1878-1899: Government and Politics: Publications

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888)—a popular utopian novel that depicts Boston in the year 2000, transformed into an orderly and just society by the nationalization of industry and the organization of the work force into an industrial army;

James Bryce, American Commonwealth (London & New York: Macmillan, 1888)—a British lord’s government in the Gilded Age;

Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column (Chicago: F. J. Schulte, 1890)—a dark futuristic, Populist novel set in New York during 1988 and depicting rule by the wealthy class over a race of brutal serfs and downtrod-den laborers;

Richard T. Ely, An Introduction to Political Economy (New York: Chautaugua Press, 1989)—a ground-breaking text by one of the most important and social scientists of the Progressive;

Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Apple-ton, 1880)—a book popularizing the notion that social inequality resulted from unearned profits on land and that a “single tax” on this increased value would produce a more egaltarian social order;

Albert Bushnell Hart, Practical Essays on American Government (New York: Longmans, Green, 1893)—a primer on politics by a well-known nineteenth-century American author;

William Hope Harvey, Coin’s Financial School (Chicago: Coin Publishing, 1894)—a Populist attack on the gold standard and the political elites who defended it;

Harvey, A Tale of Two Nations (Chicago: Coin Publishing, 1894)—a melodramatic novel of political intrigue and corruption featuring a free-silver hero bearing an uncanny resemblance to William Jennings Bryan;

Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (New York: Harper, 1894)—an influential attack on the dangers of monopoly and the corrupting influence of the captains of industry on the American state;

Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other Essays, Social and Political (New York: Putnam, 1897)—popular essays on politics and society by a future vice president and president of the United States.

Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis (New York: Baker & Taylor, The American Home Missionary Society, 1885)—an evangelical Protestant tract, which sold more than half a million copies, warning of the dangers of immigrants and Catholics to the American commonwealth;

Lester Frank Ward, Dynamic Sociology (New York: Appleton, 1883)—an important salvo against Social Darwinism and the political philosophy of laissezfaire, this book provided the intellectual underpinnings of the progressive movement;

Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885)—an early, enduring work in American political science by a future president of the United States of America.