Nationalist Clubs
Nationalist Clubs were an organized network of socialist political groups which emerged at the end of the 1880s in the United States of America in an effort to make real the ideas advanced by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward.
[2] Owing to the growth of the Populist movement and the financial and physical difficulties suffered by Bellamy, the Bellamyite Nationalist Clubs began to dissipate in 1892, lost their national magazine in 1894, and vanished from the scene entirely circa 1896.
In 1888, a young Massachusetts writer named Edward Bellamy published a work of utopian fiction entitled Looking Backward, 2000-1887, telling the Rip Van Winkle-like tale of a 19th-century New England capitalist who awoke from a trace-slumber induced by hypnosis, to find a completely changed society in the far-distant year of 2000.
[3] The new economic basis of society effectively remade human nature itself in Bellamy's idyllic vision, with greed, maliciousness, untruthfulness, and insanity all relegated to the past.
Preparation for the first Nationalist Club had begun early in the summer of 1888 with a letter from Cyrus Field Willard, a labor reporter for the Boston Globe who had been moved by Bellamy's vision of the future.
"[7] In October 1888 Willard's small Nationalist circle joined forces with the Boston Bellamy Club, establishing "a permanent organization to further the Nationalization of industry.
"[8] The first regular meeting of this remade organization, the "Nationalist Club" of Boston, was held on December 1, 1888, attended by 25 interested participants, with Charles E. Bowers elected chairman.
[8] A committee of 5 was established to create a plan for a permanent organization, including Boston Herald editorial writer Sylvester Baxter, Willard, Devereux, Bowers, and Christian socialist clergyman W.D.P.
[8] Boston club members were overwhelmingly of the middle class and included no small number of Theosophists—believers in spiritualism and reincarnation and establishment of the brotherhood of humanity on earth—a popular philosophical trend of the day.
[13] The magazine never garnered a huge readership, peaking with a paid circulation of 9,000 subscribers, but it was influential in casting the first phase of the Nationalist movement as an ethical propaganda society dominated by the Boston club.
[14] In Chicago the city's Nationalist Club was actually the continuation of an earlier organization known as the "Collectivist League," a group established on April 10, 1888, at a meeting attended by 20 people, including prominent New York socialist author Laurence Gronlund.
Nationalist Club members joined their local People's Party organizations en masse while Bellamy attempted to consolidate this alliance by molding his new publication into one of the most important voices of the Populist movement in the Eastern United States.
[34] New periodicals had emerged to pick up the slack, including The Coming Nation, a weekly newspaper published by Julius Augustus Wayland, which proclaimed itself to be an extension of the Bellamyite political tradition.
[36] In this final work, Bellamy turned his mind's eye to the question of feminism, dealing with the taboo subject of female reproductive rights in a future, post-revolutionary America.
[36] As such, Equality has been hailed by historian Franklin Rosemont as "one of the most forward-looking works of nineteenth-century radicalism," and was lauded in its own day by anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin as "much superior" to Looking Backward for having analyzed "all the vices of the capitalistic system.
Asked in 1890 to describe the thought process behind creation of the novel, Bellamy emphasized that he had no particular sympathy with the extant socialist movement, but rather sought to write "a literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity.
"[37] Bellamy continued that he had "no thought of contriving a house which practical men might live in," but rather attempted to create "a cloud place for an ideal humanity" which was "out of reach of the sordid and material world of the present.
In the view of historian Arthur Lipow, in his book Bellamy consciously ignored positing democratic control in his idealized structure of the future, instead pinning his hopes upon bureaucratic stratification and quasi-military organization of both economics and social relations.
"The historical development of society and the theory of the class struggle, which play so great a part in the philosophy of modern socialism, have no place in Bellamy's system.
