Remaking the nation through brotherhood in the utopian fiction of William Dean Howells and Edward Bellamy

Abstract

Both William Dean Howells and Edward Bellamy imagine brotherhood as the basis for new social orders in response to the trauma of the Civil War. Responding to the way in which the Civil War had pitted “brother against brother” in a “house divided,” Howells and Bellamy differently seek to reconstitute the American national family through revisioning brotherhood as universal, just, and equitable. William Dean Howells’s 1890 A Hazard of New Fortunes illustrates the difficulties of aligning men in brotherhood following the Civil War and amidst the economic upheaval of the last decades of the 19th century. Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward and Howells’s Altrurian romances (A Traveller from Altruria [1894], “Letters of an Altrurian Traveller, I‐V” [1893‐94] and Through the Eye of the Needle [1907]) demonstrate brotherhood’s importance to new visions of community. Brotherhood’s promise for remaking the nation gives rise to the Nationalist movement, which emerged to make real Bellamy’s vision of the future. Brotherhood is a powerful organizing principle for utopian endeavor in post‐Civil War America, despite the limitations coincident with brotherhood, such as the difficulty of imagining brotherhood across race and gender lines.

Keywords:

• William Dean Howells
• Edward Bellamy
• Brotherhood
• Nationalist Movement
• Utopianism
• Equality

Notes

Matthew R. Davis is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound where he teaches courses in 19th and early‐20th century American literature and culture.

The Great Railroad Strike occurred in the summer of 1877 after the management of the Baltimore and Ohio lines announced wage cuts. Railroad strikes spread throughout the country, resulting in crowds gathering and clashing with state militias, rioting and looting in several urban centers, and, ultimately, compelling the President to send federal troops to quash the strikers (Wiebe, 1967, p. 10).

The Haymarket Square Riot of 1886 occurred as plans were made for a national general strike to demand an eight‐hour work day. While only about 300,000 people participated in this strike on its first day, the course of events changed dramatically two days later when, on May 3, four strikers were killed by police at the McCormick Harvester Company factory in Chicago (Trachtenberg, 1995, p. 90). During the meeting that followed and proceeded peacefully in Haymarket Square, a bomb was thrown, killing one policeman and setting off a riot that culminated in the deaths of seven more policemen and four civilians.

The 1894 sympathy boycott in support of the Pullman strikers in Chicago, according to one historian, “pitted the United States Army against the American Railway Union, and the clash resulted in the most destructive civil violence since the Civil War” (Trachtenberg, 1995, p.208).

This figure comes from Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America; Arthur Lipow, in Authoritarian Socialism in America, estimates the number of workers participating in work stoppages at 600,000 for the year 1886.

Arthur E. Morgan (1944), in his biography of Edward Bellamy, notes that during “1885 and 1886, when Bellamy began writing Looking Backward, industrial strife was so frequent and violent that the period has been called ‘the great upheaval’” (p. 208).

Further problems that could arise due to the presence of money have been averted by other means. First, the annual provision is generous enough so that most citizens do not exceed their credit. If they do, however, they may obtain an advance on the subsequent year’s allotment. Additionally, individuals are forbidden, unless they seek a special exception, to accumulate that money which they do not spend. Instead, any surplus left over at the end of the year is returned to the general fund. The problem of inheritance, meanwhile, has been solved by various inventive means. For starters, since the nation is the sole land and property owner, there is not much that can be passed from generation to generation. Additionally, because one’s annual credit cannot be used as the means of exchange between individuals, the great accumulation of riches such as gold or china becomes utterly valueless, unless one considers them practical for their actual use, enjoyment, or beauty. Finally, any sense of competition which could arise between individuals has been eliminated due to the fact that everyone now participates toward the object of serving the nation, and not for his or her own self interests.

They had been eliminated partially due to the all‐encompassing role played by the New Nation, but also because they “would have interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army, which, of course, required to be central and uniform” (Bellamy, 1888, p.155).

According to biographer Arthur E. Morgan (1944), many of the initial members of the Bellamy Clubs had been adherents of Theosophy, and that which characterized both Theosophy and Bellamyites was their shared “zeal for the doctrine of universal brotherhood” (p. 261).

This structure mirrors the manner in which women’s auxiliaries were created in response to critiques that fraternal organizations such as Freemasonry should be open to women. Women’s auxiliaries, such as the Order of the Eastern Star, were not created as parallel societies; instead, male Masons, who administered the rituals and ran the meetings, oversaw them.

This imperium is in marked contrast to the threat posed by African‐American men united in brotherhood in Sutton Elbert Griggs’s 1889 novel Imperium in Imperio.

This suggestion by Katherine Pearson Woods in The Nationalist refutes Sylvia Strauss’s (1988) supposition, in her essay “Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia,” that blacks are meant to be incorporated into industrial service. While Strauss writes that “blacks were destined for the industrial army, where they would receive the discipline, tempered with paternalistic benevolence, that would enable them to elevate themselves to the level of civilization already achieved by the whites,” Woods’s article from The Nationalist suggests otherwise (p. 82). While Thomas Peyser (1998) sees this apparent contradiction between “cosmopolitan indifference to race” and “racial bigotry” as endemic to Bellamy’s insistence on the local as subordinate to the global, I read this apparent contradiction as consistent with the logic of brotherhood, which, as a spectrum, can include everything from broad‐based fraternal organizations (Freemasonry, the Ku Klux Klan), to the legal creation of brothers (‐in‐law), to consanguineous brothers (p.57). This ability to appear available to all while remaining racially exclusive is precisely what attracts to many to brotherhood as a late‐19th‐century solution to disunion and racial difference.

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Notes on contributors

Matthew R. Davis

Matthew R. Davis is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound where he teaches courses in 19th and early‐20th century American literature and culture.