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p A historical analysis of American Utopian thought identifies three major levels in it—and these are present in other national Utopian traditions too. These are the official Utopia level, the folk Utopia level and the literary and sociotheoretical Utopia level.

p The American official Utopia and American statehood were born simultaneously, although the social ideals which formed the first, fundamental layer of this Utopia had been in preparation long before the Colonies attained independence. Here, much of the credit should go to figures of the American Enlightenment; many of these wanted to build a brave new world on the new continent. As Thomas Paine wrote in his Common Sense, the creation of a new world was in the hands of the Americans. Debate about the nature of the future social system in America was especially heated in the last prerevolutionary decade. Thomas Paine expressed the left-wing position on this question in his Common Sense. John Adams, at that time already a wellknown public figure, set forth his Thoughts on Government, and Thomas Jefferson advanced certain considerations with regard to the future government system. Numerous anonymous pamphlets appeared, also expounding models for new government. In this connection it is important to note that the ideas and ideals of the American Enlightenment were not simply transplanted European Enlightenment constructs; they were the crystallized expression of the sociopolitical experience of at least three generations of Americans, of practical expertise gained by different political and social groups.

p However, although the type of Utopia under consideration had begun to form long before the American 53 Revolution, it assumed the shape of an official Utopia, that is, of a system of social ideals advanced by the authorities, only with the appearance of the official documents which proclaimed the independence of the American Colonies and laid down the principle of American statehood—first and foremost, the 1776 Declaration of Independence.

p For all its brevity, the Declaration is a complex and many-sided document, compressing the main principles of the American Enlightenment into a single coherent whole. Although it had a clearly defined political objective-to justify the political break of the American Colonies with the British Crown (this largely determined its wording)-it went far beyond the confines of a purely political document and represented a manifesto which determined some of the important social parameters of American society, the social ideal and legal principles of independence of the free commonwealth as imagined by progressive representatives of the ascending class.

p No doubt, it would be stretching the matter to describe this extremely important political document as a social Utopia in any sense of the word, A number of the Declaration’s provisions reflected objective trends in America’s political and social development and identified certain abilities and intentions of the young American bourgeoisie to remove obstacles to free enterprise, individualism and freedom from tutelage by the state.

p But it is equally impossible to ignore the fact that the Declaration of Independence possessed pronounced Utopian features: the image it projected was not of the America which was to develop subsequently (in accordance with the historical trends which made themselves felt at the time of independence) but of an America as pictured by progressive representatives of the rising bourgeois class, that is, an arbitrarily constructed (although far from detailed) social ideal which conformed neither to the laws of capitalist development nor to the actual abilities (and, in the final analysis, interests) of the American bourgeoisie.

p The authors of the Declaration had a vision of a free society whose citizens enjoyed political sovereignty and had a right and ability to liberate themselves-through revolution-from any government incapable of ensuring self- evident civil rights. It was a society based on the recognition of human equality: "We hold these truths to be self- 54 evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The realization of these rights was to ensure, eventually, the independence of the entire nation.

p Notably, in Locke’s formula, taken here as the basis (life, liberty and property) the last element is replaced with "pursuit of happiness"—an ideal which lacks a specific content and has a clearly Utopian ring to it.

p According to the Declaration, relations between the people and the government and the exercise of power are to be guided by democratic principles—governments " deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed". The basis of a free society is not the state but the private individual, the citizen. And so, the foundation of new forms of society is not a national, state or social entity but its autonomous part, the individual.

p However, the 200 years of American history have shown that most of the ideals proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence (and some other documents of the American Revolution) have failed to be implemented fully or consistently. "The sincere aspirations of the founders of the American republic," the Soviet scholar Konstantin Fedorov concludes, "were negated by the subsequent economic and social development.”  [54•1  This happened not only and not so much because the bourgeoisie abandoned what it used to proclaim earlier (although this, too, played its part) but above all because the Founding Fathers were looking up to ideals which were generally inconsistent with the logic of capitalist development.

p The ruling class firmly established the social ideals proclaimed in the basic documents of the American republic as part of its rhetoric and upheld them publicly even after the advance of American capitalism and the collapse of the initial democratic illusions had seriously disfigured the bourgeois social ideal. Moreover, virtually throughout American history these ideas served as the foundation on which the edifice of official American Utopia was being further built and rebuilt.

p This building and rebuilding, connected with the changes 55 occurring both in the material sphere and in the field of social consciousness, was effected by adding to the basic layer of official Utopian ideals and by their different interpretation depending on the specific needs of the moment. It would be no exaggeration to say that throughout the two centuries of American history, almost every President contributed something to the interpretation of the fundamental ideals and added his own emphasis to the official Utopia.

p Indeed, conducting his election campaign or formulating the chief objectives of his work during the forthcoming 4-year period, the President of the United States usually does not limit himself to merely stating the main principles he intends to observe but advances an entire program, a set of national objectives linked, as a rule, to the original and fundamental ideals of the nation proclaimed by the American Revolution and formalized in the documents adopted at the time of independence.

p It would, of course, be naive to include any of American Presidents among the Utopians. They have never been that kind, just as their statements, programs and other documents have on the whole not been Utopias. Yet it is all the more important to point out that these pieces of prose did contain more or less distinct elements of utopianism. Of course, the most radical, qualitative changes in the official Utopia are connected only with outstanding political figures who were usually active during crises or at turning points in American history.

p One such turning point was the so-called Second American Revolution brought about by the Civil War between the Union and the Confederacy. It was a war of "two social systems",  [55•1  and the victory of the North was not simply a victory of one of the parties to a war but the victory of a "system of free labor" with its underlying system of social values and ideals—those proclaimed, albeit in abstract terms, by the First American Revolution. Now these ideals were to be specified and expanded; that mission fell to Abraham Lincoln who, having confirmed his commitment to the 56 traditions of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, formulated the ideal of a "government by the people". " Fourscore and seven years ago," Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863, "our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.... The nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and ... the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

p It was Lincoln who, having stressed that "this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free", formulated at the official level the ideal of racial equality, formalized in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and subsequently in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. At the same time it was Lincoln who, with a clearer vision than his predecessors, connected the ideal of "equal opportunity" and the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with the domination of capitalist social relations based on individual enterprise and competition. "While we don’t propose any war upon capital," Lincoln said, "we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with anybody else. When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.... I want every man to have a chance-and I believe a black man is entitled to it.”  [56•1 

p Lincoln’s ideal of a society which, while capitalist and based on the principle of free enterprise, would be ruled by a government of and by the people to ensure universal equality, was a modified version of the official Utopia which remained in force up to the turn of the century and into the early 20th century, when U.S. capitalism entered the new, imperialist stage of development. That was when the official Utopia had to be adjusted and corrected; eventually, this was accomplished in the fullest and most consistent form by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration.

p Naturally, like Abraham Lincoln before him, Roosevelt relied on the achievements of his predecessors—in this 57 case, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover-and in some respects, simply continued their policies and brought them to their logical culmination; his course was geared to the new historical conditions, to the new needs and interests of the American bourgeoisie. But it fell to Franklin Roosevelt to impart radically new qualities to the official Utopia and predetermine its future shape for several decades to come.

p Like most of his precursors in the office of the President of the United States, Roosevelt was a realistic politician. But, first, he had to promptly tackle complex strategic political problems with many unknowns. Second, he was perfectly aware of the rules of the game any prominent politician had to observe. These rules had appeared long before his time; all Presidents had complied with them more or less skillfully; and those who had brought him to powerboth at the top and at the bottom-expected him to abide by them. In other words, Roosevelt knew that the President was not only to formulate a practical program of action of his administration but, first of all, to outline the social ideal his work was supposed to be aimed at. This ideal had to conform to the expectations of the voters, to their opinion of what America should be like and how the President should shape it. This sort of game had long become an integral part of the political process accompanying the emergence of each new U.S. President on the historical scene; it made it imperative for any, and even the most realistic, political program to include purely Utopian elements which thus appeared as a factor of big politics.

p Essentially, the official credo proclaimed by Roosevelt had no elements at variance with the fundamental ideas of the official Utopia as it had developed over the 150 years of American history. Franklin Roosevelt had no intention replacing the ideal of bourgeois democracy with the ideal of either fascist dictatorship or socialism—the charges that his political opponents sometimes leveled at him. His assurances that his main goal was to uphold the "old ideals and original purposes"  [57•1  of democracy formulated many decades before him did generally reflect his actual purposes and intentions. He emphasized repeatedly that he was 58 striving to create a society in which the independent businessman would have reliable safeguards against the oligarchy, the overall number of stockholders would increase, social justice based on a more equitable distribution of public wealth would prevail, and poverty would be banished. It was to be a society without the sweatshop system, unjust competition, shameful trade practices, etc.

p The problem was that in the new conditions, upholding the "old ideals and original purposes" (that is, protecting U.S. capitalism) called for new means which were bound to eventually modify the ends themselves. That was why the policy speeches and documents which laid the foundations of the New Deal featured motifs and ideals which made up a new facet of the official utopia. These included, first and foremost, the ideal of social harmony based on " collectivism without communism", i.e., the collectivism of private property holders. Many Presidents before Roosevelt had spoken of social harmony, but none connected its establishment in America with any form of collectivism. On the contrary, the officially sanctified image was that of an individualist-oriented society of small and medium property holders, each forging his own career, each master of his own destiny who could not and should not rely on the state.

p Franklin Roosevelt articulated a new ideal which, in its formal aspects, was consonant with the slogans of the mass democratic movements of the late 19th century but which was essentially the only feasible way of saving American capitalism in conditions of the 1920s and 1930s: a strong state which has assumed the function of regulating private enterprise and some other functions previously discharged by the free market. Roosevelt emphasized that American society must be made more manageable, that Americans could attain "social justice" only through " social action". "The philosophy of ’letting things alone’ has resulted in the days of the cave man, and in the days of the automobile-has resulted in the jungle law of the survival of the so-called fittest. But this philosophy of social action results in the protection of humanity and the fitting of as many human beings as possible into the scheme of surviving.  [58•1 

59

p And so, as laissez-faire capitalism transformed itself into monopoly and state-monopoly capitalism, certain changes occurred in the American official Utopia. To the image of a society which accords priority to the individual, the citizen, was added the image of a society which stressed the importance of the whole, of society, the nation, the state.

p Also evolving was the foreign policy aspect of the official utopia—that is, the officially expressed view of what place the United States should hold in the world community of nations and what role it should play in human history. Although the Founding Fathers had considered America a chosen land, a unique society whose exceptional destiny was divinely preordained (this was subsequently reflected in the concepts of "American exceptionalism" and "Manifest Destiny"), the image of the United States as a country standing above and imposing its will on other nations was virtually absent from the official utopia throughout the first half of the 19th century. The foreign policy doctrine proclaimed by President Monroe in 1823 and stipulating that "the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments" was still devoid of the aggressive meaning officially adopted several decades later.

p The growth of American expansionism made its impact felt here too. The interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine and the Manifest Destiny concept changed: America was not simply “exceptional” compared to other nations; it was to guide them and assume the burden of world leadership. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries this image of America as the world’s shepherd (easily transformable now into that of the world’s policeman, now the moral arbiter) became a stable element of the official utopia and retained this status throughout the first half of the 20th century, irrespective of whether the actual foreign policy pursued by the United States tilted toward isolationism or toward vigorous participation in world affairs.

p Marx’s well-known precept about the ideology of the ruling class being the ruling ideology is perfectly applicable to the U.S. official utopia. In other words, this utopia can be regarded as an expression of the Utopian social ideals of the American bourgeoisie, and its evolution—as an important aspect of the evolution of the social ideals held 60 by the U.S. ruling class. But there is another point which should be taken into consideration. An official Utopia can discharge its integrating function only if it reflects, to a certain degree, the ideals, objectives, illusions and orientations of the "common folk"—that is, if it echoes, at least in some way, the folk Utopia.

p Originally, the American folk Utopia arose outside America and prior to its discovery; this, incidentally, is also true of the American Dream. "As a state of mind and a dream, America had existed long before its discovery. Ever since the early days of Western civilization, peoples had dreamed of a lost Paradise, of a Golden Age characterized by abundance, absence of war, and absence of toil. With the first accounts of the New World it was felt that these dreams and yearnings had become a fact, a geographical reality fraught with unlimited possibilities.... Thomas More in 1516 set a precedent followed by countless imitators in locating his ideal state of Utopia in the newly discovered world.... America as an idea was already at work pointing the way in the neverending and hitherto chimerical quest of happiness.”  [60•1 

p The American folk Utopia was initially American only in name, or rather, in the name of the geographical region with which folk consciousness connected the long-awaited realization of the Utopian ideals born on European (above all, English and French) soil, of the contradictions of European society and of European culture. For some time, these concepts remained unchanged—until they were corrected, developed, complemented or ousted by new concepts which were a direct product of the local conditions and were recorded both by Americans and by such observant European authors as Tocqueville and Crevecoeur.

p In the modern age, the European folk utopia sprang from the contradictions of late feudalism and early capitalism, from the working masses’ desire, constantly reproduced by the actual social relations, to put an end to the existing order of things and create—even though in the imagination only—a different social reality in many respects opposite to the actual.

p In the real world, wearisome toil reigns supreme; in 61 utopia, all is idleness and play. Social, political and economic inequality dominates the real world; in the world of Utopia, all barriers separating classes, estates and castes are broken down and complete equality is established. As it exists in actual fact, society is plagued by shortages of material goods and shaken by famine and epidemics; but Utopia means abundance, wealth and prosperity. In the real world, man is oppressed and downtrodden; in Utopia he is free. To sum up, the society constructed by folk Utopian consciousness is the embodiment of justice and social harmony, a world which rules out hostility among men, where there is no war, a world of peace and universal brotherhood forever.

p These ideals were what formed the original foundation of the American utopia. Anticipating a little, let us note that they never disappeared completely from America’s folk Utopian consciousness, for at every stage of its development American society deprived sizable masses of their property-oriented illusions and dumped them at the foot of the social ladder—a process which intensified in the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries. This was connected with the growth of the working class, the mass pauperization of farmers and the end of the frontier. This explains why, throughout this period, American folklore featured ideals and images traceable to the European folk utopia of the modern age.

p But the salient features of America’s historical development introduced corrections both into the content and into the form of the folk Utopian ideals, giving rise to concepts connected with the American Dream. In the Europe of the modern age, the folk utopia reflected the aspirations of the lower classes, above all of peasants and artisans who saw no real chance of changing their social status. These peasants and artisans saw America, where they fled from "European feudalism in order to establish a purely bourgeois society",  [61•1  in a different light. Most early immigrants represented the groups in which the European folk utopia had taken firm root. The enclosures in Britain drove a great deal of tenant farmers and agricultural laborers 62 off the land. Unemployment, already in evidence in the cities, made it difficult for British industry to absorb them. Another group of people English capitalism deprived of their means of livelihood included petty artisans, skilled workers and apprentices from small workshops. They formed the bulk of the first wave of immigration. Broke at home, they were ready to try their luck across the Atlantic. Here, as they became small property owners, they broke free of the bonds which had hogtied them in Europe; they often thought they were becoming masters of then- destiny. True, in the New World many immigrants found themselves in a situation which was almost as difficult as in the old country. But in America, they kept up the hope that they would get a lucky break and that things would change for the better. Even those forced to accept a period of work in bondage (as so-called contract laborers) hoped to purchase a farm or start a business of their own once the contract term was over.

p The new social forms inevitably transformed the psychology of the hard-working immigrant and, eventually, his social ideals too. Describing this transformation, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in More Letters from an American Farmer that upon a European’s arrival in America, "he begins to forget his former servitude and dependence, his heart involuntarily swells and glows, this first swell inspires him with those new thoughts which constitute an American... From nothing to start into being, to become a free man, invested with lands, to which every municipal blessing is annexed! What a change indeed! It is in consequence of that change that he becomes an American.”  [62•1 

p For all the heterogeneity and inner contradictions of the European folk Utopia of the modern age, it clearly displayed a socialist or, to be more precise, communist trend (this was a crudely egalitarian communism). Naturally, the American folk Utopia of the 18th and 19th centuries did incorporate more or less pronounced elements of this trend. Still, dominating this Utopia was the petty-bourgeois, property-oriented tendency which colored its main ideals.

p Central to the American folk Utopian tradition of the period in question was the ideal of equality, interpreted 63 not so much in the spirit of equality in consumption and property as in the spirit of equality of opportunity open to every citizen. Besides, this opportunity applied not only to the economic but also to the political and legal dimensions. The ideal, therefore, was that of equal rights, of equal participation in political affairs, in other words, of the people’s sovereignty. "The people are the Government"  [63•1  was the ideal which was firmly established in America’s folk Utopian consciousness and which largely determined the course of action taken by participants in the American mass movements arising throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

p Strictly speaking, the traditional American term "equal opportunity" denotes equality of the conditions in which individuals are placed and which make their actual opportunities unequal since, as a rule, their abilities, strength, skills in adapting to their environment, let alone their property, are unequal. America created more favorable conditions for European immigrants than other countries, but it was never a society of equal opportunity.

p The orientation on equality of opportunity and the people’s sovereignty also predetermined the interpretation of freedom; aside from a negative aspect (freedom from exploitation, from oppression) it also acquired a well- articulated positive value (freedom of enterprise, freedom to take decisions having a bearing on one’s life).

p As American society developed and capitalist contradictions intensified, the folk Utopia found and absorbed new ideals, socialist in spirit and content—the ideals of public property in the means of production, elimination of class differences and exploitation, etc. Some U.S. labor organizations had adopted these ideals in a rather vague form as early as the 1830s.  [63•2  However, these notions spread widely only in the last three decades of the 19th century, during the upsurge of the labor and farmer movement. After the publication in 1888 of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward with its Utopian socialist program, the so-called nationalist clubs sprang up in several states, aimed at actually implementing its provisions. Nevertheless, socialist ideals 64 failed to acquire the dominant role in the American folk Utopia. Even in the late 1880s and early 1890s when, in the words of a contemporary author, "the books of Henry George, Bellamy, and other economic writers were bought as fast as the dealers could supply them ... bought to be read greedily",  [64•1  Grangers, Greenbackers and Populists put forward slogans and political programs advocating ideals which were not so much socialist as traditionally bourgeois- democratic-equality of all before the law and government by the people.

p Not only farmers but also a large part of the working class shared these ideals. One of the reasons, Engels noted, was the uneven development of the United States. " America is the world’s youngest but also oldest country," he wrote to Friedrich Sorge. "Just as you see antiquated furniture types side-by-side with those you have invented yourselves, just as in Boston, the droshky I last saw in London in 1838 and stage coaches out of the 17th century in the mountains exist side-by-side with Pullman Cars, so you preserve the old spiritual garments long discarded in Europe. Everything that has outlived itself here can last in America for one or two more generations.... This happens, on the one hand, because America is only beginning to find the time not only for its pursuit of material production and wealth but also for free spiritual work and the basic education this requires; on the other hand, this also stems from the dual nature of the way America is developing. On the one hand it is still tackling the first task: developing the enormous tracts of wild land, and on the other, it already has to compete for the first place in industrial production. Hence the ups and downs depending on what gains the upper hand in the mind of the average American—the consciousness of an industrial worker or that of a farmer tilling virgin land.”  [64•2 

p The Great Depression, naturally, made an impact on American Utopian consciousness, including the folk Utopia which had to respond in some way to the increased concern 65 about socioeconomic and political problems among ordinary people. According to V. L. Parrington, Jr., in those years "social planning was more frequently discussed than baseball or liquor laws. More than ever before, the radio became a political force". But, as before, "in the public consciousness it was always the simple solutions",  [65•1  a cure-all—some sort of a clever monetary or tax reformthat would put things right at once. Hence the broad support generated by the Utopian projects of Francis Townsend, Huey Long, Howard Scott and others who declared they had found a simple key to complex problems, a key which would not only help lead the nation out of the crisis but also ensure unheard-of prosperity. For the same reason, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (in his speeches he reduced it to simple slogans any American could understand, presenting these, too, as a key to every problem) eventually also won mass support.

p The trend toward reliance on the state present in folk Utopian consciousness and expressed in the ideal of a "strong state" taking care of the people and upholding their interests, was clearly articulated during the Roosevelt Administration and persisted into the postwar times. Moreover, in the period of the state-monopoly capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s it consolidated its position, aggravating the crisis of bourgeois individualism and producing new images of the human ideal and of human relations in an " organized society”.

p Still, despite all these changes folk Utopian consciousness remains heterogeneous and contradictory. The etatist ideals do not cancel out the old, market ideals of the people’s sovereignty, local self-government and a minimal state which permeated this consciousness during the era of laissez-faire capitalism. The latter ideals either combine paradoxically with the former or are pushed to the periphery of this consciousness to reemerge and reclaim lost ground at a later stage, usually at a time of crisis. This cycle was illustrated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when many Americans welcomed a new wave of conservative thinking, with its opposition to "big government in Washington" and “excessive” government regulation, and with 66 its advocacy of lower taxes and greater reliance on market mechanisms.

p The American folk utopia branches out into several more or less autonomous and distinctive ethnic divisions. The traditional image of America as a melting pot which transforms all salient features of the different ethnic groups of immigrants is not true to life. Of course, “melting” does occur, but it is not comprehensive. The Black, Italian, Chinese and several other large communities have long existed in the United States. Their members have retained their cultural identity for generations, sharing sets of distinctive social ideals which can be viewed as ethnic versions of the American folk Utopia.

p The Black population of the United States holds a special place among the ethnic groups. The reason is not only the great number of Blacks or the size of their contribution to American civilization and culture but (in the context of the subject under discussion) the fact that Blacks— not Chinese or Italians—were forcibly brought to America and turned into slaves. Their situation was unique. This makes the so-called Black utopia  [66•1  a unique feature of the American Utopian tradition. The Black Utopia arose out of the slaves’ dreams of a different, better world; hence its status as an independent part of the folk utopia.

p We can form a picture of the preemancipation Black utopia by examining Black folklore, especially folk songs, and particularly spirituals. "The rhythmic cry of the slave stands today not simply as the sole American music," W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1903, "but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas.”  [66•2 

p Folk Utopias often assume religious forms, but this does not necessarily make them religious Utopias. Strictly speaking, a religious utopia is a contradiction in terms because utopia is always oriented on the real world. According to the Soviet historian A. I. Klibanov, "the images generated by the idea of a perfect social order were 67 products of the imagination reflecting actual relations in real life. But even the most fantastic of these images differed radically from the images of religious fantasy, even in cases when they donned religious garb. For they dealt not with heaven but with the best possible order of human relations, and when this order was referred to as ‘paradise’ or the ’Kingdom of God’, these were paradise or Kingdom of God on Earth.”  [67•1 

p Spirituals are chiefly religious songs, and this determines the structure of their images, their language, symbols and, consequently, the outward features of the Utopian world encoded in these brilliant works of folk art. While it presents religious symbols and images, it is nevertheless an earthly world. And although these songs are sometimes stereotyped in content and monotonous in their vocabulary, they, as several U.S. researchers have demonstrated,  [67•2  together with other works of folklore, make it possible to draw at least a general picture of the Utopian ideals of the Black slave.

p Justice is the foremost ideal of the Black utopia. Emancipation from slavery, equality with whites, a chance to find happiness—all this culminated in the Black man’s yearning for a just society. "Through all the sorrows of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things.... Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.”  [67•3 

p The Black slave dreams of a world of universal brotherhood where human relations are based on love, a world without exhausting toil, a world of joy and ease.

p Of course, the world imagined by the Black slave is devoid of government. It is not a state but rather a community without a clearly articulated political structure. It could not be any other way with the Utopian world of people 68 who were barred from politics and, as a rule, lacked even an elementary education.

p The Union’s victory over the Confederacy of slaveholders finally brought freedom from slavery to Blacks. But the barrier which separated them from “civilized” society remained—both in actual fact and, not infrequently, on the books. No longer a slave but a U.S. citizen, the Black man was still Black, and this tied him to his former slave status with visible and invisible bonds.

p This dual status bred a dual psychology described by W.E.B. DuBois early this century: "First, we must remember that living as the blacks do in close contact with a great modern nation, and sharing, although imperfectly, the soullife of that nation, they must necessarily be affected more or less directly by all the religious and ethical forces that are today moving the United States. These questions and movements are, however, overshadowed and dwarfed by the (to them) all-important question of their civil, political, and economic status. They must perpetually discuss the ’Negro problem’, must live, move, and have their being in it, and interpret all else in its light or darkness.... From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century, from this must arise a painful self-consciousness.... Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.”  [68•1 

p Hence the dual nature of the Black Utopia of the 19th and 20th centuries and the dual approach to its realization. As an American, as a member of a definite class, the Black man may share the ideals of this or that social Utopia widespread among white Americans. At the same time his Black consciousness inevitably gravitates—especially at times of crisis—toward the ethnically restricted Black Utopia which, having undergone a certain evolution by the beginning of the 20th century and having lost its former naivete, still sees its ideal in a just, equal and free world. As an American, the Black man would like to build this just society on American soil. But as a Black man, constantly 69 reminded of his place and facing countless obstacles to his integration in American society, he maintains that a Utopian society can only be established outside America. Such were the motives behind the Black "utopia of escape" of Dr. Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican founder and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. In the 1920s he launched the Back to Africa movement which advocated resettlement of Black Americans in Africa and the creation of a "great African empire". Garvey argued that Blacks were entitled to a place in the sun just like whites, that their striving for happiness, prosperity, social equality, democracy and progress was legitimate, but that they should (and could) establish a free state on their own, outside America. "The Negro will have to build his own government, industry, art, science, literature and culture, before the world will stop to consider him.”  [69•1 

p Garvey did not invent the idea. Resettlement of Blacks in Africa had been debated for decades. Some saw it as a feasible way of solving America’s Black problem, but no one before Garvey had attempted to implement it on such a large scale. His enterprise was a resounding failure, and he himself, a victim of a financial swindle, was put behind bars. But even if he had ended up differently, his project would hardly have been realized consistently or successfully. The important thing, however, was that the very idea of resettlement was welcomed broadly by the Black population of the United States, and thousands of families were ready to use every possible and impossible way of raising money in order to pay for the passage. To resettle millions of Blacks in Africa, to drive the white colonial rulers out and to establish an empire there was, putting it mildly, impractical. Still, the Back to Africa movement aroused the Black American masses. Garvey was supported by many Black leaders, including W.E.B. DuBois.

The fact that Garvey was discredited as a political figure dampened the movement abruptly. Nevertheless, subsequent decades proved that neither the idea of resettlement in Africa nor the folk Utopian ideals rooted in the slave period disappeared from Black mentality. Even now that 70 conditions have changed, that the degree of the Blacks’ racial integration into American society, the level of their education and prosperity and their involvement in the working-class and the everall democratic movements have increased, the original folk Utopian ideals remain the basis to which new ideals are merely added—the way it happened during the Black ghetto riots of the late 1960s.