Many of us remember the 1960s and 70s, with the explosive proliferation of communes and intentional communities, many set in or around California. Most were short-lived, and some were flat-out toxic. But they were counter-culture, and to many observers they were downright un-American.
*In reality, though, they were as American as apple pie. We often miss the fact that the English colonies in America started out as experimental utopian societies: the Pilgrims with their communism and commitment to the simple life; Massachusetts and the other Puritan colonies, with their austerity and a commitment to self-examination and self-criticism that would make Chairman Mao cheer; Rhode Island, with its commitment to anarchy; the Pennsylvania Quakers, with their pacifism and their mysticism; the pacifist anabaptist sects, with their semi-closed communities; Georgia, where the rulers imported misfits and criminals so as to reprogram them after isolating them in the wilderness.
*Our pioneer settlers were the lunatic fringe, and when they sailed away, folks back in Europe were delighted to wave goodbye.
*We got another burst of utopian communities in the middle of the 19th century, as the world was turning toward the modern age, away from lifestyles that had endured for a thousand years. Celibate Shaker communes spread from Maine to Kentucky. Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in a utopian community, and so did Louisa May Alcott. So did John Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. John Brown tried to start a bi-racial community near Lake Placid.
*While dozens of such communities speckled the American landscape, they lay especially thick in a band then ran from Boston to Buffalo. One of the most successful, and longest enduring, was the Oneida Community.
*The hundreds of members practiced hard work, economic communalism, religious perfectionism, gender equality, and complex marriage… all the members were considered married to all the other members. Needless to say, they were highly controversial.
*John Humphrey Noyes founded the Community (at Oneida, NY) in 1848 – a year that saw revolutions all over Europe and in South America, publication of the “Communist Manifesto,” the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, a cholera epidemic that killed 5000 New Yorkers… a tumultuous moment.
*For the next several decades local diaries and letters are sprinkled with scandalized reports that so-and-so, or such-and-such a family, had decamped (often secretly) and joined “the Oneidas.”
*Members subjected themselves to community criticism and evaluation, as well as self-criticism. Sex was not a free-for-all… it had to be consensual, and birth control was practiced. Pregnancy had to be planned and approved, though of course “accidents” happened. Child-rearing was communal. It’s probably too much to say that women were completely equal, but they were a whale of a lot closer to it than women in the outside world. Short hair and trouser suits were the norm.
*Older members of the Community introduced younger members to sex, which near the end of the Community’s history led to threats of statutory rape charges, though in fact they probably wouldn’t have applied under New York law at the time.
*Future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau lived in the community for about five years, but members (not unreasonably) considered him insane and held him at arm’s length. He left the community, and sued Noyes, some six years before killing Garfield.
*An elderly Noyes left the country in 1878, urging the end of complex marriage. Members agreed the following year and in1881 voted to close the Community, creating in its place a joint-stock corporation that endures to this day, making the famed Oneida silverware.
*The Oneida Community Mansion House is now a museum and historic site. This Friday (Mar. 2, at 4 PM) Dr. Molly Jessup, the museum’s curator of education, will tell us the Community’s story at a Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture in Bath Fire Hall – free and open to all. Hope to see you there!