A Reformer’s World
THE AMERICA OF GASTON’S YOUNG MANHOOD WAS changing rapidly, and not in ways that made him proud of his country. Even the most casual inquiries turned up gruesome tales of deepening poverty, wrenching class conflict, with violent confrontations between industrial workers and factory owners. Many young intellectuals, the historian Dorothy Ross writes, believed they were living in an age of “profound historical crisis,” in which cherished republican values were being threatened by the new industrial capitalism. “Unadulterated capitalism,” according to another authority, seemed to many to be on the verge of destroying the social order. Richard T. Ely, one of the young scholars of that era, believed that the workings of the new system of competitive individualism were “as cruel as laws of nature.” He declared that “our food, our clothing, our shelter, all our wealth, is covered with stains and clots of blood.” As Ross observes, many of the intellectuals who etched these searing indictments were “nurtured in evangelical piety, Whiggish moral politics, and the Christian ethicism of the American colleges,” a trio of influences that had been working on Gaston; and, like the better-known critics whom Ross describes, Gaston was increasingly drawn to the “organic and idealistic thrust of socialism” in his search for answers to the social riddle. “Capital is allowed to control all opportunity,” he wrote about this time, “and give the laborers only enough of their product to keep their souls and bodies together.” 29
Passionate and eager to find answers, Gaston embarked on an extraordinary five-year intellectual and moral odyssey that culminated in the founding of the model community he would call Fairhope.
He began his journey in August of 1889 by purchasing the two-year-old Suburban Advocate, a small newspaper serving University Place. News analysis and editorial writing were better suited to Gaston’s temperament than land speculation. Journalism was also more congenial to his new passion for the study of American society, for seeking answers to the problems it created, and, especially, for finding an appropriate role for himself. A college classmate wrote approvingly from Colorado of the paper, remarking that “we can see ever so much of Ernest in it” ; a friend from Minneapolis expressed his “trust” in the “citizenship” guidance he found in Gaston’s writings.30 Unfortunately, no copies of the Advocate have survived; other evidence, however, indicates that editing it gave Gaston the opportunity to explore new ideas, develop his persuasive powers, and extend his sphere of influence.
Gaston took a second fateful step in the autumn of 1889. He brought together a small group of friends—one was a former Drake professor and another his father-in-law—to form what they called the Des Moines Investigating Club—a club to “investigate” the social and economic condition of the United States by bringing the members abreast of the best and latest literature. Gaston looked on the club as a forum for gaining perspective, broadening and testing his ideas, and sharpening his editorial skills. The group met weekly throughout the winter, discussing such popular works of social criticism as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth.31
Gaston did nothing new when he established the Investigating Club. All across the country in the summer and fall of 1889 similar groups were being formed, most of them to champion the social theories of Edward Bellamy. Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, appeared at the beginning of 1888 and in the next year the enthusiasm it generated led to the creation of a magazine, the Nationalist, and a network of clubs claiming six thousand members.32 By the end of that year the novel had sold two hundred thousand copies and, as one historian writes, it caused millions of Americans—“social workers, farmers, businessmen, bankers, and housewives”—to confront Bellamy’s “argument for a wholesale rearrangement of their capitalist society.” 33 Gaston, according to a friend, was “much pleased with the book,” but his club was not formally affiliated with the Bellamy movement.34 Nevertheless, the great author’s advice was solicited and he was invited to come to Des Moines to speak to its members. Pleading poor health, Bellamy declined the invitation, praised Gaston as one who was “looking for the morning,” and counselled him to “do all you can for our common cause personally and in your paper,” assuring him that “you can in no other way serve your country better.” 35
The most popular novel of social criticism since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bellamy’s Looking Backward viewed the America of the 1880s from the perspective of the year 2000, the time its hero awakened after more than a century’s sleep. Gaston and his fellow Investigating Club members could sympathize with Bellamy’s Julian West, a man of culture and comfortable means who was appalled by the realities of his own age, viewed with fresh eyes. They could also agree with the sage Dr. Leete, West’s twenty-first century host and mentor, who analyzed for him the doomed social order of the nineteenth century. The central problem, Dr. Leete explained, was “excessive individualism.” A cancer destroying the country, it was the “animating idea” of the age; it was a foil to “public spirit” and was “fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living men” as well as subversive of “any realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to follow.” With unbridled individualism fueling and guiding the fabulous industrial and technological revolution, American workers lost the independence and control over their destiny they had once had, and, in the face of “the absorption of business by ever larger monopolies,” the small businesses that were not sucked into the vortex of monopoly “were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, living in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice for the enjoyment of existence.” When Dr. Leete explained that “the records of the period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was furious,” the incipient Des Moines rebels could take heart, feeling that their voices contributed to that outcry; they were part of a movement.36
Opposite: Edward Bellamy’s letter encouraging E.B. Gaston.
According to Bellamy’s utopian romance, the great outcry had produced change without revolution. There was no class warfare. Instead, enlightened citizens came to regard socialism as beneficent, humane, and rational, and saw it as a logical alternative to the ruthless, competitive industrial order of capitalism. A peaceful, evolutionary process took the consolidation that had been the distinguishing feature of the nineteenth century industrial revolution to its logical conclusion so that all competing industries had been absorbed by a “single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit.” With the means of production and distribution nationalized, inefficiency was eliminated along with exploitation and inequality. National income rose and individual incomes, once wildly uneven, became more nearly equal. Such a vision had great appeal. The reform-minded Iowa Tribune explained approvingly that the Bellamy doctrine meant “ownership and control of capital, and the organization and direction of labor by the Nation.” Nationalism, the term Bellamy preferred to socialism, would guarantee “to every citizen nurture, education and comfortable maintenance from the cradle to the grave.” 37
Gaston and his friends studied Henry George as well as Bellamy. George had entered into the American consciousness a decade earlier with the publication of Progress and Poverty, an eloquent work that
