Utopian and Communitarian Movements

Utopian and Communitarian Movements. The quest for the perfect society arose in Western thought in ancient tales of a Golden Age, Greek theories of the perfect city‐state, and early Christians' anticipation of Christ's second coming. With European colonization of the New World, such hopes took on the enticing aura of possibility. The very name “America” became a metaphor for perfectionist longings, as in Thomas More's Utopia (1516), describing an ideal community on an island off the South American coast. Beginning with a party of Dutch Mennonites who settled in Delaware in 1663 and French Labadists (followers of the mystic Jean de Labadie) who came to Maryland in 1684, a succession of radical Protestant sects looked to the British colonies for refuge from persecution and the opportunity to build a godly society in miniature.

After the Revolutionary War, these expectations were heightened by the new nation's prosperity and expansionism, its religious freedom, and its openness to immigration and social experiment. The Shakers, a celibate sect led to America in 1776 by the English mystic Ann Lee, established nearly twenty tidy villages of American converts whose prosperity proved that economic “communism” was possible. The Harmonists, followers of the German pietist George Rapp, arriving in 1804, established communities in Pennsylvania, southern Indiana, and again in Pennsylvania.

Secular utopian socialists, such as the Owenites and the Icarians, founded communal ventures as well. Robert Owen, a wealthy Scottish mill‐owner and philanthropist, established a colony called New Harmony in Indiana in 1825, on a site along the Wabash River purchased from the Harmonists. Although it eventually failed as a cooperative venture, New Harmony became a major center of culture, intellectual life, and educational innovation on the frontier. The French Icarians, utopian socialists led by Etienne Cabet, founded communities in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and California from the 1840s through the 1880s.

These humanitarian idealists saw in America's cheap land and republican institutions a hospitable environment for their goal of replacing competitive capitalism with cooperative “social science.” By the 1840s, communitarianism—the idea that successful pilot communities could revolutionize society—had become a major expression of American reform, influencing some labor movements and spawning dozens of immigrant colonies and home‐grown experiments that attracted more than twenty thousand Americans. The Latter‐day Saints (Mormons) under Joseph Smith shared land and property in Ohio and Illinois before trekking to Utah in 1846. In 1841, New England transcendentalists, led by the Reverend George Ripley (1802–1880) and influenced by the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson, established a communal society at Brook Farm near Boston. Nathaniel Hawthorne offered a skeptical view of the venture in his 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance. The Oneida Community (1848–1881), formed in western New York by the Perfectionist preacher John Humphrey Noyes (and patterned on Noyes's earlier communal experiment in Putney, Vermont), sanctioned a controlled and theologically based practice of multiple sexual relationships called “complex marriage.” German pietists led by Christian Metz founded Amana, a highly successful communitarian venture, in Iowa in 1855.

The most influential utopians of the Antebellum Era were the Fourierists, followers of the French utopian writer Charles Fourier (1772–1837), whose ideas were publicized in America by Albert Brisbane's Social Destiny of Man (1840). The Fourierists set up nearly thirty communes (or “phalanxes”) and induced thousands of workers to form producer and consumer cooperatives. Brook Farm became a Fourierite phalanx in 1845, shortly before its demise. But this loose communal movement, which had been confined to the northern states, faded when its experimental communities either collapsed or conformed to the values of the mainstream culture, and when the North's victory in the Civil War ensured that individualist capitalism would become the American way.

After 1880 the rise of Karl Marx's “scientific” (as contrasted to “utopian”) socialism, coupled with massive urban‐industrial development, seemed to render anachronistic the strategy of social reconstruction through ideal communal ventures. Some workers and middle‐class reformers still harbored utopian aspirations, but these typically found expression in political schemes such as Henry George's single‐tax movement; Edward Bellamy's Nationalist program, set forth in his utopian novel Looking Backward (1888); or radical political parties such as Eugene V. Debs's Socialist party of America.

Nevertheless, communal experiments, although no longer in the center of the debate over social change, continued to crop up in varied forms. The Hutterites, followers of the sixteenth‐century Anabaptist martyr Jacob Hutter, settled in South Dakota in 1874, where their communal agricultural colonies continue to flourish. Western colonies of radical workers sprang up in the 1880s and 1890s. Julius Wayland's Ruskin Cooperative Association in Tennessee (1894–1899) drew Depression‐battered workers with its communal values and pooled resources. Sex radicals established “Spirit Fruit,” a homoerotic community, in Lisbon, Ohio, in 1899.

The Progressive Era brought Social Gospel enclaves and other communal ventures. Upton Sinclair started a short‐lived cooperative colony in Edgewood, New Jersey, in 1906. The anarchist Home Colony in Washington State (1896–1921) and Ferrer Colony in New Jersey (1915–1956) emphasized individual rights within a cooperative community. Job Harriman's Llano del Rio colony in California (1914–1918) espoused socialism, agrarianism, and resistance to established authority.

Traditional cloistered Roman Catholic orders, introduced to America by Augustinian monks who reached Philadelphia in the 1790s, and perpetuated in the twentieth century by Trappists, Benedictines, and other orders, represented a different form of the communitarian vision. So, too, did colonies embracing Spiritualism or Theosophy; gender‐based settlements such as the Women's Commonwealth in Texas and Washington, D.C. (1874–1906), and ashrams established by Asian‐influenced mystics in Massachusetts and California in the 1920s. In the Depression‐wracked 1930s, Catholic renewalists started a communitarian religious retreat, “The Grail,” in Ohio; conservative Protestants founded communities in Texas and Arkansas to promote fundamentalist religious beliefs; and radical Jews formed socialist colonies in Michigan.

Communal living reemerged during the countercultural revolt of the late 1960s and its aftermath. More than three‐thousand small, rural communes were established by disaffected young people seeking a return to nature and the simple life. Some experimented with drugs or sexually free lifestyles, or explored alternative religious traditions. Less clearly committed to social reconstruction than their nineteenth‐century predecessors, some of these groups espoused anarchistic “do you own thing” values that challenged the established social order and sought to maximize individual freedom. Opposition from neighbors and the public at large—a chronic problem for utopian groups—doomed some of these ventures, but others endured. Communes such as The Farm in Tennessee, Padanaram in Indiana, and Ananda Cooperative Village in California survived into the 1980s and 1990s. By then, however, the communal torch had been taken up by hundreds of new religious sects such as the Korean‐based Unification Church (whose followers some called “Moonies” after its founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon), the Family, and the Children of God. These groups aggressively recruited stray individuals and adopted communal living less on philosophical grounds than as a mechanism to maintain unity and enforce members' isolation from nonbelievers and the authorities.

Noyes and other nineteenth‐century observers had noted that religious communities tended to cohere better and last longer than secular ones. In Commitment and Community (1972), sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter argued that not religion per se but the “commitment mechanisms” employed by religious communes—charismatic and authoritarian leadership, an ascetic lifestyle, restricted outside contact, and so forth—enhanced their longevity. Yet these bonding techniques often appeared antithetical to mainstream American notions of individual freedom. Charges that communities destroyed families, oppressed women, and “brainwashed” disciples, hurled against many nineteenth‐century religious groups including the Shakers and Mormons, were voiced against religious “cults” of the 1980s and 1990s, with some justification in both cases. Utopian enthusiasm promises enlightenment and community but it also risks exploitation, depersonalization, and megalomania. Indeed, the public's perception of such dangers increased following the 1978 mass suicide of the Reverend Jim Jones' People's Temple followers at Jonestown, Guyana, to which Jones had moved from San Francisco, and the tragic 1993 standoff between federal authorities and members of David Koresh's Branch Davidian religious movement at Waco, Texas. More than seventy Davidians died when their compound burned down as the authorities moved in. Whether the fire was caused by the attack, or was set by the Davidians themselves, remained a matter of intense debate. Another mass suicide by the Heaven's Gate commune of computer programmers in San Diego in 1997 underscored the self‐destructive potential in some communal sects' apocalyptic and millennialist preoccupations.

Although the utopian and communitarian groups that have emerged throughout American history appeared deviant and lived separately from outsiders, they have also been inextricably bound to the larger culture. They have offered new combinations or exaggerated versions of beliefs shared by many Americans, such as faith in a national mission; the myth of new beginnings; the promise of self‐realization; and the expectation of impending salvation, often after a time of trial and suffering. As long as these generative ingredients permeate the subsoil of American culture, utopian experiments and movements appear likely to continue sprouting from it.
See also Anarchism; Individualism; Industrialization; Mennonites and Amish; Millennialism and Apocalypticism; Mormonism; New Age Movement; Protestantism; Republicanism; Roman Catholicism; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Shakerism; Sixties, The; Transcendentalism; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Arthur Bestor , Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663–1829, 2d ed., 1970.
Iacov Oved , Two Hundred Years of American Communes, 1988.
Robert S. Fogarty , All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914, 1990.
Carl J. Guarneri , The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth‐Century America, 1991.
Stephen J. Stein , The Shaker Experience in America, 1993.
Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America's Communal Utopias, 1997.

Carl J. Guarneri