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153 Chapter Seven Edward Bellamy and the Reimagining of Equal Opportunity In 1887, Julian West, a wealthy Boston businessman and the protagonist of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 bestselling novel Looking Backward, falls into a hypnotic slumber in a sound- and fireproof chamber in the lower level of his home to alleviate his chronic insomnia. Shortly after, West’s doctor leaves town and Sawyer, his houseman and the only other person who knows where West sleeps, perishes in a fire that destroys the house and, it is presumed, West as well. One hundred thirteen years later the occupants of the rebuilt home discover West in the deep basement and he awakens in the year 2000, slightly groggy but otherwise intact.Dr.Leete,whosefamilynowresidesinthehome,becomesWest’s guide to a wholly transformed Boston, a beautified city where “every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees” and where the Charles River wound like a “blue ribbon” toward the sunset.1 A series of rapid and nonviolent economic transformations have nationalized industry and eliminated poverty. The state administers work, and citizens, regardless of occupation, receive equal wages in the form of credit that they spend at community storehouses. Modeled on the military, Bellamy’s future society is highly regimented and invests broad authority in an expanded state. Retired workers promoted to regional and national functionary posts for life terms make administrative decisions. Politics as a site of social interaction to resolve disputes disappears. In this imagined nation absolute economic equality transforms class conflict into class harmony; production and Edward Bellamy and the Reimagining of Equal Opportunity 154 consumption meet in perfect synchronicity; and citizens enjoy a life free from the struggle for financial survival. Bellamy called these new arrangements Nationalism, since industry is nationalized and citizens work toward the common good. At the age of eighteen each person explores various occupations to determine his or her vocation and when twenty-one enters the industrial army to embark on his or her working life. Women are relegated to a separate sector of the industrial army, though they do receive equal pay.2 Blacks, aside from Sawyer, are noticeably absent from the novel. Bellamy does applaud the demise of slavery and characterizes racial segregation as bigotry, but he also maintains that blacks would benefit from the civilizing influence of whites. Technological advances reduce the number of hours dedicated to work and allow retirement by age forty-five. The value of work is no longer measured monetarily, but by its contribution to the social good; income is separated from labor. And the continual reduction of work hours for those tasks deemed unpleasant makes such jobs, because they allow greater leisure time, more attractive to some.3 Bellamy does not banish all property ownership in his new society, despite charges to this effect. Rather, he distinguishes between productive property, which is nationalized, and personal property, which remains in individual hands. The thread of a love story that begins with Edith, the woman to whom West was engaged in 1887, meanders through the novel and concludes with West falling in love with Edith’s great-granddaughter, also called Edith and, coincidentally, Dr. Leete’s daughter. Despite the pretense of the romance, however, the book centers on this new economic and social order, and by way of contrast, critiques Gilded Age economic arrangements. Building on a tradition with antebellum antecedents, Bellamy joined a chorus of voices in the late nineteenth century dismayed by the conditions wrought by industrial production. Much of this critique , led by clergy associated with the Social Gospel, focused on the moral questions surrounding celebrations of self-interest attached to laissez-faire and the accumulation of fortunes. Concerned with how to live a moral life in an immoral society, Social Gospelers described the “existing competitive system” as “thoroughly selfish, and therefore thoroughly unChristian.” The rampant individualism that accompanied the contemporary economic order was considered “characteristic of simple barbarism, not of republican civilization.”4 Instead, these Edward Bellamy and the Reimagining of Equal Opportunity 155 critics advocated policies predicated on the ethics of cooperation and harmony, the recognition of workers as humans, not commodities, and the payment of a just wage. Bellamy shared with many of these reformers a morally based disquiet about the Gilded Age and hoped to inscribe the values of the Golden Rule into economic relations. However, unlike most other social critics, he supported not only abolition of the existing wagelabor system, but absolute economic equality through equal wages. This effectively divorced the size of...

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