Chapter 3 details the connection between the utopian novel and vegetarianism. It argues that vegetarianism plays an important role in the two most significant texts in the development of the genre in the late-nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. It suggests that while H. G. Wells’s conflicted personal views on vegetarianism means that the subject is treated with a marked ambivalence, ultimately benefiting the fiction, the wholehearted endorsement of vegetarianism in Bellamy’s Equality is one element amongst several that reduces the text to little more than didactic screed. Here the important connection between women’s writing and vegetarianism and veganism is brought to the fore in a discussion of the British writer Mrs George Corbett and the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

In Chapter 16, “The Nature of Animality,” Michael Lundblad explores how questions of animal (and human) nature animate the contemporary interdisciplinary fields of posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies, animality studies, and human-animal studies. The chapter examines how animality has long defined how humans think about each other and how rejecting a fundamental distinction between humans and animals enables us to see the intertwined “becomings” of different beings. The chapter constructs a genealogy of prominent theoretical responses to questions about animals and animality by Jacques Derrida, Erica Fudge, and Donna Haraway, among others. Theories of animality, Lundblad demonstrates, challenge how we think about history, periodization, and culture, and breathe new life into old debates within literary studies such as questions of agency, character, and perspective.

During the period between 1890 and 1920, the United States was transformed from a largely agricultural and rural nation to one that was industrial and urban, and it wrestled with social problems concerning race, gender, and immigration. Progressivism emerged out of this context. By the turn of the century, a newly radicalized and resolute middle class launched an epic program of reforms, aiming to solve America’s social, economic, and political problems. Chicago became an important center of progressive activity. By the close of the nineteenth century, the city was home to businessmen who had achieved unprecedented levels of wealth. Meanwhile, Chicago’s numerous poor endured squalid conditions. The discrepancy between the promises made by the city and the lives lived by many of its inhabitants was depicted by progressive authors, including Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle (1906) and Jane Addams in her memoir Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). This chapter examines Chicago’s longer history of civic unrest going back to the Haymarket affair of 1886 and beyond, and it shows how Sinclair and Addams in different ways challenged Americans to come together with renewed moral purpose

This essay traces the Cold War Military Industrial Complex (MIC) back to the period of American neutrality in WWI, when US armaments manufacturers grew exponentially through sales to the Allied Powers. Already during this period, the sizeable peace movement argued that US defense and foreign policy was beholden to armament corporations, and later critiqued the corporate profiteering and weak regulation in the procurement system the US developed to industrially mobilize for war. This essay examines two leftist texts making such arguments—Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins (1919), and John Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936). Sinclair’s novel used a munitions-worker protagonist to examine the development of “total war,” which fragmented global labor solidarity by militarizing all industrial capacity; but its Bildungsroman form struggled to capture the expansiveness of the MIC. In contrast, Dos Passos leveraged modernist form to better chart the MIC’s interwar development, especially in the aircraft industry. The Big Money examines the MIC’s propensity to agentless violence and its hostility to workers’ movements, but also treats it as a potential space for class mobility and the bootstrap narrative—a hospitability echoed in the biography of Eddie Rickenbacker, the US’s most famous WWI flying ace and an aviation corporate titan.

This chapter explores the transformation of the world of the American worker wrought by the Great War.Before the war, American industry demanded an endless supply of cheap labor. This imperative structured all aspects of working-class life——labor conditions and pay, home and neighborhood, politics and labor organization, and even its heterogenous racial and national composition. It had brought into being a working class at once within and apart from mainstream America. The economic and political forces unleashed by the Great War made America’s workers both the objects and agents of immense change. With the drastic curtailment of immigration caused by wartime conditions, workers could no longer be viewed as replaceable cogs, mere labor inputs in the production process. Neither could the insularity of their communities be tolerated, for during war, government and industry demanded loyalty, even active allegiance. Yet workers seized on the possibilities presented by the war in a bid to chart their own course. Emerging from this maelstrom was a dramatically different relationship between workers, on one hand, and business and government, on the other, ending the epoch of mass immigration and putting in place the beginnings of a labor system that valued long-term employment and worker loyalty.

American political and literary discourses in the Great War era were infused with revolutionary rhetoric. In 1912, the major-party nominees for president as well as the Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, promised revolutionary change.In 1914, many initial commentators on the war, whether Vachel Lindsay or radicals of The Masses magazine, recognized its class-war implications. Even as President Wilson led an intervention seeking regime change in Central Europe, the antiwar Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sought industrial-democratic regime change at home. While the February revolution in Russia was widely applauded by Americans, the November revolution led by the Bolsheviks sharply divided US opinion. Ten Days That Shook the World, by American journalist John Reed, not only defended Lenin’s methods but encouraged their application in the United States. But counterrevolution held the upper hand in the country, as IWW leaders were sentenced to long prison terms and other radical groups were suppressed in the postwar Palmer raids. Upton Sinclair’s novel Jimmie Higgins both deplored the ill-conceived 1918-19 US military intervention against the Bolsheviks and grieved the loss of a legal, parliamentary path to social democracy in the United States.