Community College of Denver: History
Western Civilization
Utopias
Utopian Communities
Between the 1820s and 1840s, individuals who believed in the perfectibility of the social and political order founded hundreds of "utopian communities." These experimental communal societies were called utopian communities because they provided blueprints for an ideal society.
Utopia was the name of a tract by Sir Thomas Moore from the 16th C that described an ideal world. The name is applied to any imagined ideal world from Plato's Republic to George Bush Sr.'s New World Order.
Robert Owen's Utopian experiment at New Harmony, Indiana
In 1799, Robert Owen purchased the cotton spinning mills of New Lanark, Scotland, and shortly thereafter began his first experiment in instituting his ideas of social and labor reform. The mills are shown here.
Although Owen paid lower wages than most of the surrounding factories, his employees, whose number fluctuated between 1,400 and 1,500, enjoyed low-rent housing, free medical care, low-cost education, reduced prices on food and other household supplies, and free access to social and recreational facilities, gardens, and parks.
Owen’s efforts at social reform also included a steady reduction in the number of working hours (from twelve to ten and a half per day) and his refusal to employ any children under the age of ten. New Lanark’s guest book reveals that the model factory community received almost 20,000 visitors between 1815 and 1825.
While Owen’s experiment at New Lanark was a success on many levels, he did not believe it was the ideal community in which to establish his "New Moral World."
In 1824, he purchased the community of Harmony, Indiana, and 900 of his followers moved there the following year to start over as New Harmony.
Shakers
http://www.shakerwssg.org/WSSG%20Home%20Page-Shaker%20Road-Frames.htm
Nathaniel Currier Shakers Near Lebanon Lithograph, n.d. NYPL
Dancing, whirling, singing, clapping, marching, and other physically expressive means of worship were central to the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, and such activities led to their being popularly called Shakers.
The ecstatic state induced by their dancing encouraged direct communication from the spirits of ancestors, especially Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers, who died in 1784. An eyewitness account by Charles Nordhoff in 1875 described the type of dance shown here: "In their marching and dancing they hold their hands before them, and make a motion as of gathering something to themselves: this is called gathering a blessing. In like manner, when any brother or sister asks for their prayers and sympathy, they, reversing their hands, push towards him that which he asks." The Shakers, a millennial sect who believed that they could set an example of the perfect life, were not entirely closed off from the outside world: they hired laborers to work their fields, they sold their seeds and other products in local towns, and they allowed outsiders to visit and stay in their communities. Here, the woman in the red dress, on the left, is clearly a visitor to the Shaker community.
Mother Ann Lee was Believed by her followers to have been the second incarnation of Christ, Ann Lee may be one of the most extraordinary and mysterious women in the history of Western culture. From humble origins in Manchester, England, she became the visionary religious leader of the Shakers.What led to the demise of the Shakers?
They are a millennial organization. Viewing sexual intercourse as the basic cause of human sin, the Shakers also adopted strict rules concerning celibacy. They attempted to replenish their membership by admitting volunteers and taking in orphans. Today, the Shakers have all but died out. Fewer than 20 members survived in the 1990s.
What characterized the Fourier societies?
Some 40 utopian communities based their organization on the ideas of the French theorist Charles Fourier, who hoped to eliminate poverty through the establishment of scientifically organized cooperative communities called "phalanxes." Each phalanx was to be set up as a "joint-stock company," in which profits were divided according to the amount of money members had invested, their skill, and their labor. Fourier coined the term feminism, and in the phalanxes, women received equal job opportunities and equal pay, equal participation in decision making, and the right to speak in public assemblies. Although one Fourier community lasted for 18 years, most were unsuccessful. Greeley was founded as a Fourier community
Charles Fourier had very strange ideas For a scholarly account try this link
http://gr6.u-strasbg.fr/~ronse/CF/fourier.html
GREELEY HISTORY
It was Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who coined the famous phrase, "Go West young man, go West," but it was his visionary agricultural editor, Nathan C. Meeker, who spearheaded one of the most successful colonization experiments ever attempted in the "Great American Desert."Meeker called for ambitious individuals with high moral standards and money to join him in establishing a community based on cooperation, irrigation, agriculture, temperance, religion, and education. The call elicited 3,000
responses and 59 individuals who ultimately formed a joint stock company called Union Colony in December, 1869.
On October 12th of the following year, Horace Greeley paid his only visit to the town which bore his name. By that time colonists had erected houses on town lots close to the confluence of the South Platte and Cache la Poudre rivers, established a newspaper, built irrigation canals, and designed streets 100 feet wide and lined with trees.
A reading room opened in 1870 followed by the first school in 1872, a court house in 1883, and a college in 1889. Greeley's concern for the financial well-being of the community led him to require the original settlers to be wealthy enough to allow the community a good start.
45. What was the Oneida community?
Ranger & Austen [View of the Oneida Community] Syracuse, N.Y., [1865?—75?] Stereoscopic view, albumen print NYPL, Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views
Like many utopian groups, the Perfectionists believed that their social ideals should be reflected and supported by the architecture of their community. When John Noyes and his followers arrived in Oneida from Vermont, they lived in wooden buildings that were included in their land purchase. Initially, the Oneidans hoped to make their living from horticulture, and they built numerous frame buildings and designed orchards and gardens that reflected this pastoral ideal. By 1859, they had abandoned their hope for agricultural self-sufficiency and begun to look to their manufacturing enterprises for income; they had also abandoned their ideas about creating an Eden-like garden and begun to construct a series of brick buildings around a central courtyard. The interiors of the buildings were designed to house a growing population and reflected the dual needs of communal and solitary activities. Private bedrooms were grouped around or near public parlors, and the central building housed a large hall with a stage for community meetings and entertainment. While satellite communities of Perfectionists existed in Wallingford, Connecticut, Newark, New Jersey, Putney and Cambridge, Vermont; and Manlius, New York, Oneida remained the central community.
This view shows the front lawn of the "Mansion House," the central building of the Oneida community. In the early 1870s, the community was experiencing a peak in population, in part because of stirpicultural (or selective breeding) experiments and in part because of the prosperity that resulted from successful enterprises in the production of steel traps, silk thread, and fruit preserves. This prosperity would continue throughout the decade. By 1881, disagreements over leadership and widespread criticism from the outside world over the practice of Complex Marriage–in which all members were married to each other–led to the dissolution of the community and the formation of a joint stock corporation to manage the businesses. One of their enterprises, the manufacture of silver and stainless steel dinnerware, remains a successful company today.
Perhaps the most successful—and notorious—experimental colony was John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida Community. A lawyer who was converted in one of Charles Finney's revivals, Noyes believed that the millennium would occur only when people strove to become perfect through an "immediate and total cessation from sin."
In Putney, Vermont, in 1835 and in Oneida, New York, in 1848, Noyes established perfectionist communities that practiced communal ownership of property and "complex marriage." Complex marriage involved the marriage of each member of the community to every member of the opposite sex. Exclusive emotional or sexual attachments were forbidden, and sexual relations were arranged through an intermediary in order to protect a woman's individuality and give her a choice in the matter. Men were required to practice coitus interruptus (withdrawal) as a method of birth control, unless the group had approved of the couple's conceiving offspring. After the Civil War, the community conducted experiments in eugenics, the selective control of mating to improve the hereditary qualities of children. Other notable features of the community were mutual criticism sessions and communal child rearing. Noyes left the community in 1879 and fled to Canada to escape prosecution for adultery. As late as the early 1990s descendants of the original community could be found working at the Oneida silverworks, which became a corporation after Noyes's departure.
Artistic and Cultural Ferment
46. What led James Fenimore Cooper to begin his literary career?
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was another successful mythmaker. His works gave us such staples of western fiction as the lone frontiersman, the faithful Indian companion, and the kidnap, chase, and rescue. He also made such words and phrases as "paleface," "on the warpath," and "war paint" part of the American vocabulary.
Born in Burlington, New Jersey, the son of a land speculator, Cooper grew up in the frontier community of Cooperstown in central New York. At 13, he enrolled at Yale but was expelled for blowing open a classmate's door with a charge of gunpowder and roping a donkey onto a professor's chair. He then went to sea as a common sailor. In 1819, following his return to Cooperstown, Cooper was reading a popular novel of the day aloud to his wife. He tossed the book aside and claimed that he could write a better one. His wife dared him to try, and during the remaining 32 years of his life he wrote 34 books.
47. Who was Natty Bumppo?
In his second and third novels, The Spy (1821) and The Pioneers (1823), Cooper created one of the most enduring archetypes in American culture. His hero, the frontiersman Natty Bumppo (also known as Hawkeye, Leatherstocking, and Pathfinder) was an American knight errant at home in the wilderness. He became the prototype not only for future trappers and scouts, but also for countless cowboys, detectives, and superheroes found in popular American fiction and film. Part of Natty Bumppo's appeal was that he gave expression to many of the misgivings early nineteenth-century Americans had about the cost of progress (his last words were "Let me sleep where I have lived—beyond the din of settlements"). An acute social critic, Cooper railed against the destruction of the natural environment, the violence directed at Native Americans, and the rapaciousness and materialism of an expansive American society.
He was also a remarkably bad writer. see Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses by Mark Twain
Here is the full text of
Cooper, James Fenimore . The Deerslayer; or, The First Warpath . . . Volume 1
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia LibraryAmerican Transcendentalism
48. What was the common outlook of the transcendentalists?
The transcendentalists were a group of young New Englanders, mostly of Unitarian background, who found liberal religion too formal and rationalistic to meet their spiritual and emotional needs. Logic and reason, they believed, were incapable of explaining the fundamental mysteries of human existence. Where, then, could people find answers to life's fundamental problems? The deepest insights, the transcendentalists believed, were to be found within the human individual, through intuition.
The transcendentalists shared a common outlook: a belief that each person contains infinite and godlike potentialities; an emphasis on emotion and the senses over reason and intellect; and a glorification of nature as a creative, dynamic force in which people could discover their true selves and commune with the supernatural. Like the romantic artists and poets of Europe, they emphasized the individual, the subjective, the imaginative, the personal, the emotional, and the visionary.
49. Who was the transcendentalist’s central figure?
The central figure in transcendentalism was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Trained, like his father, to be a liberal Unitarian minister, Emerson found his parents' faith unsatisfying. Unitarian theology and ritual, he wrote, was "corpse cold"; it was the "thin porridge or cold tea" of genteel Bostonians. Emerson's life was marked by personal tragedy and illness—his father died when he was a boy; his first wife died after less than two years of marriage; his firstborn son died at the age of five; a brother went insane. Consequently, Emerson could never believe that logic and reason offered answers to life's mysteries.
Appalled by the complacency, provinciality, and materialism of Boston's elite, the 29-year-old Emerson resigned as minister of the prestigious Second Church of Boston in 1832. Convinced that no external answers existed to the fundamental problems of life, he decided to look inward and "spin my thread from my own bowels." In his essays and public lectures, Emerson distilled the essence of the new philosophy: All people contain seeds of divinity, but society, traditionalism, and lifeless religious institutions thwart the fulfillment of these potentialities. In his essay "Nature" (1836), Emerson asserted that God's presence is inherent in both humanity and nature and can best be sensed through intuition rather than through reason. In his essay "Self-Reliance" (1841), he called on his readers to strive for true individuality in the face of intense social pressures for conformity: "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. . . . The virtue in most request is conformity. . . . Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."
Although Emerson himself was not an active reformer (he once wrote that whenever he saw a reformer, he felt like asking, "What right, Sir, do you have to your one virtue?"), his philosophy inspired many reformers far more radical than he. His stress on the individual, his defense of nonconformity, and his vocal critique of the alienation and social fragmentation that had accompanied the growth of cities and industry led others to try to apply the principles of transcendentalism to their personal lives and to society at large.
50. What was Henry David Thoreau’s aim in moving to the cabin at Walden Pond?
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was one of the transcendentalists who strove to realize Emersonian ideals in his personal life. A pencilmaker, surveyor, and poet, Thoreau, like Emerson, was educated at Harvard. He felt nothing but contempt for social conventions and wore a green coat to chapel because Harvard's rules required black. After college, he taught school and worked at his father's pencil factory, but these jobs brought him no fulfillment.
In March 1845, the 28-year-old Thoreau, convinced that his life was being frittered away by details, walked into the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, to live alone. He put up a cabin near Walden Pond as an experiment—to see if it was possible for a person to live truly free and uncommitted: "I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." The aim of his experiment was to break free from the distractions and artificialities of life, to shed himself of needless obligations and possessions, and to establish an original relationship with nature. His motto was "simplify, simplify."
During his 26 months at Walden Pond, he constructed his own cabin, raised his own food ("seven miles of beans"), observed nature, explored his inner self, and kept a 6000-page journal. He served as "self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms," "surveyor of forest-paths," and protector of "wild-stock." He also spent a night in jail, for refusing to pay taxes as a protest against the Mexican-American War. This incident led him to write the classic defense of nonviolent direct action, "Civil Disobedience."
51. What two communities tried to apply transcendentalism to everyday life?
Two dramatic attempts to apply the ideas of transcendentalism to everyday life were Brook Farm, a community located near Boston, and Fruitlands, a utopian community near Harvard, Massachusetts. In 1841, George Ripley, like Emerson a former Unitarian clergyman, established Brook Farm in an attempt to substitute transcendentalist ideals of "brotherly cooperation," harmony, and spiritual fulfillment for the "selfish competition," class division, and alienation that increasingly characterized the larger society. "Our ulterior aim is nothing less than Heaven on Earth," declared one community member. Brook Farm's residents, who never numbered more than 200, supported themselves by farming, teaching, and manufacturing clothing. The most famous member of the community was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who based his 1852 novel The Blithedale Romance on his experiences there. The community lasted in its original form just three years.
In 1843, Bronson Alcott and others attempted to form a "New Eden" at Fruitlands—a community where they could achieve human perfection through high thinking, manual labor, and dress and diet reform. Practices at Fruitlands included communal ownership of property, frequent cold water baths, and a diet based entirely on native grains, fruits, herbs, and roots. Residents wore canvas shoes and linen tunics, so as not to have to kill animals for leather or use slave-grown cotton. Division of labor by gender, however, remained traditional. Responsibility for housekeeping and food preparation fell on Alcott's wife Abba. Asked by a visitor if there were any beasts of burden at Fruitlands, Abba Alcott replied: "There is one woman."
