Man & Beast

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, reads the essay “Man & beast,” his reflections on the zoo from the May issue of The New Criterion.

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2021

Man & Beast

On the un-zooing of the zoo 

What is so wild about If I Ran the Zoo? Don’t ask young Gerald McGrew. It was hard to escape the news when, on March 2, the zoo-loving protagonist of Dr. Seuss’s 1950 children’s book was captured and caged along with five other titles. The author’s own estate threw away the key to what quickly became the endangered species of its archive. The confinement not only ended the publication and licensing of six books. The move also cut into our ability to buy used copies of the books online. eBay announced it was “sweeping our marketplace” to remove these titles that now violated the company’s “offensive material policy.” The street price for ragged copies shot up a hundred fold. Overnight, Mein Kampf became more available than the anapestic tetrameters of that “New Zoo, McGrew Zoo.”

Somewhere between “Pasternak, Boris” and “Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr,” “Seuss, Dr.” might seem like an unexpected addition to the samizdat library. Yet some have long looked to cancel the writer beloved by generations for hitting the funny bones of children while twisting the tongues of parents. This year for “Read Across America Day,” the National Education Association declined to acknowledge Seuss at its annual March event that is, in fact, timed to coincide with the author’s birthday (Seuss had been the focus of the event during both the Obama and Trump administrations). Faced with the full loss of its intellectual property’s value, “working with a panel of experts, including educators,” Seuss Enterprises instead used the birthday to announce that six Seuss books were the first things to go—like stockings hung all in a row.

Born in 1904, Theodor Seuss Geisel had the misfortune of beginning his career as a college humorist at a time when nothing was funny, at least by today’s standards. Some of Seuss’s sophomoric efforts were indeed cringe-making by anyone’s standards. As his early work has been unearthed, activists have painted Seuss as an unregenerate racist who encoded hate into everything from The Cat in the Hat’s supposed minstrelry to Horton’s unwanted paternalism in hearing that Who.

The indictment of If I Ran the Zoo speaks not only to a modern problem with Seuss but also to a modern problem with zoos. Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens are the married academics behind an organization called The Conscious Kid that has led the prosecution against the book. With over two million followers, their Instagram account is the kind that promises to reveal “Childhood nursery rhymes you didn’t realize were racist.” In their 2019 study called The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books, the two make a diversity audit of Seuss and particularly target If I Ran the Zoo.

By scouring the world, or at least the world of his dreams, for unusual animals “to be put on display in the White male’s zoo,” according to the authors of the study, Gerald McGrew traffics in Orientalism, subservience, “exotification, stereotypes, and dominance”:

In addition to White males dominating the presence and speaking roles of characters, their violence is used as a tool of White masculinity to support dominance and White supremacy over additional forms of masculinity. An example of how White supremacy, specifically White masculinity, uses violence to support dominance is mentioned in the findings where we see a White male holding a gun while standing on top of the heads of three Asian men.

It is true that McGrew enlists “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant” from “countries no one can spell.” He also goes “to the African island of Yerka” and employs local aid to return with a “tizzle-topped Tufted Mazurka.” Yet the study’s authors conveniently ignore that McGrew’s exoticizing gaze was an equal opportunity offender, extending to the “Far Western part of south-east North Dakota,” where one can find a “very fine animal called the Iota.” McGrew also tasks local blue bloods in the “Wilds of Nantucket” to “capture a family of Lunks in a bucket.”

For some, the history of America’s zoological parks is not so unlike the one imagined by young Gerald McGrew—and just as damning. For those who run today’s zoos, their cultural position may be just as tenuous as the publication of If I Ran the Zoo. As far back as 1985, Dale Jamieson was writing “Against Zoos” for a chapter in Peter Singer’s In Defense of Animals. In 2018, a group called the The Non-human Rights Project sued the Bronx Zoo, New York’s flagship zoological institution, demanding legal personhood for Happy, the elephant who has lived “wrongfully imprisoned” at the zoo, the suit maintained, for forty-two years. While a Bronx County Supreme Court judge ruled against the motion in February, the zoo nonetheless announced it would soon end its elephant exhibit.

The un-zooing of the zoo should come as no surprise. Since 1993, the Bronx Zoo has officially not been known as a zoo at all, but the “Wildlife Conservation Society.” At the time of the renaming, zoo guides complained that they must now be known as stuffy “docents” in a “wildlife conservation center.” “The society is no longer simply a keeper of zoos and an aquarium, wonderful though those facilities may be,” responded trustee John Elliott, Jr. “The society’s primary mission is to save wildlife. Its new name reflects that mission. Fair enough?”

While the Bronx Zoo has, unofficially at least, now consented to calling itself the Bronx Zoo, a conservation mantra continues to permeate its exhibits. Animals, when they can be seen, are often woefully under-identified, appearing as mere props for a presentation on the dangers of pollution, or deforestation, or some other man-made calamity. At the conclusion of many exhibits, we are given opportunities to atone for our own culpability in this Malthusian world through the contribution of funds.

The zoo’s mission creep reflects a growing discomfort over the dynamics of its founding, a time when elite (and, yes, white) collectors indeed filled cages with game nearly as exotic and far-flung as those specimens for McGrew’s zoo. At the Bronx Zoo, the animals are now dispersed across the park, but what remains of its turn-of-the-century art and architecture, often overlooked by visitors, still speaks to the zoo’s original ambitions.

The New York Zoological Park, as the Bronx Zoo was originally known, began as an initiative of the Boone and Crockett Club, an association founded in 1887 by ten wealthy big-game hunters, including Theodore Roosevelt. Dedicated to game protection and game preserves, in 1895 the Club seeded the board of a new zoological society that would establish a free park “with North American and exotic animals, for the benefit and enjoyment of the general public, the zoologist, the sportsman and every lover of nature,” the Society wrote in its first annual report of 1897. Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Jacob Schiff, and William C. Whitney were among the first donors as the society took control of 261 acres, an ambitiously large tract of undeveloped land straddling the Bronx River that had been acquired by the New York City Municipal Park Commission in 1884.

These days visitors mainly arrive at the zoo by some back door, as parking lots disgorge them unceremoniously in some odd corner of the park. Yet as conceived, the zoo presented an ordered and elevating classical assembly leading visitors up to nothing less than an acropolis for the animal kingdom. To get some sense of that, today’s visitors must start at the zoo’s original entrance along East Fordham Road, at one time an arboreal boulevard serviced by nearby elevated rail and separating the zoo from the New York Botanical Garden to the north.

Here one of the last monuments of the zoo’s classical period still anticipates the animal wonders within. In 1934, the zoo unveiled the double-arched bronze gates as a memorial to Paul J. Rainey. His sister, Grace Rainey Rogers, commissioned the sculptor Paul Manship to create the fanciful design based on actual animals in the zoo’s collection. Tortoises, cranes, storks, owls, bears, deer, baboons, leopards, and a lion named Sultan perch on the gate’s stylized vines. The menagerie pays tribute to Rainey, the big-game hunter who filled the zoo, as well as nature museums, with the gifts of his exotic specimens. His 1911 report of his arctic adventure to capture “Silver King,” one of the zoo’s first polar bears, reads like a cross between If I Ran the Zoo and King Kong. As Rainey recounts, after much struggle the first bear he roped on an iceberg was mistakenly garroted: “Presently it seemed to me that the bear was choking, and I ordered the rope loosened at once. Too late! His eyes were glassy, and he was stone dead.”

Past the Memorial Gates, the original zoo entrance leads onto a fountain plaza and set of monumental steps that were at one time bursting with floral arrangements, now mainly turned over to parking and denuded lawn. Here the Rockefeller Fountain, of imagined sea creatures, still adds to the stairs’ Italianate design with its unusual provenance: originally from Como, Italy, where it was created by the local sculptor Biagio Catella in 1872, the fountain was purchased by William Rockefeller as a gift for the zoo in 1902.

Up the stairs, the zoo’s Astor Court, originally known as Baird Court, still speaks to the zoo’s original focus, in mineral if no longer in animal or vegetable form. Designed by the architects Heins & La Farge, the Court’s brick and limestone neoclassical buildings once housed the animals at the heart of the zoo. Modeled after the Court of Honor at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893, Astor Court is symmetrical and longitudinal, with the Primates’ House, Lion House, and Large Bird House leading on to the domed Elephant House. Stone and terracotta animal sculptures by Eli Harvey, Charles R. Knight, and Alexander Phimister Proctor cover the façades as though the buildings have been given over to the natural world. Of this design, only the central sea lion pool still serves its original function. While the Court buildings have been restored and maintained through a gift of the Astor family, they are otherwise closed to the public or greatly altered. The Elephant House now houses the museum’s rhinoceri, while the cages of the Lion House have been removed to create an immersive exhibition called “Madagascar!” Lions, primates, birds, and elephants (for now) appear elsewhere, removed into sprawling and often distant settings.

The Elephant House at the Bronx Zoo. Photo: WCS Archives.

These naturalistic habitats, most likely more salubrious for the animals’ captivity, may be in line with updated zoological practice, but something got lost in the transition. The animals at the zoo are not in a state of nature, despite the artifice of their current surroundings. With their ordered arrangement, the animals as presented in the neoclassical Astor Court were more clearly and honestly in a state of man. The animal heads sculpted onto these buildings at one time even reflected the actual assembly of the National Collection of Heads and Horns, prize trophies that originally occupied a sixth Court building, designed by Henry D. Whitfield in 1922.

From McGrew Zoo to Bronx Zoo, zoological parks as originally conceived served to reveal not white supremacy but human supremacy, and therefore human responsibility, over the animal kingdom. The big-game hunters who founded the Bronx Zoo maintained such a deep respect for animal behavior and animal habitat that they created this shrine to animals. In the modern age, the animals of the world are the captives of man with no chance of release. Let’s at least give us unwitting jailers a direct engagement with the wonders of creation in our charge. If I ran the zoo, that’s just what I’d do.

Like a Rock

James Panero reads “Like a Rock,” his Letter from Plymouth in the November 2020 issue of The New Criterion.

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2020

Like a rock

On the four-hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock.

There is nothing particularly impressive about Plymouth Rock. As far as famous rocks go, the seaside boulder on which the Pilgrims may have first set foot in the New World is notably underwhelming. It has not helped that this ten-ton glacial errant, an Ice Age deposit of granite on the morainal coastline of Cape Cod Bay, has been moved and abused, venerated and desecrated many times since the storied passengers of Mayflower set down roots here four hundred years ago, in December 1620. And yet it is precisely the Rock’s humble appearance that can still evoke the greatest awe. The pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth proved to be the moonshot of the seventeenth century—odds-breaking, death-defying, and ultimately world-shattering. The Rock remains the manifestation of the first step of these spiritual wanderers, not just from ship to shore but also heaven to earth. For the nation’s celestial origins, Plymouth Rock is our moonstone.

It took over a century for the Rock to be recognized for its historical relevance, after a Plymouth elder recalled a folktale of the landing. Its importance then grew alongside a burgeoning sense of the central role of the Pilgrims in our national story. In the War of Independence, the stone came to symbolize the endurance of the Pilgrims’ separatist faith crystallized in the cause of national liberty. In 1775, the people of Plymouth joined Colonel Theophilus Cotton to “consecrate the rock . . . to the shrine of liberty.” In attempting to move the stone from the shoreline, however, the townspeople split it in two, a portent of the coming Revolutionary break. Leaving one half behind in the sand, they relocated the other to “liberty pole square” by the Plymouth meetinghouse. On July 4, 1834, that part of the rock was moved again, this time to the front of Plymouth Hall. Other pieces went farther astray. Two chunks came to reside in Brooklyn, one at the abolitionist Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims and the other at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Smaller fragments went the way of the souvenir hunters. Meanwhile the original seaside stone came to be buried in sand and port development.

Hammat Billings’s baldachin, which housed Plymouth Rock from 1867–1920.

In 1867, an elegant Beaux-Arts baldachin designed by Hammatt Billings resurrected the beach half, which was soon rejoined by the other Plymouth rock of Plymouth Rock as “1620” was etched in the stone. Finally, in 1920, for the tercentenary of the Pilgrims’ landing, McKim, Mead & White designed the portico that stands over Plymouth Rock today. The understated design, built into an esplanade and replacing the Billings monument, invites viewers to look down onto the Rock, now again on the sandy beach. At spring tide, through iron grilles in the pavilion’s open foundation, the waters of the cold Atlantic can once again lap over the worn stone.

The present portico over Plymouth Rock, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1920.

The treatment of Plymouth Rock has reflected the ebbs and flows of our own national conscience. In 1820, at the bicentennial of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster proclaimed, “We have come to this Rock to record here our homage for our Pilgrim Fathers; our sympathy in their sufferings; our gratitude for their labors; our admiration of their virtues; our veneration for their piety; and our attachment to those principles of civil and religious liberty.” Pledging “upon the Rock of Plymouth,” he also called on Americans to “extirpate and destroy” the slave trade.

By 1835, Tocqueville came to observe how “this Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic.”

The pilgrims John Alden and Mary Chilton landing at Plymouth.

This year’s quadricentenary of the Pilgrim landing has not been so felicitous for Plymouth or its Rock. The pandemic has destroyed the town’s tourist trade and canceled many festivities on what should have been its most eventful year. A million visitors a year usually come to Plymouth Rock. This year that number may be less than half. Chinese, British, and German tourists, all precluded from international travel, are otherwise particularly drawn to the attraction. As I am told, the Chinese come for the American history, the British for the English, and the Germans for the indigenous. In other years, faith-based visitors are also regulars here, making their own pilgrimage to a site of America’s Christian origins. This year, even at the height of tourist season, the glasses at the Pillory Pub are half empty, the John Alden curio shop is in want of the curious, and the on-street parking is abundant.

Beyond just the closures, the Pilgrims’ progress, like the American project itself, has been cast in doubt. For most of our history, the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving meal of 1621 has represented the Providence of America and the amity of its native peoples—after Samoset, Tisquantum (Squanto), and Massasoit’s tribe of Wampanoag saved the new arrivals from starvation. In giving thanks for their salvation, George Washington codified the Pilgrims’ holiday into civic religion.

Until recently, the story of this first Thanksgiving was central to our civic education, from elementary-school assemblies to Peanuts television specials. Now, a “National Day of Mourning,” a protest march against Thanksgiving first organized by Native American activists, can draw crowds larger than the Mayflower Society’s own Pilgrim Progress procession held in town the same day. The Plymouth Rock monument has also been the site of attacks and desecrations. So far this year, the Rock has been splattered and sprayed with paint on two separate occasions. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims have been castigated along with Christopher Columbus for the usurpation of native lands and the murder of native peoples. If children are now taught anything about the Pilgrims, the settlers are more than likely to be denounced as a colonizing force—one that never really originated Thanksgiving, never conveyed the spirit of liberty as represented in their “Mayflower Compact,” and never even landed at Plymouth Rock.

The evidence at Plymouth suggests a more nuanced understanding. In Europe, the Pilgrims had drifted around as the backwash of the Reformation. Since taxation also meant supporting the ministers to a false faith, the Pilgrims’ separatist beliefs put them at odds with the monarch and the inseparable church of England. “The king is a mortal man, and not God,” declared the Puritan Thomas Helwys in his challenge to King James I, and “therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.” Like others, Helwys was imprisoned and died for his beliefs. From England to Amsterdam, and then to Leiden, the Pilgrims attempted to resettle. In Holland, they found the labors unforgiving and the temptations undermining. Here was a faith that knew more what it stood against than for. A group of Pilgrims struck a deal with the London Company to resettle their families around what became New York. They eventually hired Mayflower, a reconfigured merchant ship, for the late fall passage. Their decision to leave the land of Rembrandt—who was then a student just a block from their Leiden church—for lands unknown was propelled by a desperation for religious liberty. “England hath seen her best days,” Thomas Hooker, the Puritan founder of Connecticut, later preached, “and now evil days are befalling us: God is packing up his gospel.”

Plimoth Plantation today.

“Founding a colony was just about the most foolish thing a congregation or any other group of Europeans could do.” So writes John G. Turner in They Knew They Were Pilgrims, his new history of Plymouth.1 What powered these early settlers, especially through the misery of their first winter, was their separatist conviction. “They knew they were pilgrims . . . and quieted their spirits,” explained Plymouth’s Governor William Bradford. Blown off course, and after exploring the area of what became Provincetown (where there is now another Pilgrim monument), the settlers arrived in the protected natural harbor of Plymouth Bay. Regardless of where they took their first actual steps, the Pilgrims “walked into a disaster,” Turner writes. “The poor nutrition during the crossing left their health fragile, and they lacked sufficient food for the months ahead. Exposure to bitter-cold weather and wading in water did not help matters.” Barely half of Mayflower’s passengers survived the crossing and the first winter. “The living were scarce able to bury the dead,” Bradford wrote the next fall.

Just down the road from Plymouth Rock, Plimoth Plantation recreates some of these privations. In the 1940s, the museum’s founder, a gentleman archaeologist named Henry (Harry) Hornblower II, announced that “we had by-passed the era of putting a fence and canopy above a rock or some artifacts in a glass case . . . my idea was to create a living museum.” He tore down his family’s estate and converted it into a life-size diorama of the Pilgrims’ first village. Later on, the staff in period costume began to take on period roles. Now as soon as you set foot out of the reconstructed fort and walk down the village road, the Plantation offers its visitors an immersive experience. This year as you come upon Governor Bradford reading English law in his home with Mistress Winslow, the face masks are the only concessions to our present moment.

Yet even this quaint settlement does not fully convey the true extremis of the Pilgrims’ first year, as husbands lost wives and mothers lost children. The Plantation’s research and reconstruction of historic Patuxet, an equally fascinating section of the living museum, goes further in explaining how these privations were overcome. Then as now, a disease had reduced the population passing through Plymouth. An “extraordinary plague,” Samoset informed the new arrivals, had recently killed the people who had lived there. The Pilgrims arrived in the land of the Wampanoag just as the weakened tribe faced off against the neighboring and untouched Narragansetts. By the 1620s, Europeans were no strangers to American Indians. Traders had been sailing the New England waters for a century. What was new was the arrival of European families. In the early years, the Pilgrim and native populations gave thanks together for their mutual support. Twice as many Wampanoags as Pilgrims joined the first Thanksgiving dinner. Recent excavations have also suggested that the two peoples chose to live and trade next to each other.

This summer, after completing a three-year rebuilding at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport, Mayflower II, a faithful 1956 replica of the Pilgrims’ faith-conveying ship, returned to Plymouth under her own sail power. Plimoth Plantation is once again scheduling tours of the ship, tied up within sight of Plymouth Rock. Four hundred years after the original landing, the craft speaks to the hardships, endurance, and desperation of the settlers who have defined America in myth and memory. Entering the open hold of this tiny replica vessel, where 102 passengers would have endured the Atlantic passage together, reveals much about the death and disease they encountered that first winter in Cape Cod Bay.

The Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, completed in 1889.

Just up the hill from Plymouth Rock, now buried among the trees and residential development, the Monument to the Forefathers offers a final statement on the combination of forces that came to the Pilgrims’ salvation. Hammatt Billings began designing this eight-story-tall granite carving in the 1850s. His brother, Joseph, working with local carvers, completed it in 1889. The monumental site, which now also includes scalloped fragments from Billings’s original Plymouth Rock pavilion, might appear grandiloquent did it not commemorate such an extraordinary event. In addition to relief images from Pilgrim history, the monument is buttressed by the personifications of Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty. Rising above them, facing England to the east, is the colossus of Faith. “Erected by a grateful people,” reads the front inscription, “in remembrance of their labors, sacrifices and sufferings for the cause of civil and religious liberty.” Stone by stone, the monument recalls the Providence of Plymouth Rock. Through sacrifices and sufferings, its blessings continue to land on the country the Pilgrims helped define.

1They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, by John G. Turner; Yale University Press, 464 pages, $30.

The Woman Who Saw the Future

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, reconsiders the Gilded Age author Anna Bowman Dodd and her uncanny predictions about the future.

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2020

The Woman Who Saw the Future

On Anna Bowman Dodd and The Republic of the Future.

John Singer Sargent could trace out subjects who were larger than life and as illustrious as his brush. He drew the brilliance of the brilliant. “John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal,” the exhibition that was on view last fall at New York’s Morgan Library, reviewed in these pages in December by Mario Naves, was a Who’s Who of Sargent’s bright new century. As the artist turned from paint to pencil, a glittering gallery of famous figures looked out across the threshold of the twentieth century in the light of renewed confidence. Ethel Barrymore, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Henry James, Lady Diana Cooper, and William Butler Yeats were among those illuminated by Sargent’s dashing strokes.

Even a century on, many of his subjects remain household names—or, in our amnestic age, at least they remain names known by certain households. Yet, even by these standards, there were a few faces here that called out for rediscovery. You can be sure that those subjects who have slipped from our collective memory have done so through our failings rather than any fault of their own. Sargent was a far better talent scout than our culture would permit today.

One figure who dared us to look back was Anna Bowman Dodd (1855/8–1929). Her appearance was anything but flamboyant, especially compared to many of Sargent’s more theatrical bright young things. But get close to her portrait completed around 1900, most likely drawn at a time when both the artist and the sitter were living in Paris, and this middle-aged doyenne with eyebrow raised and lips curled seems to suggest she knows something we do not. Just what she knows is the question: we have to be led into her secret. The answer, as it turns out, is that she could see the future.

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Anna Bowman Dodd, ca. 1900, Charcoal on paper, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.

I am certain there are some readers out there who know of Dodd and perhaps even know her well. She might just have an underground following. But if Dodd is as new to you as she is to me, I would not be surprised. Although a prolific writer with over a dozen books to her name and an extensive career writing dispatches for journals and magazines, Dodd has so far eluded retrospective attention. Today there are no books in print about her, just as there are no books in print by her, or at least from what I could find. This fact may be all the more surprising given our supposed interest in “marginalized” voices. As a lady writer in a gilded man’s world, Dodd would seem to be a ready subject for revival. Given what she wrote, I imagine she just landed on the wrong side of history.

The majority of Dodd’s published works, and her best, were travelogues. Born in upper-class Brooklyn as Anna Bowman Blake—whether in 1855 or 1858 is disputed—Dodd traveled extensively from a young age. Her marriage to Edward Williams Dodd, of Boston, only advanced her worldly peregrinations. Along the way she developed an ear for language and an eye for color that still enliven her travel writing today.

Since Dodd’s body of writing is out of copyright, in the age of the Internet several of her books now make reappearances as online scans, complete with markings from the Harvard, Stanford, and New York Public Libraries, from where these books were photocopied. I located ten of them online with little effort.

The antique typesetting and illustrations give these books an extra transporting power. Cathedral Days, of 1888, tours the hamlets of southern England. In and Out of Three Normandy Inns, of 1892, takes us through her stays in Villerville, Dives, and Mont-Saint-Michel. On the Broads, of 1896, follows the yachting season “between the sea-beaches of Yarmouth and Lowestoft, the grain-fields of Wroxham, and the crowded river-wharves of Norwich.” Falaise: The Town of the Conqueror, of 1900, places us in one of those “minor towns” that “have been centres of great movements,” where “feudalism and chivalry, English and French arms, Catholicism and Protestantism each in turn struggled for that supremacy which was to make or mar human progress.” In the Palaces of the Sultan, of 1903, was occasioned by the diplomatic reception of General Horace Porter, the United States ambassador to France, by the Ottoman court of Abdul Hamid II.

These many accomplishments are made all the more remarkable by the early book that both framed Dodd’s career and sealed her reputation. In one sense, The Republic of the Future, or, Socialism a Reality, of 1887, published when Dodd was around thirty years old, is another travelogue. The short fictional work, set in epistolary form, draws on Dodd’s same powers of observation. There is also little action here, as the brief narrative is driven by the traveler’s descriptive force rather than any twists of plot. And yet, this book’s dystopian vision of “New York Socialistic City” in the year 2050, which returns this travel writer to her hometown after anarchists have leveled the old city to the ground, conveys one of the more prescient understandings of how the theories of the nineteenth century would manifest themselves in the years to follow.

The title page of The Republic of the Future (1887) by Anna Bowman Dodd.

The Republic of the Future contains the letters of Wolfgang, a “Swedish Nobleman,” writing to Hannevig, his “Friend in Christiania,” as he travels to New York over the course of a future December. Journeying beneath the Atlantic by pneumatic tube—in a passage that reveals Dodd’s descriptive abilities—this tourist first encounters the “armies of fishes, beautiful to behold in such masses, shimmering in their opalescent armor as they rose above, or sank out of sight into the depths below.” Still, all is not right in this kingdom of the deep, due to the

wholesale cannibalism going on among the finny tribes, a cannibalism which still exists, in spite of the persistent and unwearying exertions of the numerous Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty among Cetacea and Crustacea. We passed any number of small boats darting in and out among the porpoises, dolphins and smaller fish, delivering supplies (of proper Christian food) and punishing offenders. A sub-marine missionary, who chanced to sit next to me, told me that of all vertebrate or invertebrate animals, the fish is the least amenable to reformatory discipline; fishes appear to have been born, he went on to say, without the most rudimentary form of the moral instinct, and, curiously enough, only nourish in proportion as they are allowed to act out their original degenerate nature.

The absurd notion of regulating the deep foreshadows the regulation of the heights as Wolfgang arrives in New York Socialistic City. Journeying by balloon to his hotel, he observes that the future city’s skyline is perfectly flat, with not even the occasional spire or chimney to offer variation: “It is as flat as your hand and as monotonous as a twice-told tale. Never was there such monotony or such dullness.” Anticipating the ideological conformity behind our brutalistic housing projects to come, “each house is precisely like its neighbor. Each house has so many rooms, so many windows, so many square feet of garden, which latter no one cultivates.” The reason is that “no man can have any finer house or better interior, or finer clothes than his neighbor. The abolition of poverty, and the raising of all classes to a common level of comfort and security, has resulted in the most deadening uniformity.”

The forced elimination of sex differences and gendered labor has been another priority of the revolutionaries. The future home no longer has a kitchen. Food is now delivered by culinary conduits, from centralized plants in Chicago, in bottles or in pellets. “The State scientists,” we learn, “now regulate all such matters.” The thought is, “If kitchens and cooking and long dinners hadn’t been abolished, the final emancipation of women could never have been accomplished. The perfecting of the woman movement was retarded for hundreds of years . . . by the slavish desire of women to please their husbands by dressing and cooking to suit them.”

As the socialist revolution took aim at the family, motherhood also came to be seen as the “chief cause of the degradation of women” and was “finally abolished by act of legislature.” Children are now raised and educated “under state direction.” Automation and the elimination of work and family have left a society where “both men and women are muscled like athletes, from their continual exercises and perpetual bathing”—one of the few ways they “murder time which appears to be slowly killing them.”

The end result of the elimination of nature’s inequities has not been liberation but rather a “profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people.” Women “dress so exactly like the men in this country that it is somewhat difficult to tell the sexes apart.” There has been a “gradual decay of the erotic sentiment . . . due to the peculiar relations brought about by the emancipation of woman.” A man’s house has “ceased to be his home. There are no children there to greet him, his wife, who is his comrade, a man, a citizen like himself, is as rarely at home as he.” Woman, meanwhile, has “gained her independence at the expense of her strongest appeal to man, her power as mistress, wife and mother.” Beauty is shunned, just as the “aristocracy of intellect” has been eliminated by the exile of “scholars, authors, artists and scientists” and by “forbidding mental or artistic development being carried beyond a certain fixed standard, a standard attainable by all.”

In the pages to follow, some of it humorous, much of it grim, Wolfgang tours this future city. He talks with its citizens. He visits its “Ethical Temples” dedicated to the “nihilists, early anarchists, and socialists” whose portrait busts surround the statue of their saint, the utopian theorist Henry George. Wolfgang leaves New York Socialistic City unconvinced.

In attempting to make the people happy by insuring equality of goods and equal division of property, you have found it necessary to stultify ambition and to kill aspiration. Therefore a healthy, vigorous morale has ceased to exist. In making leisure a law you have robbed it of its sweetness.

“We are still chaotic, and unformed, and unredeemed, and unregenerate,” Wolfgang writes in comparison to Hannevig, “but we are tremendously alive.”

Published in an era of utopian literature and idealistic thinking, The Republic of theFuture established Dodd as one of the few voices of dissent over the doctrines of socialism, feminism, Georgism, and the many -isms to come. What unites these ideologies, as expressed in Dodd’s book, is the leveling and deadening effects of equality, enforced to perfection through ever greater degrees of coercion and unnatural control.

At the time of its publication, the smart set roundly rejected it. “The author is either ignorant of the writings of the best socialists, or has deliberately chosen the views of inferior men in order the more easily to ridicule them,” wrote Henry C. Adams in the magazine Science of August 19, 1887. “It is bright, in good style, and full of pleasing imagination; but for an argument it is too full of imagination.”

If only Dodd’s fictionalized imagination had not become fact through the brutalities of our real socialist states. Even in the free world, the militant impulse of equalizing “rights” through the elimination of liberties continues to define progressive thought and determine progressive policy. The Republic of the Future carried this impulse to its illogical, satirical, and devastating conclusions.

“If some of the ineradicable, indestructible principles in human nature could be changed as easily as laws are made and unmade,” writes Dodd, “the chances for an ideal realization of the happiness of mankind would be the more easily attained. But the Socialists committed the grave error of omitting to count some of these determining human laws into the sum of their calculations.” As a travel writer who deserves rediscovery, Dodd saw the world, including our own.