As enlistees in the state's "industrial army," all citizens in his utopia draw the same annual salary in the form of a "credit card" in which holes are punched to register purchases. On his deathbed, he wiled away the hours by arranging tin soldiers along the folds of his coverlet. An embittered West Point reject, Bellamy (1850-1898) cultivated a lifelong passion for the Prussian military. The basic structure of the society Bellamy imagined is easily summarized: The state runs everything and has converted the nation into a sumptuous barracks. By the early '30s, Bellamy's fans had been absorbed into American socialist circles and Franklin Roosevelt's brain trust both John Dewey and the historian Charles Beard announced that, among books published in the preceding 50 years, Looking Backward was matched in influence only by Das Kapital. Translated into 20 foreign languages, the novel was a hot topic among the intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Russia (Lenin's wife gave it a mixed review) and the architects of the New Deal (Arthur Morgan, the first head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, wrote a gushing 400-page biography of Bellamy). By the early 1890s, more than 150 "Bellamy Clubs," devoted to discussing and implementing the ideas in Looking Backward, had sprung up in cities across the United States. It took the massive hit novel Ben-Hur (1880) seven years to rack up the sales that Looking Backward tallied in just two. As West starts to rustle in his bed, it is well worth revisiting Looking Backward and teasing out the ways in which it continues to influence contemporary times.īellamy's vision of a future without capitalism proved immensely appealing. Published in 1888, Looking Backward crystallized that combination of suspicion of markets and love of centralized planning that has in various forms persisted to this day. Perhaps the most famous time traveler in literary history, West has had a powerful and enduring effect on the terms of American political debate. In the book, September 10, 2000, is the precise day West rouses from his long nap. To be sure, this amazing triumph is not a scientific marvel but a literary one: West is the protagonist of Edward Bellamy's best-selling utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887. This September, it is all but certain that West will awaken from his slumber and be brought back to life. In the course of his treatment by a Boston doctor, however, West was "mesmerized" so effectively that he never regained consciousness he has remained in a state of suspended animation for more than 100 years. On Memorial Day in 1887, Julian West, one of the best-known Americans of his day and a notorious insomniac, sought help for his chronic sleep problems.
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