Review, Vachel Lindsay, The Golden Book of Springfield (Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1999). Introduction by Ron Sakolsky

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2001

In the wake of the success of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), Americans were inundated with literary utopias from points of view as diverse as the American people themselves. Novels describing socialist, populist, business, Christian, feminist, and an array of other utopias spoke to a people making the uneasy transition from a rural, small-producer capitalist economy to an urban, big business, consumer economy. Such works reflected the social and personal tensions of this period of transformation, but also an underlying optimism regarding Americans’ ability to adapt to the challenges at hand and fashion a more humane future. Such optimism, which fueled the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century, had largely spent itself by the end of World War I, and in the wake of the mass destruction and social chaos arising from the war and the Russian revolution, the cycle of utopian literature largely came to an end.

Vachel Lindsay’s The Golden Book of Springfield (1921) stands as one of the final works in this wave of utopian writings. Recently reissued, with a lengthy introduction by Ron Sakolsky, it is an odd and idiosyncratic book, reflecting the eccentricities of its author. One of the most significant American poets of the early twentieth century, Lindsay wrote free verse that captured the American vernacular as reflected not only in the daily spoken language, but also the rhythms of the era’s popular culture, notably jazz and motion pictures. Moreover, Lindsay was fascinated with many of the intellectual strains of his time, including, at various times, socialism, feminism, Christian mysticism, and prohibition. In the best tradition of Whitmanesque democratic poetry, Lindsay contradicted himself because he contained multitudes. Thus he captures the heteroglossia of a time when the left wing of Progressivism merged with the socialist, social gospel, and feminist movements, and the residual influence of nineteenth-century political movements—from Lincoln’s republicanism, to transcendentalism, abolitionism, populism and Henry George’s single-tax plan—still carried meaning in American political discourse.

In a fine introduction, Sakolsky places Lindsay in this dynamic context and shows how the poet drew on a wide range of influences to fashion an eclectic radicalism. As Sakolsky comments, “Lindsay was not an ideological purist. Instead he attempted to creatively cobble together a variety of strains of thought. . . . In one sense Lindsay’s intellectual approach can be seen as lacking in rigor, but in a more favorable light it can be seen as the thinking of a person more interested in facilitating unity than in sectarian bickering.” Running through Lindsay’s utopian thought are not only the intellectual currents mentioned above, but also anarchism, Confucianism, slave culture, and the influence of such people as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, John Ruskin, Johnny Appleseed, Daniel Boone, Jacob Coxey, and Woodrow Wilson. In Lindsay’s fertile imagination, such ideas interact in strange and unexpected ways. “It is as though,” he says at one point, “a work by Henry George has been changed into a work by Swedenborg!” Though perhaps incoherent ideologically, Sakolsky argues that this diversity of influence served its fundamental purpose, writing that Lindsay “is not a proselytizer for a particular utopian blueprint, but an advocate of utopian thinking per se.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Lindsay’s thinking was the influence of African-American culture. The major event influencing the writing of his utopian work was the 1909 race riot in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, which Lindsay witnessed first-hand. As in most things, Lindsay’s thinking regarding race was diverse and often contradictory. An admirer of both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, he once wrote a poem about the militant white abolitionist John Brown, which he dedicated to the black accommodationist Washington. But Lindsay was deeply troubled by racism and understood the crucial role African Americans played in the development of a broader American culture. Thus a significant part of his utopian vision is of “a non-racial future,” the result of frequent inter-marriage.

Overall though, Sakolsky’s introduction is much more substantial than the book itself. Virtually plotless, The Golden Book is filled with interminable discussions of religion and politics set against a bizarre backdrop of a war between the World Government (shades of the League of Nations) and an Asian league led by Singapore, Malaysian worshipers of the Cocaine Buddha. But Lindsay’s utopia remains interesting because it differs from others in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century literature in significant ways. In the first place, his vision of life a century hence is not free of conflict, even war. International disputes, political intrigue, and social divisions (including lynchings) are still part of the landscape, as if Lindsay, who contained so many competing voices within himself, could not imagine a society without struggle. The other major difference between Lindsay’s and other utopias is the setting, which takes place entirely in his hometown of Springfield. As Sakolsky comments, “By focusing on a real place, and a small place, with all its imperfections, and attempting to re-envision its possible future, dreaming of ways in which it might evolve into a more desirable community, Lindsay departed radically from the one-true-path model of utopia, and at the same time achieved a concreteness and intimacy rare in utopian fiction.”