SOURCE: “Organization for the Unorganizable: Looking Backward and the Crisis of the Middle Class,” in Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement, University of California Press, 1982, pp. 96-118.

In the essay that follows, Lipow locates the popularity of Bellamy's anti-democratic ideas in more general political trends among the middle class of the late nineteenth-century, particularly in the desire for economic reform of “big capital.”

The response to Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy testified, was “most general and enthusiastic” in the trans-Mississippi states, the newly admitted states, the territories and the far West¹—that is, those areas outside the South where the populist movement, the chief expression of middle-class discontent in the 1890s, had its greatest support. In 1894, after the organized Nationalist movement had declined and many of the individuals involved in it had become active in the People's Party, Bellamy claimed that about half of the...