The American Frontier and Edward Bellamy's Utopian Imagination

Edward Bellamy's first important biographer, Arthur E. Morgan, identified the end of the frontier, along with the mass influx of immigrants and the consequent class struggle, as the sources of social and economic stresses in the late-nineteenth-century United States that impelled the writing of Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) (209–10). More recent scholars have followed suit. Darko Suvin labels Bellamy's utopia in Looking Backward as a "new frontier, replacing the West traversed by the irreversible rails" (59). Similarly, Matthew Beaumont notes, "In the absence of uncolonized space, Bellamy's utopian vision, appropriately enough, centred on a man who penetrates a temporal frontier and, consequently, helps to build a perfect community in the future rather than in some hitherto untouched geographical territory" (41). The notes by these critics about the frontier, however, are in passing and not a matter of extended consideration. In fact, as Richard Slotkin points out, Julian West, the young well-to-do and settled Bostonian is "a most un-Frontier-like hero," and no explicit mention of "the frontier" is made in the novel (Fatal 515–16). However, reading Bellamy's Looking Backward as a literary sublimation of anxiety over the diminishing frontier reveals the significance of the frontier in the shaping of this most popular example of American utopian fiction.

Anti-Immigrant Xenophobia

Beginning with the Great Uprising of 1877, when it became clear that workers shared too little in the prosperity of the age, labor was organizing and industrial strife in America was increasingly violent. There were nearly thirty-seven thousand strikes involving seven million workers between 1881 and 1905 (Trachtenberg 80). Looking Backward was the product of these class struggles. On May 1, 1886, factions of the nascent labor movement in support of the eight-hour day came together in Chicago for what would become the Haymarket affair, in which seven policemen and two civilians were killed during a demonstration against the McCormick Harvester Company.¹ In the fall of 1886, when the Haymarket jury returned the controversial verdict that made its case a notorious example of judicial murder of immigrant workers, Bellamy sat down at his desk to draft "a method of economic organization by which the republic might guarantee the livelihood and material welfare of its citizens on a basis of equality corresponding to and supplementing their political equality" (223).² As Dr. Leete, Bellamy's persona in Looking Backward, acutely diagnoses "the widespread industrial and social troubles, and the underlying dissatisfaction of all classes with the inequalities of society, and the general misery of mankind," Bellamy supported the motives of the workers and the need for social reorganization (72). He saw "the organization of labor and the strikes" as "an effect, merely, of the concentration of capital in greater masses" (Bellamy, Looking 73). Study in Germany and early experiences as a journalist for the New York Evening Post—a newspaper known for engaging in reform movements regarding tenement evils, sanitary regulation, and corrupt politics—sharpened young Bellamy's critical eye to social ailments and shaped his socialist political stance. In the second lyceum address of 1872 at Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, he explicitly proposed socialism as the solution to the inequalities and man's "incredible inhumanity" toward man, exacerbated by capitalist exploitation, expressing a concern about widespread American antipathy to socialism (Looking 50): "Why has the name Socialist by which is designated a believer in this renovation of Society, who denies that the world ought to be administered any longer in the interests of darkness and chaos become a byword and a name of reproach?" (qtd. in Morgan 99).

Although Bellamy initially engaged with the socialist cause, his sympathy was limited and thereafter declined because, John L. Thomas points out, he "disapproved their methods," distinguishing the violence of socialism from its good cause (94).³ Bellamy's 1873 Springfield Union article, "How to Strike," succinctly exhibits his ambivalent, if not contradictory, perspective on the workers and their labor movement through a paternalistic rhetoric of Christian socialism coupled with Mugwump elitism:

Some business is really curtailed by the state of financial affairs, and...