Utopians Eastward

WARNING. Please keep the door locked. Strange men, have been seen on the premises. Supt.

Such was the notice which appeared last week in the entry of a remodeled apartment house at No. 23 Barrow st., Manhattan. Men strange to the janitor had indeed been climbing the stairs to visit the new tenants of Apartment 4 C. The visitors were the intelligentsia of Greenwich Village. But the most important visitor the janitor had not seen. His name was Edward Bellamy and he had been dead 36 years.

In 1888 Edward Bellamy, a 38-year-old New England journalist, published a book called Looking Backward. More than a million copies of it were sold. It stirred the U. S. and Europe. It was the story of a 19th Century man who went to sleep and woke up in the year 2000 and was shown what the world was like then. This marvelous book described radio and television. It told of giant umbrellas to spread over whole cities to keep off rain and snow. But its chief interest was that it told how poverty had been abolished, how private industry had been taken over by a state syndicate, how everybody worked to produce plenty of goods for everybody else. Bellamy also had an idea how the unemployed could be put to work making goods for the unemployed.

Last week Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward lay on the tenants' table in Apartment 4 C. The chief tenant was Eugene John Reed, 47, who was once a partner in an investment banking house in Denver. His co-tenants were Chester A. Arthur Jr.,* 33-year-old grandson of the 21st President of the U. S., and Dunham Thorp, onetime editor of a literary magazine in California. All three had taken up residence in Greenwich Village with a small table, some wicker chairs, a few cots. Thus did Utopia move East. Three years ago Mr. Reed left his brokerage business in Denver and went to the Pacific Coast where last winter he founded the Utopian Society. His Utopia was virtually what Edward Bellamy had described./- but he went about gaining proselytes in a different way. A Blue Lodge Mason, he made his Utopian Society, Inc. a secret order, which, enlisting ''pilgrims." puts them through four cycles and turns them out ''hermits." Initiation fees were $3 a head, dues 10-c- a month. As the "pilgrim" progressed through the four cycles, he was given short lectures and allegorical pantomimes on economics. Each ''hermit" had to sign a form letter to President Roosevelt advocating production for use instead of profit and bring two new converts into the order. In the West and Midwest the Utopian Society claims 600,000 members, all of whom want to do away with money and use "purchasing certificates." According to Utopians, everyone can be kept busy all the time making goods for one another's consumption, so that everybody will have an income of $10,000 a year.

Naturally in the recent California campaign many Utopian "hermits" rallied readily to Upton Sinclair, no mean borrower from Edward Bellamy himself. Sinclair's defeat was not the only grief they suffered. Quarrels broke out within the order. Founder Reed and some of his lieutenants fell out. Month ago, Founder Reed appeared in the East, took out incorporation papers in New York for the Utopian Society of America (East) Inc.

Last week he was not ready to announce the Eastern Utopians' scale of initiation fees and dues but he indignantly repudiated the idea that his plan was a racket. Said he: "I'd be ashamed of a racket that didn't pay any better than this. We get only a bare living. We all sacrifice something to serve. Being opposed to the profit system, we couldn't very well exist for the purpose of making a profit, could we? True, our revenue is considerable, but...the administration expense is heavy."

Utopian Reed began his Eastern adventure by announcing an advisory committee, consisting of Esther Strachey (divorced wife of British Journalist John Strachey), Alfred Bingham, editor of Common Sense, Felix J. Frazer and Harold Loeb. Messrs, Loeb and Frazer were handy associates of Mr. Reed. Last spring they were employed under the auspices of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to make a National Survey of Potential Product Capacity in the U.S. When FERA gave up supporting the survey, New York City's Public Welfare Department saw it through. Three months ago one researcher, Robert R. Doane, caused a sensation by charging that the facts found by the survey showed that the economy of plenty was one of "the distorted, synthetic concepts of innumerable well-meaning although romantic and exaggerated imaginations," a form of easy optimism "appealing to the slothful dreams of man." He was immediately discharged from the survey (TIME, Aug. 13).

Last week Messrs. Loeb and Frazer handed in their survey to New York City. Discussing the economy of abundance, they announced that the U. S. could have produced $287,000,000,000 more goods and services in the last five years than it did, that if all productive capacity had been employed every U. S. family might have had an income of $4,370 a year. Mr. Loeb officially concluded: "The research of the N.S.P.P.C. clearly shows (a) that poverty prevails in the U. S.. and always has, but that it need not exist in the future because (b) an economy of abundance would result if production were directed toward the satisfaction of human needs and reasonable wants and restrained only by physical factors and the state of our knowledge."

This was so much raw meat for Utopian Reed. Instead of the $20,000 a year income promised two years ago by Technocrats, and the $10,000 a year income promised by Utopians in California, he took Mr. Loeb's figure. $4,370. "These." he said, "are virtually Government figures. Their accuracy is unquestionable."

* Not to be confused with his father. Chester A. Arthur who three weeks ago married Mrs. Rowena Dashwood Graves in Colorado. Young Mr. Arthur was two years ago sued for divorce.

/- Utopian Reed insists he did not know about Utopian Bellamy until much later.

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