Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Chapter 9-The Fabian Turtle Discovers America

Part 2–United States

Shortly after the New Year in 1888, a shy, frail and previously undiscovered young American awoke to a new life. For the next ten years—until his death at the age of forty-eight—he was not only to experience the rewards of literary success but to be acclaimed as the lay prophet of a new and fashionable political cult. His name, Edward Bellamy, would soon be known from Massachusetts to California, and even in such world capitals as London, Paris and Berlin. The reason? One of the most ingenious manuscripts ever received by Benjamin Ticknor of the Boston publishing firm, Lee and Shepherd, had just been published over Bellamy’s signature, and it proved to be the best-selling American novel since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Edward Bellamy was a former editorial writer and book reviewer who appeared to have been something of a drifter. Son of a New England minister, he had studied for a few terms at Union College in Schenectady and then spent a year in Dresden, Germany, where he pursued an already awakened interest in Socialism.(1) Everything he started seemed to be cut short either by illness or his own restless temperament; for Bellamy suffered intermittently from tuberculosis, that plague of early America.
Returning from Europe Bellamy prepared for the bar, but practiced only briefly. Instead he went to New York City with a letter of recommendation from Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the well-known Abolitionist and latter-day Socialist, and began writing for the New York Evening Post. When he was only twenty-two, Bellamy delivered a lyceum address on the “barbarism” of competitive industry and the beauties of a socialized system, which apparently resulted in his leaving New York and joining the staff of the Springfield Union.
Poor health made regular work difficult; but an early retirement brought Bellamy the fame that had so far escaped him. Though he had published some two dozen short stories in respected American magazines of the day, his circle of admirers was small. Settling down in the little cotton-mill town where he was born and fortifying himself with generous infusions of whiskey and black coffee, he produced several novels that gained him but slight attention. At last he wrote Looking Backward, the tale of an American utopia and a singularly effective piece of propaganda for a non-American doctrine.
Like many another popular novel, it was not destined to become a classic. By now it remains little more than a literary curiosity, bused in libraries throughout the world and resurrected only occasionally. A briefer edition, reprinted in the nineteen-thirties, (2) gives hardly a clue to its original impact. When the book first appeared, however, it was noted for its novelty and for the fact that it was a socialist romance which never once mentioned Socialism.
A book review of March 29, 1888, in The Nation (then owned by the New York Evening Post, where Bellamy had been a contributor) did not hesitate to mention the proscribed word. Hailing the work as a “glowing prophecy and gospel of peace,” the anonymous critic added that even if Bellamy’s schemes for solving the land question “ought theoretically to have restored the society of ancient Peru instead of banging about the millennium, . . . Mr. George himself would rejoice in a realized ideal of Socialism such as this.”
The “Mr. George” referred to was, of course, Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, who had run unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City less than two years before and polled the surprising total of 67,000 votes—7,000 more than a muscular young Republican named Theodore Roosevelt. As The Nation’s reviewer noted, the brand of Socialism offered in fiction-coated form by Bellamy was stronger medicine than any prescribed by Henry George, who urged a Single Tax on land as the remedy for humanity’s ills. Looking Backward predicted that America’s golden age would be achieved not merely by making real estate unprofitable, but by making all other investments equally unprofitable.
This marvel was to be wrought, presumably by peaceful means, through “the national organization of labor under a single direction.” For like its predecessor, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had sparked anti-slavery agitation in New England, Looking Backward was Abolitionist in spirit. In the most polite and indirect way, it preached to the questing Puritan conscience the abolition of “wage slavery.”
There was nothing accidental about it, as some biographers assert today. In the same year that Edward Bellamy began writing his long-projected utopian novel, Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor—George Bernard Shaw’s Dark Lady (3)—toured the United States, noticed a great deal of “unconscious Socialism,” and announced that some day “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Capitalism would be written.” (4) A mutual friend, Laurence Gronlund, transmitted the word to Bellamy, with a further specification that the book should be designed to attract persons of “judgement and culture.” Five other utopian novels were published in 1888; but Bellamy’s was the only one to be promoted by a clique of Socialist-tinged intellectuals even then in the process of formation. Though its popularity waned as fashions in fiction changed, the long-range movement it served to launch has persisted in various related forms for some three-quarters of a century.
Julian West, the hero of Looking Backward, was a properly well-to-do Bostonian of the type Bellamy and Gronlund hoped to reach. In 2000 A.D. Julian awoke £rom a long, hypnotic sleep to find that the United States had evolved painlessly into something called the Cooperative Commonwealth, where everyone was happy, comfortable and behaved like an angel. Looking backward, he was able to detect many flaws in the society of his birth and to perceive that they had all been corrected by the new collectivist system. It was, as the British social evangelist, William Morris, rather snobbishly remarked, “a cockney Paradise” which he personally would not care to inhabit. (5)
Sweetened by a sentimental love-interest, this optimistic fantasy appealed to America’s kindly, culture-hungry middle class, in an era when the routine of daily life was brightened by the Lend-a-Hand Clubs and the Chatauqua Circles. For a time Looking Backward sold at the then fantastic rate of a thousand copies a day. Total sales in the United States eventually topped half a million and in England reached nearly half that amount. As a result, Edward Bellamy became the figurehead and symbol of an American Fabian Socialist movement, whose future pattern of growth he could not foresee in detail. British Fabians, however, and their disciples in the United States were available to guide its development, from the eager beginnings to the grim conclusion which a veteran American Socialist, Upton Sinclair, (6) assures us blithely was never closer than it is today.
Lee and Shepherd, original publishers of Looking Backward, were promptly besieged with questions about its unknown author. Among others,, Frances E. Willard, then heading the very respectable National Council of Women in Washington, D.C., wrote to a friend employed by the firm: “Have been reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and think it’s a revelation and an Evangel. Who and where is he? . . . What manner of man is he in private?” To which she received the reply: “We do not know, except that his letters are mailed from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts.”(7)? Three weeks later Frances Willard, ever an ardent advocate of women’s causes, wrote to say, “Some of us think that Edward Bellamy must be Edwardina —that a big-hearted, big-brained woman wrote the book. Won’t you please find out?”
As the moving spirit of the International Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances E. Willard was a lifelong intimate of English temperance leader Lady Henry Somerset and a perennial house guest at her country estate. Like a number of early American feminists and reformers, Frances Willard also joined the Fabian Society of London.(8) Though disappointed to learn that the author of Looking Backward was no female, her enthusiasm for the novel was not diminished. Frances Willard quickly brought it to the attention of British friends and claimed credit for introducing the book to students at Oxford, besides commending it to her many lecture audiences in America. In a face-to-face discussion, Bellamy even persuaded her that references to after-dinner wine and cigars in the year 2000 were permissible, since by then the curse of intemperance would have been safely removed.
In private life, Edward Bellamy was addicted to stronger beverages than wine; (9) but his frequent inability to appear in public was usually ascribed to “dyspepsia.” He was no less guarded about revealing the origins of his Socialist creed. In a letter to William Dean Howells, the silver-haired New England poet and essayist, he stated: ‘I have never been a student of Socialist literature, or have known more of Socialist schemes than any reader of newspapers might.” This careful denial may be doubted, for Bellamy was a voracious reader of German as well as English books. In his lyceum address of 1872, he had already shown more than a bowing acquaintance with Socialist doctrines.
To others, he “confessed” that he learned all he knew of “scientific Socialism” from a little volume by Laurence Gronlund, a Danish-American lawyer then living in Philadelphia. It was called The Cooperative Commonwealth—a term that modern Socialists still use interchangeably with the term “industrial democracy,” given currency some years later by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Published in 1884, also by Lee and Shepherd, The Cooperative Commonwealth was the first book deliberately to present the doctrines of Marxian Socialism in non-Marxist terms for American readers. Four years later Gronlund ordered his own work withdrawn from circulation, in order to help promote the sales of his friend Bellamy’s novel—a rare example of literary altruism.
Educated in Europe, Laurence Gronlund was already a full-blown Marxist when he emigrated to the United States. As a lawyer, teacher and would-be labor organizer in this country, he had come to the conclusion that neither European methods nor an alien terminology could ever succeed in making Socialism acceptable to the great majority of Americans. (10) Social revolution must be disguised. It must be a gradualist movement for social reform. Perhaps it was not purely by coincidence that a similar idea occurred at precisely the same time to the founders of the London Fabian Society. This idea coincided with the long-term plan for England and America of the two tireless arch-conspirators, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, from whom modern Social Democracy stems.
As early as 1872 Karl Marx, speaking in Amsterdam, had intimated that social revolution might be accomplished by peaceful means in England and America—that is, by taking advantage of libertarian traditions and free institutions to subvert them. Both countries were well-known to Marx and had treated him kindly. London was his home during years of exile. There he set up the First International, known as the Workingmen’s International Association, on September 28, 1864 at a public meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, Long Acre. While Marx never visited the United States, the weekly five dollars which he received as a special correspondent for the New York Tribune was for a time his chief source of income. (11) He sent articles on the Crimean War to that newspaper, whose editor, Horace Greeley, likewise called himself a Socialist—although Greeley seems to have perceived little difference between the utopian farm colonies inspired in antebellum America by Charles Fourier and Robert Owen and the “scientific socialism” of a Karl Marx.
The father of modern Social Democracy believed that in certain respects the United States held the key to world revolution. In the preface to Volume I of Das Kapital, Marx wrote: “As in the eighteenth century, the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working class.”
Following the collapse of the Paris Commune which he had backed after its formation, Marx ordered the headquarters of his First International transferred to New York City in 1872, under the direction of a trusted aide, Friedrich Adolph Sorge. Seventy years later a grandson of that selfsame Sorge headed a Communist spy ring in Tokyo, whose intrigues precipitated the Japanese decision to strike southward at Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into World War II in time to save Communist Russia.
In his lifetime, Karl Marx freely deplored the fact that his Socialist followers in the United States were no more than a displaced group of angry trade unionists—refugees from the revolutions of 1848 and 1870. Their meetings were held and minutes were written in German. Socially, politically and psychologically, they were not only isolated from the main current of American life, but for years they rebuffed attempts by English-speaking Socialists to join them. Laurence Gronlund; his friend Charles Southeran, the biographer of Horace Greeley; and Florence Kelley, who translated Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (pristine Marxists, all), were expelled in turn from America’s Socialist Labor Party for being unorthodox— and non-German.
A British Fabian Socialist and charter member of the London Fabian Society, Edward R. Pease, once observed tartly that the early Social Democrats in the United States resembled some small dogmatic sect whose every action required a Marxian text to sanctify it.(12) For years, this remained the characteristic mood of working-class Socialism in America. Though the General German Workingmen’s Union and the Socialist Labor Party made some temporary headway in centers of immigrant population—notably New York City, where the slogan “Down with German Socialism and German lager!” became a war cry of Tammany Hall—Engels remarked in a private letter to Sorge that the disappearance of the stubborn, unruly old German comrades would be a healthy thing for the Socialist movement in America. Revolutions and barricades, dynamite and rifles were all the talk among the German-American Marxists of the eighties, and anybody who suggested anything else was unworthy of the name of Socialist.
The decade had been a stormy one for the comrades. In Russia, social revolutionaries conspired to kill grand dukes and ministers of state, and in 1882 had actually succeeded in assassinating the Czar. In Chicago three German-American Anarchists and one native American, Albert Parsons, were hanged in 1887 for complicity in the Hay-market Square bombings the year before. Socialist protests against these executions had led the American public to believe that Socialists and Anarchists were identical—and in some instances, they were, as persistent Anarchist infiltration of the First International and the Socialist Labor Party demonstrated.
To the average American of the eighties, as Edward Bellamy said, the very word Socialism brought to mind ideas of atheism, revolution and sexual novelties. Visits to the United States in 1884 by Frederick Engels and in 1886 by Wilhelm Liebknecht, a co-founder of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, did nothing to dispel that impression. Engels’ godless views on religion and marriage, as expressed in his Origin of the Family, were widely publicized. Wilhelm Liebknecht, who prophesied the future triumph of Socialism in the United States one Sunday afternoon at Brommer’s Park in New York City, (13) was accompanied by Eleanor Marx and her common-law husband, Edward Aveling, translator of Das Kapital into English. During a fifteen week lecture tour as guests of the Socialist Labor Party, the couple’s unconventional union provoked a public scandal. Here, it seemed, was living proof that Socialists favored free love and flouted family ties; and the topic was revived at intervals long after the unhappy Eleanor Marx, in England, had committed suicide as a result of Aveling’s desertion.
Abhorred by native American workingmen and members of the urban middle class, Socialist ideas nevertheless began in the middle eighties to exert a certain fascination in learned circles. They were spread by professors and students of a new, somewhat occult science known as Political Economy. Foremost among these campus soothsayers was Professor Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins University— later of the University of Wisconsin, where, notably, he influenced the thought of a future governor of Wisconsin and Progressive Senator, Robert M. La Follette, Sr. It was Professor Ely who took the initiative in organizing the American Economic Association, which convened for the first time on September 9, 1885, at the fashionable United States Hotel in Saratoga, New York. (14)
Minutes of this historic meeting show that the Socialist-minded element at once captured a majority of the Association’s elective offices. Professor Ely, who served as chairman, was voted general secretary of the organization. Two like-minded colleagues, Professors H. C. Adams of Cornell and E. J. James of Pennsylvania, were elected first and second vice presidents; and Professor E. W. Bemis (later on the faculty of the University of Chicago) attended as secretary of the Connecticut branch. Included among the several hundred charter members, not yet a recognized authority, was the future Professor John R. Commons of Indiana and Michigan Universities, whose outline of political economy became a standard textbook for several generations of college students throughout the country.
Those five were the main leaders of academic socialism, (15) which in their day cast a shadow no larger than a man’s hand. They argued privately, and sometimes publicly, for the municipal or national ownership of what they termed “natural monopolies,” but for the time being did not profess to the full Socialist program of nationalizing all land and capital. (16) The new learned society provided a dignified sounding board for their doctrines, as it does for their modern counterparts. It is interesting to note that the American Economic Association very soon published over its imprint two essays by an amateur economist who also happened to be the chairman of the London Fabian Society —the emerging Sidney Webb.
Lending the authority of the cloth to the Association’s original meeting were the Reverend Lyman Abbott and the Reverend Washington Gladden, both to become prominent in the Christian Socialist movement. There was also Dr. E. R. A. Seligman of Columbia, the Association’s first treasurer, who became something of a power behind the scenes in national politics as well as in the academic world. Member of a wealthy German-American banking family in New York and privately tutored as a lad by Horatio Alger of the rags-to-riches precepts, Dr. Seligman was usually regarded as a conservative; yet throughout a long lifetime he condoned every heterodoxy in the name of academic freedom. The Reverend Abbott (a future editor of The Outlook) and Dr. Seligman were promptly named to the council of the American Economic Association together with a reserved, lantern-jawed young associate professor from Bryn Mawr College, Dr. Woodrow Wilson, who none suspected would one day be President of the United States.
Appointed to the Labor Committee was Woodrow Wilson’s good friend, Dr. Albert Shaw, then editor of the Tribune in Minneapolis with its strongly German-Socialist population, and later chosen to edit the influential Review of Reviews. Dr. Shaw’s personal contacts with British Fabians were established in the nineties, when he published a book entitled Municipal Government in Great Britain.
Other characters of incidental interest attending the founders’ meeting of the American Economic Association were Thomas Davidson, who had inadvertently helped to found the Fabian Society of London, and F. H. Giddings, editor of the Springfield Union, where Edward Bellamy was employed for five years. It must be recorded that representation from the New England colleges was slight and not a single professor from Harvard was elected to office that year—an omission long since rectified. In those post Civil War years education was moving westward, along with the expanding economy.
At its annual meeting three years later, members of the same Association listened to a paper by a solemn, bearded little Englishman wearing a beribboned pince-nez. It was Sidney Webb in person, appearing as an emissary of the British Economic Association (afterwards the Royal Economic Society) which a fellow-Fabian, George Bernard Shaw, had been instrumental in founding. Flanked by his faithful lieutenant, Edward R. Pease, Webb came to America for the first time in September, 1888, and remained for a full three months. (17) In his portmanteau he carried the manuscript of an essay, “The Historical Aspects of the Basis of Socialism”—shortly to be published as “Socialism in England” over the imprint of the American Economic Association, and later included in the Fabian Essays, for whose American edition of 1894 Edward Bellamy wrote a foreword.
In America of the late eighteen-eighties the cocksure young Londoner found a strange new world, pulsating and throbbing with gigantic economic forces that were producing fresh forms of wealth undreamed of by even the most utopian imagination; (18) but his conceit was equal to the challenge. He had no scruples in recommending the same gradualist tactics of revolution which he felt were destined to conquer England for Socialism. To Webb’s calculating eye, it was plain that any frontal attack against the vast new citadel of capitalism was doomed to failure. In fact, owing to the furor already created by a handful of Anarchists and militant Socialists, the little Socialist movement in the United States faced the possibility of being outlawed by act of Congress unless it could speedily muster the support of a large body of respectable middle class opinion around the country.
For that purpose Edward Bellamy’s well-contrived novel, which its author acknowledged was written “to convert the cultured and conservative classes,” provided a practical springboard. New England with its close cultural ties to Old England and its susceptibility to New Thought of all kinds, seemed the logical place from which to launch a new and less vulnerable type of Socialist movement. Sentimental memories still lingered there of Brook Farm and other utopian communities, and the influence of the English Christian Socialists had lately made itself felt through the writings of Dr. Elisha Mulford and the Reverend Washington Gladden. Theosophy, which stressed the brotherhood of a fatherless humanity, was also winning converts. Bostonians had heard of the beautiful Annie Besant, a leading British Theosophist who was likewise a member of the London Fabian Society.
When Sidney Webb and Edward Pease appeared im Boston during the autumn of 1888, armed with letters of introduction to literary folk, college professors, clergymen and assorted uplifters, no more than ten thousand copies of Looking Backward had been sold.(19) Enough to make it a best-seller at the time, but only a glimmering of what was to comer While literary promotion was not the Fabians’ prime purpose, from first to last they have never objected to making the fortune of an author or a publisher, provided they could, in the process, create a cordial climate of opinion for Socialism. Chief beneficiary in this instance was the Houghton Mifflin Company,(20) which purchased the rights from Lee and Shepherd and, as a result of certain activities set in motion by the two English visitors, was able to develop Bellamy’s book into a uniquely valuable property.
The previous June, a pair of Boston newspapermen had already written to Bellamy expressing their desire to form a club for the propagation of his ideas. They were Cyrus Field Willard, labor reporter for the Boston Globe and a relative of Frances E. Willard, and Sylvester Baxter, editorial writer for the Boston Herald, who had penned the first ecstatic review of Looking Backward. Both were Theosophists, devotees of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Since summer hardly seemed the best season for rounding up an organization of cultured Bostonians, Baxter seized the opportunity for making a trip to Germany with a stopover in London.
Meanwhile, several former army officers in Boston wrote to Bellamy on September 7 telling him of their own plan to found a club in his name. The leaders were Captain Charles E. Bowers and General Arthur F. Devereux, a Civil War hero who had made a name for himself at Gettysburg. Whatever their intention, it was certainly not to advance the cause of Socialism. In common with other thoughtful citizens, they viewed the sudden eruption of trusts and monopolies in the United States with concern. At the same time, they could not fail to be aware of the problems created by wave after wave of immigrant labor pouring into a country largely unprepared to receive them, so that the newcomers were often victimized both by earlier arrivals from their own native lands and by chaotic new conditions of industry.
In establishing a club “for the elevation of man,” General Devereux and his friends hoped to suggest the need for specific reform measures to both major political parties in America before the problems at hand became too acute for an orderly solution. On September 18 their little group, named the Boston Bellamy Club, held an initial meeting with twenty-seven charter members. At this point it began to look as if more patriotic elements had stolen a march on the Socialists. In haste,` Edward Bellamy sent a letter from his retreat in Chicopee Falls, begging the military men to postpone further meetings and to unite with the group which Willard and Baxter still hoped to organize. The moment was a delicate one, calling for some diplomacy, and just then, as if by prearrangement, a master diplomat in embryo, Sidney Webb, appeared on the scene. Minutes of the British Fabian Society indicate that by September 21 Webb had already left London for the United States.
In October a conference was held, and the two factions agreed to combine. On December 6 a committee was named to draft a joint statement of policy quite unlike that previously adopted by the military group. Besides the two army officers and the two journalists, another voice was introduced on the committee. It was the voice of the Reverend W. D. P. Bliss, carefully prompted by Sidney Webb. Bliss was a local clergyman, soon to assume the duties of pastor at Grace Church in South Boston and to be dismissed a few years afterwards for his Socialist activities, Christian and otherwise.
Born in Constantinople of American missionary parents, Bliss was a frequent visitor to London where he fell under the Fabian spell. For some twenty years he proved himself an eager spokesman of Fabian Socialism in the United States and an exponent of the superior virtues of the London Fabian Society. As a writer, editor and organizer, he was almost abject in his adulation of Webb and Pease, who sometimes found themselves embarrassed by his misplaced zeal. Ousted from one church after another and unable to support himself by writing, he later secured a position with the United States Bureau of Labor— the first but by no means the last old Socialist to withdraw to that snug harbor.
The twelve weeks Webb and Pease spent in the United States during the autumn of 1888 coincided exactly with the period when the revised Boston Bellamy Club was in process of being formed. In certain respects the club was similar to the London Fabian Society, with a declaration of principles corresponding to the Fabian Basis, and subscribed to by members of the parent club and affiliates to be set up throughout the country. The name proposed for the new organization was typical of the Webb talent for compromise. It was to be called the Nationalist Club, a name which appealed on one hand to patriotic pride, and on the other hand suggested the club’s final goal: namely, the nationalization of private industry. The purpose of the club was to “educate” the American people through lectures, books and publications in the reform measures and general ideas advocated by Looking Backward, and thereby to stimulate such political action as might ultimately lead to the establishment of the Cooperative Commonwealth—a polite synonym for the all-embracing State foretold in other terms by Marx and Engels.
The declaration of principles showed the imprint of Sidney Webb’s hand, down to the use of the words “practical” and “practicability” which characterized so many impractical documents drafted by him over the years. (21) The statement is worth quoting at least in part, because of its devious nature and because of its subsequent acceptance by thousands of well-meaning, if ingenuous, Americans:
“The principle of the Brotherhood of Humanity is one of the eternal truths that govern the world’s progress on lines which distinguish human nature from brute nature. . . .
“No truth can avail unless practically applied. Therefore those who seek the welfare of man must endeavor to suppress the system founded on brute principles of competition and put in its place another based on the nobler principles of association. . . .
“We advocate no sudden or ill-considered changes; we make no war upon individuals who have accumulated immense fortunes simply by carrying to a logical end the false principles upon which business is now based.
“The combinations, trusts and syndicates of which the people at present complain demonstrate the practicability of our basic principle of association. We merely seek to push this principle a little further and have all industries operated in the interests of the nation—the people organized— the organic unity of the whole people.”
At a meeting on December 15,1888, where Edward Bellamy made one of his rare personal appearances and was elected vice president of the club, this declaration was approved by the leaders. Private papers of the president, General Devereux, reveal that a member of the Fabian Society of London, presumed to be Sidney Webb himself, attended incognito. The same statement was read and adopted by the general membership at the first public meeting of the Boston Nationalist Club in Tremont Hall on January 18, 1889.
By that date Sidney Webb had resumed to England, leaving behind a lively memento of his visit. Historically, it was only the first in a long series of informally linked undertakings to be promoted under Fabian Socialist tutelage in the United States. All have been marked by the same superficial candor and mildness, and an air of bland self-righteousness which seems to be the peculiar contribution of New England to the American psyche. And yet, from the very beginning, all these organizations were penetrated at the core by a Fabian Socialist conspiracy to capture the mind of America and eventually the machinery of government, in the interests of a revolutionary future wholly alien to the American tradition.

Footnotes

1. Sylvia E. Bowman, The Year 2000–A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy (New York, Bookman Associates, 1958), pp 97-98.
2. Modern Library Edition, New York, Random House, no date, with a foreword by Heywood Broun. A new British edition of Looking Backward was published in 1948 and advertised in reviving “native Communism.”
3. Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw (London, Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1961), p. 120.
4. Bowman, op. cit., pp. 116-177.
5. E. P. Thompson, “William Morris,” Monthly Press Review (New York, 1961), p. 632. Letter form Morris to Glasier, May 13, 188.
6. In a television interview with Upton Sinclair by Paul Coates, originating at Station KTTV, Los Angeles, May, 1962.
7. Frances E. Willard, “An Interview with Edward Bellamy,” Our Day, Vol. IV, 1889.
8. William A. Clarke, “The Fabian Society,” New England Magazine (March, 1894), p. 91.
9. Bowman, op. cit., pp. 149-150.
10. Richard T. Ely, Socialism and Social Reform (Boston, T. Y. Crowell & Co., 1894), p. 102.
11. John Spargo, Socialism, A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1913), p. 210.
12. Edward R. Pease, History of Socialism (London, A. & C. Black, 1913), p. 339.
13. The New York Times (September 21, 1886).
14. Minutes of the American Economic Association, Vol. I.
15. W. D. P. Bliss, A Handbook of Socialism (London, Sonnenschein, 1895), p. 146.
16. Ibid.
17. Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (London, A. C. fifield, 1916), pp. 75-76.
18. Max Beer, Fifty Years of International Socialism (London, Allen & Unwin, 1937), p. 109.
19. Edward Bellamy, Edward Bellamy Speaks Again (Kansas City, Peerage Press, 1939), p. 206. This sales statement was made by Bellamy himself.
20. Bowman, op. cit., p. 115. A new edition subsequently issued by Houghton, Mifflin was based on the amended text prepared by Bellamy in 1888 for Rabbi Solomon Schindler of Boston, who translated Looking Backward into German.
21. See “Labour and the New Social Order,” written by Webb and adopted by the British Labour Party Conference in June, 1918, which similarly denounces “the competitive struggle” and advocates “the socialisation of industry so as to secure the elimination of every kind of inefficiency and waste.” It also refers to “practical programmes of the Labour Party often carelessly derided as impracticable.”

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