The Curious Tales of The Scarlet Empire

The Scarlet Empire (1906) by David Maclean Parry, a former president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), offers an anti-utopian romance set in an authoritarian socialist Atlantis. Supplementing the efforts of NAM to limit the power of unions and diminish the appeal of socialism through political and editorial suasion, the novel promised a new and powerful way of proselytizing middle-class readers by competing with prominent literary utopians and socialists, especially Edward Bellamy and Upton Sinclair. The novel's protagonist is converted to individualism and capitalism and comes to see socialism as emasculating. Empire bundles capitalism and masculinity together through a redemptive adventure romance narrative that serves capitalist ideological purposes and has the protagonist combining tremendous wealth, a powerful faith in individualism, and a recovered masculine subjectivity to become a captain of industry and paragon of a hegemonic masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century.