Native Radicals

...According to these traditions, only an egalitarian society of economically independent, Christian producers could ensure the continued vitality of American democracy...

...Alternative America is historian John L. Thomas's compelling and well-researched account of how Bellamy, George, and Lloyd molded such mainstream beliefs into an indigenous radical critique of corporate capitalism...

...Fortunately, Thomas does not repeat Richard Hofstadter's inaccurate caricature of populist thought as the "paranoid style in American politics," but he does imply that George, Bellamy, and Lloyd were primarily motivated by irrational longings and millennialist fantasies...

...Bellamy's acquiescence in the centralizing tendencies of industrial capitalism is now the common intellectual property of conservative and liberal thinkers alike, including even thoughtful historians like Thomas, who see in proposals for democratic revival only manifestations of political immaturity or individual pathology...

...Though Bellamy shared George's concern for the fate of democratic institutions in an age of monopoly, his Looking Backward of 1888 proposed a Utopian socialism that now seems completely at odds with George's garden city republic...

...the true conflict is between labor and monopoly...

...In his 1894 antimonopoly tract, Wealth against Commonwealth, Henry Dema-rest Lloyd wrote, "Our barbarians come from above...

...The path that led these three reformers from middle-class respectability to radicalism began with the economic and emotional shocks following the Civil War...

...The paradox of increasing poverty alongside the opulence of the new "barbarians" led George, Bellamy, and Lloyd to journalism, economic theory, Utopian speculation, and political activism...

...Again and again, George alienated union supporters by insisting that "there is in reality no conflict between labor and capital...

...In Wealth and Commonwealth and subsequent books, Lloyd moved from trust-busting to Fabian socialism and agrarian cooperatives as models for future socialist organization...

...After painstakingly reconstructing the political, social, and cultural components of republican radicalism, Thomas undermines its political significance by calling it merely a therapeutic rest-stop along the expressway to capitalist modernity...

...The spirit of social solidarity and patriotism that had once animated the Union Army would now inspire the drilled soldiers of his collectivist regime...

...Only Lloyd came close to linking his antimonopoly ideology with the workers' and farmers' radicalism of the period...

...Like Edward Bellamy and Henry George, the two other major radical thinkers of the period, Lloyd had been raised on the ideology of the antislavery movement, which in turn harked back to the ideals of Jefferson's individualism, the artisan's republicanism, and Calvin's perfectionism that had dominated Northern public opinion since the Revolution...

...The Nationalist and Bellamy Clubs formed in the wake of Looking Backward's phenomenal success ran into similar problems, attracting elite reformers, feminists, and even some Populists, but rarely enlisting workers' support for their cause...

...Without restraints of culture, experience, the pride, or even the inherited caution of class or rank," the robber barons of gilded-age America had undermined the country's democratic institutions and ushered in an era of predatory capitalism and imperialism...

...It is this legacy of Bellamy's utopianism that cannot be reconciled with George's and Lloyd's thought, despite Thomas's claim for a single "adversary tradition...

...His book suffers, however, from a bias toward the very processes of "modernization" that provoked the outraged protest of his subjects...

...Thomas argues that George, Bellamy, and Lloyd underwent a "vocational crisis" in these years, caught between the revered memories of their ancestors' Revolutionary, Jacksonian, and abolitionist crusades and the new ethos of professional expertise that would motivate Progressive intellectuals at the beginning of the Twentieth Century...

...Lloyd's attack on the emerging corporate order of the late Nineteenth Century drew on the rich political and cultural traditions that resonated deeply in the minds of many of his contemporaries...

...He was referring to the businessmen who had amassed fortune and power in the years following the Civil War...

...George and Lloyd, at least, saw that "modernization" was no neutral, impersonal process but rather a political and economic struggle with real winners and losers—and without a fixed denouement...

...The children of fathers who maintained a genteel domestic front in the face of hard luck and dwindling finances, and of mothers who schooled them in Protestant piety and self-discipline, George, Bellamy, and Lloyd were horrified to find their expectations shattered by what Bellamy called "the feverish excitement of modern life...

...Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know," Lloyd explained...

...Along the way, he tried to forge a working coalition of Populists, trade unionists, socialists, and middle-class reformers...

...George's 1879 Progress and Poverty is best remembered for its famous proposal of a Single Tax on rent...

...Too often Thomas echoes Bellamy's determinism, claiming that the "verdict of history" preordained the failure of any defense of republican community...

...The forces and the wealth are new and have been the opportunity of new man...

...Despite these efforts, Lloyd maintained a basic hesitance about reform from below, hoping that middle-class reformers like himself might mediate class tensions through impartial arbitration—a process Lloyd himself pioneered in the resolution of the 1902 anthracite coal strike...

...Bellamy's doctrine of Nationalism envisioned Twenty-first Century Boston as an impersonal Industrial Army governed by efficient engineers...

...Thomas, however, ends Alternative America with the suggestion that their decen-tralist alternatives may have had only a "psychological" function as "a temporary retreat or haven from the battlements of the modern age...

...In fact, those interested today in a revitalized adversary culture need to begin by repudiating the whole line of fatalistic technological reasoning that runs through modern progres-sivism from Bellamy to the Atari Democrats...

...By taxing rent, George hoped to end land monopoly and promote an alternative, decentralized model of social development in which rural values of community and self-government would be preserved and strengthened...

...The panic of 1873, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the scandals of urban political machines, the plight of individual entrepreneurs amid a ruthless merger movement, and the Haymarket Riot of 1886 convinced all three men that industrial "progress" was not the salvation it was made out to be...

...In his deft combination of biography and intellectual history, Thomas has illuminated one of the most fascinating moments in the history of American political ideology...

...Bellamy later softened the authoritarian implications of his Utopia and moved closer to Populism at the end of his life, but his novel's image of a militarized socialism under the command of benevolent managers shared with George's radicalism a deep distrust of independent working-class activism...

...His fanatical devotion to the cause of the Single Tax later earned George a reputation as a crank, but his larger goal was the protection of small producers threatened by real estate speculation and by the states' and Federal Government's enormous land grants to railroad, mining, and lumber corporations...

...Casey Blake (Casey Blake, a graduate student at the University of Rochester, is writing a dissertation on Randolph Boune, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mum-ford...

...In a prophecy reminiscent of a crude Marxism, Bellamy assured readers that Nationalism would come about as the result of a "process of industrial evolution which could not have terminated otherwise," as economic concentration culminated in the creation of One Big Trust administered by a managerial elite...

...Like Bellamy in Looking Backward, Thomas assumes the inevitable triumph of the social forces that undermined republican values and institutions...