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p The socialist Utopia had a different fate in America. "Utopian novels were produced at intervals throughout the century," V. L. Parrington, Jr. writes about the 19th century, "but it was not till the 80s that utopianism became the vogue. New ideas were in the air; men began to think and write and talk socialism.”  [90•1  Indeed, Utopian socialist novels became fashionable only in the last quarter of the 19th century. However, Americans had begun to "think, write and talk socialism" much earlier. This should be emphasized specially because many American historians maintain that socialist thought in the United States is devoid of national roots, that it was introduced into the country by immigrants and propagandists from Europe. This view obviously underrates (1) the independent search for a socialist ideal by Americans themselves; (2) the transformations the European socialist theories underwent on American soil; and (3) the practical communitarian experiments which America staged on a scale far surpassing anything attempted in Europe and many of which were a practical expression of the socialist quest. Upton Sinclair was quite right when he said that "even in the midst of our pioneer individualism there were Americans who dreamed of an ordered society based upon justice. We had our Brook Farm and a score of other colonies nearly a hundred years ago. We had our native Socialist movement, with leaders such as Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley and Phillips Wendell and Frances Willard and Edward Bellamy—and so on down to Gene Debs and Jack London. All these were native Americans, who spoke our language, and the only reason they are not understood is that their words so 91 seldom reach the people.”  [91•1 

p One must obviously keep from going to the other extreme and underrating the great work done by European Utopian socialists, above all Robert Owen, Etienne Cabet with his followers and the supporters of Fourier and SaintSimon, to disseminate and put into practice socialist ( communist) ideas in America, especially in the first half of the 19th century. Utopian socialist ideas were especially widespread in America from the 1820s to the 1840s, when the contradictions of U.S. capitalism became obvious for the first time but the political machinery which was to shape the ways in which American society would function for years to come was as yet far from complete. This produced a peculiar situation which affected the destiny of socialism in the New World. Many Americans regarded socialism not as a theoretical and practical negation of capitalism but as one of the ways—and perfectly legitimate at that—of realizing the ideas and promises of the American Revolution and correcting the deviations from the “ordained” path, committed by inept politicians and greedy businessmen. Socialism was interpreted as consonant with the very spirit of the ideas expounded by the Founding Fathers, with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and, consequently, with the very "idea of America". European Utopian socialists, specifically Robert Owen, did much to promote that interpretation. As a result, Americans approached socialism from the point of view of its effectiveness in ensuring the implementation of the ideals advanced by the American Enlighteners.

p Initially, the socialist Utopia and its creators who visited the United States were not simply welcomed by the Americans; the officialdom also clearly displayed interest in it and its founders. Suffice it to recall that Robert Owen addressed Congress twice and met with prominent public figures such as Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Andrew Jackson and Monroe. The speeches he delivered at the joint House and Senate sessions attended by Cabinet and Supreme Court members were published in the press.  [91•2  92 However, having inquired into the plans of the European socialist, American politicians were in no hurry to respond to Owen’s pleas for financial assistance. Fully in the spirit of the free market, they left it to him to win the hearts, minds and purses of Americans.

p One should note that Americans approached different European socialist Utopias differently. According to Morris Hillquit, "the system of the great French Utopian, Charles Saint-Simon, that had for its principal aim the organization of national and international industry on a scientific basis, and was a universal social philosophy which did not admit of experiments on a miniature scale, found no echo in the United States. The philosophy of Robert Owen, in which communities are not an essential factor, but play an important part as preparatory schools for the communistic regime and as object lessons in the communistic mode of life, gained a considerable foothold in the United States, although it did not attain the same degree of strength or exercise the same measure of influence on social thought as it did in the country of its birth, England. On the other hand, the system of the French Utopian, Charles Fourier, which was based principally upon social organizations on a small scale, developed more strength in this country than it did in France.”  [92•1  Americans were indeed sensitive to the practical effectiveness of socialist doctrines and as the fate of Owen and his comrades bears out, quickly lost interest in those which, although initially welcomed enthusiastically, could not "make it”.

p Still, there was another reason why Americans found doctrines like Fourier’s attractive, at least as long as their true worth remained unclear. Fourier not only opposed crude egalitarianism but, unlike Owen and other Utopian socialists, did not advocate abolition of private property. In spite of this circumstance (which gave rise to arguments among students of Fourier’s socialism), Marx and Engels had a high opinion of Fourier and held that scientific socialism "rests on the shoulders of Saint-Simon".  [92•2  93 Apparently, to them the actually humanistic content of Fourier’s principal ideas was more important than his formal acceptance of private property.

p From the economic viewpoint, Fourier’s phalanstery was a sort of joint-stock company which valued individual success and offered additional rewards for it but in which there was neither competition (in the forms in which it existed outside) nor the threat of bankruptcy. In other words, Fourier’s Utopia combined the ideal of economic individualism (embodied in the Utopia of a farmers’ America), which many Americans found attractive, with an ideal typical of all socialist Utopias and, generally, also traditionally favored by many 19th-century Americans. The word “community” would be the best expression of this ideal’s essence-“community”, or "fraternal unity", or " commonwealth of free men", or "community of equal citizens". It was precisely the community ideal and not the ideal of socialized production or of "equality in property" that attracted, as a feature of socialism, Americans in the 1820s, 30s and 40s. As to relations concerning property, most American adherents of socialism preferred even distribution of property to its socialization.

p That, for example, was the approach of Thomas Skidmore, a prominent American Utopian socialist of the early 19th century. The very title of the book he published in 1829 was significant; it sounded like a manifesto: The Rights of Man to Property: Being a Proposition to Make It Equal Among the Adults of the Present Generation; and to Provide for its Equal Transmission to Every Individual of Each Succeeding Generation, on Arriving at the Age of Maturity. "Skidmore," Foner writes, "proposed that every young man, twenty-one years of age, and every unmarried woman should receive a free grant of one hundred and sixty acres of land, to be held in perpetuity so long as the settler tilled his soil. But the right to sell or rent land was to be abolished forever.”  [93•1 

p Of course, voices were raised in defense of socialized property at that time too. However, it took several dramatic decades of economic and political crises and bitter 94 clashes between classes for the ideal of public property in the means of production to become attractive to American working people.

p This happened during the last quarter of the 19th century, when a new stage began in the development of the socialist Utopia in the United States.

p The rapid progress of U.S. capitalism which exacerbated social contradictions and clearly displayed its inconsistency with the ideals proclaimed by the American Revolution, as well as the growth of the farmers’ and industrial workers’ movement contributed to the emergence of a series of properly American socialist Utopias. The most successful among them was Edward Bellamy’s Utopian novel Looking Backward (1888).

p Like the American Utopian socialists who were active in the 1820s, 30s and 40s, Bellamy proclaims a society based on "the idea of the solidarity of humanity, the brotherhood of all men" as his ideal. He stresses the need to ensure "equality of condition" which presupposes "equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture".  [94•1  However, unlike his precursors, Bellamy is convinced that this cannot be achieved by even distribution of property alone. Human nature is immutable; therefore more radical measures which could change human motives equally radically are what is needed. This refers to a change in the system of property resulting in "one capitalist in the place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies" would be absorbed, "a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared,"  [94•2  with the people becoming the sole master of all riches. Socialized property is regarded as the only effective basis of the “community”. Bellamy tries to blend the two ideals previously separated in the thinking of American Utopian socialists.

p But, having accepted socialization of property, Bellamy has to remove from his "society of solidarity" all those elements of anarchy which the institution of private property entails. As a result, his free society becomes almost as strictly regulated as the Utopian societies imagined by More, Campanella or Fourier. And, while Bellamy himself 95 insists that in the Boston of the year 2000, the scene of his novel, personal freedom is restricted much less than before and relations represent a logical consequence of natural human activities under rational conditions, the life of the society he describes appears strikingly poor and dull in political, cultural and social terms; and thus the freedom that is proclaimed proves on the whole to be formal freedom.

p Bellamy was America’s first socialist-oriented Utopian who, having attempted to combine the “community” ideal with that of public property, drew up a model of a strictly regimented society. However, he failed to blend the two ideals and to show how a society based on public property in the means of production could ensure not lesser but greater freedom for the individual than that obtaining in a society based on the operation of the market.

p Nevertheless, Bellamy’s Utopia became extremely popular both in the United States and abroad, specifically in Russia. Moreover, it stimulated the movement of the so-called nationalists who tried to put Bellamy’s ideas into practice. That was understandable. Looking Backward aptly expressed the discontent of those groups of Americans who traced all their troubles to the sway of uncontrollable market forces and were looking for alternative structures to regulate social developments. These alternatives were to ensure equality of opportunity and guarantee increasing prosperity—even at the expense of restricted personal freedom and a stronger authority of the state. "The crux of the problem," V. L. Parrington says about the America of the 1880s and 1890s, "seemed to reside in an extention of the powers of the political state, converting to social ends powers that hitherto had been serving private gain.”  [95•1  This means that Bellamy’s novel reflected not only the state of mass consciousness but also a new trend in the development of American society—toward restriction of the free market mechanism and a gradual strengthening of the role of the state in social developments, with all the social, political and cultural consequences that entailed.

p Looking Backward was truly a landmark, both in literary and in sociopolitical terms. "Along with certain repercussion abroad-notably William Morris’ News from 96 Nowhere (1890)—Looking Backward initiated in the- United States a vogue of Utopian debate that lasted until after the turn of the century. The book became all but universally known, and its immense popularity overshadowed and determined Bellamy’s later work. With the formation of numerous Bellamy clubs, with the rise of the’ amorphous Nationalist ‘party’, Bellamy felt it his duty and opportunity to lead in the reform movements directed toward the realization of his own dreams.”  [96•1  In 1897, Bellamy published Equality, an attempt at a theoretical substantiation of the social relations described in Looking Backward. But the sequel was only a poor relation of the first Utopian novel. Bellamy went down in popular history as the author of Looking Backward only.

p Looking Backward produced conflicting reactions in the United States. On the one hand, it gave rise to a series of Utopian parodies and refutations (The Republic of the Future by Anna B. Dodd, 1891; Looking Inward by J. W. Roberts, 1893; Caesar’s Column by Ignatius Donnelly, 1890). But it also prompted a stream of imitations (The Co- opolitan by Zebine Forbush, 1889, Letters from New America by C. E. Persinger, 1900; The Legal Revolution of 1902 by Bert J. Wellman and others). Supporting the ideals of public property in the means of production, of universal labor and eradication of class antagonism, these Utopias, nevertheless, firmly rejected any revolutionary transformation of American society and, like Bellamy’s novel, advocated a nonviolent, “legitimate” and evolutionary path toward socialism. The ways which the authors of socialist Utopias believed capable of establishing a "just society" in America included a carefully designed system of education, a government policy of gradually ousting private business from the national economy, organization of production and consumer cooperatives, winning a majority in local or Federal government, redemption of industrial enterprises from their owners and the like. (Significantly, most authors of such works, including Bellamy himself, preferred to call themselves “radicals”, "champions of justice", etc., but not socialists.) Another salient feature of the American socialist Utopia was that “justice” was often interpreted in the spirit of "equality of opportunity" which 97 categorically rejected crude egalitarianism, a concept always repulsive to most Americans. For example, Charles Persinger explained that in the new society, "a man’s progress depends upon himself, and not upon an accident of his birth or the circumstances of his life", but added that this society would not try to "make men equal when Nature failed in that endeavor".  [97•1 

p William Dean Howells was perhaps the best known and most gifted of Bellamy’s followers. In 1894 he produced his first socialist Utopian (“Altrurian”) novel. Entitled A Traveler from Altruria, this was, in the words of the literary critic Howard Mumford Jones, "a book about the American dream published during an American nightmare.... The nightmare was the great depression that hung over the country from 1893 to 1898.... To many it seemed that the bloody prophecy in Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1891), that grim melodramatic masterpiece, was coming true.”  [97•2  Jones notes quite rightly that, in Howells’ opinion, "Altruria is what America would be if it really took to heart the principles of the Declaration.... Altruria is what a country could be if everyone really loved his neighbor as himself.”  [97•3  But in constructing his Utopian image of America, Howells, whether consciously or unwittingly, was working within the framework of the American socialist Utopian tradition.

p The plot of the novel is simple. A Mr. Homos, citizen of Altruria, an island nation which the rest of the world has lost sight of, arrives in the United States of the 1990s. After examining the life of American society, Homos concludes that it is extremely unreasonable. There is no social equality. ("I don’t know," one of the Americans says, "how the notion of our social equality originated, but I think it has been fostered mainly by the expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality. As a matter of fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West, and among the gold-hunters of California.") There is 98 no respect for the man of labor, care for one’s neighbor, no spirit of fraternal cooperation ("There is ... as little love in this country as in any country on the globe."). It turns out that "the American ideal is not to change the conditions for all, but for each to rise above the rest if he can.”  [98•1 

p Finally Homos concludes that America needs the type of radical transformations that were once carried out in Altruria. "We," the Altrurian says, "are still far from thinking our civilization perfect; but we are sure that our civic ideals are perfect. What we have already accomplished is to have given a whole continent perpetual peace; to have founded an economy in which there is no possibility of want; to have killed our political and social ambition; to have disused money and eliminated chance; to have realized the brotherhood of the race, and to have outlived the fear of death.”  [98•2  All this has become possible because a basically new system of social relations has been established in Altruria. Private property does not exist: "No man owned anything, but every man had the right to anything that he could use; when he could not use it, his right lapsed." Chance as a source of social inequality has been banished from economic and social relations: "We have totally eliminated chance from our economic life. There is still a chance that a man will be tall or short, in Altruria, that he will be strong or weak, well or ill, gay or grave, happy or unhappy in love, but none that he will be rich or poor, busy or idle, live splendidly or meanly." And all men are brothers: in the "great political brotherhood, the commonwealth of Altruria" people live not "upon each other", the way they did before, under a plutocratic oligarchy in the times of the “Accumulation”, but for each other”.  [98•3  In Altruria aesthetic laws have become universal in all creative effort; life is easy and unhurried; cities have been replaced by small village-type communities. Economic equality has abolished political struggle, and administrative work has lost its erstwhile prestige.

p In full conformity with the American socialist Utopian tradition, Howells emphasizes that all radical change in Altruria has been carried out without any bloodshed, 99 via an evolutionary, “parliamentary” way: the strictly lawabiding proletariat has won a majority in the parliament. Nonviolence is the underlying idea of many of Howells’ books. The old socialist David Hughes, a character of his World of Chance (1893), says that "society is not saved by self-outlawry.... The way to have the golden age is to elect it by the Australian ballot.”  [99•1 

p Through the Eye of the Needle, Howells’ second Utopian novel, appeared in 1907. A detailed description of Altruria, it contributed nothing essentially new to the socialist Utopia of his Traveler.

p Unlike Bellamy who, in a typically American way, plunged into politics to realize the principles he suggested for restructuring American society, Howells remained merely an observer and commentator, although he was one of the few who openly called themselves socialists. He wrote to Henry James in 1888: "After fifty years of optimistic content with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality. Meantime, I wear a furlined overcoat, and live in all the luxury my money can buy.”  [99•2  In the words of the Soviet researcher Boris Gilenson, Howells was a link of sorts which kept the socialist tradition whole across the turn of the century. In the early 1900s socialism was no longer only a subject for theoretical debate; it emerged as a practical slogan in class action by working people.  [99•3 

p This action assumed particularly great proportions in the late 1910s and early 1920s, largely encouraged by World War I and the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. In those years, the American Left were engaged not so much in the theoretical development of new social projects as in a search for means to involve American working people in the world revolution and in political struggle to establish a revolutionary organization for them. A new stage in the development of socialist Utopian thought in the United States started in the 1930s, when advocates of socialism joined the common effort to lead the country out of the crisis and transform 100 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1985/AU236/20090711/199.tx" American society. At that time the EPIC Plan became widely known. It was worked out by Upton Sinclair, who also tried to implement it.

p Sinclair was a prominent figure on the American literary and public scene. As early as World War I Lenin noted his "anti-war manifesto". His evaluation of Sinclair as a socialist went to the heart of his utopianism and highlighted what was typical of many other American socialist- oriented Utopians. "Sinclair is a socialist of the emotions, without any theoretical training," Lenin wrote. "He states the issue in ‘simple’ fashion; incensed by the approach of war, he seeks salvation from it in socialism." Lenin referred to the following statement by Sinclair: "We are told ... that the socialist movement is yet too weak so that we must wait for its evolution. But evolution is working in the hearts of men; we are its instruments, and if we do not struggle, there is no evolution.... A thousand men aglow with faith and determination are stronger than a million grown cautious and respectable; and there is no danger to the socialist movement so great as the danger of becoming an established institution.”

p This was a typically Utopian (and very American) approach: to act proceeding from a sense of justice and ignoring actual circumstances, so as to create the necessary conditions and attain the desired goal. Analyzing the above statement, Lenin wrote: "Sinclair is naive in his appeal, although fundamentally it is a very correct one; he is naive because he ignores the development of mass socialism over the last fifty years and the struggle of trends within socialism; he ignores the conditions for the growth of revolutionary action when an objectively revolutionary situation and a revolutionary organization exist. The ’ emotional’ approach cannot make up for that.”  [100•1 

p In 1933 and 1934 Sinclair put forward the EPIC (End Poverty in California) Plan of sociopolitical change. Sinclair’s political program featured many aspects of Bellamy’s and the Nationalists’ Utopian project. Like Bellamy, Sinclair maintained that workers and industrialists, bank tellers and financiers, landowners and farmhands could be easily converted to his faith by mere persuasion. He also 101 subscribed to the theory asserting that the opposite social poles suffered equally from the inadequacy of economic relations and should be thus mutually attracted. Sinclair’s naive belief was that democracy could be easily saved, the unemployed given jobs and a violent revolution avoided if only all classes set to work in concert.

p Sinclair set forth the essence of the plan in the Twelve Principles of EPIC which deserve to be quoted here in full.

p “1. God created the natural wealth of the earth for the use of all men, not of a few.

p “2. God created men to seek their own welfare, not that of masters.

p “3. Private ownership of tools, a basis of freedom when tools are simple, becomes a basis of enslavement when tools are complex.

p “3. Autocracy in industry cannot exist alongside democracy in government.

p “5. When some men live without working, other men are working without living.

p “6. The existence of luxury in the presence of poverty and destitution is contrary to good morals and sound public policy.

p “7. The present depression is one of abundace, not of scarcity.

p “8. The cause of the trouble is that a small class has the wealth, while the rest have the debts.

p “9. It is contrary to common sense that men should starve because they have raised too much food.

p “10. The destruction of food or other wealth, or the limitation of production, is economic insanity.

p “11. The remedy is to give the workers access to the means of production, and let them produce for themselves, not for others.

p “12. This change can be brought about by action of a majority of the people, and that is the American way.”  [101•1 

p Sinclair pinned great hopes on the establishment of cooperatives to assist in the implementation of the plan, which was also his election platform (he was running for Governor). He maintained that cooperatives could helpfirst within one state and then throughout the nation—end unemployment, direct production at meeting the 102 requirements of working people and, in the final analysis, establish, within the capitalist economic framework, an autonomous cooperative sector—the material basis for a new society. Quite seriously, Sinclair expected the Democratic Party to help him realize the EPIC Plan. It was clear that he remained a "socialist of the emotions" in the 1930s too.

p Naturally, the EPIC Plan fell through. But it marked an important stage in the development of the American socialist Utopian tradition. It was a concentrated reflection of many major features and principles which had established themselves over the more than a century of Utopian socialism in the United States: optimism, faith in the possibility of attaining the proclaimed objectives and restructuring society according to socialist principles despite all obstacles; orientation on the moral impulse (emotion) as the motive force or at least the original impetus of the socialist process; preference of common sense over theory; reliance on personal practical verification of the projects proposed; respect for the law and legal forms of struggle; advocacy of a nonviolent, i.e., essentially reformist introduction of socialism; the intention to use the existing "democratic machinery" on condition that it be "made pure"; and the conviction that the struggle for socialism should rely not on the working class but on "a majority of the people”.

p These aspects, which had featured more or less prominently in every American socialist Utopia of any importance in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, reflected distinctive characteristics in the development of the United States and the American working-class and mass democratic movements. In turn, they influenced both these movements and American socialist thought.

Sinclair was the last great Utopian socialist in the prewar United States. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Utopian socialist ideas lost their former popularity with Americans, to remain on the periphery of the Utopian tradition for nearly a quarter of a century.