Yet what struck observers, repeatedly, was how much poverty remained amid the plenty. Gravity-defying skyscrapers spoke to new accumulations of capital, but the shadows of those tall buildings fell over large, polluted slums that were crowded with the unfortunates sucked in by industrialism’s undertow. That the world’s richest country should at the same time be so squalid was hard to countenance. The press rumbled with proposals to tame the chaos, clean the cities, and fix whatever was broken. One of the blockbusters of the age was a work of science fiction, Looking Backward (1888) by Edward
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