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The Fall of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon Portland State University PDXScholar Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications Nohad A. Toulan School of Urban Studies and and Presentations Planning 2-1-1990 Utopia and Bureaucracy: The alF l of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon Carl Abbott Portland State University Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/usp_fac Part of the Urban Studies and Planning Commons Citation Details Abbott, C. Utopia and Bureaucracy: The alF l of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon. Pacific iH storical Review , Vol. 59, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 77-103. This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Utopia and Bureaucracy: The Fall of Rajneeshpuram, Oregon CARL ABBOTT The authoris a memberof theurban studies and planning departmentin PortlandState University. There may be places in Oregon thatare more iso- latedfrom their centers of population -towns like Wagontire, Lonerock,and Remote-butRajneeshpuram is hardenough to reach.The drive fromPortland to its site in the central basin ofthe John Day Rivercovers 175 miles. The hundred square miles of Rajneeshproperties spanned two counties. The officesof Jefferson County were seventy miles awayin Madras,population 2,235 in 1987.The officesof Wasco County wereninety miles distantin The Dalles, population10,265. A circleof a hundredmiles circumference centered on Raj- neeshpuramembraces only one townof more than 1000 resi- dentsand one additionaltown of more than 500. Between 1981 and 1985,followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneeshbuilt a substantialutopia in thesolitude of eastern Oregon.The instantcommunity promised spiritual reassur- ance,material comfort, and opportunitiesfor worldly achieve- mentfor a populationthat was officiallyplanned for3,700 and sometimesprojected to reachthe tensof thousands.1It also offeredthe chance to build a carefullyplanned new city. At its peak in 1984,Rajneeshpuram housed between2,000 1. City of Rajneeshpuram,Comprehensive Plan (Rajneeshpuram,Ore., 1982;Hugh Milne,Bhagwan: The God ThatFailed (New York,1986), 215. PacificHistorical Review C 1990by the PacificCoast Branch American Historical Association 77 78 PacificHistorical Review and 3,000 permanentresidents along with varyingnumbers of visitors,students of Rajneeshism, and streetpeople partic- ipating in a short-livedShare-a-Home program.The idea of a high-techutopia that equipped itselfwith Uzis and Rolls Royces as well as beads and thatcounted Ph.Ds. in political science and linguisticsalong with its grayingguru was irre- sistibleto the news media. National magazines, newspapers, and network television chronicled evolving conflictswith thecity's rural neighborsand itsspectacular collapse in a wave of criminal indictments.Rajneeshpuram has figuredpromi- nentlyin at least seven books, including Frances Fitzgerald's widely read Citieson a Hill. In John Updike's recent novel S. it appears in transparentdisguise as the Arizona-based Ashram Arhat.2 The building of Rajneeshpuram brought international scrutinyof Oregon's hard-earned reputation for tolerance. The state had supported a strong anti-Catholicmovement and a strongKu Klux Klan in the 1920s and had joined the anti-Japanesefrenzy of the 1940s.3Since then,however, it had grownsubstantially more open-minded in the public arena, a process assisted by the small size of its urban minoritypopu- lation and the tendency for counterculturaliststo shelter quietly in the forest.Rajneesh and his true believers, how- ever, were eminently visible and uninterestedin compro- mise. They were impatient,insistent, implicitly threatening, and oftendirectly confrontational. Whether intended or not, the repeated changes in their stated plans looked like con- scious deception. 2. Robert Anderson, Behind theRed Door: The Rajneesh Exposd (Portland, Ore., 1983); Kirk Braun, Rajneeshpuram: The Unwelcome Society (West Linn, Ore., 1984); Dell Murphy, The Rajneesh Story: The Bhagwan's Garden (West Linn, Ore., 1986); Milne, Bhagwan;Frances FitzGerald, Cities on a Hill (New York,1986); Kate Strelley,with Robert D. San Souci, The UltimateGame: The Rise and Fall of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (San Francisco, 1987); James S. Gordon, The Golden Guru: The StrangeJourney of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Lexington, Mass., 1987);John Updike, S. (New York,1988). 3. David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism:The Historyof the Ku Klux Klan (3rd ed., Durham, N.C., 1987),85-91; Eckard V. Toy,Jr., "The Ku Klux Klan in Tillamook, Oregon," PacificNorthwest Quarterly, LIII (1962), 60-64; DorothyO. Johansenand CharlesM. Gates,Empire ofthe Columbia (New York, 1967),494-499. Fallof Rajneeshpuram 79 LOCATION MAP: NORTHWESTERNOREGON PORTLAND HEDALLES WASCO SALEM CO. ANTELOPE AJNEESHPURAM i 5 MADRAS wEUGENE 50miles The initial response in Oregon was an uneasy balance in which tolerance tended to outweighhostility with increasing distance. Nearby residentswere caught betweendisapproval of a nontraditionallifestyle and an ingrained commitmentto an individualisticethos that would allow people to do what theywanted on theirown property.More cosmopolitan resi- dents of WillametteValley cities and universitytowns were tornbetween commitment to freedomof belief and behavior, embarrassmentover expressionsof bigotry,and the fear that Oregonians were being conned by a set of tricksters. The physical isolation of Rajneeshpuram offereda strik- ing contrastto itsobtrusive public presence.Most Rajneeshees themselves were city people from the American coasts or 80 PacificHistorical Review Europe forwhom a Wasco Countyranch was a westernadven- ture.Journalists faced the choice ofutilizing Rajneeshpuram's own guestfacilities or makingthe dustyround tripto Madras over bumpy gravel roads and two-laneblacktop. Its location tied the experience of Rajneeshpuram to America's nine- teenth-century"backwoods utopias." Indeed, the reported comment of Rajneesh's "prime minister"Ma Anand Sheela on being shownthe Big Muddy Ranch placed Rajneeshpuram directlyin the line of succession."This is it!" she announced, paraphrasing Brigham Young's famous "This is the place!" uttered as he crested the Wasatch Range into the Salt Lake Valley.4 In contrastto the common impression,this paper argues that the physical isolation of Rajneeshpuram has diverted attentionfrom the closenessof its public institutionalcontext. Rajneeshpuram may have looked like it was in the middle of nowhere,hours fromcourtrooms and countyplanning offices, but it was actually embedded in a dense systemof laws and regulations.Like everyother location in late twentieth-century America,Rajneeshpuram was withinreach of local, state,and national bureaucracies. The constraintsof this institutional contextprevented the developmentof the cityin itsintended formand contributedto its collapse in 1984 and 1985. From Blithedaleto Bureaucracy When Nathaniel Hawthorne published his fictionalized account of the Brook Farm community as The Blithedale Romance (1852), he was far more interested in interaction among the Blithedalers themselvesthan in the relationships between the farmand its encompassingeconomic and social environment.Hawthorne's attention to personalityand belief foreshadowedthe standard approach to the historicalstudy of American utopian experiments. Historians and histori- cally minded social scientistshave concentratedon questions internalto theirsubject communities. Writers concerned with human motivationhave focused on program,ideology, and sources of individual commitment.Other scholarsinterested 4. Braun, Rajneeshpuram,28; Fitzgerald, Citieson a Hil4 72. Fallof Rajneeshpuram 81 in the dynamicsof small groups have looked at the processes and problems of implementation,including physical con- structionand design, finances,and decision-making.5 The isolated locations of the most prominent of the nineteenth-centuryutopias seem to validate the internal emphasis. As geographerJ. Wreford Watson has pointed out, "the communitarianmovement... tended to be an essentially rural feature."A detailed analysis by Philip Porterand Fred Lukermann found a majorityof communitieslocated within a hundred miles of the standard frontierline of six persons per square mile.6Rajneeshpuram's regional predecessors have included laternineteenth-century and early twentieth-century 5. Surveysof utopiancommunities in the United Statesinclude Charles Nordhoff, The CommunisticSocieties of the United States (New York, 1875); Arthur E. Bestor, Backwoods Utopia: The Sectarianand OwenitePhases of Commu- nitarianSocialism in America(Rev. ed., Philadelphia, 1970); Donald D. Egbert and StowPersons, Socialism and AmericanLife (Princeton, N.J., 1952), 125-211; Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communitiesin America, 1680-1880 (Rev. ed., New York,1966); RobertS. Fogarty,Dictionary of American Commu- nal and Utopian History (Westport, Conn., 1980); Yaacov Oved, Two Hundred Yearsof American Communes (New Brunswick,N.J. 1988). Works that emphasize the physicalconstruction of the communitiesinclude JohnReps, The Making ofUrban America (Princeton, N.J. 1965), 439-474; Dolores Hayden, SevenAmer- ican Utopias: The Architectureof CommunitarianSocialism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); and J. Wreford Watson, Social Geography of the United States (London, 1979),224-226. Social and psychologicaldynamics are thefocus of Rosabeth Moss Kantner, Commitmentand Community:Communes
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