Over the past few nights I have been watching a PBS documentary on the city of Chicago, based on Donald L. Miller’s book City of the Century which was published in 1996. The book, and the documentary derived from it, cover the history of the city from its exploration and earliest settlement through the rest of the 19th century. At the time, Chicago’s rapid growth, its unbridled capitalism, its extremes of both wealth and poverty, seemed to indicate the future of our whole society – for better or worse. Even Europeans were looking to Chicago as a portent of changes that were coming for them. As if in a crescendo, the 1893 World’s Fair brought all eyes to Chicago and the spectacular achievement of the White City.
Much of the story of 19th century Chicago is a story of struggle. Empires were built out of sheer will by men such as Fields and Armour and Pullman. Simultaneously great masses of laborers, mostly immigrants, struggled for survival and for better lives for their children in tenement slums. Labor organized to struggle against the giants of capital for better wages and working conditions. Capital struggled to find a solution to the “labor problem.” Still, Miller points out, that even amid the squalor and chaos, it was generally an optimistic time. There was the shared belief that through hard work people could better their lot.
To illustrate this point in the documentary, Miller says that this was a time that people believed in cities. He goes on to refer to Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, noting that his utopian vision is an industrial urban paradise – a city. That sparked a curiosity, as I had not looked at that book since college. Today I picked it up again.
Looking Backward 2000-1887 was first published in 1888. In the book, upper crust Bostonian Julian West is placed in a hypnotic trance to relieve his insomnia. Some unknown catastrophe befalls the house he is lying in, but he is reposed in an hidden chamber. He is discovered and revived from his state of suspended animation in the year 2000. He went to sleep in an age of great labor unrest, and great unease among the privileged classes, and he wakes in an age of peace, contentment, and equality.
The premise of the development of the utopia of the 20th century is that it arrived merely as a natural extension of the progression of the economic activity of the 19th century. The escalating agglomeration of capital into larger and larger monopolies, eventually resulted in a single monopoly – the government. The people then relieved of the oppression of large capitalist juggernauts, took control of this government to operate it to the equal benefit of all members of the society. In a running dialogue between West and the doctor that revived him, Bellamy makes great efforts to describe the institutions and practices of the new society. Those engaged in labor have a prescribed term of service lasting from age 21 to age 45. The fruits of the continued abundance of American production are shared rather than accumulated by the few. Excess is spent on the development and beautification of the cities for the benefit of all. Government is the sole capitalist, and governmental corruption is a thing of the past.
Bellamy’s socialistic vision of the 20th century, of course, did not come to pass. Even within the novel, West wakes to realize that his experience in that future paradise was just an elaborate dream. The ideas of Bellamy’s new society, however, did immediately inspire a political movement and social activism.