Dissatisfaction with social conditions in the Gilded Age extended well beyond
aggrieved workers. Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan in the late
1880s spoke of a "deep feeling of unease," a widespread fear that the country
"was in real danger of another kind of slavery that would result from the aggre
gation of capital in the hands of a few individuals." Alarmed by fear of class
warfare and the growing power of concentrated capital, social thinkers offered
numerous plans for change. In the last quarter of the century, more than 150
utopian or cataclysmic novels appeared, predicting that social conflict would
end either in a new, harmonious social order or in total catastrophe. One pop-
ular novel of the era, Caesar's Column (1891) by Ignatius Donnelly, ended with
civilized society destroyed in a savage civil war between labor and capital.
Of the many books proposing more optimistic remedies for the unequal
distribution of wealth, the most popular were Progress and Poverty (1879) by
Henry George, The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) by Laurence Gronlund,
and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). All three were among the
century's greatest best-sellers, their extraordinary success testifying to what
George called "a widespread consciousness... that there is something radically
wrong in the present social organization." All three writers, though in very dif-
ferent ways, sought to reclaim an imagined golden age of social harmony and
American freedom.
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