Idealism
and the Search for Utopia in the 19th Century
A
Utopian History:
Sir Thomas More was the first writer to coin the word Utopia.
It is thought that in creating the word, he was being purposely ambiguous
as to which root he used; either the word eutopia, which means a place away, or
outopia, which means not a place. His
book described a perfect society with enough resources for everyone and peace.
Utopia was first published around 1517 in Latin and 1551 in
English translation. But More was
not the first to create a utopia. Plato’s
Republic holds that honor. However,
the genre does not just encompass them. In
the Ancient World, Plutarch’s writings about Lycurguses, a ruler (or two) of
Sparta is considered utopian. Lycurgurses
was a radical reformer of Sparta who introduced a peaceful revolution and
republican ideals to the city-state after traveling through much of the known
civilized world and observing other types of governments.
In the Renaissance there were several other utopian authors besides More.
Tommaso Campanella was an Italian Friar whose biggest influence was the
Inquisition. He believed strongly
in science, but also in mysticism, and wrote his book, The City of the Sun
as a description of how he would reform his society to fight against the Church.
He ended up spending a great part of his life in prison due to his
philosophies and radicalism. A
third writer was Johann Valentin Andreae, a German educator, who wrote Christianopolis. Andreae started working on educational reform before
branching out into societal reform. Because
he was actually applying his theories of reform, Andreae’s writings seem much
more modern, as though they are from the 19th century rather than
1619, although he was not translated into English until 1916.
He is the only one of the above writers who had ideas that could work
applied in their current society.[1]
The
biggest unifier amongst the older utopian stories (other than Christianopolis)
was that the societies described were either completely unattainable, or
possible only with a bloody revolution. While
some of the writers and aspiring social engineers thought that their
ideal societies could exist, they did not write any practical ideas as to how to
bring the reforms to fruition. More’s
Utopia was specifically not a place at all but an imaginary island.
Scholars are not sure if he meant for his utopia to be a place to strive
for or just a way to comment on contemporary government.
It was not until the 19th century that social theorists began
to think that a complete social overhaul could happen without a revolution, but
instead due to the will of the working classes.
With
the growth of the middle class in the 1800s, there grew to be a population that
was neither downtrodden and suffering, nor obliviously above it all.
There was plenty of leisure time amongst the professional classes, time
in which to think about the social problems that they saw in the streets and
with the people who worked for them in the factories.
The growth of cities brought together many more poor people in smaller
quarters, making their plight much more obvious than that of the rural poor.
This led to a growth of reformers: people who either tried to start
idealistic communities, or who wrote novels incorporating their ideal societies
into a romance.
1865-1900:
Societal Changes in America:
Before the Civil War, the South was an agricultural society and the North
was rapidly becoming industrialized. Waterways
became power generators for mills and towns sprung up around the factories
creating industrial towns. A large
number of the factories were textile mills, traditionally manufactured at home
by women, which would employ women, giving them previously unknown freedom and
income. This was a start in the
alteration of traditional family structures.
After the Civil War there was a great shift in the make-up of American
society and geography. The
industrialization that had started in the North grew and spread West.
The manufacturing power had helped save the Union from splitting by both
creating the goods needed during the war, and by providing a steady stream of
income. The South’s agricultural
economy was devastated after the War. The
cities could now provide a more stable base of employment and there was a
massive movement from the rural to the urban. The influx of people was coming at a faster pace than either
housing, or jobs could keep up with. The
lack of affordable housing created dense ghettos of workers with poor
sanitation. Once in the city,
frequently the entire family would have to go to work, from the smallest child
to the sisters and mother. If the
women could not find work in the factory then they might take in laundry, or
even get a job as a maid in the factory owners’ homes.
Because even the young children had to work, they could not go to school.
The country had embraced the ideal that the hard worker could be socially
mobile (illustrated in books such as those by Horatio Alger), but the conditions
of the factory worker left little time left for self-improvement.
Children who could not go to school were not likely to move beyond the
factory floors. While women could
find gainful employment, such as mentioned above, this meant that they had
little time for proper child rearing (but the children were probably already
working in the factories anyway).
The
workers initially had little to no control over their working conditions or pay.
The machines were the bosses and humans bowed down to their power rather
than the other way around. The
workers could not get ahead no matter how much they worked, and government
regulations for fair labor practice were virtually nonexistent.
By the end of the century, the workers were fed up with the system and
started to form unions in order to strike for better working conditions and a
living wage. The striking came to a
head starting May 1, 1886 in Chicago. This
was the famous Haymarket Riot. On
May 3 there was a riot that ended in one death after the police became involved.
This violence was followed by more protesting on May 4 where a bomb went
off in the crowd, killing eight policemen who were once again trying to break up
the striking workers. This shocking
event affected many people around the country, and had a particularly lasting
impression on both Mark Twain and Edward Bellamy and influenced their writing at
the time: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Looking
Backward, respectively.
Along
with the industrialization of the country, there was also an industrialization
in the home. Amongst all of the
technological innovations that were taking place were also innovations in the
home, including how food was prepared, and what was being eaten.
The Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 in particular introduced a multitude
of new food products such as Aunt Jemima syrup, Shredded Wheat, Cream of Wheat,
Cracker Jacks and diet soda pop. Brands
were being created, with which to market the latest commodity.[2]
Home economics was becoming a science and women such as Charlotte Perkins
Gilman strove for women’s equality by trying to make the value of their work
in the home as important as men’s work outside of the home.
Perkins was constrained at the time by the Victorian idealization of
motherhood and women as the moral centers of society but was still able to
introduce ideas such as paid childcare and communal kitchens.
A
third aspect of the great social upheaval that was going on at this time was the
sudden emancipation of the nation’s blacks.
There is not room to adequately address this subject, but the fact that
there were several hundred thousand people who were suddenly looking for work
off of the plantations added to the societal stresses that were already being
increased due to the abundant immigrant populations that were also gathering in
the cities. Both influxes of
populations added to the inherent racism of the majority of utopian novels.[3]
Utopian
Novels of the Nineteen Century:
Edward Bellamy became the best-known utopian writer at the end of the 19th
century. His version of a perfect
America, Looking Backward, was published in 1887 and was considered the
best book that he wrote by far. Bellamy
was raised by a Baptist preacher father and a strict Calvinist mother.
His upbringing was austere and it was drilled into his consciousness that
one should never act in one’s own self-interest.
This philosophy can be seen liberally sprinkled throughout his book.
Bellamy’s education was started at Union College in New York, where he
attended for a year before moving to Germany.
While in Germany, he was introduced to German socialism which furthered
the development of his theories for social organization which were started in
his year in college. Upon returning
to the United States, Bellamy studied law.
This vocation was dropped after his first case, which involved evicting
an elderly widow. Bellamy instead
turned to journalism and writing, contributing numerous editorials espousing his
beliefs and culminating in his writing Looking Backward.
Bellamy’s
vision of a perfect country was one where the people were completely selfless in
their actions and worked for a common good, not their own. The government was little more than an oversight committee
for the “industrial army.” Nationalism
was the formal description, but it can also be described as reformed socialism.
Unlike pure socialism, there could be personal ownership of property,
although not real estate. Bellamy
did a wonderful job of addressing nearly every question that could come up about
his new society. All wages are
equal, but length of work hours are determined by a modified job market (the
harder the job, the fewer hours the workers work).
He attempts to show that there is just as much personal choice in
choosing careers as there was in his day, if not more choice due to better
education, but there are still many government parameters in place for how one
goes about getting a job. There is
also no choice about whether one will or will not work.
One cannot save up money from one year and then not work the next, at the
end of the year all of the unspent money goes back into the public domain.
Consumerism
is still a big part of this world, although in a different way than in
Bellamy’s world. There are large
central marketplaces where one does all of their shopping.
All prices are controlled by the government, so there is no comparison
shopping, and all stores have every product on the market, so if one cannot find
what one is looking for, it is not for sale.
There are no salesclerks trying to sell anything since the workers’ pay
is not based on the amount of product that has been sold.
Even without the thrill of the hunt, shopping is still presented as an
enjoyable pastime, something that would have been common amongst the wealthy
women of Bellamy’s time.
The
biggest problem with Bellamy’s future utopia is that its existence relies on
his assumption that the natural state of humans once needs are met, is that of a
state of grace and generosity. He
thinks that humans are only greedy because they are not guaranteed their next
meal. Once the worries of shelter,
food and clothing are taken care of, he assumes that all people will want to
band together and work really hard for everyone’s benefit. Crime is eliminated because what need is there to steal if
there is no need for the necessities? (Although
Bellamy does do a decent job of acknowledging psychopathy.)
A
smaller problem with Looking Backward is that women are still unequal,
coddled creatures. Edith is only
shown talking to Julian and shopping. Her
mother is shown doing even less (although we can assume that the mother was
retired by now, as was Dr. Leete). The
women are revered for their childbearing capacities and given equal stakes in
society’s wealth so that they are independent of men, but they have their own
special job corps from which to choose jobs, and those are all jobs that are
designed for women’s lesser capabilities.
Bellamy’s sequel to Looking Backward, Equality, attempts
to address some of these problems. Women
are now fully integrated into the work corps with men, and they can even have
supervisory positions in physical jobs such as agriculture.
“Moving beyond the socialization of domestic work cherished by material
feminists such as Gilman, Bellamy creates recycled and disposable clothes and
household items in Equality which require no tending by women.”[4]
Charlotte
Perkins Gilman was an extremely important woman’s rights leader during this
time. Although some of her most
important and best known works were published in the early 20th
century, her philosophies were formed before then and so she can safely be
mentioned here. As stated above she
was a big influence on Bellamy and also on trying to professionalize women’s
tasks such as cooking and childrearing. Gilman’s
utopian novel was called Herland and was published in 1915. Unlike Bellamy’s book, this was purely fiction and unlikely
to actually take place. In her
society, there is a secret land hidden from the rest of the world where only
women live. Some of them
spontaneously reproduce (only giving birth to girls) which replenishes the
population and without men around there is complete peace and sisterhood between
everyone. Some of the structure of
the story is similar to Looking Backward in that the society is being
explained to some male outsiders that happened upon this female paradise.
In this utopia, it is the absence of men which creates the ideal
situation for perfect existence.
Before
writing Herland, Gilman had published a few books, including Women and
Economics (1898) and A Woman’s Utopia (1907). Both were non-fiction
essays calling for equality among the sexes.
Her premise is that the world’s evils were caused by the suppression of
women and good cannot rein without the elevation of women.
She also calls to women to use their influence over men to help them make
the moral choices in life.
One
cannot write about the utopian novels without mentioning one of the most famous
dystopian novels: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
In this fantasy, Hank Morgan thinks that he has the perfect opportunity
to revolutionize Medieval England, but without the will of the people behind
him, he ends up running a benevolent dictatorship instead of a democracy.
Although the narrator still expects more perfect human natures, this time
the reader is made to see what happens with perfect intentions, but average to
dull people with which to try out those intentions.
The biggest problem that Morgan faces is that nobody sees anything wrong
with how life is going. Even the
poorest of the poor who are completely dependent upon the mercy of the landowner
to survive, do not see anything wrong with how the caste system is set up. Every once in a while the Boss will come across a person with
whom he can reason, and that person is sent off to one of his factories to be
taught all that the 19th century has to offer, but at the same time,
the Church cannot be directly fought against.
While the Boss does his darnedest, everything ultimately blows up in his
face (literally). At this point in
his life, Twain was rather cynical, and the book definitely reflects his outlook
on life, but at the same time he is making a very valid point that even the best
intentions in bettering people’s lives will fail unless the people want to
change for the better.
Addressing
the plight of the freed slave, there were a couple of utopian novels written by
blacks, for blacks to give them hope during such a bleak time. One of the impetuses for the writing of black utopian novels
was the outcome of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson where “separate
but equal” was codified and Jim Crow was the new law in the South.
Besides the segregation, lynching was a popular pastime wherever there
was a crime that needed a criminal. Black
writers, when published, had to be better than white writers just to prove that
they were equal in some capacity, they had to represent their race in the best
light possible, and they had to make sure that any message to other blacks about
equality or justice was coded so that white readers would not understand and try
to prevent the message from being spread. Two
writers that managed to achieve this were Sutton E. Griggs and Pauline Hopkins.
Sutton
E. Griggs wrote a novel of two childhood friends who join together later in
their lives to lead a secret underground government for blacks.
The novel was Imperium in Imperio (1899) and takes place in
academia, the black middle-class, and ultimately, Waco, TX.
The story follows the two friends as the light-skinned mulatto one moves
up in the world and the dark-skinned one continuously faces prejudice.
Pauline Hopkins’ novel, “Of
One Blood” was serialized in a magazine from November 1902-November 1903 and
dealt directly with the issue of miscegenation.
The “one blood” refers to the idea of all humanity having come from
forefathers in Africa. The hero of
her novel finds a hidden civilization in Ethiopia and then discovers that he is
descended from their nobility. This
utopia celebrates a pre-colonial Africa although it also points out the
otherness of African Americans which many blacks trying to fit into society had
a problem with.
The above are but a few of the utopian writers of the 19th
century. All of the societal unrest
spurred quite a few more tomes on how society could be better run. One of the other best-known writers on this subject was Karl
Marx. One of the reasons that he
was so important (besides being the cornerstone of Communism) is that he was the
first to think of utopia as something that could be achieved rather than just a
city in the clouds. Some other
novelists were Etienne Cabet, who wrote Voyage to Icaria, which led to
him trying to establish Icarian communities in the 1850s based on his principles
(which failed, although the last one lasted until 1898); William Morris’ News
from Nowhere, which was anti-structure as a protest to Bellamy’s society;
and Eugene Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future, which
satirized socialism as a warning for all who would follow it’s principles.
There are probably many more utopian novels that have been left out for
the end of the 19th century was full of critics. There was a great deal of social turmoil, but also the
greatest explosion of wealth and efficiency of production that had ever been
seen. This combined with a large
reading public created the perfect setting for a proliferation of sociological
stories. Many of the utopian
fantasies did contribute ideas towards making the workplace better, or women’s
lives a little bit easier, but all of them were ultimately too idealistic,
otherwise we would have gotten rid of war and poverty by now.
Selected Bibliography
Aaron, Daniel. Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives. New York:
Oxford
University Press, 1951
Berneri, Marie Louise. Journey Through Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1950.
Bowman, Sylvia. The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy. New York:
Bookman, 1958.
Egbert, Donald Drew, ed. Socialism and American Life. Vol One. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1952.
George,
Henry. Progress and Poverty.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1906.
Kolmerten,
Carol A. Women in Utopia: The
Ideology of Gender in the American
Owenite
Communities. Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Madison, Charles A. Critics and Crusaders: A Century of American Protest. New York:
Ungar, 1959.
Morgan,
Arthur E. Edward Bellamy.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1944.
Shor, Francis Robert. Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America. Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997.
Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society in the Gilded Age.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: Signet Classics,
1889.