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Vaughan, Rob. "The Worker's Paradise: Edward Bellamy and the 'Labor Question,' 1888-1898," American Studies Department, University of Hawaii, Manoa, May 2007. Advisor: David Stannard
In the 1870s America was largely a nation of farms and small towns controlled by the values of Main Street, including beliefs in individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and progress. By 1900, however, it was more a country of big cities with a Wall Street ethos characterized by science & technology, industrialism, urbanization, labor unrest, immigration, and recurring economic depressions. Perhaps the most significant changes were those affecting the workplace and the workers themselves. Longfellow’s village smithy had given way to Carnegie’s Homestead; the poet’s independent Yankee blacksmith had been replaced by armies of factory hands; and his spreading chestnut tree had given way to a forest of smokestacks. What was to be the role of workers in this new industrial system? That was America’s “labor question.”
U.S. industrialization and the “labor question” have been well documented by historians. Often overlooked in fin de siécle America, though, is the vital role of reform literature, especially utopian texts. Utopian literature depicted significant social, political, and economic change in a fictive alternate world, usually set in the future United States. Between the 1880s and the 1910s several hundred utopian writers depicted the future of work in America. Among them were religious leaders, labor activists, business moguls, parlor radicals, do-gooders, and a smattering of cranks & fools. The most important was Edward Bellamy, whose bestselling Looking Backward (1888) envisioned an ideal 21st-century, sold millions, and triggered a public debate over the “labor question.” Bellamy’s utopian vision of work in America and the subsequent national colloquy it set off is the subject of this dissertation.
Looking Backward energized millions. Countless Americans conceptualized labor reform within its framework. Whether they hailed his vision or condemned it, few were unmoved. Yet, rarely does Bellamy rate more than a passing reference in histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Most usually dismiss him as the perpetrator of a well meaning but trivial popular enthusiasm. This dissertation will reaffirm Edward Bellamy’s vital role as a reformer in the 1890s by constructing a cultural history of his utopian vision and demonstrating its popular appeal in 19th-century America’s effort to answer its “labor question.”
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