62 Indiana Magazine of History American Folklife Center, Library Of

62 Indiana Magazine of History the community at large. The relationship had its share of sour moments, usually precipitated by the appearance of one of the Star columns. In these sections Bustin explores the question of how members of different cultural groups understand or fail to understand one another. One naturally expects this theme in, say, Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa (1937) but is gratified to en- counter it in a discussion in which all parties are English-speak- ing Americans of North European ancestry. The book’s second thrust is history in the more customary sense of the term. In the opening sections and epilog Bustin sketches the county’s economic situation, the larger American scene as it impinged on the county, and the aspects of the art world that influenced Nashville’s artist’s colony. During this dis- course Bustin examines the meaning of the town’s “Liar’s Bench” and a broader theme emerges. The liar’s bench stood in front of the courthouse, an artifact fraught with symbolism. As Bustin notes, it meant one thing to the men who sat on it, another to urban Americans who saw Hohenberger’s picturesque image of it, and yet another to the town’s women, presumably including the wives of the “idlers” who wasted time there. It was this latter group who finally destroyed the bench. This story not only de- scribes the town’s social dynamics but also tells how an object may become a symbol and how symbols are interpreted by the variety of people who confront them. The book is well designed, the photographs well reproduced, and Bustin’s prose reads smoothly. The excerpts from Hohenber- ger’s diaries tend to be telegraphic and often follow one another for two or three uninterrupted pages. This demands close con- centration from the reader, but the method of juxtaposing the man’s words and pictures is effective. Bustin had shaped the ma- terials into a humane and insightful chapter in the history of Brown County. At the same time and without tendentious schol- arly writing, the occasion was used to interpret the very process by which the evidence was created. Altogether, If You Don’t Out- die Me is a fine and valuable accomplishment. American Folklife Center, Carl Fleischhauer Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Harmony on the Connoquenessing, 1803-1815: George Rapp’s First American Harmony, a Documentary History. Compiled and edited by Karl J. R. Arndt. (Worcester, Mass.: Harmony So- Book Reviews 63 ciety Press, 1980. Pp. xliv, 1021. Illustrations, notes, index, end map. $38.00.) Harmony on the Wabash in Transition, 1824-1826. Transitions to: George Rapp$ “Divine Economy” on the Ohio, and Robert Owen$ “New Moral World” at New Harmony on the Wabash. A Documentary History. Compiled and edited by Karl J. R. Arndt. (Worcester, Mass.: Harmony Society Press, 1982. Pp. xl, 876. Illustrations, notes, index-register, end map. $40.00.) The tricentennial of German immigration to North America (1683-1983) and the history of communitarianism in Pennsyl- vania and Indiana are well served by Karl J. R. Arndt’s two most recent additions to his meticulously compiled and annotated documentary history of the Harmony Society. Chronologically second and fifth in his series, these volumes continue to flesh out in minute detail the saga of economic, cultural, and communal achievements and conflicts of the 1,200 pietistic Separatists from Wurttemberg who followed the millennialistic vision of George Rapp to America after 1803 and built Harmony and Economy (now Ambridge), Pennsylvania, and New Harmony, Indiana. Most readers will find Arndt’s George Rapp’s Harmony Society, 1785- 1847 (1972) a welcome guide to these works. Documents illuminate such subjects as the Harmonists’ ar- rival, settlement, formal agreements of association, adoption of a common treasury and celibacy, economic and political influence, reasons for moving to Indiana territory in 1815 and returning to Pennsylvania a decade later, building of their steamboat William Penn, and their dependence upon the Wabash and Ohio rivers. George Rapp’s mystical passages and prophetic interpretations of current events appear in pastoral letters together with his com- ments regarding the publication and English translation of his Thoughts on the Destiny of Man (18241, the first book of religious philosophy printed in Indiana. Arndt presents two types of evidence to support his main contention that Rapp’s religious community was the antithesis of the misguided, nonsectarian communal experiments of Robert Owen at New Harmony (whom Arndt diagnoses as a megalo- maniac in Harmony on the Wabash, p. xxiv) and Frances Wright at Nashoba, near Memphis. First are sources that have long been in print but are conveniently included here to carry the narrative. These include President Thomas Jefferson’s 1804 letter to Albert Gallatin attempting to facilitate Harmonist settlement on public lands in Ohio and John Melishs favorable account of his 1811 visit to Harmony, Pennsylvania, which brought the Harmonists 64 Indiana Magazine of History their initial fame in Europe and America and first attracted Rob- ert Owen’s attention to their successful collectivism. Also re- printed are passages from Owenite sources such as the diaries of Robert Dale Owen and Donald MacDonald; Robert Owen’s radical Fourth of July Oration, which, contrary to Arndt’s suggestion, has always been readily accessible in the New-Harmony Gazette of July 12, 1826; and the published observations of both Owen’s New Harmony and Rapp’s Economy by Duke Bernard of Wiemar in the editor’s new translation. The second type of sources com- posing the bulk of these volumes includes Harmony Society rec- ords and letters to and from George Rapp, his adopted son, Frederick, and a handful of other Harmonists, including several women. These are selected from Arndt’s own extensive private, and still closed, collection at Clark University, the result of his forty years of tireless research. Documents in German are pro- vided in English translation with valuable, if not totally unbiased, summaries and notes but without direct citations to locate the original documents in his archives. The abuses of authoritarian leadership and intentionally de- vious organizational policies often associated with cultist communal groups surfaced in the Harmony Society. George Rapp held spiritual control and maintained group solidarity through his charismatic mysticism while his adopted son, Frederick, directed the society’s business affairs. George discouraged members’ private correspondence, censored their mail, implemented his util- itarian concept of women, and eliminated potential challenges to his leadership by removing capable men from positions of authority by vindictive acts of personal jealousy. George and Fred- erick never shared annual reports of communal income and expenses with the membership. Reports of members’ inheritances collected for the society in Germany were transmitted only in code. Frederick eventually speculated heavily with the community’s multiplying wealth without members’ knowledge. Arndt is convinced that the grasp for power represented by the “Decla- ration,” which the members apparently signed in 1825 and which put all society property in Frederick’s name but which was not legally filed until after his death in 1834, helped cause the great Harmonist schism when one third left Economy in 1832. Despite Arndt’s best investigative efforts, mystery still shrouds when and why the society generated, signed, and made legal its organizational documents and whether the ugly rumor that George Rapp inadvertently killed his only son, John, by castration in 1812 has substance. John did not sign the society’s first Articles of Asso- ciation but did marry and did father a child in the celibate community. Therefore, Arndt feels obligated to take the rumor Book Reviews 65 seriously enough to offer religious explanations that could account for the elder Rapp’s rationalization of such an heinous act. All this induces the leading Harmonist authority, who in 1980 revived the Harmony Society Press to complete his publi- cations, to lament that “the most disappointing, disillusioning and yet undeniable result of my long and thorough research into the history of Rapp’s determination to build the City of God on earth is the inescapable fact that an element of doubt and un- certainity, if not premeditated ‘pious’fraud, clings to most of the important documents of Rapp’s Society as far as its honesty toward the members of the Society is concerned” (Harmony on the Wabash, p. 597). Indiana State University Evansville Donald E. Pitzer Dreiser and His Fiction: A Twentieth-Century Quest. By Lawrence E. Hussman, Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Pp. viii, 215. Notes, index. $22.50.) So many elements in Theodore Dreiser the man and Theodore Dreiser the artist elude satisfactory intellectual explanation and seem to embody the very essence of contradiction: Dreiser was the man who strenuously attacked the Soviet system in print but who also referred to Stalin as the “White Christ” and who, almost on his deathbed, applied for membership in the Communist party; the creator of books at once harsh in their indictment of the American system and sloppily sentimental about underlying religious and moral values; and the sometimes incisive thinker who was also the often impossibly awkward, almost inarticulate writer. In Dreiser and His Fiction Lawrence E. Hussman, Jr., sees these and other problems as parts of an underlying unity-the ef- fort of an engaged mind to respond to the chaos in himself and in the world and to make sense of both. Treating in chronological order all of the novels and significant stories and essays as well, Hussman proposes that Dreiser’s life was a struggle toward so- lution: “Having cut himself off from religious beliefs at the outset of an increasingly skeptical, materialistic age, he was nonetheless plagued by a gnawing need to believe in some transcendent re- ality.

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