Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy Utopia Essay

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy Utopia - Essay Example Its massive growth accompanied with the explosion of the city and the growing gap between the rich and poor made it seem like the industrial system was heading off the deep end. As a social remedy, muckrakers exposed the social ills that capitalism was creating and in turn became one of its saviors. One of these writers was Edward Bellamy who published Looking Backward, a novel in which Julian West, a man from 1887, awakens to find a utopian socialist society juxtaposed against the harsh world from he came from. This book, depicting the evils of capitalism, also offered solutions that helped mobilize groups to help their common man. The progressive reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were the response to the problems in American industrial society criticized by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward. Capitalism, Bellamy argued, was the root of all problems in American industrial society. He pointed to competition, corruption, and most of all the inequitable distribution of wealth as being responsible for the poor living conditions of most people in the early nineteenth century. In the latter part of the book, West goes back to the Boston of the past to see a world marked by clear distinctions and divisions between the rich and the poor. ... Similarly, the stories of Horatio Alger gave the poor a sense of false hope that they could escape the chains of poverty and become rich and powerful. These parables were not true given the fact that the upper class did almost everything possible to keep them as poor as possible in order to profit personally. John Rockefeller realized that by reducing wages and working conditions, his own pocketbook swelled to a tremendous amount. Child labor and terrible working conditions were of the two most notable results of capitalism and self motivated profit. Likewise, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie created monopolies and trusts that squeezed out competition from the market to be able to control and set a high price for the consumer. While Bellamy identified competition as one of the most negative aspects of capitalism, the "robber baron" or "captain of industry" alternative was no better. (Manuel, 215) The distinction was where the profit went to. In the early nineteenth century, the private individual reaped the profit while in the utopian world of the future; the profit was every ones to share. . In return for twenty five years of labor in the Industrial Army each American receives an equal share of the nation's production every year of his or her life. Service to society guarantees full support by society. When West goes to talk to his fiance's family about the problems of society he proclaims, "Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death" (Bellamy, 210) By throwing him into the street, the family tries to eliminate anything that might threaten their system of