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.



[1] From Journey Through Utopia by Marie Louise Berneri.

[2] From The Incorporation of America.

[3] From Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America.

[4] Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America, Pg 30.

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