The Obsolete Necessity

Tables and Illustrations

TABLE

Table 1. Geographical Distribution of the Utopian Authors Compared to a Random Sample of Authors and the Population

PLATES

Plate l. Volcanic Eruptions, AD 2000

Plate 2. “The City of Ruins,” The Last American

Plate 3. “The Two Monuments in the River,” The Last American

Plate 4. “Map of North America,” Cosmopolitan Railway

Plate 5. “Confronted by a Singular Looking Being,” Etidorhpa

Plate 6. Aeronauts Discover the North Pole, AD 2000

Plate 7. Twenty-Second Century Airplane, The Great Awakening

Plate 8. “Aerial Navigation,” Looking Forward

Plate 9. “The Automatic Valet,” Looking Forward

Plate 10. “Farming in 1999,” Looking Forward

Plate 11. “Classified Advertisements,” Looking Forward

Plate 12. “Hello-Central!” A Connecticut Yankee

Plate 13. “Etidorhpa,” Etidorhpa

Plate 14. “A Monorail,” The Goddess of Atvatabar

Plate 15. “Map of the United States of the Americas,” Looking Forward

Plate 16. “Plan of Distribution of Buildings,” The Human Drift

Plate 17. “Plan of Apartment Building,” The Human Drift

Plate 18. “Floor Plan of a Single Apartment,” The Human Drift

Plate 19. “Completed Apartment,” The Human Drift

Plate 20. “Side Elevation of Apartment Building,” The Human Drift

Plate 21. “Single Tier in Process of Construction,” The Human Drift

Plate 22. “A ‘Big-House’ Community,” Cityless and Countryless World

Plate 23. “Neuropolis,” John Harvey

Plate 24. “Street Scene,” The Goddess of Atvatabar

Plate 25. “Sketch of the Center of New Era Model City,” New Era

Plate 26. “Outline of Plan for New Era Model City,” New Era

Acknowledgments for the Classic Edition

My primary gratitude still extends to the many people mentioned at the conclusion of the Preface to the 1976 edition of The Obsolete Necessity (xiv) and to Thomas D. Clareson (1926–93) for his careful reading of the manuscript. For this edition, I am particularly indebted to Phil Wegner and Tom Moylan who suggested that I send a proposal to include the book in the Ralahine Classics in utopian studies series. Since the appearance of The Obsolete Necessity, the publications of many scholars and reviewers have influenced me and helped me gain perspectives on the strengths and limitations of the book. The scholars include: Jean Pfaelzer, Howard Segal, Carol Farley Kessler, Lee Cullen Khanna, Arthur Lipow, Charles Rooney, Susan Matarese, Daphne Patai, Carol Kolmerten, Toby Widdicombe, Herman Prieser, Nancy Griffith, Matthew Beaumont, and many of the reader-response critics of the past forty years. Of the many reviews, the ones that were especially helpful were written by: Glen Negley, Arthur O. Lewis, Neil Barron, Freiberg, J. W., Jay Martin, James Mehan, Jean R. Quandt, Alexander Saxton, D. B. Smith, and Howard Segal.

I am especially thankful to the late Arthur O. Lewis (1920–2009) and Lyman Tower Sargent. I thank Professor Lewis for his excellent annotated bibliography, Utopian Literature in the Pennsylvania State University Libraries (1984), for co-founding the Society for Utopian Studies, for establishing the Arthur O. and Celeste J. Lewis Utopian Literature Collation at Penn State, and for his encouragement for my work. Professor Sargent’s half century of bibliographic work is the foundation for much of modern utopian studies scholarship. For this Ralahine edition, he prepared for me an 1888–1900 American utopias annotated bibliography from his monumental electronic bibliography Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography from 1516 to the Present (openpublishing.psu.edu/utopia).

I owe special debts to Mark Cook and Trudi Beckman, who transformed a 50-year-old text into a clean PDF and then into a bizarre Word document, and then cleaned up that document. I thank the Peter Lang IT staff who converted our Word document into the print and electronic editions for the Ralahine Classics series. I thank Tony Mason for his patience as I missed deadlines and Dyana Jaffris for overseeing the final production.

Preface to the 1976 Edition

Misshelved, yellowed with bent and broken corners, lost—but most of all forgotten. Why disturb them? Why exhume an outpouring of American utopian visions over a half-century old?

To answer these questions, I shall try to define the nature of this book. It is not a literary study. True, I stress the importance of settings, character types, plot elements, conventions, and images, but those interested in literary analyses should turn to Part 2 of J. O. Bailey’s Pilgrims Through Space and Time or to several of the dissertations described in the secondary source listing for more detailed literary surveys. Nor is this book a social history of actual utopian communities. By the late nineteenth century, the golden era of American utopian settlements had passed; most idealists were writing or organizing, not settling. Of course, utopian communes still existed, and studies of these experiments are valuable. But the utopian writings, especially popular works such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, had a greater impact on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, the utopian authors were not restrained by the nagging, day-to-day problems of founding communities. Therefore, they could let their imaginations roam beyond the limits of present realities where they often revealed their most fundamental hopes and fears about the past, present, and future.

Neither a literary nor a social history, The Obsolete Necessity is primarily an attempt to examine 160 American fictional and nonfictional utopian, anti-utopian, and partially utopian works with three main goals in mind. First, I want to make the utopian authors’ ideas and attitudes more accessible to scholars and non-scholars whose interests include utopian speculation. This is the major function of the annotated bibliographies, the content analyses, and the summaries of plots and proposals. The increase in conferences, courses, dissertations, and articles on utopian literature, the popularity of science fiction and the activities of the newly established Science Fiction Research Association, the Arno Press reprints of forty-one American utopian works, and the general tendency towards a reevaluation of American ideals all suggest the need for greater accessibility to this relatively untilled field of Americana.

My second goal is to evaluate the relevancy of specific utopian reforms and utopian speculation in general. The utopian authors advocated numerous reforms relating to problems all too familiar to us—problems such as economic slumps, technological unemployment, social inequality, pollution, sex discrimination (both male and female), government corruption and the apparent irrelevancy of school curricula and religious creeds. Possibly some of the authors’ solutions to these problems may be helpful to us. And this possibility leads to other broader questions: Can utopian speculation serve any useful purpose today? Or does it simply foster unrealistic expectations, or worse, lead us down the path imagined by Orwell and Huxley?

My third and primary goal is to see what the utopian works can tell us about American culture, past and present. Most of the authors came from an important socio-economic group—the middle and upper-middle classes. Hence, their utopias may reflect how this group reacted to the rapidly changing world of late nineteenth-century America, which of course means that we would also gain insights into that turbulent era. A second advantage to studying American utopian works published between 1888 and 1900 is that often their visions of ideality were closely tied to present realities. Thus, analyses of these parallel presents, especially attempts to delineate which parts of the present were kept and which discarded, offer provocative hints about which elements of American culture were most cherished during the late nineteenth century. Another interesting characteristic of this literature is suggested by the many Nationalist Clubs inspired by Bellamy’s immensely popular Looking Backward and the fact that many of the utopian authors were political activists or reform journalists. This demonstrates that the outburst of utopian works was more than a literary vogue. It spilled over into concrete reform activities. Therefore, the utopian proposals may illuminate the nature of American reform movements in general. Finally, since utopianism has been such a persistent mode of self-definition in America and since utopian fiction forces authors to examine multitudes of topics ranging from complex abstract principles to the minutiae of daily living, the utopias may help us to understand the American Dream or Experience or Character or Style—the exact term depending upon which student of American culture is trying to answer Crèvecoeur’s old question, “What is an American?” Or, at least, the utopias envisioned may suggest the limits of our ability to answer this question.

“May reflect,” “may illuminate,” “may help,” “may suggest”—certainly, I cannot claim that one collection of books published during a twelve-year period will reveal all there is to know about the middle and upper-middle classes during the late nineteenth century, American reform movements, and the American Character. The brief discussion of methodological problems in Chapter 1 should make this clear. Nevertheless, the utopian works examined represent more than the raving of wild-eyed dreamers or the boring sermons of amateur economists. If handled carefully, they offer insights into the hopes and fears of past and present Americans since many of the attitudes expressed by the authors were shared by their contemporaries and are still with us today.

A few words about terminology and organization may further clarify the nature of this book. Utopia, eutopos, dystopia, kakotopia, utopian, utopia, utopographer—the study of imaginary better societies is burdened with enough strange-sounding names to convince an interloper to take a course in Greek cognates. I have tried to keep my terms as simple as possible: utopia-hypothetical community, society or world reflecting a more perfect, alternative way of life; utopians—beings (usually humans) who live in utopia; a utopian work—a piece of literature depicting a particular utopia; a utopian author—a person who writes a utopian work. In the first chapter, these definitions will be refined and adapted to late nineteenth-century American utopian literature. Besides simplifying the terminology, I have attempted to organize the study in a logical manner. Chapter 1 suggests the possibilities and limitations of my subject by briefly justifying the periodization and by defining the sample, the authors’ backgrounds, and several methodological problems. Chapters 2 through 4 examine the authors’ basic assumptions about how America might be transformed into utopia. These prophets were especially concerned with three questions: When will The Change occur?; Where will it occur?; and, is it possible to change human nature? Chapters 5 through 8 analyze the results of the transformation. I adopt the role of an anthropologist visiting a foreign country: the most frequently discussed cultural areas are surveyed roughly in order of their importance to the authors, and Chapter 8 on the utopian city serves as an overview of the utopian culture. The final chapter expands upon central ideas presented in Chapters 1 through 8; it deals primarily with my second and third goals.

A preface is incomplete unless the author attempts to reveal his or her biases. My views on several recent issues, directly related to problems examined by the utopian authors, should be quite obvious and need not be enumerated here. My belief that an important element in the American temperament is a fundamental ambivalence towards change should also be obvious. But my feelings about utopian speculation may not be as clear. Much of this book is a critique of the limitations of American visions of utopia. These are frightening limitations because they have survived and still influence American beliefs and behavior. My criticisms of the utopian authors should not, however, be interpreted as attacks on utopianism per se. Humane, careful speculation about much better futures is crucial. Indeed, the rate of change in the twentieth century and the accompanying temptation simply to let change determine its destiny have made dreaming about America as utopia more than an idle luxury; utopian thinking is a necessity.

Many people aided me in the preparation of this book. First, I would like to thank Professors Hennig Cohen, Michael Zuckerman, and Wallace E. Davies who supervised my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. These same professors offered valuable suggestions for revision for book publication as did the readers and editors of Kent State University Press. Next, I would like to thank Professors Murray G. Murphey and Anthony B. Garvan, also from Penn, who introduced me to new ways of studying American culture, and Professor Stephan Thernstrom, whose course at Harvard first interested me in American utopianism. Clayton L. Eichelberger and Glenn Negley offered their expert advice about the bibliographies, and my search for obscure utopian works was aided by the library staffs of Duke University, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY at Oneonta, and UT Arlington. UT Arlington also awarded me grants to cover the cost of typing the manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Micki, for hours of proofreading and valuable criticism.