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By Paul Horton

While the fundamentalist and evangelical right seems to have monopolized the national discourse surrounding religion and politics today, most Americans seem to have little grasp of a time in American history when religion identified with what could be called social reform.

Much of the impulse to view souls as equal before god was inspired by the First Great Awakening of the mid eighteenth century that was largely the product of underserved frontier congregations of “new lights” on the western fringes of established churches. Many of those who fought in the revolutionary war were inspired by “new light” preachers who encouraged congregants to fight for religious, economic, and political independence from the strictures of Parliament and the established Church of England.

Less than a century later, the Second Great Awakening was motivated by a millenarian impulse within a series of new “new light” faiths that pushed their flocks to prepare for the second coming. This impulse took many forms from Alexander Campbell’s Church of Christ to the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to the renegade Unitarian-Universalist-Transcendentalist branch of New England Congregationalism.

What united the religious discourse of the Second Great Awakening was the embrace of a new covenant that sought to bring together congregants to resist the fall exhibited by runaway individualism and materialism in American society.

This impulse manifested itself in an array of forms in the 1830s and 1840s. Mormons invented a hybrid capitalist-socialist utopia that provided a baseline of well-being for congregants. Black Abolitionists created a support network for those who followed the North Star to New England cities and Ontario, Canada. White Abolitionists and Women’s rights advocates supported political movements that called for moral suasion, immediate abolition, political abolition, and equal rights for women. And Utopian Socialists ranged from those who saw salvation in creating prophetic communities (Shakers) to those who combined religious and secular inspiration in phalanxes (communal buildings) that could be found at New Harmony, Indiana, Brook Farm, Massachusetts and at nine hundred other sites according to historian Carl J. Guarneri in his, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in the Nineteenth Century.

Students need to know that religion in the United States is more complexly related to political movements. Indeed, for much of the Antebellum period, mainstream and evangelical religion were more closely tied to American reform movements than to social conservatism, individualism, and racism. 

With the coming of the crisis of the Union in the 1850s, American religion split into northern and southern branches and conservative fundamentalism became identified with the South, the maintenance of slavery, and later, the perpetuation of Jim Crow.

Lesson

Nineteenth Century Utopian Communities: Why Did People Want to Join Them?

Thousands of Americans joined utopian socialist communities in the United States from 1830 to 1860. The late 1830s and early to mid 1840s saw the apex of the formation of utopian communities. This period coincides with the deepest depression of the Antebellum period caused by Jacksonian hard money policies, the failure to re-charter the National Bank, the movement of Federal deposits to “pet banks,” and the pressure placed on the entire system due to economic contraction in Europe. When European banks called in American loans requiring them to be repaid in specie, American credit tightened, banks failed, and many Americans lost businesses, land, and personal assets tied to notes being called by creditors under tremendous pressure. As a result, economic expansion slowed as credit tightened, wages declined, unemployment increased. Prices bottomed out in the Winter of 1843-44.

While it may be easy to overemphasize the link between the great Antebellum depression and the rise of Utopian communities, economic factors certainly played a role.

Part I

Define the following terms in at least one complete sentence using your text and digital resources:

Mother Ann Lee

Shakers

Utopian Socialism

Robert Owen

New Harmony

Charles Fourier

Phalanx (Fourierist)

Brook Farm

Marx’s critique of Utopian Socialism

Horace Greeley

Albert Brisbane

Part II

Please review and summarize how some historians and critics have explained the attraction to Antebellum Utopian communities:

Document A

There had been some continuities in between labor movements of the Jacksonian period and those of the succeeding twenty years, but the most important activities involved newly arrived immigrants as well as natives in innovative efforts. Unskilled day laborers and craft unions built unions, cooperatives, and protective associations. Smaller, more radical political organizations, like the Befriegundsbund, a secret revolutionary society founded in 1847 by the German émigré Wilhelm Weitling, arose in immigrant neighborhoods. The new organizations attempted to create unity between skilled and unskilled workers, efforts that bore fruit in 1850 with the formation, in New York, of the national Industrial Congress. Although internal factional warfare soon divided the Congress, individual craft and laborers’ unions persisted and led a wave of strikes in 1853-54, halted only by a brief financial panic (a prelude to 1857) in late 1854 and 1855. 

Accompanying these union activities were various broader efforts at labor reform, preeminently the land reform movement headed by former Working Men’s Party leader George Henry Evans. Evans, exhausted, had retreated from his Manhattan base to the New Jersey countryside in 1835. When he returned to radical agitation in 1841, he was a thorough convert to the proposition that the wage slave would be freed only if he could obtain a patch of land. Followers of various utopian writers (including Albert Brisbane, the leading American champion of the French visionary Charles Fourier), as well as the British Chartist land reformers, found their way into Evans’s fold. Constituted as the National Reform Association, the land reformers invented the snappy slogan, “Vote Yourself A Farm!,” encourage local movements like the New York state Anti-Renters, and developed blueprints for neo-Jeffersonian townships to be built out West—the building blocks of free and independent labor.

Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), pp. 720-21.

According to Wilentz, why might laborers be attracted to a utopian community during the Antebellum period?

Document B

Fourierism [the ideology of building a utopian community called a phalanx] was itself a highly respectable, doctrine, not at all revolutionary, but rather a back-fire for revolution. It was a conservative attempt to avoid, on the one hand, the destructive forces of working class revolt. The socialism of [New York Tribune editor] Greeley was simply “the faith that the laws and usages regulated the social relations of mankind may be so modified as to enlarge the opportunities and improve the circumstances of the classes now relatively destitute and suffering.

Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker: 1840-1860 (Boston and New York, 1924), 167.

According to Ware, why would a major newspaper editor be interested in promoting utopian communities?

Document C

Drawing on the response of lower orders to “hard times” in the Panic of 1837, small cooperatives spread across New England but concentrated in New Hampshire and especially Vermont. Horace Seaver, the veteran Worky and freethinker, published a new exchange with [Ohio utopian socialist Josiah] Warren on the importance of cooperation as a practical step toward socialism. By summer 1844, the Fall River Mechanic took up the call-in-earnest, shortly joined by Lynn cordwainers and others. In Boston, John G. Kaulback and other Fourierists organized the first “Protective Union,” a cooperative store to introduce and demonstrate socialist concepts to a broader, more working-class audience. In January 1845, the New England Fourier Society adopted what Warren B. Chase called “that simple, safe, and practicable system of combination among consumers and merchandise.” Within a few years, these regionally federated cooperatives spread across most of the north.

Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Champlain, U of IL. Press, 2005), 31

According to Lause, did those who sought to create utopian communities limit themselves to building those communities? How did many utopians seek to teach broader publics about the virtues of socialism?

Document D

People from the East who had migrated to the opening frontier in order to find a new beginning were joined by individuals impacted by a religious excitement known as the Second Great Awakening, the fervent revival that swept western New York in the 1820s. Religion was a major factor in how utopian community members self-selected their roles.

Yaacov Oved thought that one important common element was what he called “volunteerism.” Members joined their chosen community without compulsion because of their deeply held religious or ideological convictions. For some, of course, their commitment was not as strong as others, the core members. Nevertheless, most people who joined a utopian community were committed to holding property in common, to selfless living for the benefit of the community, and to developing new roles for women, and different ways to treat children.

Not all utopian communities were tied together into religion—some were secular. The former were millennial communities and bonded together in the belief that they must do so quickly in order to prepare for the Second Coming. Spiritual cohesion took priority over economic considerations, although members did not adopt communal property. Their leaders claimed a rare charisma in that they were able to inspirational contact with God. The members’ devotional attitude toward the leaders was crucial for the utopia’s growth at least, if not for its survival. In the cases of some utopias, when the leader died, community bonds atrophied and the community also declined or even dissolved.

Secular utopias differed from their religious counterparts in a number of important ways. The catalyst was, rather, the evil of capitalism and the need to respond communally to ameliorate this malignancy in everyday life. They held out in Horace Greeley’s terms, a fellowship of compassionate members Where there were “no paupers and no surplus labor…[no] inefficiency in production or waste in consumption.” The promise was not salvation but the alleviation of financial or social distress. The utopia guaranteed the elimination of dehumanizing conditions of factory work and at the same time provided security, fraternity, a better education, and moral improvement through communal living.

Robert P. Sutton, Heartland Utopias (Northern Illinois U. Press, Dekalb, 2009), p.4.

According to Sutton, what are the major differences between religious and secular utopian communities?

Document E

We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.

Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, 1840

What does Emerson imply with the phrase “a little wild”?

Document F

Unlike Shaker communities, some Owenite groups, and the “no property” community that would be formed at Skaneateles, New York, by the abolitionist Joh A. Collins in 1843, Northampton was not based on common property. Like Brook Farm, Hopedale, and the Fourierist communities, it would be owned by shareholders who were not required to relinquish their own property beyond the amount of their investment. Yet unlike some Fourierist groups, Northampton was organized to ensure that control was retained by its members, not by outsiders. Only residents could vote in its deliberations. In addition, there would be a formal division between the Stock Company, consisting of resident members who were stockholders, which would exercise financial control, the Industrial Community, consisting of all resident members, stockholders or not, which would run day-to-day operations. The two bodies would overlap, but the power of the stockholders would be curbed by the general membership. Provisions for dividing earnings were also intended to equalize the rights members and stockholders. Though they differed in some respects, the Northampton community’s initial arrangements put it broadly in line with other contemporary joint-stock communities; they were a variant of a common type of “blueprint” for harmony and equality.

The principles set out in the Preliminary Circular were also based on other community theories. The document developed three lines of argument. First, radical social change was necessary to overcome social ills: “when existing conditions are found inadequate to promote the further progress of society,” communitarian groups could lead the way to fulfill God’s designs for society, and bring about equality and cooperation. Second, human beings should be brought into harmony with one another and with nature, to promote “progressive culture and the high development of all of the powers and faculties of our nature.” Communities would do this by combining work, domestic life, and education, to make a “union of spiritual, intellectual, and practical attainments.” Third, life in community would be superior to the “separate and conflicting action” of existing society, where social ranks, based on “invidious distinctions,” divided “culture, skill, and labor” from one another, separating intellect from action and making it barren, dividing labor from “speculative pursuits” and turning it into degrading drudgery. Work, freed from these restraints by new social arrangements, would become a source of “health, education, and happiness.”

Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (Ithaca and London, 1995), 58-59

According to Clark, did the first members of the Northampton community aspire to create a socialist or a capitalist community? Explain your response. 

Document G

Our objects, as you know, are to insure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker, as far as possible, in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom, by providing all with labor, adapted to their tastes and talents and securing them to the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services, by opening up the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.

George Ripley to Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in, Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge and London, 2004), P. 34.

According to Ripley, the founder of the utopian community of Brook Farm, how are class divisions to be eliminated in his proposed community? 

Document H

Each village itself was made up of several “families” that were overseen by two elders and eldresses. By the time Meacham died [Shaker elder] these families had become the basic unit of Shaker life. As the population of the village expanded, it would be subdivided into separate families, with no one family exceeding a hundred Shakers. Each family functioned as an independent economic unit. Its members ate together, ran their own businesses, kept common accounts, and received discipline from the same small group of elders. For the average Shaker, these “family elders” were the most relevant sources of daily authority.

At each of these four levels of authority—family, village, bishopric, and Lead Ministry—power was divided equally between men and women. At no level, except sometimes at the very top, was a single individual in charge. Elders and eldresses enjoyed certain privileges, but all Shakers lived in the same spare, dormitory-style rooms and ate the same simple (usually vegetarian) food. And everyone worked.

Limiting these families to one hundred members allowed for a group that was large enough to be financially self-sustaining—they could raise most of their food, operate several light industries, and reap substantial economies of scale—but small enough to foster social cohesion, mutual accountability, and spiritual intimacy. In a group of one hundred, everybody knows one another. It is easy to spot a shirker.

At a time when state governments provided almost no services, life within “gospel order” offered a rare social safety net. Despite the hysterical protests of anti-Shaker activists, poor and unwed women frequently brought their infants to be raised by the Shakers. Countless orphans were fed, educated, and raised into adulthood within the Society. The guarantee of three squares and a warm bed also attracted many adults with dubious faith in the doctrine of Christ’s Second Appearing Within Zion, these lukewarm believers were known derisively as “winter Shakers” or “bread and butter Shakers.”

Chris Jennings, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (New York, 2016), pp. 62-66.  

How did the Shakers live a life of radical equality? How were they able to survive economically? What did they have to give and give up to do so?

Document I

The Democrats had been pushing for a more competitive economy, but [Parke] Godwin [a supporter of Fourierist communities] now argued that laissez faire was the problem, not the solution. If the relatively open New World economy has evolved toward inequality and oppression, removing all remaining restrictions would “make the rich richer and the poor poorer” and entrench the same financial and industrial elite that the Jacksonians had been battling for a decade. By mid-1843 Godwin became convinced that instead of competitive capitalism, Americans needed an entirely new social polity. Since inequality was “organic,” social relations had to be restructured. In a series of popular tracts he began to elaborate Fourier’s critique of competition and advocate the phalanx as the totalistic solution to America’s problems.

Endorsing Fourierism meant that Godwin repudiated the Democrats’ laisse faire program, but it also transformed the meaning of Democratic ideals. His Fourierism infused “equal rights” and liberty with an ethic of mutual responsibility, so that equal treatment metamorphosed into entitlement, and freedom into participation. By designing a society ‘in which the least individual shall have his rights acknowledged, and the means and opportunities for the fullest expansion of his faculties guaranteed,” the phalanx [Fourierist community] promised a new and “true” Democracy. In a proliferation of cooperative Fourierist “townships” Godwin envisioned decentralized democracy evolving into an updated, ideal version of a New England village.

Hard times drove many northerners to Association [Fourierist communities] as a practical way to pool their resources and find employment and security. Especially in the early 1840s, workers rushed to join phalanxes or in some cases to organize them.

The depression’s impact on trades helps account for the many urban craftsmen—especially carpenters—from Albany, Boston, Providence, and New York City who joined Brook Farm and the North American Phalanx. Carpenters and masons entering the Wisconsin Phalanx were also reacting to the slowdown in building activity along the Great Lakes after the western land boom collapsed.

West of the Appalachians the Fourierist communities enlisted large numbers of farmers, many of them recent immigrants from New England’s declining agriculture. More than two-thirds of the residents of Sodus Bay Phalanx in western New York were country dwellers. In Pennsylvania, neighboring farmers simply pooled their land to form phalanx domain. Fourierist farmers in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin took a different route, turning their land over to the community for resale and exchanging cattle and farm equipment for phalanx shares.

Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth Century America (Ithaca and London, 1991), pp. 42-43; 66-67.

How did Parke Godwin’s utopian vision challenge the Democratic party’s ideology in the 1840’s? What kinds of workers were attracted to Fourierist phalanxes? Why did these workers join utopian communities?

Part III

Analyzing the evidence

Create a horizontal spreadsheet or chart. Across the top create the following categories: Religion, Political, Social, Cultural, Economic. Using the evidence from above, categorize the reasons for joining utopian communities in the above categories. (attach chart)

Using your chart, answer the following questions:

1)Was there evidence that did not fit into any of the five categories above? What evidence? Could you create a new category(ies)?

2)In your view, what was the most significant reason why many joined Utopian communities during the antebellum period? Why? Be specific. Second most important? Third most important?

Part IV

Write a short essay below agreeing or disagreeing with the following statement using the evidence above: The most compelling explanation of the attempt to join and build utopian communities in the United States during the antebellum period is that the popularity of these communities was a direct response to the economic depression that lasted from 1837-1844.

Part V

Confirming your thesis with primary evidence. You will examine a primary source, the Primitive Expounder, a Unitarian-Universalist newspaper originally published in Ann, Arbor Michigan before moving to a utopian community just outside of present day Kalamazoo, Michigan. This community was called Alphadelphia. 

Use your digital device to click on this link: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044054765839;view=1up;seq=31

Scroll down to page 19 and read the article, “Fourier Associations—No. 1”

Read this article and answer the following questions:

1)What is meant by “causing men to look upon others as their lawful prey”?

2)How will potential members benefit from joining a Fourierist Association?

3)In what ways does the proposed Fourierist Association attempt to create a moral community? A religious community?

Scroll down to page 36 and read the article, “Fourier Associations—No. 2”

Read this article and answer the following questions:

  1. Describe three objections to the practicality of establishing a Fourierist Association?

2) How does the author of this article attempt to convince doubters that the objections above can be overcome?

3) You are a reader of the Primitive Expounder in 1843. You are considering investing and joining a Fourierist community near Kalamazoo, Michigan. List at least five questions that you would like answered at an organizational meeting.

Scroll down to page 59 and read the article, “Fourier Associations—No.3”

Read this article and answer the following questions:

  1. How will property be divided in the proposed Fourierist community? How have other communities like the Rappites and Zoarites divided their property?

2) Can one withdraw from this community and recover his/her investment?

3) Would you consider joining such a community if you were (explain why or why not):

A widow with children

An unemployed carpenter

A farmer

A teacher

4) Based on what you have learned about one “pitch” to form a Utopian community, would you change your analysis in part IV? Why, why not? Explain in depth.

Paul Horton is History Instructor at University High School, The University of Chicago Laboratory School.

Featured image: painting of the New Harmony Church by Karl Bodmer, 1832.

Author

Anthony Cody

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