Toward the end of the 19th century, labor unrest replaced slavery as the greatest perceived threat to the United States. After the Long Depression of the 1870s, recessions continued to plague the 1880s as corporations and monopolies grew unchecked and the 14-hour workday continued unchallenged. An angry public began lashing out. Stagnate wages led to increases in anti-Chinese riots and the lynching of free Black Southerners, while labor strikes often escalated to violence. One year before Bellamy began writing Looking Backward, a labor strike for an eight-hour workday by McCormick Harvesting Machine Company workers at Haymarket Square in Chicago turned into a massacre; a bomb thrown at the police and the retaliatory gunfire led to 11 deaths and dozens injured. The 1886 Haymarket affair, because it was perceived to be the act of anarchists, represented an existential threat to law and order and an imperative for reform to happen before the nation fell into chaos.

In Looking Backward, Bellamy’s response to the labor crisis is the invention of an alternative economic system all together. Though familiar with socialist ideas, Bellamy was not a political scientist. He was an American Romantic author more influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson than Karl Marx.