Duveronymous Yawp

This is probably a useful thing to do, writing a blog post, a way to get some words on paper and, prior to that, some thoughts composed. I’m presenting a paper at the C19 conference in Berkeley in just over five weeks on the representation and rhetoric of sexuality, gender, and marriage (too much to do, really) in turn of the 20th century novels about socialism (for it, against it, defining it, etc.), what I am calling “novels of socialism.” In order to ground my work, I’m looking at the earlier 19th century history of utopian, communal socialist movements in the US, notably the Fourierists, but I will also end up looking into other groups, too (Owenites, for example).

Carl Guarneri’s The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (1991) has been indispensable to this end. Charles Fourier (1772-1837: here’s a good, contextualized run-down of his ideas) offered a wide-ranging, and all-encompassing, to say the least, set of critiques, ideas, and recommendations for social change. His theory accounted for the stages of human history, the working of the universe, and predicted the demise of present religious systems with the growth of a “religion” in which people lived in “unconscious obedience to natural law” (Guarneri 94). Also, nations would fall away, to be replaced by 2 million phalanxes (structured living and working communities of a particular size). But, among Fourier’s ideas, as Guarneri notes, “most distressing” to those reformers who wished to act on Fourier’s critique of modern life and economics and build cooperative communities along the lines he described, “was Fourier’s prediction of a ‘New Amorous World’ that would give full scope to human sexual ‘attractions’ by organizing love in a series of graded ‘corporations’ ranging from ‘vestalic’ virginity to complete promiscuity, both heterosexual and homosexual” (94). Continue reading →

Gender and Sexual Perversity in Novels of Socialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Edward Bellamy insisted on describing his utopia as “nationalist” rather than “socialist,” saying in a letter to William Dean Howells that he could never “well stomach” the term “socialism,” not only because of its “foreign” ring, but also because it suggested to him “all manner of sexual novelties.” Nor was Bellamy alone among his colleagues: most utopian socialist writers in the US disavowed the term, many, like Bellamy, coining other labels for their cooperative, manifestly socialist societies.  Certainly socialism’s American detractors had often, and long before Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), gone to the deep rhetorical well of domestic and sexual perversity for arguments against socialism, beginning with reactions to antebellum utopian communities like Oneida, with its institution of “complex marriage,” and those based on Fourier’s model of a “New Amorous World.” But Bellamy and his followers’ conservative gender and sexual politics did not do much, apparently, to disarm the appeal to the imagined sexual and domestic perversity of socialism in the many novelistic replies to Looking Backward.

Continue reading →

From the back of a Carl Sandburg pamphlet, You and Your Job (Charles Kerr, 19??), which is available from the Eugene Debs collection at Indiana State U http://debs.indstate.edu/s2133y6_1900.pdf.  I would love to have this game and, for good measure, to have the first edition of Monopoly.

ADDENDUM 9/26 — After doing a little web searching to see if this is still out there somewhere (so far, nope), I ran into another, more recent “Class Struggle” game on the Stalin’s Moustache blog.

Little Change in Public’s Response to ‘Capitalism,’ ‘Socialism’ | Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Overview

The recent Occupy Wall Street protests have focused public attention on what organizers see as the excesses of America’s free market system, but perceptions of capitalism – and even of socialism – have changed little since early 2010 despite the recent tumult.

The American public’s take on capitalism remains mixed, with just slightly more saying they have a positive (50%) than a negative (40%) reaction to the term. That’s largely unchanged from a 52% to 37% balance of opinion in April 2010. Continue reading →

List of recessions in the United States – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In the course of my current research, I frequently encounter information about the boom and bust cycles of the American economy at the end of the 19th century, and it never ceases to impress me how many recessions there have been in the US.   There were frequent “panics” and profound recessions throughout the end of the century, for reasons which I’m sure many historians and economists have devoted significant ink.  For my work, I’m less interested in the causes than in the literary/cultural responses. But either way, from our current standpoint, I think it’s worth thinking about how often we been in the soup.