LABOR AND THE REPUBLIC ★^643violent upheaval. He thus made socialism seem more acceptable to middle-
class Americans who desired an end to class conflict and the restoration of
social harmony.
Bellamy’s Utopia
Not until the early twentieth century would socialism become a significant
presence in American public life. As Gronlund himself noted, the most import-
ant result of The Cooperative Commonwealth was to prepare an audience for
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which promoted socialist ideas while
“ignoring that name” (Bellamy wrote of nationalism, not socialism). Bellamy
lived virtually his entire life in the small industrial city of Chicopee Falls,
Massachusetts. In Looking Backward, his main character falls asleep in the late
nineteenth century only to awaken in the year 2000, in a world where coopera-
tion has replaced class strife, “excessive individualism,” and cutthroat competi-
tion. Inequality has been banished and with it the idea of liberty as a condition
to be achieved through individual striving free of governmental restraint. Free-
dom, Bellamy insisted, was a social condition, resting on interdependence, not
autonomy.
From today’s vantage point, Bellamy’s utopia— with citizens obligated to
labor for years in an Industrial Army controlled by a single Great Trust— seems a
chilling social blueprint. Yet the book inspired the creation of hundreds of nation-
alist clubs devoted to bringing into existence the world of 2000 and left a profound
mark on a generation of reformers and intellectuals. Bellamy held out the hope of
retaining the material abundance made possible by industrial capitalism while
eliminating inequality. In proposing that the state guarantee economic security to
all, Bellamy offered a far- reaching expansion of the idea of freedom.
Protestants and Moral Reform
Mainstream Protestants played a major role in seeking to stamp out sin during
the Gilded Age. What one historian calls a “Christian lobby” promoted political
solutions to what it saw as the moral problems raised by labor conflict and the
growth of cities, and threats to religious faith by Darwinism and other scien-
tific advances.
Unlike the pre– Civil War period, when “moral suasion” was the preferred
approach of many reformers, powerful national organizations like the Wom-
en’s Christian Temperance Union, National Reform Association, and Reform
Bureau now campaigned for federal legislation that would “Christianize the
government” by outlawing sinful behavior. Among the proposed targets were
the consumption of alcohol, gambling, prostitution, polygamy, and birth con-
trol. Most of these groups spoke less about improving society than stamping
out the sins of individuals. In a striking departure from the prewar situation,
How did reformers of the period approach the problems of an industrial society?