How Two Amateur Novels Undermined America's Liberties

Gary North - November 19, 2015

I teach four years of literature courses for the high school program of the Ron Paul Curriculum.

I also teach six weeks of literature for the eighth grade. For these lessons, I analyze two novels: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000--1887 (1888) and Charles Sheldon's In His Steps (1896). Bellamy's book is occasionally assigned to college students in courses on the history of American literature. Sheldon's book is still in print, but it is rarely mentioned.

Here is what few historians understand. Bellamy's novel launched American socialism. Sheldon's book launched the Social Gospel movement.

LOOKING BACKWARD

Prior to Looking Backward, American socialism was a tiny fringe movement of a handful of German immigrants. There was a tiny Marxist movement in the United States, but it was so far out on the fringes that no one knew about it. There had been a series of Utopian communities, some of which had common property. The Hutterites were examples. But unless they were based on communal religion, these experiments usually failed within a few years. They did not lead to full-scale movements calling for the nationalization of property by the U.S. government.

Then came Looking Backward. In the same year that Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland, Americans had their first introduction to the idea of the national government taking ownership of the means of production.

The book was little more than a series of descriptions of how such an economy would unleash massive production, thereby eliminating all poverty. There would be entire armies of workers employed by the state. No man would work longer than age 45. Every man would begin work as a common laborer at age 21. Daily wages would be equal for all, although the bureaucracy could determine that highly skilled workers in high demand would work shorter daily hours.

Here is the plot. An upper-class resident of Boston in 1887 goes to sleep in a basement. Somehow, mesmerism puts him into a state of suspended animation. He wakes up in 2000. Boston is completely different. Everyone is rich. The state produces everything. All meals are held in luxurious common dining halls. There is free entertainment on the equivalent of a giant telecommunications system. Only the best kinds of music are available, free for all.

The visitor keeps asking questions about how everything works. The man who discovered his frozen body describes the wonderful results.

In what is almost incredible in retrospect, the revived visitor in the future asks a question that Ludwig von Mises asked in his 1920 essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." The question: "How can a socialist planning board set prices?"

"All that is conceded," I said. "But, with all its defects, the plan of settling prices by the market rate was a practical plan; and I cannot conceive what satisfactory substitute you can have devised for it. The government being the only possible employer, there is of course no labor market or market rate. Wages of all sorts must be arbitrarily fixed by the government. I cannot imagine a more complex and delicate function than that must be, or one, however performed, more certain to breed universal dissatisfaction."

Even more astounding, the answer is basically the one that Marxist economist Oskar Lange gave to Mises in 1936-37: bureaucratic guesswork.

"I beg your pardon," replied Dr. Leete, "but I think you exaggerate the difficulty. Suppose a board of fairly sensible men were charged with settling the wages for all sorts of trades under a system which, like ours, guaranteed employment to all, while permitting the choice of avocations. Don't you see that, however unsatisfactory the first adjustment might be, the mistakes would soon correct themselves? The favored trades would have too many volunteers, and those discriminated against would lack them till the errors were set right.

And then the ultimate parallel: Lange's plan was never adopted by any socialist planning board in history. Dr. Leete says: "But this is aside from the purpose, for, though this plan would, I fancy, be practicable enough, it is no part of our system." He never answers the question.

[Note: The year after Lange's two articles attacking Mises were published, the University of Chicago hired him as a full professor. Think about this. The University of Chicago economics department was known as a free market department, but it rewarded a Marxist economist in the depths of the Great Depression with a full professorship for attacking Mises. The department refused to hire F. A. Hayek in 1950, five years after Lange renounced his citizenship and returned to Poland to advise the Communist government.]

A bloodless revolution created this system of common ownership. We are not told when or how.

This is sheer fantasy. Yet in response, over 150 "nationalist societies" were set up. The members expected to be able to create this bloodless revolution.

Wikipedia describes the impact of the book.

The time was ripe for new ideas about economic development which might ameliorate the current social disorder.

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), a relatively unknown New England-born novelist with a history of concern with social issues, began to conceive of writing an impactful work of visionary fiction shaping the outlines of a utopian future, in which production and society were ordered for the smooth production and distribution of commodities to a regimented labor force. In this he was not alone -- between 1860 and 1887 no fewer than 11 such works of fiction were produced in the United States by various authors dealing fundamentally with the questions of economic and social organization.

Bellamy's book, gradually planned throughout the 1880s, was completed in 1887 and taken to Boston publisher Benjamin Ticknor, who published a first edition of the novel in January 1888. Initial sales of the book were modest and uninspiring, but the book did find a readership in the Boston area, including enthusiastic reviews by future Bellamyites Cyrus Field Willard of the Boston Globe and Sylvester Baxter of the Boston Herald.

Shortly after publication, Ticknor's publishing enterprise, Ticknor and Company, was purchased by the larger Boston publisher, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and new publishing plates were created for the book.[8] Certain "slight emendations" were made to the text by Bellamy for this second edition, released by Houghton Mifflin in September 1889.

In its second release, Bellamy's futuristic novel met with enormous popular success, with more than 400,000 copies sold in the United States alone by the time Bellamy's follow-up novel, Equality, was published in 1897. Sales would top 532,000 in the USA by the middle of 1939. The book gained an extensive readership in Great Britain as well, with more than 235,000 copies sold there between the time of its first release in 1890 and 1935.

The book remains in print in multiple editions, with one publisher alone having reissued the title in a printing of 100,000 copies in 1945.

This set the pattern. Other socialist novelists followed. The most successful was Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel, The Jungle, led Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. This disappointed Sinclair, who wanted nationalization, not regulation.

IN HIS STEPS

Charles Sheldon was a theologically and political liberal Protestant minister. He wrote his book as a defense of moral renewal. The churches could be restored to primitive Christianity -- creedless, of course -- by asking their members to adopt this guideline: "What would Jesus do?"

Sheldon offered no guidelines, other than this one: get legislation passed to close the saloons. The book is one long tirade against the saloons. It was straight out of the anti-Catholic reform movements of the second half of the 20th century. It promoted the goals of the temperance movement.

The novel shows one disaster after another. Yet every disaster is described as a success.

The novel never explains how anyone can determine what Jesus would do. He would help the poor and shut down saloons. He would enforce the rules of the Interstate Commerce Commission (1886) to ban the railroads' evil rebate system -- discounts for large purchases.

The great beneficiary of these rebates was John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the liberal Baptist who helped bankroll the Social Gospel movement. That is a delightful irony of the novel. But it was not visible in 1896. A decade later, Rockefeller put up about 5% of the money to launch the Federal Council of Churches in 1908, which became the National Council of Churches in 1950. His son was the single largest source of funds for Social Gospel Protestantism after 1916. On the history of the FCC/NCC, read historian C. Gregg Singer's book, Unholy Alliance. Download it free here: //www.garynorth.com/public/1034.cfm.

The Social Gospel movement had no developed theology in 1896, and almost no adherents in the pews. It had no body of published books. The only prominent Social Gospel minister was Washington Gladden, a co-founder of the American Economic Association in 1885. In His Steps created huge interest, and in the first decade of the 20th century, a series of Social Gospel theology books were published.

Wikipedia describes the book's impact.

In His Steps is a best-selling religious fiction novel written by Charles Monroe Sheldon. First published in 1896, the book has sold more than 30,000,000 copies, and ranks as one of the best-selling books of all time. The full title of the book is In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?.

Though variations of the subtitle "What would Jesus do" have been used by Christians for centuries as a form of imitatio Dei, the imitation of God, it gained much greater currency following publication of the book.

Chicago Advance, the original publisher, failed to register the copyright in the proper form. Other publishers took advantage of this, publishing the book without paying the author royalties. Thus lower prices and multiple publishers led to larger sales.

The 30 million estimate was the author's. There were no statistics; he was paid no royalties. Other estimates are as low as two million copies in the United States.

The book can still be found in Christian book stores. Fundamentalist book store owners have no idea what is in it.

It is a book that attacks wealthy Protestant Christians. It identifies them as selfish, narrow-minded, and drones. They are lovers of wealth, not lovers of Jesus.

CONCLUSIONS

Literature is important, both in preserving culture and undermining it. Think of Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. Think of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Fiction can change people's minds.

It does not have to be good fiction. Looking Backward and In His Steps are classic examples of aesthetically dreary books that changed people's minds.

Bad fiction is difficult to overcome. People who read and believe a message in bad literature do not read scholarly refutations.

Parents should pay attention to what their teenage children are asked to read in high school. When the students enter college, it's too late. Immunize them before college.