SOURCE: McHugh, Christine. “Midwestern Populist Leadership and Edward Bellamy: 'Looking Backward' into the Future.” American Studies 19, no. 2 (fall 1978): 57-74.

In the following essay, McHugh demonstrates the connection between Looking Backward and the Populist party and avers that Edward Bellamy's novel contained the ideal world the agrarians sought while the Populist party was the means to fight for this new world.

At the founding convention of the People's party in 1891, Minnesota Populist Ignatius Donnelly remarked that Edward Bellamy was an author “whom not to know is to argue one's self unknown.”¹ Donnelly's compliment was typical of those expressed by midwestern Populist leaders, prominent agrarian reformers and newspaper editors, who read Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888). The author's vision of equality and brotherhood in a cooperative commonwealth found a responsive audience among agrarians burdened with economic hard times in the depression-ridden 1890s.

In the novel Julian West, a wealthy...