Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward presents a wholly unique look on the problems of the heated times of the Gilded Age. Through a presentation of the future of America as a completely equal and utopian industrial society in his fiction, Bellamy criticized the capitalist institutions of his day that saw the enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of very few while the vast population of workers contributed all the labor to the development of wealth without just returns. In a complicated era of class frustrations and growing divides between the poor and the wealthy, both in their wealth and their culture, Bellamy captivated audiences with his novel, claiming that a reorganization of the systems of industry was not only necessary, but inevitable.…show more content… In his lifetime, Bellamy had seen the American economy became more industrialized than ever before. As more Americans moved into cities and take up work in factories, textile mills, and on railroads, Bellamy bore witness to the dehumanizing of American workers as they worked long hours to aid in industry bosses getting as wealthy as they possibly could. In Looking Backward, Bellamy expresses his anger over both the abandonment of the American worker as a few heads of industry take control of all of the wealth and the superiority the newly minted wealthy classes endowed on themselves. Bellamy writes that, “a singular hallucination that those at the top generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of a finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order of being who might justly expect to be drawn”. This sense of superiority the wealthy used to justify their control of capital is present in Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth when Carnegie writes that it is a unique talent for business organization and management that is the sole reason for their wealth, and that those who are unfortunate are so simply by nature of their being. Bellamy despised both the unjust inequalities created by men like Carnegie and the superiority they felt of the common
