Henry Whitney Bellows (11 June 1814 – 30 January 1882) was an American Unitarian minister from New York City. In 1845, he wrote The Anxiety of Gain, a critique of the free labor ideal and the American focus on business.
Biography[]
Henry Whitney Bellows was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1814, and he had a brief Unitarian pastorate in Mobile, Alabama from 1837 to 1838. He became a minister in New York City, and, in 1845, he wrote The Influence of the Trading Spirit upon the Social and Moral Life of America (also called The Anxiety of Gain), analyzing a dark side of the free labor ideal and criticizing the personal and moral effects of America's focus on business. He especially pointed out how the United States was the only country where people would not content themselves with poverty or expect to remain poor, and how this mindset would prevail in the rest of the world. From 1861 to 1878, Bellows served as president of the US Sanitary Commission, raising millions of dollars for the Union war effort during the American Civil War. He died in New York City in 1882.