Christmas came bitterly in 1894, amid the gloom of an exceptionally harsh winter and the nation’s worst-ever economic depression. That year, crops froze across the South, President Grover Cleveland suppressed the Pullman Strike, and, as unemployment rose to nearly 20 percent, an Ohio man named Jacob Coxey led the jobless in a massive march on Washington. A Harper’s Weekly cartoon channeled the nation’s discontent, depicting Andrew Carnegie storming the capitol with his own version of Coxey’s Army: a horde of Gilded Age industrialists demanding bailouts.

In an article for Ladies’ Home Journal, the left-wing writer Edward Bellamy imagined that a time traveler from the year 2000 would be aghast to see the America of 1894 celebrating Christmas at all. Bellamy’s visitor wakes on Christmas day to the familiar sounds of pealing bells and jubilant crowds. Yet when he ventures outside, he is perplexed to find “on every hand the contrast of pomp and poverty, the full and the hungry, the clothed and the naked — the picture that broke Christ’s heart.” If nineteenth-century Americans were to recognize Christmas as the people’s “great emancipation day,” he concludes, it would lead “to the instantaneous overthrow of the whole order of things, and the breaking into fragments of every human yoke.”

Consider, for a moment, the opposite scenario: Bellamy transported from the 1890s to Christmas Day, 2023. He’d likely be horrified to arrive in what many have termed a “Second Gilded Age,” with figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk standing in for the Carnegies and the Rockefellers. He’d see Americans celebrating an apolitical Christmas, rooted in a set of traditions popularized by nineteenth-century advertisers. He might even be eager to return to his own time, where — as the historian Janine Giordano Drake shows in her new book, The Gospel of Church — far more people shared his revolutionary vision for the holiday.