and editorial writing were better suited to Gaston’s temperament than land speculation. Journalism was also more congenial to his new passion for the study of American society, for seeking answers to the problems it created, and, especially, for finding an appropriate role for himself. A college classmate wrote approvingly from Colorado of the paper, remarking that “we can see ever so much of Ernest in it” ; a friend from Minneapolis expressed his “trust” in the “citizenship” guidance he found in Gaston’s writings.30 Unfortunately, no copies of the Advocate have survived; other evidence, however, indicates that editing it gave Gaston the opportunity to explore new ideas, develop his persuasive powers, and extend his sphere of influence.
Gaston took a second fateful step in the autumn of 1889. He brought together a small group of friends—one was a former Drake professor and another his father-in-law—to form what they called the Des Moines Investigating Club—a club to “investigate” the social and economic condition of the United States by bringing the members abreast of the best and latest literature. Gaston looked on the club as a forum for gaining perspective, broadening and testing his ideas, and sharpening his editorial skills. The group met weekly throughout the winter, discussing such popular works of social criticism as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth.31
Gaston did nothing new when he established the Investigating Club. All across the country in the summer and fall of 1889 similar groups were being formed, most of them to champion the social theories of Edward Bellamy. Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, appeared at the beginning of 1888 and in the next year the enthusiasm it generated led to the creation of a magazine, the Nationalist, and a network of clubs claiming six thousand members.32 By the end of that year the novel had sold two hundred thousand copies and, as one historian writes, it caused millions of Americans—“social workers, farmers, businessmen, bankers, and housewives”—to confront Bellamy’s “argument for a wholesale rearrangement of their capitalist society.” 33 Gaston, according to a friend, was “much pleased with the book,” but his club was not formally affiliated with the Bellamy movement.34 Nevertheless, the great author’s advice was solicited and he was invited to come to Des Moines to speak to its members. Pleading poor health, Bellamy declined the invitation, praised Gaston as one who was “looking for the morning,” and counselled him to “do all you can for our common cause personally and in your paper,” assuring him that “you can in no other way serve your country better.” 35
The most popular novel of social criticism since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bellamy’s Looking Backward viewed the America of the 1880s from the perspective of the year 2000, the time its hero awakened after more than a century’s sleep. Gaston and his fellow Investigating Club members could sympathize with Bellamy’s Julian West, a man of culture and comfortable means who was appalled by the realities of his own age, viewed with fresh eyes. They could also agree with the sage Dr. Leete, West’s twenty-first century host and mentor, who analyzed for him the doomed social order of the nineteenth century. The central problem, Dr. Leete explained, was “excessive individualism.” A cancer destroying the country, it was the “animating idea” of the age; it was a foil to “public spirit” and was “fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living men” as well as subversive of “any realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to follow.” With unbridled individualism fueling and guiding the fabulous industrial and technological revolution, American workers lost the independence and control over their destiny they had once had, and, in the face of “the absorption of business by ever larger monopolies,” the small businesses that were not sucked into the vortex of monopoly “were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, living in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice for the enjoyment of existence.” When Dr. Leete explained that “the records of the period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was furious,” the incipient Des Moines rebels could take heart, feeling that their voices contributed to that outcry; they were part of a movement.36
Opposite: Edward Bellamy’s letter encouraging E.B. Gaston.
According to Bellamy’s utopian romance, the great outcry had produced change without revolution. There was no class warfare. Instead, enlightened citizens came to regard socialism as beneficent, humane, and rational, and saw it as a logical alternative to the ruthless, competitive industrial order of capitalism. A peaceful, evolutionary process took the consolidation that had been the distinguishing feature of the nineteenth century industrial revolution to its logical conclusion so that all competing industries had been absorbed by a “single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit.” With the means of production and distribution nationalized, inefficiency was eliminated along with exploitation and inequality. National income rose and individual incomes, once wildly uneven, became more nearly equal. Such a vision had great appeal. The reform-minded Iowa Tribune explained approvingly that the Bellamy doctrine meant “ownership and control of capital, and the organization and direction of labor by the Nation.” Nationalism, the term Bellamy preferred to socialism, would guarantee “to every citizen nurture, education and comfortable maintenance from the cradle to the grave.” 37
Gaston and his friends studied Henry George as well as Bellamy. George had entered into the American consciousness a decade earlier with the publication of Progress and Poverty, an eloquent work that combined economics and ethics, laid bare the inequities of the social order, and made its reformation appear not only urgently needed but also possible. Described by George’s biographer as “a moral Mount Whitney of American protest,” Progress and Poverty was unmatched in its power to gather converts to radicalism and protest.38 “No single figure in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was more successful than Henry George in arousing public opinion to an awareness of the social origins of wealth and poverty,” one historian writes, while another believes that his writings “magically catalyzed the best yearnings” of the men and women of the ’eighties, helping to banish the arrogance and indifference of the previous generation.39 The famous writer, also a powerful orator, spoke in the Opera House in Des Moines in January of 1889 but no record survives to tell whether Gaston heard or met him.40
To George the central problems of the age were the unfair distribution of wealth and power and the deepening poverty that accompanied unprecedented material progress. “This association of poverty with progress,” he wrote in his most famous passage, “is the great enigma of our times. . . . It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization and which not to answer is to be destroyed.” Why, George asked, and his Des Moines readers wondered, could not everyone benefit from society’s prodigious wealth-producing ability? Advancing material progress ought “to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy life,” he wrote; instead, it made life worse for millions of people. Not to discover and then to apply a solution to this problem, George warned, was to ensure the decline of American civilization:
What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power. This same tendency, operating with increasing force, is observable in our civilization today, showing itself in every progressive community, and with greater intensity the more progressive the community. Wages and interest tend constantly to fall, rent to rise, the rich to become very much richer, the poor to become more helpless