The Bellamy boys pledge allegiance. (Flashback: to know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero).(Frances Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance)

If one man's heaven is another man's hell, what do we call Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward?

Back in 1887, Bellamy imagined an America of the year 2000 in which all residents have been drafted into an "Industrial Army." Individual liberty has been extinguished. Toil is compulsory, as "every able-bodied citizen [is] bound to work for the nation, whether with mind or muscle." Cooking is done only in public kitchens, music is performed only by conscripted professionals, and even rain is a thing of the past, as cities are guarded by enormous tarps. "In the nineteenth century," explains one character, "when it rained, the people of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads."

Under the One Big Umbrella, separate states have disappeared, for "state governments would have interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army." Bellamy called his philosophy "Nationalism." Historian Arthur Lipow notes that "Bellamy's authoritarian socialist views were an historical precursor of totalitarian collectivist ideological currents."

This seems as close to a prescription for mass slavery as has ever been written. But to Edward Bellamy, it was utopia.

Looking Backward sold more copies in America than any novel since Uncle Tom's Cabin. Its message was spread by 150 Nationalist Clubs, whose members were dedicated to regimenting their countrymen. In an 1889 Nationalist manifesto, Bellamy stated that patriotism must be

co-opted in order to achieve Nationalist goals. He urged his followers to "identify themselves with National traditions and aspirations." Enter cousin Francis Bellamy.

Francis Bellamy, born in Mount Morris, New York to an itinerant Baptist preacher, was in the process of losing his faith. He had been a minister and Prohibition Party speaker before turning to "Christian Socialism" and delivering such sermons as "Jesus the Socialist."