A Journey to the Experimental Nation: Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Search for Industrial Democracy in New Zealand

In 1899 the American journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd was one of many social reformers who travelled to New Zealand to witness the social programmes instituted by the Liberal government. For Lloyd and other Progressives, New Zealand represented a model industrial democracy. His book Newest England (1900) describes Public Works Department projects built under the direction of the Department’s Minister, Richard Seddon, including the Makōhine Railway Viaduct. This viaduct was significant as the first steel structure built using the cooperative labour system. This paper places Lloyd’s interpretation of the Makōhine Viaduct within the Progressive discourse about design and labour taking place in Chicago around 1900, focusing on the activities of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society of which Lloyd was a member. Attention to Lloyd’s Newest England reveals a radical plan for the future of industrial society, one that prefigured the technocracy movement of the early twentieth century. In its dedication to the aims of settler colonialism, it also reveals the theme of racial evolution underpinning Progressive visions of the coming industrial democracy. Exploring that theme, the paper expands scholarship on the origins of modern American architecture in Chicago to include the historical context of colonisation and global immigration.