C HAPTER T WO

U TOPIAN C OMMUNITIES

R ELIGION, DEMOCRACY, AND S OCIALISM

THE FIRST HALF-CENTURY OF THE LIFE of the new nation witnessed an extraordinary development of hopeful experiments and ideas. Idealists like Thomas Owen founded utopian socialist communities while religious enthusi- asts like Mother Ann Lee came to the United States seeking a place to start ex- periments like her Shaker communities. The combination of space that allowed people to develop their own communities relatively undisturbed and a philosophy that emphasized liberty, even the liberty to be eccentric, made the United States fertile ground for many radical experiments. Throughout the nineteenth century, various communitarian experiments were tried. Some were very short lived while others lasted for several generations, and a few continued into the twenty-first century. While there was a brief upsurge of in- terest in these early communal experiments by the participants in latter-day communes of the 1960s and 1970s, for the most part this story is a forgotten chapter in the nation’s history.1

M OTHER A NN L EE AND THE S HAKERS

Shakers may be one of the most romanticized of American religious communi- tarian movements, although at times it is hard to know the focus of the roman- ticism. Today the communitarian impulse is not the only thing that Shakers are known for. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is probably far from the top of the list. Mildred Barker, leader of the Shaker Community at J. W. Fraser, A History of Hope © James W. Fraser 2004 28 A HISTORY OF HOPE

Sabbath Day Lake, Maine, who died in 1990, reflected, “I almost expect to be remembered as a chair or a table.”2 While Shaker furniture has grown in popu- larity, the kind of beloved community created by the Shakers that produced both the physical beauty of their furniture and the spiritual beauty of their wor- ship and community life recedes farther and farther from view. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, called Shakers, dates back to the spiritual ferment that took place in France in the century before the French Revolution. A group of spiritualists attacked the Catholic Church as a false religion. Like other Protestants of the time, they called for reformation. And like other Protestants in France, they were not welcomed by the authorities. Some were silenced, others fled to England where they linked up with some dissident Quakers, especially in the emerging industrial center of Manchester.3 The Shakers—sometimes called the Shaking Quakers in the early days because of the enthusiasm and ecstasy in their worship—were one of the prod- ucts of this merger of reform-minded French spiritualists and English Quak- ers. From these Shaking Quakers Ann Lee—known among the Shakers as Mother Ann Lee—gathered a small group of supporters in England, immi- grated with them to the United States, and founded the first Shaker communi- ties here. As with many charismatic religious leaders and founders, much of Lee’s life and early teaching remains a mystery. She was born in Manchester, En- gland, in 1736 and was influenced by “inspirationists” from France and the English Quakers. She was married and had four children all of whom died in infancy. By her mid-thirties her spiritualism had led her and her fellow believ- ers to disrupt the worship services of the Established Church of England, which she saw as a dead ritual that diverted people from true spirituality. As a result she was arrested several times for disrupting the worship of other de- nominations.4 In 1770, while in jail on these charges, she had a powerful mys- tical experience. It convinced her of two things: that she was receiving a very special revelation from God that she was to share and that made her a special prophetic leader; and that human sexuality was the key to all sin—from Adam and Eve to the present—and celibacy was the only way to live a godly life. (Psychologists have had a field day wondering if the loss of four infants had played a role in her new rejection of sex, but there is really no way to know.) Lee was jailed several more times in England because of her continued preaching and practice of her beliefs. Indeed, she did much more than just preach. Like many a prophetic voice, she condemned the established churches to their faces, entering worship where, as one report noted, she “willfully and contemptuously in the time of divine service, disturb[ed] the UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES 29 congregation then assembled at morning prayer.” For that particular offense she was jailed for two days.5 Lee came to America in 1774 and eventually inspired the creation of celi- bate colonies that shared the pacifism and communitarianism of which she spoke. Ann Lee’s pacifism led to her being jailed by New York in 1780 on charges of undermining the American Revolution. In the first years after their arrival, the small Shaker community was content to live their own lives and did not seem much interested in seeking converts. However, after her release from jail in December 1780, Lee and two of her followers crisscrossed New York and New England founding “families” of Shakers. This famous missionary journey, which lasted from May 1781 to September 1783, established Lee’s mythic leadership. She suffered abuse from the unconvinced in many towns, but she also made many converts to her own version of the Christian faith. Lee died the following year, in September 1784, but the authority of her teachings was well established by that time.6 As Stephen Stein has noted in his carefully researched study of the Shakers, it is hard to know exactly what Lee did teach. One source that Stein uses is a 1780 publication from Valentine Rathbun, a Baptist minister who was deeply hostile to the Shakers. According to Rathbun, who viewed the movement as a “new scheme . . . the spirit of witchcraft,” Shakers had several key characteris- tics. They believed that marriage was sinful, they viewed Ann Lee as “the mother,” and some seemed to believe that she had “the fullness of the God Head” and was “the queen of heaven, Christ’s wife.” Many of the earliest Shak- ers also shared their meals and lodging and were clearly an intimate, although celibate, community. Perhaps most interesting, their worship was ecstatic. “Their actions in worship is according to the dictates of the spirit that governs them,” Rathbun reported. Shaker worship did not involve the traditional prayer or preaching. Instead their worship reflected their understanding of the new “spiritual dispensation,” including, as Stein notes, “shaking and singing, hopping and turning . . . and running, groaning and laughing. The believers viewed all these actions as manifestations of divine power and union with God.”7 That one of the Shakers’ harshest critics should describe their early lives in ways so similar to the actual practice of their later communities leads one to conclude that these characteristics were all established quite early in Shaker life. While Lee and her closest followers had lived together in a small com- munity just outside of Albany, New York, at the time of her death Shakers were scattered in many homes and villages across New England. Almost im- mediately after her death in 1784, however, Shakers began the process of sell- ing their homes and moving into a small number of tightly organized Shaker communities. In part this was a response to the hostility of neighbors who 30 A HISTORY OF HOPE took a dim view of their approach to marriage, their unique form of worship, and their harsh critique of established churches. Lee’s successors urged the Shakers to share all of their possessions and “have all things in common,” as had the earliest Christian communities. The core of the first Shaker commu- nity in New Lebanon, New York, was established when they built their first meeting house in 1785. Soon thereafter, a lively Shaker village sprung up around it.8 The Shaker community at New Lebanon thrived, as did the whole move- ment, and within a decade after Lee’s death there were ten communities with over 2,000 members. The revivals of the early nineteenth century added to the Shakers’ membership and they became one of the largest and most successful of the nineteenth-century communitarian movements. Early in the nineteenth century, the Shaker Community began the diffi- cult process of writing their own history and defining their basic beliefs. At its core, Shakerism is a faith based on ecstatic worship and ordered community life, with both open to the continued leading of the Holy Spirit. As a result, Shakers have always been distrustful of written statements of their theological beliefs. Nevertheless, the growth of the Shaker community, the geographical dispersion of their communities, and the hostility of their neighbors led Shak- ers to feel the need to clarify some of their most basic beliefs. In 1814 members of the church family signed an amended covenant de- signed not only to clarify some of their beliefs but also to assure continuity in the leadership, as the generations after Lee sought a clear basis for their own authority. After some initial reluctance because of their fears of being misun- derstood by others, they publicly asserted that “our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did make his second appearance, by his Spirit, first in Ann Lee, whom we acknowledge to be the first Mother of all souls in the work of regeneration, and the first spiritual head of the Church of Christ then in the body.” They then continued their statement tracing the authority of the current leadership to Lee and her successors. They agreed “that the spiritual lead of the Church descended from her to James Whittaker.... That since the decease of the said Joseph Meacham, the ministration of the gifts of God, and the spiritual pro- tection of souls, have rested with the said Lucy Wright, whom we still ac- knowledge, love and respect, as our spiritual Mother in the Church.” For close to two centuries following the 1814 statement, Shaker theology and the cen- tralized leadership of the Shaker movement was clearly established.9 While the early Shaker correspondence shows that there were quarrels about the topic, it is clear that by 1814, one of the most powerful and unique aspects of Shaker theology was the placement of Ann Lee on a par with Jesus and the parallel commitment within the society to the equal leadership of UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES 31 women with men. The Shakers were quite clear about this. There could be no “spiritual union and relation” until a woman was appointed to “complete the order in the foundation of the new creation.” And Shaker community life as well as the community’s leadership reflected these theological beliefs.10 While they felt the need for these basic statements of their creed to clar- ify their views to an often hostile world, Shakers were in fact willing to give their members wide latitude regarding their theological beliefs. Where they were not flexible was the practice of community life. What united all Shak- ers, indeed what was absolutely required in order to be a Shaker, was celibacy and commitment to community. The celibacy always limited the community’s appeal and meant that all new members had to come from the outside as converts. The commitment to community—to sharing all things in common—also led to a series of complaints by those who sought to leave and take their share of the communal property with them. These complaints and lawsuits produced many of the most widely available Shaker writings, explaining their unique communities and defending themselves from a wide range of public complaints. For those who wanted to join the Shaker community, there were a series of stages. The Declaration of Junior Membership—the first stage of appren- ticeship for full acceptance—stated the rules, expectations, and hopes of the community very clearly. Junior members were not asked for any long-term commitment to the community; only the promise that by their free act and will they would live fully by the community’s norms for as long as they chose to be part of the community. So they sang:

Whereas with the Shakers, at present I live, This plain Declaration I honestly give. To show the condition on which we agree— How I’m to treat them, and how they’re to treat me. To be a good member, my honor’s at stake, That all my old sins I confess and forsake; And then, as a brother, it is understood That I be employed in doing some good. In uniform clothing we’re equally dress’d. And to the same table I go with the rest. In health and in sickness, as long as I’m here, In all their enjoyments I equally share. I am in my senses, I’m candid and free; There is no imposition practiced on me: The terms of the gospel I well understand; I’m bound to observe them, as witness my hand.11 32 A HISTORY OF HOPE

By making this pledge, junior members could try out living in a community where all were celibate, where all shared all things together in equality, and where not only the worship but every aspect of community life seemed infused with the ecstatic presence of God. It is in their many hymns, some of which have become well known, that Shaker theology is best preserved. One less well-known hymn expresses the joy and hopefulness of Shaker life:

Come old and young, come great and small, There’s love and union free for all, And everyone that will obey Has now a right to dance and play. For dancing is a sweet employ. It fills the soul with heav’nly joy, It makes our love and union flow While round and round and round we go.12

One can conceive of many reasons that nineteenth century Americans might reject the Shaker way, the demand of celibacy being high on the list. But one can also imagine that in spite of the celibacy, many Shakers experienced life with a far more heightened consciousness, a far greater sense of joy, and a far more profound sense of passion and love than many of their contemporaries. Shaker life thrived throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. By the time of the Great Depression and World War II, however, the Shakers were a fast-shrinking community. Their orphanages, which had long been a source of recruits, were taken over by state agencies or more mod- ern foster care arrangements. Few people seemed interested in joining the group and the membership was aging quickly. By 1960 the society had shrunk to two communities—Canterbury, New Hampshire, and Sabbath Day Lake, Maine. The members of these two communities were old and growing feeble. They also faced several new threats. Though their numbers were small, their real estate had become very valuable. They also had archives and were deter- mined to be remembered. And with the coming of the 1960s, a new genera- tion seemed much more interested—too interested in the minds of some of the elders—in joining the Shaker community. In 1965 the leadership at Canterbury, the acknowledged head of the United Society, decided to close the society and give their attention to pre- serving their historical memory as a witness on which future generations might build in different ways. That was not, however, the end of the Shakers. The community at Sabbath Day Lake, Maine, under the leadership of Mildred UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES 33

Barker, rejected the ban on new members. As a result, the two communities split and Sabbath Day Lake continues into the twenty-first century as a small but young and hopeful Shaker community giving witness to the joyful spiritu- ality of the over two centuries-old movement.13 At the same time, the simplicity and joyfulness of the Shakers has infil- trated American culture in a wide variety of ways. Certainly they have been ro- manticized beyond recognition at times, but that is also not the whole story. Shaker furniture, now so popular, was not just a product for them. As the Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton said in 1966, “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of be- lieving that an angel might come and sit on it.” Or as the Shaker Mildred Barker said, behind all of the physical artifacts, “There’s the religion.”14 And while many of their hymns and their more complex theological ideas have largely been forgotten, the basic joy, humility, and playfulness of the Shakers continues to be remembered in this familiar hymn that dates to the 1830s:

’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free; ’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be; And when we find ourselves in the place just right, ’Twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gain’d, To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d To turn, turn will be our delight, ’Till by turning, turning we come round right.15

In the gift of music, freedom, and delight, the Shakers represent hope for many.

J OHN H UMPHREY N OYES AND THE O NEIDA C OMMUNITY

If the Shakers sought perfection in their own community life and in the rela- tionship of their members to God through celibacy, John Humphrey Noyes and his followers at the Oneida Community, who lived not far from some of the Shakers in upstate New York, took a very different route to the same goals. The Oneida Community that flourished in Oneida, New York, between 1848 and 1879 was one of the most successful of the many nineteenth-century efforts to build a perfect society on a small scale that might, its members hoped, be a model of the good life for the larger society. For three decades, hundreds of middle-class European Americans participated in the life of this extended family. Where the Shakers sought to build up their communal life 34 A HISTORY OF HOPE and to support the equality of women and men through celibacy, members of the Oneida family sought similar goals in a very different way. At Oneida, as with the Shakers, the members owned all property in common. But where the Shakers were celibate, at Oneida they practiced what they called complex mar- riage in which all members of the community were considered to be married to all other members. Monogamy and jealousy were seen as barriers to the kind of loving community that they wanted to create at Oneida. Under the leadership of the charismatic John Humphrey Noyes, members of the com- munity worked, played, made love, nurtured children, and lived together in relative harmony for most of their years together. They shared their ideas and their way of practicing the good life with any who would pay attention, recording every aspect of their life, issuing a steady stream of publications, and entertaining visitors on a grand scale. The founder and spiritual guide for Oneida throughout its existence was John Humphrey Noyes. Noyes, born in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1811, was the child of a storekeeper and future Vermont congressman and a strong- willed and devoted mother who wanted her son to be a minister. After consid- ering a number of options, Noyes began studying for the ministry first at Andover Theological Seminary in 1831 and then at Yale Divinity School be- ginning in 1832.16 It was at Yale that Noyes began to develop the theological basis that eventu- ally became the Oneida way, although neither he nor those with whom he was studying had any idea of where Noyes’s ideas would ultimately take him. While studying with the leading theologian of the day, Nathaniel William Taylor, Noyes began to question not only the focus on sin and predestination in the reigning Calvinist theology but also Taylor’s more liberal belief that people could earn redemption through their own effort and the confession of their sins. Noyes became convinced that repentance from sin was not enough. Peo- ple, he believed, should simply stop sinning. Though the notion that any human could stop sinning was anathema to Calvinists, Noyes was not the first to believe that perfection was possible for some Christians in this life. Indeed, John Wesley founded Methodism on a similar belief that Christians should try—and some might succeed—in “going on to perfection.”17 But Noyes de- fined perfectionism quite differently from Wesley. He became convinced that a second conversion was available to all Christians in which they not only re- pented but also moved to a state “in which all the affections of the heart are given to God, and in which there is no sin.”18 During the course of the next decade, Noyes developed his perfectionist be- liefs in more and more detail. He was far from alone. There were many who em- braced the doctrine of perfectionism during the revivals that were sweeping the UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES 35

United States in the 1830s. As Noyes defined it, perfectionism did not mean that one would never make mistakes. It did mean for those who were fully converted that their hearts and souls belonged fully to God and that sin could no longer have any power over them. For such people the old moral law was no longer the guide. A person who had experienced true conversion could, Noyes believed, follow the rule in which God said, “Do as you please; for I promise that your pleasure shall be mine. I will write my law upon your heart.”19 It was over a decade after his initial embrace of perfectionism that Noyes proceeded to apply the concept to the realm of sexuality. For several years after his break with Taylor and the Calvinism of Yale, he was an itinerant preacher and publisher of his perfectionist theology. Eventually he gathered a small community, mostly members of his own family, at a farm in Putney, Vermont. There, in part it seems because of a growing attraction that Noyes felt for one of his converts, Mary Cragin, and in part because of his changing theological views, he expanded his definition of Christian perfectionism to include what he called complex marriage or, at times, communist marriage. Noyes explained his growing belief that “In a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be—and there is as little reason for shame in the one case as in the other.” As part of the celebration of the new Christian community that Noyes and his fol- lowers saw as fast approaching, they came to believe that just as in heaven peo- ple “neither marry nor are given in marriage,” so in the community of the already perfect there could be no “jealousy of exclusiveness.” “I call a certain woman my wife—she is yours, she is Christ’s, and in him she is the bride of all saints... she is dear in the hand of a stranger, and... I rejoice.”20 As news of the Putney Perfectionist community’s beliefs and practices be- came known, the Vermont clergy and the Vermont legal authorities began to take a very dim view of their affairs. In the fall of 1847 Noyes was arrested for breaking the state’s laws against adultery. Rather than face trial, and possible jail, Noyes and his followers moved to a farm near Syracuse, New York, and founded their lasting home at Oneida. Within a year the Oneida Association, as it became known, had eighty-seven members drawn from Perfectionist con- verts across New England and New York. After some difficult early days—ro- manticized in later years as in many communities—Oneida grew and prospered financially and socially.21 At Oneida, Noyes’s understanding of complex marriage was at the heart of the community and all who joined had to do so on Noyes’s terms, accepting many different sexual partners for themselves and forgoing any jealous hold on a specific partner. The Oneida community made no effort to hide its sexual beliefs and practices. In 1848 Noyes published Bible Argument: Defining the Relations of 36 A HISTORY OF HOPE the Sexes in the Kingdom of Heaven. It that book he argued that monogamy was clearly incompatible with the Bible’s emphasis on universal love and with human nature which led many to see marriage as a prison that “gives to sexual appetite only a scanty and monotonous allowance.” Sexual pleasure was a gift from God to be enjoyed by God’s children, Noyes insisted. And the perfect communism of the early Christian community demanded the sharing of that love without any exclusive or jealous reservations.22 There was much more to Oneida than its sexual practices, however. Com- munist marriage was part of a much larger effort at building a utopian Christ- ian communal society on a small scale. As Noyes wrote and said repeatedly, absolute communism in property—in which nothing was jealously held back or “owned”—was a way of recreating what the early Christians experienced after the day of Pentecost when “all that believed were together and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all, as every man had need.” In fairly short order they consolidated their com- munity by moving from a number of small buildings into one large Mansion House that provided housing for most members and a communal meeting space for up to several hundred.23 From most of the accounts, Oneida was a happy but complicated place for people to live. Noyes and his inner circle dominated every aspect of the com- munity’s life. One needed permission from the leaders to select a new sexual partner. And Noyes’s theological views were not to be challenged. On the other hand, there was a strong bond among the community members; there was unusual equality among individuals and between the sexes. Work was shared, and after the first few years the burdens were relatively light compared to the work life of most other nineteenth-century Americans. The inventive- ness of the community members ensured economic prosperity. Writing after the dissolution of the community in 1879, Jessie Catherine Kinsley tried to describe for her own daughter what life had been like at Oneida. It must have been a daunting task, in late Victorian America, to try to explain to a child of those times what her mother’s life had been like one gen- eration but a cultural millennium earlier. Kinsley reflected on her initiation into complex marriage as a young teenager.

There came a time when we entered the social life of the Community [at Oneida social was a euphemism for sexual]. I will not speak too intimately of that. Looking back upon it, I do not wholly understand it, nor do I unre- servedly approve of all that experience. I see faults of a grave nature. Perhaps there was “self seeking” in the conduct of some; nevertheless, the thought to forestall stolen loves and to make desire legitimate was, I believe, the purpose UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES 37

of those in authority—those who managed our lives—while in our hearts was innocence and struggle for unselfishness, and toward Mr. Noyes, loyalty as to one almost divine. I was sixteen when I loved G. A. (George Allen). The love began in a romantic way and was a part of my happy life for years. At length I saw him become interested in a woman greatly my superior in looks and in mentality, and because I would not then strive for what I thought would be selfishly sought, we drifted apart.... I loved G. (George Allen) and C. (Charles Cragin) and O. (Orrin Wright).

Kinsley continued with a plea to her daughter to try to understand what must have seemed exceedingly strange to her. Remember, she seems to be saying, that there was a larger purpose to it all, that we were trying to achieve some- thing great in our own faith and for the world.

Dear Edith, if imagination carries you back into the unusual past that I can- not describe you must think that religious devotion was a part of it all. In its religion you will find the key to this Community life. We applied religious phraseology to everyday life curiously and, if I mistake not, without hypocrisy (truly without hypocrisy to those of us who knew no other existence, no other explanation). The fulfillment of Complex Marriage was an “Ordinance”—a loving “ordinance of fellowship”—more earnest than the kiss or the everyday handclasp, no doubt, but simple, sacred, without guile or unrestrained pas- sion; “a communion of spirit and body.”24

The fact that Oneida with its ordinance of complex marriage and its commit- ment to Bible Communism flourished for three decades is a tribute to the de- gree that this communion of spirit and body worked for many of its members. Oneida was not equal in its treatment of women. But it did offer women far more equality than was available almost anywhere else in the United States in the nineteenth century. Noyes had developed a method of male contracep- tion that seems to have worked very well and dramatically freed Oneida women from unwanted pregnancy. He and the community also insisted that both partners had a duty to attend to the sexual pleasure of the other and a man who failed at this duty could be severely criticized. A woman who chose to become pregnant received support from her sisters and brothers. For the first year after the child’s birth, she was freed from work to care for the child. After that the child was turned over to the Children’s House to be reared col- lectively while the mother returned to the general life of the community. Oneida memoirs provide a mixed picture of collective child rearing, some finding in it a great freedom and others a wrenching separation from the chil- dren they had born and loved.25 38 A HISTORY OF HOPE

Members of the Oneida community not only shared their worldly goods and their sexual loves. They also sought to make Oneida a beautiful place and to add to their comfort and prosperity through an amazing number of inven- tions. They studied the major landscapers of the mid-nineteenth century, in- cluding Frederick Law Olmsted, and designed gardens and buildings at Oneida that are still beautiful one hundred years later.26 The Oneida community embraced technology, celebrating the introduc- tion of steam heat to their buildings in 1869. Technology was also the key to the community’s prosperity. In the mid-1850s, at a low point in their financial fortunes, Sewall Newhouse, a member of the community, began building a new form of hunting trap that was widely sought. Other members of the com- munity quickly developed methods for the mass production of the traps, and by the Civil War the community was producing 275,000 steel traps a year and its fortune was assured. Well before the demand for the traps began to decline, another venture that started with the making of tin spoons would assure Oneida’s legacy. The Oneida silverware empire emerged only after the disso- lution of the community, but that company’s fortune assured employment for the community’s descendants and the financial resources to preserve the Oneida story and the Oneida buildings into the twenty-first century.27 In the end Oneida fell victim to the prudishness of the Victorian era. It also fell victim to its dependence on a single charismatic leader and to internal debates by a generation that came to chafe at his dictates. Between 1875 and 1879 Oneida was torn by debates between loyalists who insisted on the old ways and dissidents who believed that members of the community should be given much more freedom in the selection of sexual partners—without need- ing the permission of the inner circle. Jessie Kinsley described the change: “There were scenes in the Evening Meetings. The disaffected began to sit in the gallery and from there hurl words upon the loyalists. Open scorn, hatred and rebellion were shown in many places. You will understand the misery of this if you contrast it with the almost complete harmony of the past extending backward beyond the limits of my life.”28 Pre-1875 Oneida may never have been as harmonious as Kinsley thought, but something significant had changed. Noyes’s efforts to get the community to elect his son, Theodore Noyes, as his successor only made matters worse. And after a decade of quiet, the outside world was again intruding with threats of arrests for Oneida’s clear and public flouting of the marriage laws of the state of New York. In 1879 Noyes himself suddenly fled to Canada, partly to avoid arrest but probably also to escape the tensions growing up around his leadership. In the year that followed, the community, with Noyes’ blessing from Canada, aban- UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES 39 doned its system of complex marriage, and couples who wanted to joined in conventional marriages. As its publications had prophesied for thirty years, economic communism could not be sustained in the face of monogamy, and communal ownership was exchanged for shares in the communal enterprises, the Oneida Community, Ltd. The silverware part of the business insured that the descendants lived well and the historical record was preserved. But the community itself had ended.29 Nevertheless, the Oneida Community was a beacon of hope to many for the thirty years of its existence. At one time Noyes had hoped that the com- munity would be recreated over and over again, but that did not happen. Still, Oneida remains a symbol of the hopeful exuberance, the willingness to break out from ancient constraints, and the embrace of a better—even a potentially perfect—future that is part of the American heritage.

R OBERT O WEN AND THE N EW H ARMONY C OMMUNITY

John Humphrey Noyes clearly saw Oneida as part of a larger communitarian movement. In 1870 he published History of American Socialisms. While Oneida emerges from Noyes’s history as perhaps the best example of a utopian social- ist community, it is far from the only example. Indeed, Noyes acknowledges his debt to the work of Robert Owen and the members of the community Owen founded at New Harmony, Indiana.30 Owen himself was a product of the dislocation of the Industrial Revolution in England. Born in a working class family in Wales in 1771, he began work in a drapery shop in London at the age of ten. His early interest in religion ended by the time he was fourteen when, he wrote, “my religious feelings, were im- mediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity—not for a sect or a party, or for a country or a colour—but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do them good.”31 In time Owen was one of the winners in industrial- izing England, but he did not forget his early commitments. After making a considerable fortune for himself, he founded a utopian model factory town at New Lanark, Scotland, in which he sought to put the spirit of universal charity into practice. Owen championed child labor legislation, and supported factory inspection and unemployment legislation at a time when few of the industrial leaders of Britain were prepared to even consider such socialistic ideas. But the heart of his effort was in the creation of a utopian socialist community where a new and different model of human economy could emerge.32 After what he considered success at New Lanark in the early 1820s, Owen decided to seek a wider stage for his version of utopian socialism in the United 40 A HISTORY OF HOPE

States. He purchased land in New Harmony, Indiana, and published his plans in Discourses on a New System of Society. In that announcement he said: “By a hard struggle you have attained a political liberty, but you have yet to acquire real mental liberty, and if you cannot possess yourselves of it, your political lib- erty will be precarious and of much less value.”33 At New Harmony, Owen meant to show the way to “real mental liberty.” Owen’s vision for establishing his utopia in the New World seemed to be an immediate success. He was welcomed in Indiana and also in Washington, D.C. where he spoke twice before Congress. In the early months of 1825 some nine hundred people arrived at New Harmony including, as Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, wrote, “a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusias- tic devotees to principle, honest latudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprin- kling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.”34 There are differing accounts of life at New Harmony, but all of them re- flect the high level of energy and commitment of many of the community’s members. There was music and dancing, a Female Social Society, and a range of other gatherings. Visiting preachers were welcome, but the community es- poused no religious creed. In launching New Harmony, Owen set it up with a temporary govern- ment vested solely in himself, but with a plan for a relatively quick transition toward a radical communitarianism. Within months, Owen announced that it was time for the transition and a Community of Equality with power vested equally in all of the adult residents was declared. At about the same time, in 1826, Owen personally condemned the institutions of private property, organ- ized religion, and marriage, a move that strengthened the loyalty of some and alienated others. In reality, New Harmony failed within a year. The transition from Owen’s benevolent but centralized rule to totally shared government was probably far too quick. The community was never able to attract enough skilled workers to make it economically successful. The socializing was controlled by an elite and not necessarily welcomed by all of the community’s residents. As one disaf- fected resident recalled, the “aristocrats” quarreled and the cabbage fields went to ruin. Owen himself lost the great bulk of his fortune, which he had in- vested in New Harmony, but returned to England to continue to advocate his version of social reform.35 Nevertheless, New Harmony was a powerful example in the early years of the nineteenth century. Many later reformers—whether deeply religious as the Shakers or the Oneida community or secular as New Harmony—tried to copy its successes and avoid its failures. The nineteenth-century history of the United States is far from complete unless the wonderful and diverse range of UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES 41 utopian, communal, and communistic ventures, from the relatively tame New England Transcendentalists at Brook Farm to the wildly controversial and suc- cessful Mormons who ultimately gathered in Utah, are included as major play- ers in the story. In later generations, the stories of these communities would inspire some, horrify others, and give hopes to many that human society could be organized along more loving and humane lines than had yet been invented.