From Commune to Company Town

FROM COMMUNE TO COMPANY TOWN DWARD K. SPANN Edward Spann's lively study examines two key phases in the evolution of Hope- dale, Massachusetts—its development as a radical Utopian Christian community and its establishment as a model company town under George Draper. Hopedale's story began in the 1840s when Adin Ballou established a peaceful and prosperous community of "Practical Christians." The Hopedale Community gradually became a prosperous manufac turing village shaped by elements of the Christian reform culture of its times, nota bly nonresistance, abolition, feminism, temperance, and spiritualism. Hopedale's success in creating an envi ronment for manufacturing attracted the attention of George Draper, an ambitious entrepreneur and the brother of an original member. Draper, taking advantage of a financial crisis in the community, gained control of the village and geared its manu facturing success specifically toward the production of textile machinery. After a period of industrial expansion under Drap er, Hopedale developed a renewed sense of idealism, and under the management of Draper's sons, the Draper firm became one of the most innovative and profitable businesses in America. Inspired at least partly by their early years in the Hopedale Community, the sons implemented what can be characterized as an early form of welfare capitalism in their company town. By 1920, though, the firm's profits had begun to decline while new problems set in, ending Hopedale's golden age. HO P E DA LE Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series Zone L. Miller and Henry D. Shapiro, General Editors Fragments of Cities: The New American Downtowns and Neighborhoods Larry Bennett Cincinnati Observed: Architecture and History John Clubbe Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis Ann Durkin Keating Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery Blanche Linden-Ward Plague of Strangers: Social Groups and the Origins of City Services in Cincinnati, 1819-1870 Alan I Marcus Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880-1922 Dominic A. Pacyga Washing "The Great Unwashed": Public Baths in Urban America, 1840-1920 Marilyn Thornton Williams HOPE-DALE From Commune to Company Town, 1840-1920 EDWARD K. SPANN Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 1992 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spann, Edward K., 1931— Hopedale : from commune to company town, 1840-1920 / Edward K. Spann. p. cm.— (Urban life and urban landscape series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-0575-5 (alk. paper) 1. Hopedale (Mass.)—History. I. Title. II Series. F74.H74S63 1992 974.4'3—dc20 92-7194 CIP Text and jacket design by Nighthawk Design. Type set in Caslon Antique and Pilgrim by Graphic Composition, Athens, GA. Printed by Braun-Brumfield, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.® 987654321 To Suzan, Jason, and Laura with love Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi 1. The Road to Hopedale 1 2. A Christian Socialism? 18 3. The Well-Regulated Economy 34 4. Hopedale Village 49 5. Fundamentals 64 6. Moral and Mental Culture 80 7. Larger Worlds 98 8. Days of Glory 113 9. Days of Dust 126 10. Island in the Storm 139 11. Twilight 153 12. A Different Day 165 Notes 181 Bibliography 201 Index 209 Acknowledgments i would like to thank the Research Committee of Indiana State University for its generous financial support. I also owe a debt of gratitude to those often unthanked but essential assistants of the scholar—librarians, especially the librarians at the Indiana State University Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Ban- croft Memorial Library in Hopedale. My special thanks also to Jack T. Ericson for his work in compiling the Hopedale Community Col lection on microfilm and to Paul Curran of Milford for his interest in my work. Introduction riopedale, Massachusetts, is unique among American towns in that it was the site of two distinct attempts to create an ideal soci ety, each representing a distinct phase in American history. It was partly for this reason that I decided to make it the subject of a sepa rate book rather than incorporate it into my study of American rad ical social idealism, Brotherly Tomorrows (1989). In its first form, Hopedale ranks among the most successful communitarian experi ments in pre-Marxian socialism made by Americans in the nine teenth century. Begun in 1842 as a struggling religious commune on a run-down farm, it developed into a thriving little village that won the attention of an ambitious entrepreneur, George Draper. Recog nizing Hopedale's potential as an industrial site, Draper was able in 1856 to seize control of it and to expand its industrial base until he and his sons had created the nation's dominant firm in the produc tion of looms for the cotton textile industry; the full story of Drap er's coup against socialism in favor of capitalism is told here, for the first time, in chapter 9. Under the Drapers and their partners, Hopedale became a model company town that provided benefits and a beneficial environment to its residents. During its peak years in the early twentieth century, it seemed to be the long-desired way to establish harmony between labor and capital. The nature of this experiment in welfare capital ism has been described by John S. Garner in his Model Company Town. Garner, however, does little to relate that experiment to the first period of Hopedale's idealism, without which there would have been no basis for either the Draper Company or its town. Hopedale's earlier history calls attention to a special regional subculture that by the early nineteenth century had appeared along the Blackstone River in south-central Massachusetts and northern Rhode Island. This small world had its being in a local network of industrial villages that had sprung up to exploit the waterpower of xii • Introduction the Blackstone and its tributaries. Although embracing some diver sity of skill and ambition, these places were heavily dependent on the early textile industry. In a time of depression in that industry, the Hopedale Community was founded by some of the more ideal istic as well as discontented inhabitants of the region, often crafts men, petty businessmen, and other members of the small-town middle class, who sought a new social life for themselves in the fa miliar world of friends and families rather than on the far western frontier. They drew their inspiration from the local religious community, specifically from Adin Ballou, who had developed a compelling spir itual vision from his experiences in the Blackstone region. Unlike most of Massachusetts, with its roots in Puritanism, this area had strong ties to the dissenting religion of Roger Williams and Rhode Island. From that background and from his involvement in Garri sonian abolitionism, Ballou developed his own social model based on what he believed was the one true Christianity Jesus had taught to his disciples, and especially on the critical doctrine of nonresist ance. Convinced that God had, through Jesus, provided the prin ciples for a truly good life to be achieved in this world, Ballou and his fellow Practical Christians determined to create a brotherly so ciety based on the tenet that coercive force was not to be used against anyone, not even one's worst enemy. This belief could be found in various religious groups like the Shakers, but the Practical Christians who founded Hopedale extended it in a more radical di rection by attempting to demonstrate that it would be possible for ordinary people to practice nonresistance without a sectarian iso lation from general society. Nonresistance, in this form, distinguished Hopedale from the rest of the world; in other respects the community was representative of the society around it. It exemplified the social radicalism that arose in response to early modernization, although its socialism was no tably more flexible and pragmatic than most. Avoiding a commit ment to one specific social plan, it experimented with varying forms of cooperative life, making itself a laboratory in which virtually every formula known to the times was put to the test. And it re flected the great moral ferment that enlivened New England during the half-century before the Civil War, a ferment associated with Introduction • xiii temperance, abolitionism, woman's rights, millenarianism, spiri tualism, education, and other strivings to remake the world. The Hopedale Community was also an effort by members of a small-town middle class to reshape small-town society so as to meet their cultural as well as economic needs, in the process protecting themselves from the tempting but also chaotic and corrupt world of big cities. Essentially, they tried—as many others were to try over the next century—to miniaturize the urban-industrial society de veloping around them so as to incorporate modern advantages into a stable community they could control. Toward this end, they of ten adapted practices common to the town developers of their day, demonstrating that Christian socialists could also be boosters and promoters. Hopedale was thus a highly interesting social and religious ad venture in search of a better tomorrow, an adventure inspired by perhaps the least adequately appreciated of the major socioreligious thinkers of his times, Adin Ballou. Given Ballou's central impor tance at Hopedale, it may seem that it was his personal experiment, but this was only partly true. Even more than his better known contemporary John Humphrey Noyes, he was less a dominating, charismatic leader than a practical visionary who led by rational persuasion and ruled by consensus, allowing for much active partic ipation by his followers—women as well as men—in decisions af fecting their lives.

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