although everyone has the same montly allowance. In Bellamy's world is so ideal that it does not have any police, a military, any lawyers, or, best of all, any salesmen. Education is so valued that it continues until students reach the age of 21, at which point all citizens enter the work force, where they will stay until the age of 45. Men and women are compensated equally, but there are some distinctions between job on the basis of gender, and pregnancy and motherhood are taken into account.
Bellamy was living during the start of the Industrial Revolution, and like Francis Bacon and Tomasso Campanella who wrote during the height of the Age of Reason, he sees science and human ingenuity as being what will solve all of humanity's problems. He does not get into too many details regarding the comforts of modern living in the future, but there are several telling predictions (e.g., something very much like radio). However, it is clear that Bellamy is writing primarily to talk about economics and sociology, especially because he always compares his idealized future with the problems of his own time.
Obviously Bellamy's critique of the late 19th century will be of less interest to today's students that his various predictions on the both the future and an ideal world, unless they are specifically studying the American industrial revolution. But the latter two are enough to make "Looking Backward" deserve to be included in a current curriculum and I am looking foward to how well my students think Bellamy predicted the world in which we now find ourselves living. This particular edition, while not a Norton Critical Edition, does have a nice selection of additional readings in the back consisting of some of Bellamy's other writings as well as contemporary works by writers of other utopias and social commentaries such as William Morris, Charlotte Perkins, Henry Lloyd George, and William Dean Howells. All of these appendices provide a context for Bellamy's novel in terms of late 19th-century utopianism.
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