I am reading various novels and thinking about the White Left in them. By “White Left” I mean the left that does not want to consider the centrality of race in United States politics. I mean the left that says that it is really all about class, the corporation, the banks, and such, and does not want to grapple with white supremacy. Edward Bellamy joins the White Left in his 1887 utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887. Carson McCullers briefly illuminates the White Left in her 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
In Looking Backward, Bellamy tells the story of an upper-middle class man named Julian West who falls asleep in his home in Boston in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. Upon his miraculous arousal, he discovers that the United States has been cured of all troubles stemming from class conflict, inequality, and greed. Everyone now works for the Great Trust and the Industrial Army. People retire at 45. Obviously, it is much better in this future, the protagonist explains; he uses the following metaphor to illustrate what it was like Back Then:
“By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.”
“The coach scene from Looking Backward.” Art by Lois Rosson
Bellamy’s novel never concedes the existence of racial inequality, even though Looking Backward’s Industrial Army model is arguably contoured by nostalgia for the socially totalizing Northern experience of the American Civil War. Race only surfaces twice in his opus, and only very briefly, but these instances suffice to tell you what Bellamy is about regarding the matter.
First, the Julian West who lives in the year 1887 has “a faithful colored man” named “Sawyer” to tend to his needs. Sawyer functions as what was called back then a manservant. He has been taught to “mesmerize” West when the later suffers from bouts of insomnia. Sawyer briefly appears at the beginning and end of the novel, serving the protagonist breakfast, sherry, and hypnosis. That is the beginning and end of him.
“The absence of race in Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward,” by Lois Rosson
Second, in a postscript to the novel, Bellamy insisted that the utopian system he outlined could and would eventually be realized. After all, he wrote, in 1759 England seemed unstoppable, yet the North American colonies won their independence just 30 years later. In 1864, few thought German unity possible, Bellamy wrote, but “Seven years later it had been realized.” And, most notably:
“In 1832, the original Anti-slavery Society was formed in Boston by a few so-called visionaries. Thirty-eight years later, in 1870, the society disbanded, its programme fully carried out.”
That last sentence is only partially correct. True enough, Article 2 of the Society’s constitution called for the abolition of slavery, which had been eradicated in fact and law by 1870. But Article 3 asked for more: “This Society shall aim to elevate the character and condition of the people of color,” the document declared, ” . . . by removing public prejudice, that thus they may, according to their intellectual and moral worth, share an equality with the whites, of civil and religious privileges.” To the extent that Looking Backward shows any interest in race and racism, the novel’s postscript vaguely implies that somehow by the last years of the Gilded Age this mission had been “carried out,” when of course it had not. Perhaps Bellamy intended the trustworthy colored hypnotist/servant Sawyer to serve as proof of this oblique claim. More likely he just did not want to consider the problem very much.
There is a character in Carson McCullers remarkable novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter who talks like he has read Bellamy. His name is Jake Blount. He is one of five or so lost souls who inhabit a southern town and through the text bump into each other in various ways. Blount is a communist and drunkard and malcontent who works as a mechanic for a local carnival. Towards the second half of the novel he gets into a heated argument with a Black doctor named Copeland, whose son has been horribly tortured and maimed in a nearby prison. When Doctor Copeland attempts to speak to a county judge about this injustice, he is beaten and thrown into jail. By the time Copeland and Blount have their conversation, the former is dying from tuberculosis. At first the men converse with patience and respect, working under the impression that they have something in common. Then they discover that this is not the case and begin to angrily talk past each other.
“There are corporations worth billions of dollars – ” Jake laments in a long diatribe, “and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat . . . ”
Doctor Copeland complains that he cannot get a word in edgewise. “And the Negro,” he attempts to add. “To understand what is happening to us you have to – ”
Jake interrupts him – “savagely,” in McCullers’ words. “Who owns the South?” he rhetorically asks. “Corporations in the North own three fourths of all the South.” There are only two roads ahead, he warns: fascism or revolution.
“Do not forget the Negro,” Doctor Copeland pleads again. “So far as I and my people are concerned the South is fascist now and always has been.”
The tense debate moves onto the question of what is to be done. Jake suggests chain letters to heighten awareness about the corporate problem. Doctor Copeland calls for a march on Washington, D.C. to protest racial injustice, which Jake calls “crazy.” “You’ve got everything backward,” he sneers. “The only way to solve the Negro problem under capitalism is to geld everyone of the fifteen million black men in these states.”
Understandably, this is too much for the physician. “Foul blasphemer,” Copeland spits. “White . . . fiend.”
Interestingly, not long after the 1940 publication of Lonely Hunter, Black-American trade unionist A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a massive Washington demonstration to protest racial discrimination in the booming defense industry. The call to action so alarmed President Franklin Roosevelt that he created an investigative unit to combat the problem. The Fair Employment Practices Commission was the first major federal civil rights initiative since Reconstruction after the Civil War. The march never happened, but even the threat of it moved the civil rights agenda forward. McCullers anticipates the event by about a year via her Doctor Copeland, whom Jake calls a fool. “You are trying to stuff the hog by way of his ass,” he stupidly tells the physician.
Jake Blount is a fictional man. But judging from how he speaks, his real life counterpart might have read many Gilded Age socialist books similar to Looking Backward. I am thinking of Lawrence Gronlund’s Cooperative Commonwealth (1884), which defended terms like “wage slave” to describe workers under market capitalism. “True, a master could whip his slave,” Gronlund wrote of the antebellum south in 1879, “but our employer can discharge his clerks whenever it takes his fancy, which probably would have worse consequences for the clerks than a whipping would. The fact is, these were mere accessories. Slavery is not yet abolished.” Similar musings can be found in Progress and Poverty (1898) by Henry George. ” . . . under the system of chattel slavery the slaves always got at least enough to keep them in good physical health,” George contended, “but in such countries as England there are large classes of laborers who do not get that.” These nonsensical claims ignored the fact that when Old South masters discharged their slaves they did so by literally selling them to other white planters, destroying families and traumatizing children. But George’s economist’s “Single Tax” on speculated land solution probably influenced Upton Sinclair’s 1934 “End Poverty in California” gubernatorial campaign, whose final platform neatly ignored race problems in the Golden State.
Why this willful ignorance among Gilded Age and Great Depression era economic reformers? In Gronlund, Bellamy, and Sinclair’s case they probably just wanted to avoid the issue, which they saw as a divisive impediment to winning adherents to their utopian schemes. In George’s case racism doubtless played far more of a role. There are so many books, pamphlets, and diatribes from the late-nineteenth century that propose to cure America without a thoughtful word about white supremacy that one wants to set up a special library for the genre. Perhaps we will call it the This is Not Happening and We Are Not Here Collection. Except, of course, that they were there, if they cared to look. Or, if like Doctor Copeland, they had no choice.
