American Utopias

Compiled from Noyes, American Socialisms; Holloway, Utopian Communities in America; Hinds, American Communities. The division into religious and secular communities is to some extent arbitrary, but convenient as an ordering principle. Noyes's argument throughout American Socialisms is that communities are more successful when based on common religious commitments. This appears consonant with the data. Obviously, the enumeration is not anything like complete.

Religious

Rhode Island. Founded by dissenters Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, 1635, as outpost of female preaching, free speech, and Protestant dissent. Rhode Island has, of course, failed miserably, and is now a desolate wasteland.

The Woman in the Wilderness. Christian communist community founded near Philadelphia in 1692. Pietistic Christians from Germany.

Ephrata. Founded in 1735 in what is now Lancaster County, PA, by Johann Beissel; German pietists. Extreme austerity, local educational work.

Shakers: Mother Ann Lee, an English woman of peasant stock from Manchester, took a group of schismatic Quakers (various Quaker groups could fit in throughout, at any rate) to New York in 1776, and established a compound at Watervliet. The most successful of the religious utopians, unless you count the Mormons, the Shakers spread to a number of compounds throughout the US. Ecstatic dancing and economical, integral design. Up to 5,000 members by mid-early-19th c. Led for much of the 19th c. by Frederick Evans, who had been at New Harmony, and knew Warren. Celibacy, though it has a feminist reading, sadly did not turn out to be the wave of the twentieth century, which displayed an inexplicable preference for pornography and promiscuity. It has been asserted that their communism influenced Robert Owen.

Rappites: George Rapp, a German prophet, came to Baltimore in 1803 with 300 families and settled in Western PA, calling the community Harmony. Adopted communism for practical reasons on the frontier. Very prosperous, they sold out at a profit and removed to Indiana, where they also called their community Harmony. Eventually, they sold to Owen, who established New Harmony on the site. Rappites returned to Western PA and founded "Economy."

Zoar: similar German protestant sect, settled in wilderness of Ohio in 1819 with 225 people.

Mormons: radical protestant sect founded with a new scripture by Joseph Smith in 1830. Numbered at least 15,000 when they settled the town of Nauvoo. Experimented with plural marriage and various communistic schemes.

Oneida: founded by John Humphrey Noyes in upstate New York in 1848 on a doctrine of "Christian perfectionism" (he had already founded a small community in Putney, VT). Practiced a form of communism and "plural marriage." Eventually mutated into a successful co-operative silverware manufacturer, thus merging (conceptually) with capitalist utopias such as Hershey and Amana. Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau stayed there awhile, and couldn't get laid even under the auspices of plural marriage; Guiteau was referred to affectionately by the women of Oneida as "Charles Gitout."

Hopedale; founded by Adin Ballou in 1841, formerly a Universalist minister; like Noyes a charismatic and schismatic Christian. Ballou preached absolute non-resistance consistently through the Civil War, unlike his abolitionist and reform-movement brethren, for the most part. The economy was described as "socialistic," but the polity was based on devotion to the charismatic cult of Ballou. Hopedale had a couple of hundred members at its height, but fell to land speculation in 1856.

Amana: "Inspirationist" community settled from Germany near Buffalo in 1855, eventually removing to Iowa. A large, prosperous community that eventually manufactured appliances.

Secular or "Socialist"

New Harmony: Scottish industrialist and idealist Robert Owen bought the Rappite village of Harmony in Indiana, and used it to test his theories of property, education, co-operative manufacture, and higher culture. The experiment persisted from 1825 to 1827 when it broke down in factional disputes, though even long afterward, or perhaps even today, New Harmony is an unusually interesting town. Josiah Warren and Frederick Evans, later Shaker elder, were resident, and Frances Wright blew through town in her bustling about. There were other Owenite settlements, notably at Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Nashoba: 1826-30. A community for freed slaves and white experimenters founded by the amazingly cool English freak Frances (Fanny) Wright near Memphis, Tennessee. Accusations of miscegenation and local hatred and Wright's removal for fund-raising purposes closed the place down. This sucker is hard to imagine in its extreme courage. 1828 has Wright delivering a July 4 address in New Harmony, and visiting Josiah Warren in Cincinnati. Warren remains a staunch feminist throughout his life, while later rejecting the idea of "free love."

Brook Farm: a transcendentalist community founded by George Ripley in 1841. Adorned by very smart people doing physical labor and playing music and writing poetry, including Hawthorne. Emerson and Bronson Alcott participated from the fringe. Emerson called Brook Farm "an age of reason in a patty-pan." Made a transition to Fourierism in 1844, after which, like any decent Fourierist experiment, it disintegrated.

Fourierist Phalanxes: Charles Fourier proves that all these folks lived in an era when a man could sit in his garret in Paris hallucinating, write it down, and call it science. This was also Pearl Andrews's approach to empirical investigation: an a priori science based on introspection into the mind of an eccentric. Fourier had a utopian plan to organize the whole world into big old "phalanxes," which looked something like Versailles. The American experiments included La Reunion near Dallas, Texas and the North American Phalanx - probably the largest and most successful Fourierist project - in Monmouth County, NJ (1841-56).

Capitalist

Probably early company towns and idealized industrial communities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (the one I'm familiar with is Hershey, Pennsylvania; Pullman, Illinois might also be mentioned), owe much to the religious and Owenite experiments. They deserve to be mentioned in particular with regard to Warren's projects, since they have some features in common. It is perhaps no coincidence, for example, that Hershey is located in a hotbed of communities; Amish, Mennonite, as well as Ephrata.

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