Perfectionists and the Weather: the Oneida Community's Quest for Meteorological Utopia

perfectionists and the weather: The Oneida community's quest for meteorological utopia, 1848-1879, The

Meyer, William B

There has always been-and, modern environmentalism notwithstanding, there no doubt remains-much about the environment that people would willingly alter if they could. Visions of a perfect earthly future have routinely incorporated a reconstructed earth. Not least have they described the transformation of features so often and so stubbornly unsatisfactory in many ways as weather and climate. Writers in classical antiquity who tried to imagine a terrestrial paradise purged its weather of everything dangerous or merely disagreeable, from extreme temperatures and tempestuous winds to overcast skies. Early Christian representations of the Garden of Eden gave it the same mild and moderate climate as medieval Europeans ascribed to the "Land of Cockaigne": "There is no heat or cold, water or fire, wind or rain, snow or lightning, thunder or hail. Neither are there storms. Rather, there is eternally fine, clear weather ... It is always a wonderfully agreeable May." Two geographers who made a study of the utopian novel found that the genre characteristically presents the weather as "either an equable given or something totally under man's control."1

But there is a second and quite different way in which meteorological utopia can be sought. It does not depend on the perfecting of the elements by divine or natural favor or by human effort. It tries to make the weather unobjectionable without altering it physically. What will be abolished in this kind of paradise is not the weather that people think bad, but their reasons for thinking it bad. The causes of complaint lie not in the weather itself, it is assumed, but in human beings, their attitudes, and their social and technological arrangements. If those attributes and arrangements are reformed, dissatisfaction with weather would disappear.. An unnamed character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) expresses this point of view. Ile and several companions are riding through a surprise April snowstorm to join a newly founded utopian community outside of Boston. He reproaches the narrator, Miles Coverdale, for grumbling about the weather. They can never consider themselves "regenerated men," he admonishes Coverdale, until they feel as thankful for "a February northeaster" as they do for "the softest breeze of June."2

Even as Hawthorne's book appeared, another band of utopians was beginning a deliberate and sustained attempt to follow just that principle. The "Perfectionists," followers of the unorthodox religious and social thinker John Humphrey Noyes, lived and worked in central New York state from 1848 until their Oneida Community was dissolved and reconstructed on more conventional lines in 1879-80. Though it lasted for barely thirty years, and its membership never much exceeded three hundred, Oneida was one of the most famous and successful of nineteenth-century American utopian experiments. In subsequent years it has been one of the most studied. Noyes and his followers earned note or notoriety in their day and have retained it into ours because of their efforts to reform the relations of society. Such institutions as common property, "complex marriage," "mutual criticism," and "stirpiculture" scandalized many of their contemporaries and have fascinated many modern scholars. Yet the Perfectionists aspired also to reform human relations with God and with God's creation, the terrestrial environment. In particular, they claimed that their way of life was suited as no other was to coping with the weather. They made the most sustained collective effort in American history to improve the weather by rooting out the causes of discontent with it.

Their efforts are of interest for several reasons. Human relations with weather and climate remain a somewhat neglected area of environmental history. Much of the work that has been done deals with the effects of climatic change or with the closely analogous case of a change of climate experienced when groups migrate from one zone to another. Less attention has been given to the ways in which weather and climate change in their meaning as human activities change, or to the differences in their meaning at any one time for different groups of people. The attempts of the Perfectionists to find a way of life better suited than that of their neighbors to the same environment offers a rich and well-documented case study in this vein. The Community members' attempts to put into practice their theories about weather and society-above all, their insistence on the point, now widely accepted, that human relations with nature cannot be understood apart from the social relations linking humans with one another-also represent a significant episode in the history of both American environmental and American utopian thought.

The Community and the Weather-Theory

Born in northern New England in 1811, John Humphrey Noyes attended college at Dartmouth and studied for the ministry at the Andover Theological Seminary and the Yale Divinity School. Expelled from the latter for unorthodoxy, he began preaching and publishing his ideas throughout the northeastern United States. In 1838, newly married, he settled in his childhood home of Putney, Vermont. Around him collected a group of devoted followers attracted by the force of his reasoning and the power and charm of his personality. Because of growing local hostility, Noyes decided in 1848 to move his small community to a site that he was offered in Madison County, in central New York, along the banks of Oneida Creek. For a time, he maintained branch communities in Putney and in Brooklyn, and a larger and more enduring offshoot was established in Wallingford, Connecticut; but from 1848 onward, Oneida was the center of activities for Noyes and his followers.3

Once settled at Oneida, the Perfectionists, as they called themselves, systematically set about trying both to practice their principles and to convert the outside world to them. At the core of their doctrine were a number of interwoven beliefs. The most important was that the Second Coming of Christ had already occurred in A.D. 70. It followed that mankind already was capable of redemption and that individual spiritual perfection-defined in orthodox terms as a state of sinlessness and of union with God's will and purposes-could be attained not only in heaven but on earth. But it could be attained only by those who discarded the corrupt institutions of the world and lived instead according to those of heaven. And because heaven and earth were no longer estranged, those same institutions would prove as superior to those that they replaced in the practical business of life and livelihood as they were in spiritual things. The institutions adopted at Oneida included communism in all important matters. Private property was abolished. The "marriage spirit," any exclusive personal attachment of the sort recognized in the outside world through the matrimonial tie, was sternly repressed. Monogamous unions were replaced by the institution of "complex marriage," which in theory meant the union of all with all and in practice involved the assignment of sexual partners for single or multiple occasions by Noyes himself. Children were regarded and raised as the children of the entire large family. The quest for perfection was aided by the discipline of community life, including the practice of "mutual criticism" to identify and eradicate sinful traits. The proper size of a community was determined by the number of hands necessary to make it self-sufficient in its productive activities and free it from dependence on the outside world. Numbers were regulated by selective admissions and by male birth control. When new births were desired, the parents were selected according to the principles of a kind of early eugenics that Noyes dubbed "stirpiculture."

From their core doctrines, the Perfectionists also derived certain rules governing human relations with the natural environment and in particular with the weather. Many of their contemporaries saw the relations of climate and human life chiefly in terms of climatic determinism, the belief that different climates molded different forms of human society and character. Its exponents included radical Northern thinkers with whom the Oneidans shared much ground: Emerson and Thoreau, the African-American leaders Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith, the feminist and abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child. The Oneidans, however, rejected the "very plausible and popular sophistry" of explaining social phenomena as the work of the weather. Their reasons for doing so were grounded in their religion. They had little sympathy for any belief that weakened Christian doctrines of morality, human responsibility, and human brotherhood-or their own belief in universal perfectibility-by granting local physical features a dominant role in behavior. "We are sick of this materialistic philosophy which makes man the creature of climate and circumstances," one Oneida publication proclaimed. Were the teachings of Jesus, they asked, to be explained away as the product of the physical geography of Palestine? Temperate-zone determinists often dismissed the tropics as irremediably backward. The Perfectionists thought them as capable of the highest civilization, the best government, and the truest religion as any other climatic zone.4 Determinism saw the role of the weather and climate in human life as given, as an external and independent influence. In rejecting it, the Oneidans affirmed their basic belief that the weather's significance was not found but made.

That conviction left them hardly more interested in the possibility of weather and climate modification. Such measures, in one sense the opposite of determinism, in another sense follow logically from it, for if the weather controls human life, only by changing it can life be changed for the better. Weather modification too had its prominent advocates in the antebellum United States. The meteorologist James Pollard Espy gave lectures around the country advocating government management of the rain and the winds.5 At the same time, the American disciples of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier looked forward as their master had to the transformation of an unsatisfactory environment and particularly the creation of a "serene and genial" atmosphere. They listed among mankind's tasks "the regulation of the seasons, the moderation of temperatures, and the control of climates, in such a way as to have them always the most favorable." It could only be done, they maintained, through social reform on the lines of cooperative association and the detailed planning of work and life. The benign influences of a more rational system of land use and settlement would eliminate "sudden and violent fluctuations in temperature, prolonged droughts and excessive rains, which exhaust vegetation, excess of heat and cold, &c, &c." But without what the Fourierists called Association, "those great labors ... which are necessary to bring the earth and the atmosphere into a healthy condition, are impossible," and disorganized and unregulated human action only worsened an already bad state of affairs. "Climates and seasons deteriorate," the polar and torrid zones and deserts encroached on the temperate lands instead of being reclaimed, and the air was poisoned by miasma.' The Oneidans's plans for an ideal earthly future did not depend on any such hopes for gaining control of the weather.

Even the special case of weather modification through divine agency, though present in their doctrine, was not central to it. Their contemporaries the Latter-Day Saints expected the harsh climate of the Great Basin to be gradually softened by God's favor. Protestant theology added faith in "special providences," unique interruptions of the natural order, to faith in "general providence," the belief that God's wisdom and beneficence had provided humankind with all of the means it needed to flourish. In nineteenth-century American thought, the widespread acceptance of both conceptions of providence gave way to an increasing reliance only on the latter; belief in miracles and divine interpositions grew weaker.7 The Oneidans reached much the same position in their own way.

On the one hand, the idea of special providence had much appeal for them. Thinking themselves the unique bearers of Christian truth on earth, they readily supposed that they enjoyed the favor and aid of the deity who controlled the skies. They many times declared their faith in the reality of special providences.8 They cited examples from their own weather experience.9 But their faith was so strong that, paradoxically, it pulled them back in effect to a trust in general providence and to a belief that special providences would occur chiefly in small things. "If I find myself moving in a vortex of good luck," Noyes observed in 1855, "I am not to consider that God has turned aside out of his general course, and instituted a separate system in my individual case; not in the least." It meant, rather, that he had found a way of living that was in harmony with God's creation. Proper conduct would not so much be rewarded with special weather providences as it would bring out the best in ordinary weather. Every general or sustained pattern of weather and climate was necessarily beneficial to those who lived in the right way, a reflection of divine wisdom even if its benefits were not immediately apparent. The leader of an Oneida evening meeting in 1864 cited a current drought in order to contrast "the way it affects the world outside of us, viewed from their stand point- its effect on us, viewed from our entirely different stand point. To them it bodes evil. They think of it as a calamity & are seriously disabled by it. We ... see, & expect good to come of it-& accordingly can pursue the serene tenor of our way, all the same."10

At the most, the Oneidans allowed that rare violent events could be the work of the devil, "in which he assumes the character of a providence directing things according to his will" until checked by divine intervention. Otherwise, they reasoned, whatever was, was right, and troubles came only from living in conflict with the conditions of the earth. Noyes and his followers began to expound this view during their first years at Oneida. An 1852 editorial in their newspaper, The Circular, on "How to Take the Weather" founded their thought directly upon their religious convictions. It dismissed "the idea of imputing evil and mischievous power to the rain and wind and simple elements" as patently inconsistent with Christianity. "I do not see why we may not take that principle of Paul's-`Every creation of God is good,'- and extend it to the weather." If all but the most extraordinary weather was good, the causes of unhappiness with it must lie in people and particularly in their selfishness and self- centeredness. Most people were "always cross in stormy, sloppy weather" because it interfered with their plans: "their hearts are in their business, and that suffers at such times: the farmer cannot work out doors and the merchant misses his customers." As their livelihoods fared best in fair weather, rain generally made them angry, but the fault was theirs for counting on what they had no right to expect all the time. They sinned in making no allowance for, and no good use of, the wet days that were sure to come. "Do not scowl at the heavens, because you think they scowl at you," one editorial proclaimed. "If you scowl at all, scowl at mankind who are in a quarrel with the heavens: but I should not recommend much scowling in any direction. Take it all good-naturedly; but come out from the spirit of the world ... and you will find that the weather is tolerably clever, and can be put to good use, be it what it may."11

The Circular returned to the topic several times over the next few years. All weather came from God, it observed in 1854, but most people wanted only the kind that would be to their immediate benefit: "No wonder that such a world of people as this is, should not have weather to suit them." In 1857, the paper again criticized the "weather grumbling" and "climatic unthankfulness" that it saw prevailing everywhere. Such an attitude was wrong on several counts. It impiously faulted God's arrangements; it was futile, for the weather had "never been made better by murmuring" ; and it ignored the great amount of good there was in all weather. It was an expression of what the Oneidans called the "turn-up-the-nose spirit," the sinful tendency of people "to dislike a thing, when the difficulty is not in the thing but in themselves." The true doctrine was that "the thankful view is always the correct one."12

At their simplest, such pronouncements could suggest that all weather problems were but an illusion resulting from a mistaken attitude. And merely correcting one's frame of mind, the Oneidans indeed held, could greatly lessen the discomforts and the dangers to health of heat, cold, and damp. They emphasized how important it was to "keep in rapport with the weather." "It is by getting our spirits at crosspurposes with the order of the universe, by grumbling and complaining... that we are injured and made sick or uncomfortable." They looked forward to the day when they would feel so much in harmony with rain that they would cease to use umbrellas.13 But they recognized too that weather problems could be much more than merely matters of psychology or of personal maladaptation. That they were not inherent in the weather itself did not mean that they were simple illusions that a mere change of heart would sweep away. In many cases, a change in behavior also was needed. Many common ways of life and livelihood that conflicted with the weather, however, were beyond the power of the isolated individual to alter; they had to be changed collectively. Their own ways, the Oneidans maintained, were ideally suited to eliminating the real inconveniences that the weather could bring.

Much of what they said on this score echoed the assertion of the American Fourierites that community living offered great advantages over individual family life in coping with weather. It was a claim far more congenial to Noyes and his followers than were the hopes of the Fourierites for transforming the global climate. The large collective dwellings of the Fourierite community, by replacing many wasteful individual family homes, would enjoy a great economy of both fuel and labor through a modern system of central heating in winter. Uniting living, dining, and recreational space, they would offer an expanse of shelter from the elements that individualistic family life hopelessly lacked. Through covered and enclosed galleries, one could walk "from house to house, and from workshop to workshop, without exposure to the inclemencies of weather," saving money on protective clothing and benefiting in health. Heavy unemployment in the winter was a fact of life in the mid-nineteenth century northern United States. But under the rational planning of Association, Fourier's disciples claimed, "there never could be a season when any should be idle because they could not obtain work," nor even a day when the weather outdoors meant that nothing could be done. Tasks would be shifted around to harmonize with prevailing conditions. There would always be work, "either in doors or out, according to the weather," - "full employment for all, in all weathers, and at all seasons."14

Noyes in his Putney years had read the Fourierite literature with great interest, and although he and his followers had many quarrels with it, on these points they found common ground.15 The three early annual reports of the Oneida Community and the Circular expounded in very similar terms the advantages of joint life and livelihood in coping with the elements. Even their use of the Fourierite term "Association" as a synonym for their own "Community" or "Communism" is evidence of how much they borrowed, while enriching it with their own distinctive beliefs and placing the result on a quite different foundation of theory. The idea that the many economies of scale and advantages in efficiency of associated over individual life would best satisfy basic needs, make community life more appealing, and free the members as far as possible to focus their efforts on the attainment of perfection harmonized with their own conviction that the institutions of heaven were the ones best suited to earthly life. Many families living together could afford "improvements which but few single families can adopt." They could enjoy tools of adaptation-shared outerwear for cold, wet, and snowy weather; irrigation works to offset droughts; the large sheltered, enclosed, and heated space of the communal dwelling-that individual families could not afford. A community of the proper size, engaging in a diversity of occupations, could keep its members busy at all seasons, following an overall program of "mechanical pursuits in the winter, and gardening in the summer." It could easily muster, as the individual household could not, the many hands needed for "bees," short bursts of intensive labor in highly seasonal or weather-sensitive trades. A community was "far better able to make hay while the sun shines'... than a single farmer is, because it can put on extra force-call all hands to the field." Nor need a farmer be idled by rain "in Association where many trades are carried on, some in-doors as well as out." Or, as one issue of the Circular argued, "It is a great advantage of the combined industry of Association that it makes work independent of the weather." By pooling a variety of interests, a community could also ensure that effects of weather were balanced: Though some members might be hurt by a storm or cold spell, others would be helped, and the group as a whole would come out ahead. Thus the tendency toward grumbling was corrected in that members were encouraged to appreciate the good in any weather "sympathetically" when they could not do so "individually." Breaking worldly ties, finally, made it easier to discard practices that were maladapted to the weather yet imposed by prevailing opinions. The Oneidans's ways of life would be tested not by fashion and convention but by inspiration and experience.16

Using both original and borrowed materials, the Perfectionists thus succeeded in constructing a coherent understanding of weather and society that was closely integrated with their other beliefs. It amounted to the most elaborate statement in American thought to its time of a view of the weather-and, by implication, the environment in general-as something whose meaning and significance depend entirely on the ways of life carried on within it. But it was a program for action as well as a system of natural theology. It was meant to guide the Oneidans in the way they lived. How well did it fare when put into application?

Daily Life-Shelter and Clothing

Of all the ways of uniting comfort and economy that community life could offer, indoor climate control furnished one of the earliest vindications of the Perfectionists' claims. In their first several years at Oneida, they, like most of their neighbors, used closed stoves for space heating. Already they could boast of the advantages of communal living. The forty families at Oneida required only twenty-three stoves in all of their buildings, no more than twenty of which were in constant use. Forty families living separately would have used "not less than sixty, and perhaps eighty." The results were "a great saving in the expense of stoves; and second, a saving of about three-fourths in fire wood."17

A hot-air furnace was first used in the main community dwelling house in the winter of 1851- 52. It offered new evidence of the superior efficiency of communal living as making possible "improvements which but few single families can adopt." Central heating-rare in all but the most affluent private houses of the time-was much more comfortable than the stoves that it replaced. On the Circular's estimate, it still saved half to three-quarters of the fuel that the stoves of separate families would have consumed. The saving of labor was even more striking, for only one central fire had to be tended instead of many scattered ones. "Is this not a good illustration," the Circular asked proudly, "of the advantages of Communism over isolation? There are many things which in isolation each man finds it necessary to do for himself, but which one can do for a huge company with the same ease as for himself, as in making a fire in the furnace."18

In time, the Oneidans began to enjoy an additional element of comfort. The medical authorities of the period strongly opposed the use of furnaces without open fires to create a draft and freshen the air, and they insisted on the absolute need for open windows at night. Early Community doctrine too called at first for shutting down the furnace at night, "opening the bedroom windows and filling the house with cold air."19) At an evening meeting in i86o, however, Noyes broke with the received wisdom. He declared that the furnace registers provided all the air circulation required and that a bitter chill was more dangerous than an occasionally stuffy atmosphere. The open window and the cold furnace at night were mere survivals, he suggested, from "the penurious habits of isolated life," and the community could well afford to discard them. Thereafter, though "crotchety folks-folks with peculiar ideas about ventilation" remained free to do as they wished in their own rooms, hot air from the furnace was provided at night as well as in the daytime, and those who used it suffered no apparent ill effects.20

The enclosure and covering of space for shelter was a goal that the Fourierites stressed but that the Oneidans more successfully put into practice. As a result, they faced less exposure to cold and other inclement conditions than their neighbors. In the mid-1860s, the Circular calculated the area of contiguous space within the Mansion House and its outworks "rescued from the wrath of old Boreas" as 444 square rods (about 11,000 square feet), not counting the cellars. It pointed proudly to "the amount of liberty in this respect that the Community enjoys during our stern winter weather," the freedom that members enjoyed to roam a wide expanse unhindered by the elements. "Those who talk of the curtailment of personal liberty as connected with association," the Circular admonished, "trust not neglect to put that item in their balance-sheet."21

Uniting many resources for work and entertainment in one place, the Communists were less exposed than most central New Yorkers to the difficulties of travel on muddy roads in spring and fall. They also suffered less from tedium when heavy snow or deep mud prohibited travel altogether. "Winter in Association," the Circular boasted, was a very different thing from winter as families living by themselves experienced it. The latter were all too often shut tip at home by the cold and the drifting of the roads in the very time of the year when the use of sleighs and the slackening of work would have made it possible for them to enjoy a steady round of visits and entertainments. The Oneidans experienced no such narrowing of their social circle. When a snowfall of several feet put central New York under a lengthy "snow blockade" early in 1865, Noyes and his people felt little deprivation. "A Community is like a garrison well-provisioned -we are a village under one roof," the Circular declared. "Drifts, or mud, or freshets do not suspend our social intercourse." A rainy midsummer in 1872 allowed them to make the point once more. Whatever might be said against communal life, "no one can deny that it possesses rare advantages for mitigating the horrors of a 'spell of weather' ... The social interchange of a Community is promoted rather than obstructed by a dispensation of clouds and vapor, for then we are thrown more closely together."22

When Community members had to fare forth into rain or snow, they could don protective outerwear from a common stock. In isolated individual life, everyone was obliged to buy such articles for the rare times when they were needed. A much smaller total met the Community's needs, for not all members ever required them at once. "Thus a dozen outside garments, as overcoats, cloaks &c., suitable for going abroad, are found sufficient to accommodate the whole Community." The supply of umbrellas from a similar stock represented another of the "economies of Communism" that the Oneidans were fond of enumerating.23 And not even for drying clothes were they dependent on the whims of the weather. The volume of their collective laundry made it feasible to install a heated clothes-drying room for use in wet or cold weather.24

In clothing design, the Perfectionists made one of their most notable and attention-catching contributions. They were among the American pioneers of the reformed style of women's dress, replacing the fashionable long skirt with pants and a short skirt, to which Mrs. Amelia Bloomer's name became popularly attached.?5 Throughout their existence as a community the Oneidans were among the most active and vocal crusaders for the reform costume. They braved much ridicule to exhibit its advantages to a world that never ceased to regard it as both improper and unattractive. In proselytizing for the reform dress, they pointed often to its suitability to all weather. The long skirt that it was designed to replace, "sweeping the muddy side walk on a wet day," was also unmanageable in high winds, and it endangered women's health by hindering them from exercising freely and easily outdoors in all weather. The reform dress helped make its wearers "independent of mud" and of much else besides. Group solidarity in turn helped the wearers support the burden of ridicule from the outside world-a burden so great that the Oneida women stopped wearing the reform dress, despite all of its advantages, once the Community dissolved.26

Livelihood-Industry and Agriculture

The Oneidans expected in several ways to be able to overcome the most important problems that the weather created in mid-nineteenth-century American economic life, those of the many short-term, weather-related peaks and troughs in activity, superimposed on the heavy seasonal unevenness of many occupations. They would escape the first by using "bees" to meet short-term demands for labor and the second by combining industry in winter with agriculture in summer.

The Perfectionists were as proud of their "bee" system of work as they were of pioneering the reform dress. "The practice of doing work 'by storm,' or in what is more commonly called a 'bee,'" they observed in their second annual report, "has been found very popular and effective." It allowed pressing agricultural tasks, such as picking, having, and harvesting, to be done "at a single stroke" and "with all the enthusiastic, sportive feeling of a game of ball." When "done in storm by a huge company," such tasks were, "as the phrase is, 'nothing but fun.'" The variety of tasks undertaken kept any of them from growing tedious. Entertainment, such as music by the Community band, was often provided to make the work pass still more enjoyably. The contrast was clear enough between the rapid and efficient results that the "combination of labor" made possible and the travails of the individual farmer trying to assemble an adequate workforce during the time when labor was everywhere in short supply.27

Like many rural Americans of the period, the Oneidans gradually reduced some of the sharpest annual peaks in labor demand by replacing human energy with machine power. They could again do so more efficiently than the family farmer because of the size of their operations. In the three decades of its existence, the Community mechanized such once laborious tasks as haying, harvesting, and ice cutting. Their new devices also helped lessen the impacts of unexpected weather interference; they sped the work when, for example, rain threatened to spoil haying.28

For all their eagerness to seek out only what was best in their weather, the Oneidans persisted for some time in one course of action that regularly brought out its worst side. Among the Community's auxiliary doctrines was an insistence on the moral and social superiority of horticulture, the intensive cultivation of fruits and vegetables, over the more extensive forms of agriculture based on grain and livestock raising. Another was a belief in the particular goodness of fruit as an article of diet.29 Once settled at Oneida, they began to plant large quantities of strawberries, grapes, pears, plums, peaches, and currants. It was not long before they began to suffer the consequences. Yet even after cold winters, spring frosts, and other staple features of the central New York climate had many times destroyed or damaged the more delicate fruits, peaches in particular, Oneidans renewed their efforts and saw the story repeated.30 They did what they could by siting beds and orchards in warn microclimates, protecting their trees with smoke and heat on frosty nights, and choosing the hardiest varieties available for planting. They eventually built an irrigation system to guarantee their strawberry crop, among the most successful of their plantings, against the chief threat to it, drought in early summer.31 But the climate in which they lived set limits to what they could achieve. Upstate New York had areas in which even peaches could be grown with profit, but they were places where the climate was moderated by proximity to water-to lakes Erie and Ontario and to the Finger Lakes in the central-western interior.32

In the end, the Oneidans met their practical needs by shifting from growing to purchasing much of the fruit that they could not reliably produce. They saved their doctrinal consistency by blaming human action, especially local and regional deforestation, for the severity of winter in a region that they supposed must once have been as they would have liked it to be. The weather of which they complained was not God's weather; it had been spoiled by mankind. The belief was incorrect, for earlier attempts to raise peaches and the like in the vicinity, when the forest cover was greater, also had failed. Yet their conclusion was, at the time, a scientifically respectable one. The Oneidans found backing for it in George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature and in the conservationist editorials of The New York Tribune and The Horticulturist. That the selfishness of isolated individuals had swept away the protecting forest and damaged the climate for all furnished them with a new argument for communism.33

Manufacturing, the planned mainstay of their winter months, had its own problems with the weather and the seasons. The issue of wage labor was especially troubling. The Oneidans had resolved originally to do without the help of hired outside labor. Though staunchly opposed to slavery, they acknowledged the justice of antebellum Southern criticisms of the North for its wage-labor system. They would not condone any institution that associated people in heartless relations of employer and employee rather than the bonds of community love.34

Such a system showed itself at its worst in the callous routine discharge of labor whenever it was not needed. Massive layoffs were a common phenomenon in nineteenth-century America, and much of the unemployment was seasonal in character. Many occupations, for reasons related to the weather, could not profitably be pursued at the same pace throughout the year. Some-notably farming-suffered directly from meteorological constraints that prevented them from being carried on at all seasons. Uneven demand during the course of the year for many other products, from coal to clothing, meant a corresponding unevenness in production, for efficiency demanded that supply not run too far ahead of sales. In different occupations, these factors produced different schedules of peak and slack times. But the overall pattern in the northern United States was one of high unemployment during the winter. The slower pace of agriculture, construction, transportation, and related industries in the cold months idled many workers and, by sharpening competition for work, forced wages down.35 The American Fourierites thought it conclusive proof of the irrationality of the prevailing social and economic system that "the "bitterest winter weather" coincided with "scant employment and increased expenses" that "double the burden of the laborer." "Why," they asked, with outdoor work more taxing and living costs greater, "should not the wages of this class of laborers be increased rather than diminished, during the winter?"36

One result of the seasonality of the economy was a phenomenon well known to reform communities and mentioned in the Circular. "Winter Shakers" were people who had no commitment to Association as a permanent way of life but who sought to exploit its practical benefits. They would try to join communities as the cold months approached, to enjoy shelter and security, then leave in the spring when their labor was again in demand in the outside world.37 There were few if any "Winter Perfectionists"; the Oneidans carefully screened applicants for admission to weed out the merely opportunistic. Instead of housing the jobless in winter, Noyes and his people proposed to show by example how the problem of seasonal poverty could be solved. The communal organization of society would provide all of the labor needed for a variety of occupations and harmonize its allocation across the year.

Foremost among Oneida's early manufactures were canned and bottled fruits and vegetables, traveling bags, processed silk, and traps for fur-bearing animals; the Community also ran a printing shop and grist and saw mills. The trap business soon emerged as its leading indoor industry. One member, an experienced trapper named Sewall Newhouse, had devised some lighter, sturdier, simpler, and cheaper models than the imported traps that dominated the American market. The Community began to turn them out in quantity in the mid-1850s with much success. Trap-- making was a business that suited it in many ways. Much of the work of making and assembling the parts could be done by machine, using the community's waterpower site on Oneida Creek and, later, steam power. The market for traps was not so large or so well served already that an enterprise as small as Oneida faced difficult barriers to entry. The high qualit, of their products soon won them a predominant share in the market.

As sales rose, it became clear that the Perfectionists had found a product that would support them in comfort. But it led them into a trap of sorts itself. The business was a highly seasonal one because of uneven demand. Fur-bearing animals either shed or thinned their coats during the warm months. As Newhouse explained, "All furs are best in winter, but trapping may be carried on to advantage for at least six months in the year, i.e., any time between the last of September and the first of April. There is a period in the warn season, say from the first of May to the first of August, when trapping is out of the question, as furs are worthless."38 As a result, demand for traps was highest from late summer through early winter and lowest in late winter and spring. Large wholesale orders by such retailers as the Hudson's Bay Company shifted the time of demand on producers even earlier, into late spring and summer. In short, trap making was far from the winter-peak industry that the Oneidans would have liked to pursue. It required a great deal of work in the periods-summer and fall-when outdoor work was heaviest, and it offered little to do in January, February, and March, when idle hands were most abundant. It amplified existing peaks in labor demand more than it offset them.

Success with this and several other products thus intensified the problem of seasonality in work. As early as 18 56, the Circular noted the tendency of trap-making to encroach on the outdoor tasks of summer and fall.39 Oneida's next most popular product, canned fruits and vegetables, fared quite well on the market, but like trap manufacturing furnished little to do in the winter. The work had to be done in the summer and fall, when produce was fresh, and sales, mostly to retailers, were heavily concentrated in the fall, peaking in October. The four months from September through December routinely accounted for more than three-quarters of the year's orders.40

In the early years at Oneida, frequent morning and evening bees at busy times allowed the Community manufacturing departments to meet their commitments. The increase in business, however, soon exceeded their capacity. As early as 1861, the Community began hiring some local hands in its outdoor activities. In 1863, the Oneidans surrendered their last scruples and began to engage domestic help and workers for the trap shop during the busy season. They rationalized the decision as something that had been forced upon them; "Our trap business has increased so much that we are overrun with orders, & are unable with our own folks to fill them, so that it was a matter of necessity to hire help."41 The bag-making and fruit and vegetable-preserving departments followed the example within a year or two.42 Though the Oneidans tried to hold on to their best workers by finding them work in the slack months, they routinely discharged many of the others when orders fell off and made it a rule "to keep the smallest number of hands that would do our work."43 They remained uneasy, and for a time they regarded the "hireling system" as "forced and temporary." They looked eagerly but unavailingly for "some business that we can carry on in connection with our trap-business, to which we can shift our help when our trap-trade slackens up." Their employees were "all anxious to work for us, and probably would work for less wages, if they could have work all winter."44 In 1868, they abandoned the fruit business as requiring more work in the already busy times of summer and fall than it was worth. Hiring had taken firm root, however, and in the early 1870s canning was resumed, mostly with outside workers. "We hire enormously in the fruit business," one member noted in 1877.(45)

Even those most hostile to the Perfectionists did not deny that they were model employers and were prized as such by their neighbors.46 It was chiefly in light of their own principles that they can be said to have failed. They did not, as they had hoped, meet all their labor demand with Community hands. To prosper as they did, they had to rely in their busy seasons on reserve labor from the outside, non-- Community world. Because they could do so, however, they succeeded, as they had hoped, in eradicating seasonal want from their own lives. The Persistence of "Weather Grumbling"

Two decades into their life at Oneida, the Perfectionists had in many ways made the weather far less troublesome than it was for their neighbors. Steam heat, installed in the Community Mansion House in the fall of 1869, was not less sparing of fuel than the closed stove of the isolated individual family, still the norm across the northern United States at the time, or even the hot-air furnace.47 Moreover, it meant a level of uniform, cozy heat that only the richest private American householders of the day could enjoy. "Now the whole house is a model of comfort," wrote one Community member to another. "The moment you close the front door behind you, no matter how blustering the day outside, you are transported into an atmosphere of delightful warmth The Oneidans worried chiefly that they might find it too comfortable and be overly tempted to stay indoors in the winter.48

They had done much else in twenty years to reduce their troubles with the weather. In gradually substituting steam for stream power in their manufactures, they lessened the impact of drought or flood. Their own hours of work, courtesy of the hiring system, peaked in mid- September, but not dramatically, and then declined, with a corresponding rise in the time available for leisure, entertainment, and education, into the winter.49 Such innovations as a winter version of croquet and such improvements as a greenhouse added to their ability to enjoy all seasons equally.50 Many small incremental improvements during the 1870s made the weather still less of a hindrance or more of a help. Im874, for example, the Community voted to spend money on a door to shield the living quarters in summer from the heat and steam of the kitchen, blinds to protect an exposed tower room from the sun, double windows to insulate another room from the cold, an extension of the length of paved walks, and a new skating pond for the children.51

If the Perfectionists may be said ever to have freed themselves of most of the weather's burdens, it was during their last decade as a community. Thereafter, perhaps, they might have been expected to live up to their long-espoused doctrine of welcoming all weather and all seasons impartially. They indeed continued to preach "our philosophy that all weather is good to serve God in," that "those who have the weather in charge know what they are about," and that "the Lord manages the weather pretty well."52 But, in fact, the weather grumbling that they had set out to eradicate from the world did not even disappear from their own talk. It argues no great inconsistency on their part that they went on expressing pleasure or dissatisfaction with the weather as it assisted or hindered some particular activity. Thus rain was praised when it meant the end of a drought, an early snowfall praised for giving the children the treat of sledding, and a mild winter deplored when it threatened their ice supply. But when it came to judging the weather in its own right, as a matter of simple liking for some kinds over others, they failed the test that they had set themselves. They showed a persistent tendency to describe some kinds of weather as bad; they could not even manage the lip service to them that their doctrine required. Collected and tallied, their utterances during this final decade betray a heavy preference for sunshine over cloudiness and rain, moderate outdoor warmth over cold or heat, and spring, summer, and early fall over late fall and winter. Occasionally they showed some self-consciousness in the matter: "I don't wish to be heard complaining of Providence but-this weather is very trying." Now and then they dutifully protested their equal liking for all conditions in a way that only reads as forced and mechanical -"We welcome the winter with joy unfeigned. ... Welcome winter!"53 Such formal words of welcome for winter were far outnumbered by such words as Oneidans exclaimed in these years: "Ugh! Ugh! The weather has changed from moderate to frigid since last night." They wrote in their weekly newspaper of the "melancholy impressions" and "the sadness" that the first snow always produced, of "a dreary day with some snow on the ground and more in the air," of the "cheerless scene" that the season presented, of a long winter as "dreary indeed," of their "illusions of hope" that it was finally ending, of their delight at seeing "welcome signs that winter is over and gone." Spring, by contrast, they condemned only for being too slow and irresolute in arriving. They had nothing but lavish praise for it when it fully appeared, as they had for summer, a time when "Nature is doing her best to be agreeable." Only about the occasional extreme heat of midsummer did they express some reservations. They praised fall only if it was summer-like, warm, and sunny;, otherwise they deplored its arrival. Sunshine they thought "unsurpassed in loveliness," while cloudiness and rain were "trying" and "frowning" conditions, "depressing, gloomy weather."54 Surviving correspondence written from Oneida in these years shows the same pattern of meteorological and seasonal likes and dislikes.55 So does the poetry, reprinted and original, that was a frequent feature of the Circular and its successor, The American Socialist. The more descriptive titles alone tell the story of what they celebrated in verse and, by omission, what they did not: "It Will be Summer Time, By and By," "In the Sun," "Spring" (no less than four of them), "May "Song of the Southern Breeze."56

The different values that the Oneidans placed on the different seasons and forms of weather closely matched those of the culture in which they had grown up. Noyes and his followers for many years defied every social convention that did not seem reasonable to them and sometimes risked the wrath of the law in doing so. Flouting the conventional ties of marriage and parenthood, the accepted standards of public dress, the institution of private property, and basic tenets of Protestant Christianity, they were fully capable of breaking with the weather preferences of their time if they had had a mind to. If they disparaged cloudiness and winter and exalted springtime and sunshine, it was not because nineteenth-century Anglo- American culture dictated such responses to them; it was because they meant it. Their failure to stop "grumbling" about some kinds of weather, on grounds other than their practical importance in life and livelihood, was their greatest failure in the task that they had taken on. It casts some doubt on the premise with which they began: All dissatisfaction could be corrected by a change in attitude or in ways of life. That so bright and independent a group did not discard the common meteorological likes and dislikes of their time, even after trying to, suggests that these preferences may go deeper than the Perfectionists believed and may indeed be felt all the more strongly when other causes of annoyance have been removed.

Conclusion

The Perfectionists' adaptations bore out many of the claims made for them. Community life at Oneida incurred much less trouble and expense from the weather than fell to the lot of their mid-nineteenth century neighbors. That a great deal of the weather's impacts was the fault not of the weather but of particular ways of life, and could be changed by changing them, Noyes and his people amply demonstrated.

They did not, however, show that their own original root principles were in every way the basis for perfect weather-society relations. They had to abandon one of them and begin hiring outside labor in order to meet successfully the economic challenges of seasonality. Neither did they prove that their way of life was superior for all times. The advantages that they reaped from Association have lost much of their value today. Technological developments have placed such amenities as central heating and indoor clothes drying within easy reach of the average individual American household. The deseasonalization of most work and especially the drastic decline of agricultural employment have done away with the problem of mass winter joblessness. Accepted styles of clothing today incur far less trouble from the weather than did the long women's skirt of the Victorian period. Better street paving and snow clearance have reduced weather obstacles to travel.

Like the Oneida Community, though by means other than communal association, the population of the present-day United States has been shielded from many of the weather impacts that troubled earlier generations.57 The result, however, has not been the disappearance of strong weather preferences. As many of the weather's varied meanings as both help and hindrance have been effaced, indeed, such preferences show up all the more clearly because practical considerations no longer obscure them. It is no mystery today what most Americans regard as good and bad weather. Substantial seasonal migration now occurs annually from the colder and wetter to the warmer and drier states. Permanent migration in the same direction is motivated in part by the search for a pleasant climate. Many Americans suffer from the form of depression known as seasonal affective disorder, with a strong peak in the fall and winter. All these facts testify to the persistence of strong likes and dislikes-the same ones, in fact, that the Oneidans expressed in spite of themselves and their governing principles. One sees better in the light of their experience why changing the weather has been a more popular route by far to meteorological utopia than adapting preferences to what already exists, for preferences may not be as malleable as Noyes and his followers supposed them to be.

I would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their comments. Manuscript materials from the Oneida Community Records are cited by permission of the Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library.

1. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979); Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, trans. Matthew O'Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995); Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life, trans. Diane Webb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 180-81; Philip NV. Porter and Fred E. Lukermann, "The Geography of Utopia," Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor ofJohn Kirtland Wright, ed. David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 210.

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, ed. Willaim Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964), 12.

3. This section is drawn from an extensive literature on Noyes and Oneida. Important book-length studies are Robert Allerton Parker, A Yankee Saint John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935); Maren Lockwood Carden, Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); Constance Noyes Robertson, Oneida Community: An Autobiography, 1851-1876 (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1970); Robert David Thomas, The Man Who Would Be Perfect: John Humphrey Noyes and the Utopian Impulse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977); Richard DeMaria, Communal Love at Oneida: A Perfectionist Vision of Authority, Property, and Social Order (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1978); Ira L. Mandelker, Religion, Society, and Utopia in Nineteenth-Cen tinO America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); and Spencer Klaw, Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida CommuniO, (New York: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1993). Important shorter treatments include chapters in Dolores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communal Socialism, 1790- 1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976) and Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). The principal surviving manuscript material from Oneida is held in the Oneida Community Records in the Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library.

For samples of Emerson's climatic determinism, see Essays & Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 287, 359-60, 788, and 958; on Thoreau's, see Richard J. Schneider, "'Climate Does Thus React on Man': Wildness and Geographical Determinisin in Thoreau's 'Walking,'" in Thoreau's Sense of Place, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2000), 44-60. For the other authors cited, see Frederick

Douglass, "F. P. Blair's Lecture in Boston," Douglass' Monthly 1, #10 (1859): 34-35; and "A Trip to Haiti" (orig. 186]), in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. P. S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1952), III, 87; J. McC. Smith, "Civilization. Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances," The Anglo-African Magazine 1 (1859): 517; and L. Maria Child, Letters from New York, 3rd ed. (New York: C. S. Francis, 1846), 256-58. Climatic determinism of one form or another was also used in this period by many Southern apologists for slavery, though rejected by some others: Mart A. Stewart, "Let Us Begin with the Weather': Climate, Race, and Cultural Distinctiveness in the American South," in Nature and Society in Historical Perspective, ed. Mikulas Teich et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 248-50. The main Oneida statements quoted were responses to a deterministic editorial in the liberal, antislavery Springfield Republican: "Climate and Character," The Circular 7 (2o January 1859): 207 and "Climate and Character," The Circular8 (27 January 1859): 2. Though for a few later lapses, see "Foot-Notes. No. XIV.," The Circular n.s. 1 (5 September 1864): 197 and "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 10 (17 February 1873): 61.

5. Clark C. Spence, The Rainmakers: American "Pluviculture" to World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 9-21; William B. Meyer, Americans and Their Weather: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 85-90.

6. Charles A. Dana, "Report," The Phalanx 1 (8 February 1844): 311-12; "Young America: Anti-Rentism," The Harbinger 1 (23 August 1845): 174-75; "The Universality of Providence," The Harbinger i (ii October 1845): 286; "Cannibalism," The Harbinger 4 (17 April 1847): 291; Parke Godwin, A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1844), 79-82. On the theme of climate modification in Fourier's thought, see Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 338-41, 352. On American Fourierism, see Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in NineteenthCentury America (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

7. Richard H. Jackson, "Righteousness and Environmental Change: The Mormons and the Environment of the West," in Essays on the American West, 1973-1974, Charles Redd Monograph in Western History #5, ed. Thomas G. Alexander (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), 21-42; Jeanne Kay and Craig J. Brown, "Mormon Beliefs About Land and Natural Resources, 1847-1877," Journal of Historical Geography 11 (1985): 255-56; Charles D. Cashdollar, "The Social Implications of the Doctrine of Divine Providence: A Nineteenth-Century Debate in American Theology," Harvard Theological Review 71 (1978): 265-84; and The Transformation of Theology, 1830-18go: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and Arid America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 346-58.

8. "Special Providence," The Circular 3 (29 August 1854): 460; "The Law of Special

Providence," The Circular n.s. 1 (27 February 1865): 397-98; "Community Journal," The Circular n.s. 7 (12 December 1870): 309; H. A. N., "Special Providences," The Oneida Circular ii.s. 9 (29 April 1872): 138.

9. "Community Journal," 24 April 1853 and 29 August 1854, Oneida Community Records, Department of Special Collections, Syracuse University Library [hereafter OCR-SU], Box #72; William A. Hinds to Tirzah Miller, 17 February 1875, OCR-SU, Box #48; Charlotte M. Leonard Journals, 1 November 1876, OCR-SU, Box #63; "Oneida Journal," The Circular 3 (27 July 1854): 403-04; A. W. C., "Providences of God in the War," The Circular ii (24 April 1862): 44. lo. H. J. S., "Faith and Climate," The Circular lo (23 January 1862): 204; "Special Providences: Home-Talk," The Circular 4 (15 March 1855): 29; "1863-1864 Daily Journal," 23 July 1864, 283, OCR-SU, Box #11; see also "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 7 (20 May 1858): 67; Daily Journal of Oneida Community i (19 February 1866): 122. ii. George Washington Noyes to Portia Underhill [?], 26 June 1865, OCR-SU, Box #67; "How to Take the Weather," The Circular 2 (15 December 1852): 34-35.

12. H. J. S., "A Lesson from the Weather," The Circular 3 (14 November 1854): 592; "'. A.

H., "A Thankful View," The Circular 6 (io September 1857): 134; Charles Olds to Harriet N. Olds, 14 Feb. 1864, OCR-SU, Box #72.

13. See, e.g., "How to Take the Weather," 34-35; H. N. L., "Can We Conquer the Cold?," The Circular 3 (7 February 1854): 108; "A Recipe for the Weather," The Circular 3 (20 July 1854): 391; "Hints for Cold Weather," The Circular 3 (16 September 1854): 490; "An Oneida Journal: Keep in Rapport With the Weather," The Circular 5 (14 February 1856): 15; T. L. P., "Hot Weather Philosophy," The Circular 8 (14 July 1859): 98.

14. "Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents," The Phalanx 1 (1 June 1844): 154; "The Anarchy of Labor," The Harbinger 1 (2 August 1845): 116; "Civilization: The Isolated Family," The Harbinger 1 (27 September 1845): 252; T. C. P., "A Plain Lecture on Association," The Harbinger 4 (5 June 1847): 403; Albert Brisbane, A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association, 8"' ed. (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1844),17, 2o21, 22.

15. On the Perfectionists's relations to Fourierism, see Bible Communism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: The Circular, 1853), 7-8; Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium: The Burned-- Over District of New York in the 1840s (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 77-79; and Klaw, Without Sin, 53-54.

16. Bible Communism, 16; "Correspondence," The Circular 3 (11 April 1854): 220; "Facilities of Association," The Circular 3 (2 May 1854): 255; "Drought at the West," The Circular 3 (20 July 1854): 392; "The Needs of Labor," The Circular4 (22 February 1855): 18; "In-Door Employment," The Circular 4 (22 February 1855): 19; "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 4 (14 June 1855): 83.

17. Second Annual Report of the Oneida Association Exhibiting Its Progress to February so, 65o (Oneida Reserve, N. Y.: Leonard & Company, 1850), 5-6.

18. "The Hot-Air Furnace," The Circular 3 (24 December 1853): 35; "Stoker's Journal," The Circular 3 (ii February 1854): 119; "House-Warming by Heated Air," The Circular 3 (14 February 1854): 123. Furnaces at this time were "still in the luxury class" in the northern United States: See Edgar W. Martin, The Standard of Living in i86o (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 93

19. "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 4 (lo January 1856): 203. For prevalent medical opinion, see Morrill Wyman, A Practical Treatise on Ventilation (Boston: Munroe, 1846), 181- 82, 315, 324-25; Luther V. Bell, The Practical Methods of Ventilating Buildings (Boston: Damrell and Moore, 1848), 25-26; Catherine E. Beecher, Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), 91-94,165-68; William-- Edward Coale, Hints on Health (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857), 53-55; William A. Alcott, The Laws ofHealth; or, Sequel to "The House I Live In"(Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1859), 90-95, z69-72; . Elliot Cabot, "House-Building," Atlantic Monthly, lo (1862): 429; and Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Principles of Domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford and Company, 1873), 40.75, 310-21.

2o. "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 9 (23 February i86o): 15; "Dedication of the New Community Mansion," The Circular ii (27 February 1862): 10; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s, 11 (27 July 1874): 245.

21. "An Oneida Journal: Winter in Association," The Circular 5 (14 February 1856): 15.

22. "Community Gossip," The Circular FI.S. 2 (27 March 1865): 11-12; Ni. C. T., "A Spell of Weather," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (12 August 1872): 263.

23. Second Annual Report, 6; "Economies of Communism," The American Socialist 2 (24 May 1877): 165.

24. "Laundry Improvements," The Circular n.s. 1 (31 October 1864): 260.61.

25. Gayle Veronica Fischer, "Who Wears the Pants? Women, Dress Reform, and Power in the Mid-Nineteenth-Centurv United States," Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1995

26. "The Bloomer Dress in Winter," The Circular 1 (15 February 1852): 59; H., [untitled paragraph], The Circular 2 (26 January 1853): 84; H. M., "Dress Martyrdom," The Circular n.s. 3 (26 March 1866): 11; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s.10 (3 November 1873): 357; R., "The Weary Stairs," The Oneida Circular n.s. 13 (20 January 1876): 20. On the rapid post-breakup abandonment of the reform dress (and for a somewhat different interpretation of the reasons), see Fischer, "Who Wears the Pants?," 391-93.

27. Bible Communism, 13-14; Second Annual Report, 11-12; "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 4 (14 May 1855): 66.

28. "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 6 (23 July 1857): 107; "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 6 (3o July 1857): in; "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 7 (8 July r858): 94; The

0. C, Daily 4 (25 July 1867): 83-84; "Community Gossip," The Circular n.S. 2 (22 January 1866): 357; Daily Journal of Oneida Community 1 (25 January 1866): 35-37; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 8 (31 July 1871): 244; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 11 (20 July 1874): 237.

29. G., "Gardening and Fruit-Growing," The Circular 1 (5 September 1852): 174; "Fruit-- Culture," The Circular 3 (20 December 1853): 26; "The Test of Civilization," The Circular 4 (12 July 1855): 98; G. W. N., "Fruit as Food," The Circular 7 (2 September 1858): 126; "Talk with Mr. Hy Pothesis," The Circular n.s. 2 (24 July 1865): 146-47.

30. See, e.g., "Community and Climate," The Circular 3 (28 February 1854): 148; H. T., "Gardening Affairs, The Circular 3 (1 June 1854): 307; "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 4 (io May 1855): 62-63; 11. T., "Talk About Fruit-Trees," The Circular 4 (3 January 1856): zoo; T. L. P., "Fruit-Growing at Oneida," The Circular 5 (16 October 1856): 155; "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 7 (18 March 1858): 31.

31. See, e.g., "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 5 (13 November 1856): 171; "Fruit-Growing," The Circular 6 (29 January 1857): 7-8; "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 7 (22 April 1858): 51; A. B., "Horticultural," The Circular 8 (1 September 1859): 127-28; Daily Journal of Oneida Community 1, #97 (18 May 1866); Henry Thacker, "Fruit Trees Injured by Frost," The Oneida Circular n.s. 8 (13 March 1871): 87; H. J. S., "Irrigation," The Oneida Circular n.s. 13 (zo January 1876): 24.

32. Ulysses P. Hedrick, The Peaches of New York State (Albany: J. B. Lyons Company, 1917),134

11. On earlier experience in the area, see Lord Selkirk's Diary, 1803-1804, ed. Patrick T. C.

White (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1958), rob; William Cooper, A Guide in the Wilderness (1810; reprint, Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 24-25; William Darby, A Tour from the City ofNew-York to Detroit in the Michigan Territory (New York: Kirk & Mercein, 1819), 59; "Fruits and Fruit Culture," Transactions of the NewYork State Agricultural Society ly, 1/61. 7,1847 (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1848), 563-64, 566-67; and The Oneida Telegraph, quoted in "The Community Festival," The Circular 1 (11 July 1852):138. For Perfectionist views blaming deforestation, see "The Drought," The Circular 3 (22 July 1854): 395; "Forests," The Circular4 (15 February 1855): 14; "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 4 (26 April 1855): 54; "Use of the Woods," The Circular 4 (31 May 1855): 76; "Forests and Climate," The Circular 7 (5 August 1858): 112; H. J. S., "Man's Relations to the Earth," The Circular n.s. 1 (3 October 1864): 229-30; Henry Thacker, "Cultivation of Fruits. No. 8.," The Circular n.s. 5 (23 March 1868): 3; Henry Thacker, "Influence of Trees on Climate," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (6 May 1872): 147

34, "Work and Wages," The Circular 5 (14 August 1856): n8; "Practical Communism," The Circular 8 (ii August 1859): 113.

35. Stanley Engerman and Claudia Goldin, "Seasonality in Nineteenth-Century Labor Markets," in Thomas Weiss and Donald Schaefer, eds., American Economic Development in Historical Perspective (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 99-126; Carville Earle and Ronald Hoffman, "The Foundation of the Modern Economy: Agriculture and the Costs of Labor in the United States and England, 18oo-6o," American Historical Review 85 (1980): 1055-94; Alexander Keyssar, Out of \&brk: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 59-69. 36. "Social Re-Organization. No. IX.," The Harbinger 4 (22 May 1847): 382; M. E. L., "Scriptural Analogies. No. Ill.," The Harbinger 6 (18 March 1848): 154.

37. "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 8 (4 December 1871): 389.

38. Sewall Newhouse, The Trapper's Guide, ed. John Humphrey Noyes (Wallingford, Conn: The Oneida Community, 1865), 10.

39. "An Oneida Journal," The Circular 5 (24 April 1856): 55.

40-Calculated from figures in "Fruit Department Sales Book, 1865-1866," OCR-SU, Box #29; "Fruit Department Sales Book, 1874-77," OCR-SU, Box #29; and "Fruit Department Sales Book, 1877-79," OCR-SU, Box #30.

41. "A Community Journal," The Circular 12 (1 October 1863): 123; "1863-1867 Business Board Minute Book," 13 September 1863, 40, OCR-SU, Box #23.

42. "1863-1867 Business Board Minute Book," 27 November 1864, 122; 25 June and 2 July 1865,175,178, OCR-SU, Box #23.

43- See, e.g., "Community Gossip," The Circular n.S. 2 (9 October 1865): 236; "Community Gossip," The Circular n.s. 2 (15 January 1866): 349; "1867-1875 Business Board Minute Book;' 29 December 1867, 169-70, OCR-SU, Box #23.

44."Synopsis of Community Activity, 1848-1874," 6 January 1868, OCR-SU, Box #11; T. R. N., "Hired Labor at O.C.," The Circular n.s. 4 (6 January 1868): 341; The 0. C. Daily4 (19 November 18667): 482-83.

45. "Community Journal." The Circular n.s. 5 (21 December 1868), 317; "Synopsis of Community Activity 1848-1874," 19 September 1868 and 12 February 1872, OCR-SU, Box #11; Elizabeth C. Hawley to Mary Louise Prindle, 28 January 1877, OCR-SU Box #47.

46. John B. Ellis, Free Love and its Votaries; or, American Socialism Unmasked (New York:

United States Publishing Company, 1870), 110; Isaac C. Reed, Jr., "The Oneida Community of Free Lovers," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 30 (2 April 1870): 38.

47."Community Journal," The Circular n.s. 6 (25 October 1869): 252-53; "Co-Operative Washing," The Circular n.s. 6 (io January 1870), 340; "Benefits of Communism," The Circular n.s. 7 (21 March 1870): 5; T. C. M., "Our Willow-Place Letter," The Oneida Circular n.s. 8 (18 December 1871): 405; Tirzah Miller to Mary Louise Prindle, 7 November 1869, OCR-SU, Box #66. 48."Community Journal," The Circular n.s. 6 (1 November 1869): 260; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 10 (17 February 1873): 61; "Home Items," The Oneida Circular n.s. 12 (1 March 1875): 69.

49."Weekly Summary of Community Labor, August 18, 1877-December 15,1877," OCR-- SU, Box #25.

50. G., "A Winter Pastime," The Circular n.s. 3 (28 January 1867): 364-65; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (9 December 1872): 397; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. to (i January 1873): 4-5.

51. "1874 Special Appropriations," 13, 14, 48, 66-67, 69, 72, OCR-SU, Box #25.

52."Community Journal," The Circular n.s. 7 (17 January 1870): 348; "Community Items," The American Socialist 4 (29 May 1879): 173; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 11 (4 May 1874): 149.

53 Beulah Hendee to Annie Hatch, 12 May 1879, OCR-SU Box #48; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 8 Hendee to Annie Hatch, 12 May 1879, OCR-SU Box #48; "Community Jour

54. See, e.g., "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 10 (3 November 1873): 77; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 10 (3 November 1873): 357; "Commu"Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 10 (1 December 1873): 389; "Community nity Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 10 (1 December 1873): 389; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 11(4May 1874)xi 149; "Home Items," The Onedia Circular n.s. 12 (5 April 1875): 389 (on wind "Home Iter); "Community journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 12 (4 April December 1870): 389 (on winter); "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 8 (24 April 1871): 132; "Corn1870): 20; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 8 (24 April 1870:132-1 "Corn munity Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (29 April 1872): 141; "Home Items," The Oneida Circular n.s. 12 (26 April 1875): 134; and "Community Items," The American Socialist4 (3 April 1879): rug (on spring); "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 8 (18 December 1871): 404; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (8 July 1872): 220; and "Community Items," The American Socialist 3 (22 August 1878): 269 (on summer); "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (14 October 1872): 332; and "Home Items," The Oneida Circular n.s. 12 (27 September 1875): 309 (on fall); and "Community- Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 10 (5 May 1873): 149; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 11 (28 September 1874): 317; "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular n.s. 11 (19 October 1874): 341; and "Home Items," The Oneida Circular n.s. 12 (23 August 1875): 269 (on rain and sunshine). Though cf. Z. X., "The First Snow," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (5 February 1872): 47 (praise for the first snow of winter).

55. Harriet Matthews to Harriet N. Olds, 24 May 1870, OCR-SU Box #64; Charles Olds to Harriet N. Olds, 22 May 1870, OCR-SU Box #72; Annie Hatch to Alfred Barron, 9 December 1872, OCR-SU Box # 47; Charlotte M. Leonard Journals, 2 January; 6 January; 13 March; 20 June; 3 October; 30 October; 3o October; and 2 November, 1876, OCR-SU Box # 63; Flora Whiting to Fanny N. Leonard, 3 July 1876, OCR-SU Box #76; Julia C. Ackley to Harriet N. Olds, 19 March 1877, OCR-St Box #38; Mary Louise Prindle to William A. Hinds, 4 July 1877, OCR-SU Box #73; Fanny Leonard to Charlotte N. Leonard, 8 May; 12 May 1978, OCR-SU Box # 63; Elizabeth Hutchins to Mary Louise Prindle, 6 May 1878, OCR-SU Box ff 62; Beulah Hendee to Annie Hatch, so December 1878; 21 February; 1 April; 7 .April; r4 April; 14 April; 1 May; 28 June 1879, OCR-SU Box # 48; Alfred Barron to Beulah Hendee, 9 September 1879, OCR-SU Box #48. Though cf. Beulah Hendee to Annie Hatch 6 January 1879, OCR-SU Box #48 (praise for a snowy winter over an "open" one) and Lorinda Lee Burt to Harriet Matthews, 26 March 1877, OCR-SU, Box #43 (praise for "a nice April shower").

56. H. J. S., "Song of the Southern Breeze," The Circular n.s. 7 (16 May 18-o): 68; J. L. Bates, "It Will Be Summer Time, By and By," The Oneida Circular ii.s. 8 (so July 1871): 222; G. N. M., "Spring," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (29 April 1872): 142; "In the Sun," The Oneida Circular n.s. 9 (12 August 1872): 262-63; G., "Spring," The Oneida Circular n.s. so (14 April 1873): 121; H. T., "Spring," The Oneida Circular n.s. 12 (29 March 1875): 97; John G. Whittier, "May:' The American Socialists (25 May 1876): 70; "Spring," The American Socialist 4 (17 April 1879): 125. See also the prose poem by a Community member in "Community Journal," The Oneida Circular ri.s. 11 (8 June 1874): 189. 57- Jesse H. Ausubel, "Does Climate Still Matter?," Nature 350 (1991): 649-52.

William B. Meyer holds a Ph.D. in geography from Clark University and is currently an associate of the Belfer Center of the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is the author of Human Impact on the Earth (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Americans and Their Weather: A History (Oxford Universih, Press, 2000).