ONEIDA

Kingdom Come

The sin-system, the marriage-system, the work-system, and the death-system, are all one, and must be abolished together. Holiness, free love, association in labor, and immortality, constitute the chain of redemption, and must come together in their true order.

—JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES

Burned

On the evening of April 5, 1815, people on the Indonesian island of Sumatra heard the faint, rumbling sounds of a distant naval skirmish. To the east, on the island of Sulawesi, the noise was more distinct. British soldiers stationed there could make out the low, intermittent crack of cannon fire interspersed with the stuttering report of small arms. Assuming that a merchant ship was under attack by pirates, British officials dispatched the Benares, an armed cruiser operated by the East India Company, to find and engage the enemy.

For three days, the crew of the Benares sailed from harbor to harbor looking for the pirates. Failing to find any sign of a battle, they returned to port. Two days later, the clamor resumed, louder and more frequent. Within the heavy walls of the British fort, plates and cups rattled.

The next morning, the sky went black. “By noon complete darkness covered the face of the day,” wrote Thomas Stamford Raffles, captain of the Benares. “I never saw anything to equal it in the darkest night.”

There had not been any skirmish. The noise came from the island of Sumbawa, a full sixteen hundred miles from Sumatra, where Mount Tambora was erupting.*¹ Despite the volcano’s remote location, more than ten thousand people were killed by its eruption and the tsunami it caused. Twenty-four cubic miles of debris were launched into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun for hundreds of miles. The cloud of sulfurous ash spread, dimming the sun over most of the Northern Hemisphere. Byron commemorated the cataclysm with the poem “Darkness” (1816): “I had a dream, which was not all a dream. / The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; / Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.”

—

In New England, where the founding Brook Farmers were still in short pants, a mysterious red haze hung in the air all summer. The next year, 1816, was freezing. The press called it “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death” and “the Year Without Summer.” In early June, six inches of snow fell on northern New England, killing tender young crops. Farmers worked through the night to replant. When more snow fell in July and August, the second planting was wiped out. In some parts of northern New England, there were twelve consecutive months of ice and snow. Freshly shorn sheep froze to death standing up in the fields.

In Europe, the cold weather caused food shortages, famines, and riots. In the United States, the farmers of New England’s hill-country villages were the hardest hit. Even without Tambora’s eruption, the first quarter of the nineteenth century was a trial for the region. In 1811, powerful floods washed away mills and drowned cattle. In 1812 and 1813, “spotted fever” (meningitis) felled 3 percent of Vermonters. In 1826, a plague of grasshoppers devoured harvests. During “the Year Without Summer,” when corn would not grow, some farmers starved. Countless others were ruined.

The victims of these disasters were the children of the Great Awakening—the descendants of the Puritans. They saw the hand of God in everything. To them, this punishing concatenation of natural disasters seemed like divine judgment. Worn down, farmers from the scrabbly, overfarmed uplands of western New England pulled up stakes. Like dust bowl Okies pouring into California’s verdant Central Valley, an exodus of poor Yankees moved west across the Hudson River, toward the deep, alluvial topsoil of New York’s broad, green western valleys. Entire New England villages were packed up, carried west, and reassembled in western New York. Beset by famine, floods, locusts, and pestilence, these God-fearing refugees arrived in their promised land with an apocalyptic cast of mind.

—

At first, western New York did seem like a land of honey and milk. The Erie Canal, begun in 1817 and completed in October 1825, painted a wide stripe of prosperity all the way across the state. By linking the Great Lakes to the Hudson, the canal connected the frontier to the port of New York City and the world. On the morning of its opening, cannons were arrayed at intervals along the canal’s route and down the Hudson to New York City. Starting in the west, a triumphant booming signal dominoed its way from Lake Erie to the Atlantic coast and back in three hours and twenty minutes. In the decade before the telegraph, it was a thrilling conquest over time and space.

The canal shortened the time it took to cross New York from a matter of weeks to a matter of days. The cost of transporting freight from the frontier to the coast was cut dramatically. The man-made river carried more than twice as much cargo as the Mississippi. Barges laden with Manchester calico, Chinese china, machine parts, and European immigrants traveled west, passing eastbound boats riding low with lumber, salt, and flour.

Although the canal transformed the national economy, its strongest impact was on the section of New York through which it passed. Along with the jobs created by the work of digging and paving the waterway, countless factories sprang up along the canal’s route. Towns such as Utica, Buffalo, and Rochester boomed.*²

The social and economic changes taking place along the canal route were an amped-up version of what was happening throughout the Republic. The Yankees in western New York came from small communities of subsistence agriculture. In their old life, the life of their parents and grandparents, family members worked side by side on a single plot of land. They raised a few animals, worked a patch of corn, spun their own woolens, milled their own grain, and made their own shoes and soap. There was little distinction between working hours and nonworking hours. Folding money, when they had any, was for a new kettle, a bottle of patent medicine, a Bible. Life was almost entirely dependent on one’s land, labor, and the weather. Ideas, other than those about sin and rain, were scarce.

Things were different in the canal zone. Work and life began to separate. Men went to earn wages on large farms or in small factories. Women stayed home, raising children, keeping house, and taking in piecework. Grown sons (and to a lesser extent grown daughters) traveled away from home to find work. The entire country was shifting rapidly from a rural agricultural economy to an urban industrial economy. In western New York, that transformation seemed to be happening overnight.

The manufactories that sprang up along the canal required capital to buy large machines. Cash-cropping farmers needed loans to buy huge tracts of land. Investors in lower Manhattan paid hard cash for wheat that had not even germinated. Working people in remote places were suddenly entangled in financial markets as far off as London. The canal showed the world a man-made river. Now something called the national economy entered the lives of ordinary people like a man-made version of the weather: a vast, unpredictable force with limitless power over daily life.

The Panic of 1837 derailed western and central New York’s vigorous economy. When the inflated price for commodities plummeted, the region slipped into a depression. The sudden downturn was as mysterious as the red haze caused by Tambora’s eruption. As the historian Michael Barkun wrote, this rapid transition from natural disaster to man-made calamity gave the citizens of western New York “a special receptivity to millenarian and utopian appeals.” The new world demanded new ways of living.

In a place increasingly in the thrall of money and material progress, an alternate set of aspirations blossomed. During the late 1820s and early 1830s, hundreds of thousands of Americans converted to new evangelical denominations in a nationwide paroxysm of faith that came to be known as the Second Great Awakening. The excitement that had carried the Shaker gospel over the Alleghenies at the turn of the century had come east.*³ And once again, talk of the millennium was front and center.

Lay preachers saw “signs of the times” everywhere. They parsed each weird line of that ancient monster parade known as the book of Revelation and watched for clues in the weather, the Vatican, the Congress, even in the distant power struggles of the Ottoman Empire. This sort of horizon gazing was especially common in the newly settled counties of western New York, a place where ideas moved fast and the world seemed to be transforming on a daily basis. The historian Whitney Cross called the canal a “psychic highway.”

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The new religious excitement spilled out of traditional churches, spawning small denominations by the dozen. Circuit-riding evangelists blanketed upper New York. At rollicking tent meetings, they summoned souls to Christ, telling Americans that salvation was in their hands. Western New York was so crowded with revivals that Charles Grandison Finney, the signal voice of the Second Awakening, dubbed it “the Burned-over District”—a place where the smell of brimstone seemed to hang in the air and scant fuel (sinners) remained to feed the revivalist blaze.*⁴ In 1830 alone, more than one hundred thousand western and central New Yorkers were “born again” into the new millenarian churches.

Spiritual and social innovation were fully intertwined. The future-facing citizens of the Burned-over District were at the vanguard of almost every nineteenth-century reform movement. The region was ground zero for abolitionism, feminism, the temperance movement, anti-Masonry, Shakerism, and a wide array of utopian communalist schemes. During the 1840s, the region was home to the country’s highest concentration of Fourierist phalanxes. At least ten were planned; seven were actually built.

Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, whose family moved from Vermont to Ontario County during “the Year Without Summer” as part of the Yankee diaspora, became the most successful of the region’s many revelators. He described the district as a place of “unusual excitement on the subject of religion…an extraordinary scene…a strife of words and a contest about opinions.”

In 1843, on the eve of Fourierism’s tidal surge into western New York, people in the region were enthralled by the apocalyptic calculations of an unassuming local farmer named William Miller. Miller, a veteran of the War of 1812, had no formal theological training, but in 1831 he read the book of Daniel and, using a variety of ancient calendars, calculated that Christ was scheduled to return to the earth sometime between March 1843 and March 1844.*⁵ Miller’s announcement of the imminent Second Advent struck a chord in a time and place where many people expected the end of history to arrive at any minute. To spread the word of the coming rapture, the “Millerites” held large revivals and printed illustrated posters outlining their apocalyptic math.

When Jesus failed to show during his allotted time, one of Miller’s followers recalculated using a different, older Hebraic calendar, granting the Son of Man an extension until October 22, 1844. On that day, as many as fifty thousand Americans gathered outside to be beamed heavenward. Many of them had sold their homes and left their fall crops to rot in the field. Some had sent money to the federal government, paying off previously dodged taxes. When nothing happened, the press gleefully chronicled the “Great Disappointment,” reporting erroneously that the believers had donned white “ascension robes” to meet their Maker.

Primed for heaven, thousands of Millerites were set adrift. One group sent word to New Lebanon requesting a Shaker mission. They formed a substantial harvest for the western New York villages. Others filed into the phalanxes that were just then springing up around Rochester. A few started their own small communes. The largest and most lasting spin-off of Miller’s movement was the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whose members still claim that October 1844 was a pivotal moment in the unfolding saga of the end times.

A widely distributed poster depicting William Miller’s calculations concerning the end of days.

Future Perfect

Three years after the Great Disappointment, a fresh millenarian excitement arrived in the heart of the Burned-over District. At the very center of New York State, twelve miles south of the Erie Canal, John Humphrey Noyes, a man whose thinking about the end of history developed partly in opposition to Millerism, established the Oneida Community, the most remarkable utopian experiment in American history. At the community’s peak, three hundred Oneida “Perfectionists” lived an intensely intimate, intellectual existence in a rambling, Italianate mansion. They saw their community as an earthly branch of the Kingdom of Heaven, a sort of portal through which the millennium would come to earth. Under the influence of their utopian forebears, the Perfectionists renounced private property, raised their children collectively, embraced gender equality, perfected a novel form of birth control, experimented with every health fad of their day, pursued rigorous self-improvement, practiced a complex system of free love, and initiated an unprecedented experiment in eugenics.

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Even more than Robert Owen’s New Harmony or Étienne Cabet’s Icaria, Oneida is the story of one man’s evolving vision of the perfect society. John Humphrey Noyes was born in Vermont in 1811. His father’s side of the family had been in New England since 1634, when they made the crossing from England. John Noyes, Sr., studied and then taught at Dartmouth before moving to Brattleboro. There, he married Polly Hayes, the tall, red-haired daughter of a tavern keeper from a prominent Vermont family. When their neighbors began migrating west across the Hudson, the prosperous Noyes clan stayed in Vermont, settling in the Green Mountain village of Putney. John Sr. was elected to Congress and, in 1877, while Polly Hayes’s son was running his radical experiment in upstate New York, her nephew Rutherford moved into the White House.

Much of the energy of the Second Great Awakening came from women. In many of the new evangelical churches, they outnumbered men two to one. Polly Noyes was among them. In 1831, she dragged her skeptical eldest son to a four-day revival in Putney. John Jr. was twenty, a gangly, gray-eyed, ginger-haired young man. Fresh from Dartmouth, he was apprenticing at the law firm of his brother-in-law. With a head full of Byron, common law, and intellectual swagger, he went to the revival for the same reason that many people go to church—to please his mother. He wore bell-bottom pantaloons, fancy square-toed boots, and a fashionable pyramid-shaped hat.

For two days, Noyes regarded the hysterics around him with smug undergraduate detachment. On the third day, a strange calm came over him. That night he couldn’t sleep. Soaked with sweat, he lit a lamp and reached for the Bible. The familiar sentences of the New Testament seemed to glow on the page, lambent with urgency. On the fourth and final day of the Putney revival, John Humphrey Noyes pledged his life to the Word. “Hitherto, the world,” he wrote in his diary, “henceforth, God!”

His instincts were still academic. His first move was to take up Hebrew grammar. Within a month he was enrolled at the prestigious Andover Theological Seminary. It was a bad fit. With the restless zeal of a fresh-saved convert, Noyes disdained Andover’s staid, orthodox Congregationalism and the faculty’s attachment to Calvinist dogma.

Calvinism was the shipboard religion on the Mayflower. It was the founding American faith. Two of its central pillars are the conviction that humankind is irrevocably tainted by sin and that salvation and damnation are fixed, predestined. During the American expansion into the West, the belief that any freeborn (white, male) American could forge his own destiny was rapidly becoming the central myth of the Republic. This sense of possibility was at odds with the deterministic Calvinist account of salvation.

The revivalists of the Second Great Awakening offered a message that was better suited to the willful American citizenry. The whole purpose of a revival is to save unsaved souls. It is logically incompatible with the dogma of predestination. Under the new teaching, American sinners no longer dangled helpless above the fiery pit. The levers of salvation were in their hands.

Noyes was an enthusiastic exegete, but he loathed the detached “professional” spirit of Andover’s young churchmen in training. While his peers quibbled over hermeneutic minutiae, he buzzed with the kinetic intensity of the Putney revival. “My heart was fixed on the millennium,” he wrote, “and I resolved to live or die for it.”

After a year, he transferred to the comparatively progressive program at Yale, where the faculty were not so uniformly arrayed against the new Awakening. Noyes threw himself into his studies with renewed intensity. He also helped found an abolitionist group and preached in one of the city’s black “free churches.”

As he studied, Noyes found himself drawn to the ancient Christian doctrine of Perfectionism. In orthodox Christian theology, moral corruption is understood as the essential human condition. No human has been “perfect” (without sin) since Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Perfectionists, by contrast, believe that a living Christian can be wholly freed from sin in this life and thus significantly closer to God. Some Perfectionists go so far as to claim that being a Christian requires total salvation from sin. The debate is as old as scripture. Matthew (5:48) says: “Be ye perfect.” John (1:8) says: “If we claim to be without sin…the truth is not in us.”*⁶ For a Perfectionist, being saved is to undergo a distinct transformation in the eyes of God. Some Perfectionists believe that this transformation exempts the perfected from the moral regulations that govern the unredeemed. Within the crowded spiritual marketplace of the Second Great Awakening, several strains of Perfectionism had begun to gather converts. The various groups were identified by their headquarters. There was “New Haven Perfectionism,” “Oberlin Perfectionism” (a less extreme position associated with Charles Grandison Finney), “New York Perfectionism,” and, eventually, “Oneida Perfectionism.”

This rise in Perfectionist theology paralleled a broader intellectual reorientation. Beyond the canvas big tops of the revivalists, a secular interest in social and individual “perfection” flourished.*⁷ Secular perfectionism, which provides the groundwork for utopianism, is the belief that progress—in matters scientific, artistic, moral, economic, medical, social—has no upper limit and that the world is approaching some ideal state.*⁸ It is impossible to fully unbraid the sacred and the secular threads of American perfectionism. They inform each other and stem from the same general sense about how the world works. Within the person of John Humphrey Noyes, they were wholly inseparable.

All of the nineteenth-century communal utopians spoke in the language of perfectionism. For the Shakers, perfection was a matter of melding individuals into a unified “body of believers” and keeping the imperfections of the World out. Their fastidious stone walls were a rampart against the fleshpots of Babylon. Robert Owen claimed that his hyperrational scheme was a mechanism of “endless progressive improvement, physical, intellectual, and moral, and of happiness, without the possibility of retrogression or assignable limit.” Fourier wrote that under his scheme, humans “will be elevated to perfection of body and mind.” Cabet felt much the same. “Man,” he wrote, “is evidently perfectible through experience and education.”

While most religious Perfectionists spoke of man’s perfectibility as a private spiritual enterprise, the communal utopians regarded perfection, including perfection of the soul, as an inherently collective project. Fourier claimed that the passions he identified will produce harmony when they are expressed in a crowd, whereas in solitude, human nature will “entice us only to evil.” A Shaker theologian wrote that the individual who seeks transcendence alone is like a foot separated from a body.

Sin No More

On a freezing Thursday evening in late February 1834, John Humphrey Noyes left the apartment he shared with his younger brother Horatio and hurried across New Haven toward the Orange Street Chapel, where he was scheduled to deliver a sermon. Noyes, then in his second year at Yale, was convinced that the Bible promised the possibility of total, sinless salvation. What he did not yet understand was how such salvation might be attained. Desperate for an epiphany on a par with his conversion in Putney, he had been up for nights poring over the Bible. Vanquishing sin could not simply be a matter of restraint or flawless behavior. Even sinful thoughts are an offense to God, and nobody can prevent the mind from wandering. He concluded that spiritual perfection must be more than rule following; it must be a mystical state, a purifying brush with the divine. Something that happens to you.

Stepping into the warmth of the chapel, Noyes removed his overcoat and then sat at a desk facing the congregation. The sparse assembly looked back in silence at their young volunteer minister. Reading calmly from prepared notes, Noyes gave a simple, perplexing sermon: “He that committeth sin is of the devil.” Having offered this single line from the book of John, Noyes then insisted on its literal meaning: If you sin at all, you are not a Christian. He stood, pulled on his coat, and walked back into the cold.

Lying in his bed that night, Noyes received the purification he had been craving. “Three times in quick succession a stream of eternal love gushed through my heart, and rolled back again to its source. Joy unspeakable and full of glory filled my soul. All fear and doubt and condemnation passed away. I knew that my heart was clean, and that the Father and the Son had come and made it their abode.” He was perfect. Like Ann Lee, who understood her jailhouse vision of Eden as the dawn of a new dispensation for all of humanity, Noyes interpreted his private epiphany as a cosmic event, a decisive step toward the millennium.*⁹

The next morning, one of Noyes’s classmates showed up at his apartment. He had heard the Orange Street sermon and wanted to know what Noyes meant by his claim that anyone who sins is of the devil. Humanity is defined by sin; God loves us despite our corruption. To preach that a Christian cannot sin would be to “unchurch” oneself. When Noyes simply repeated what he had said the night before, the frustrated seminarian put it squarely: “Don’t you commit sin?”

Knowing that his reply would “plunge [him] into the depths of contempt,” Noyes answered firmly: “No.”

—

Word of this heresy flew across the Yale campus. Incredulous young men packed the Noyes brothers’ rooms, quizzing John on his alleged sanctity. Even for the relatively forward-thinking faculty at Yale, this was too much. They revoked Noyes’s preaching license, expelled him, and suggested that he leave New Haven. He was unfazed. “I have taken away their license to sin and they go on sinning. So, they have taken away my license to preach, I shall keep on preaching.”

Kicked out of the Congregationalist Church and unmoored from institutional Christianity at the age of twenty-three, Noyes boarded a sloop for New York City. He took a room in a boardinghouse near Canal Street and, over the next three weeks, became completely unhinged. Tormented by visions of devils and angels, he did not eat or sleep. In a spell of paranoia, he wandered lower Manhattan by night. Test-driving his newfound sanctity, he drew close to sin, tasting his first hard liquor and preaching to stoned prostitutes in the narrow alleys of Five Points. One afternoon, he became certain that he was dying. He returned to the boardinghouse, lay down in his cot, and awaited the end. When the terror passed, Noyes felt reborn—purified. Satan had tested him and he had proven himself invincible. His spiritual perfection was intact. He later recalled that those three weeks alone in New York felt like three years.

At the time, there were several centers of Perfectionism in the Northeast. Noyes visited with most of the leading members of the movement, but he did not join forces with any of them. He believed that God had singled him out as a divine instrument. He could not countenance working beneath another preacher. For a time, he and an old friend printed a paper called The Perfectionist in New Haven, but the partnership didn’t last. Noyes drifted around the Northeast, preaching his new doctrine to anyone who would listen. He was often broke. At one point he walked for three days from New York City to New Haven without eating. His willowy frame grew emaciated.

Noyes was on the move for almost three years. It was a period, he later recalled, of “vagabond, incoherent service.” He was not a particularly passionate preacher. His genius was for conversation and the written word. Like Ann Lee, Noyes possessed a weird, otherworldly charisma that, among a certain kind of seeker, inspired complete devotion. As he traveled, he accumulated a modest flock.

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Noyes returned to Putney to stay in 1836. His brother George and his sisters Harriet and Charlotte all came to regard John as their spiritual leader. Their mother held out for a while, but after months of daily sermonizing—“bullying,” she called it—Polly Noyes acknowledged her eldest son as her spiritual “father.” (The rest of the family never embraced John’s teachings, thus splitting the Noyes clan into two camps.)

When John Sr. died in 1841, Noyes and the three siblings he had converted pooled their inheritance and bought land adjoining the family farm. By then, some of Noyes’s other converts had gathered in Putney. Gradually, this small group of Perfectionists organized themselves into a loose community, which they called the Putney Bible School.

Noyes was torn between an urge to hit the road as an evangelist and the desire to build up a strong, stable congregation in Putney. This dilemma, between spreading the Word and living the Word, would never be fully resolved in him, but he settled on a compromise. He would stay with his followers in Putney and broadcast the Perfectionist gospel with a free newspaper, The Witness. Even more than most of the ink-stained reformers of his day, Noyes put great stock in the power of newsprint to change the world. The Perfectionists sometimes lived on thin potato soup, but they never skimped on ink or paper.

Noyes’s decision to remain in Putney was partly a reaction against revivalism, particularly the hyped-up mass hysteria of the Millerite movement, to which the Putney community lost a few members. Noyes wanted, he wrote, to put Perfectionism on a “permanent basis, not by preaching and stirring up excitement over a large field…but by devoting myself to the particular instruction of a few simple-minded, unpretending believers.”

By the winter of 1843, there were twenty-eight adults and nine children living on the Noyes family farm. Like the early Brook Farmers insisting that their plan had no connection to Fourierism, Noyes claimed that his ambitions were neither utopian nor socialistic. The Putney community was a prayer group and a publishing operation, not an “association.” That gradually changed. In 1846, as he later wrote, “the little church at Putney began cautiously to experiment in Communism.” The believers already studied together, farmed together, prayed together, worked together, and ate together. Now they began to hold all their property in common, too.

Like most communitarians of the nineteenth century, the Putney Perfectionists took inspiration from the social and economic arrangements of the primitive Christian Church as described in the book of Acts. Noyes believed that the first community of Jesus followers were theological Perfectionists but that their true, early Christianity had been lost at the close of the age of the apostles. Since that time, Christendom has been stuck in a long dark age that Noyes called “the Apostasy.” By imitating the spiritual communism practiced by the first Christians, Noyes intended to revive true Christianity, thus initiating the long forestalled promises of the millennium. As with all religious sects, it is impossible to draw a clear distinction between the Perfectionists’ spiritual inspirations and their workaday needs. Along with Noyes’s reading of Acts, the practical necessities of rural living probably helped spur the believers into communism.

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Noyes’s defining quality was a total refusal to acknowledge any division between theory and practice. Every idea that popped into his head was immediately transmitted into experiment. He understood his own spiritual perfection as a sudden, mystical experience—a union with that which is metaphysically perfect (God). Although that experience freed him from the taint of original sin, it did not translate into worldly infallibility. Social perfection—the building up of the millennial kingdom—would not come like a flash. It would be a process, requiring hard thinking, trial and error, and a great deal of human creativity.

Like all utopians, Noyes had little regard for the way things are usually done. He overthrew long held customs with remarkable ease. When it occurred to him that the practice of eating three hot meals a day subjected women “almost universally to the worst of slavery,” he simply stopped it. The thirty-odd members of the Putney community ate one sit-down meal in the morning and then foraged for themselves from an open pantry “as appetite or fancy may suggest.” The door to the pantry was marked with a card bearing the motto “Health, Comfort, Economy, and Woman’s Rights.” Later, when the Perfectionists had more money, they went in the opposite direction, experimenting with Fourier’s eight-meal-a-day schedule.

It was not by coincidence that the Perfectionists began forming themselves into a commune just as American Fourierism reached its zenith. The Putney community was directly inspired by Brook Farm, which collapsed the same year the Perfectionists began formally organizing themselves as a community. Although Noyes had a revivalist’s distaste for the coolheaded abstractions of Unitarian theology, he regarded George Ripley as a moral and intellectual titan. To Noyes, the continuity between what he was doing in Vermont and what the Fourierists were doing elsewhere was self-evident. The community in Putney, he wrote, “drank copiously of the spirit of [Brook Farm’s] Harbinger and of the socialists.”

For their part, the leading Fourierists regarded the Perfectionists as sincere, if slightly addled, comrades. In the winter of 1846, two Brook Farmers visited the community in Putney to lecture on Fourierism. After returning home, they reported in The Harbinger that the Perfectionists were “well-meaning people, ardently longing for a divine order of society,” but that their fixation on spiritual matters kept them from appreciating “sufficiently the influence of social institutions.” Not surprisingly, the Brook Farmers suggested that the Putney communists would benefit from reading more Fourier.

In his own paper, Noyes responded to this assessment by saying that his community certainly admired Fourier, but only as one of several influences. “On many points [Fourier’s] philosophy well agrees with our principles,” he wrote. “But we can say nearly the same of the Shakers.” Noyes believed that Fourier’s philosophy—which, like most Americans, he received via Brisbane, Dana, Ripley, and Greeley—focused too much on social arrangements while neglecting the importance of the individual. He believed that “social perfection,” which for him was synonymous with the millennium, had to commence with the cultivation of the soul, not social structures. The Fourierists, he wrote, were proceeding backward—“trying to build a chimney by beginning at the top.” Noyes called his community a “spiritual phalanx.”

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The Fourierists, Owenites, and Icarians all tapped into a pervasive belief that some sort of man-made golden age was about to commence. The Perfectionists, like the Shakers, combined this sort of general millenarian optimism with a specific story about the Second Advent and the prophesied reign of heaven on earth. Most American Christians were divided over whether Christ would return before or after the millennium.*¹⁰ Noyes offered a surprising third option: Christ had already returned and left again. Noyes believed that the Second Coming had been in AD 70, when Roman legions marched on Jerusalem to suppress a Jewish uprising and sacked the Second Temple. The notion that Christ would return just four decades after his death certainly fits with what he told his followers, at least according to the Gospels. “Verily I say unto you,” Jesus says to his brother and two other men in the Gospel of Matthew (16:28), “there be some standing here which shall not taste death till they see the Son of man coming in his Kingdom.”

For Noyes, the fact that Christ had already made his promised return did not mean that the “resurrection state” of the millennium had already begun, only that it was now possible for individuals to attain spiritual perfection and begin the work of perfecting society. The Savior had done His part of the saving. It is up to humanity to finish the job.

There is an inherent conceptual tension between Christianity and utopianism. In one sense, the dream of a man-made utopia is a Promethean blasphemy. How can anyone presume to devise a better world than the one created by a well-meaning, all-knowing, omnipotent God? Even if humans could radically improve the world, should they? The Bible says that man is destined to live in a world of sin and death until God transforms earth into a paradise. Terrestrial life is meant to be a vale of tears—a difficult qualifying round for the one true utopia: heaven. Noyes’s belief that the Second Coming had happened in the first century allowed him to slice through this theological knot. The only reason the earth is not yet a paradise is that true Christianity (Perfectionist, communist) was lost at the end of the apostolic age. Since the Putney Perfectionists were the only people who understood the true nature of redemption, it was up to them to commence building an earthly branch of the Kingdom of Heaven. Noyes further claimed that the apostolic community of the first century was still intact in a higher sphere. He believed that the fulfillment of the millennium would somehow involve bringing his community into union with those first Jesus worshippers. He felt a particularly intimate fellowship with that apostolic latecomer Paul.

What made Noyes a utopian, rather than a raving seer like William Miller, was that he combined these supernatural beliefs about the end of history with a highly practical plan for realizing his vision. By creating an entirely new type of human community—one that enacts the biblically enumerated promises of the millennium—Noyes planned to trigger the long forestalled reign of heaven on earth. (This could be called fake-it-till-you-make-it millennialism. If you act as though it is the millennium, it will become the millennium.)

To spread the new millennial order, the Perfectionists intended to use the same basic strategy employed by their utopian contemporaries. They would build a single small utopia—a seminal prototype of the coming paradise. Its example would be so appealing that others would rapidly imitate it. Eventually, the entire world would take up the new system. Presto: heaven on earth.

But first, Noyes needed to figure out precisely what life in the millennium would look like. What, as he put it, would be the “social privileges” of life in the “resurrection state”?

Marriage Supper of the Lamb

Although his name was eventually synonymous with libertine sexuality, young John Humphrey Noyes was skittish around women. As a junior at Dartmouth, he confided to his journal that he “could face a battery of cannon with less trepidation than I could a room full of ladies.” Debilitating shyness was a family tradition. Out of sheer bashfulness, all four of John Sr.’s brothers had married women already named Noyes—cousins or “kin of some degree.”

While Noyes was still in New Haven, not long after his conversion to Perfectionism, he overcame his trepidation long enough to fall in love with an intelligent, dark-eyed Free Church congregant named Abigail Merwin. She was eight years his senior. Their spiritual connection was intense, and she became Noyes’s first real convert.

Merwin’s family disapproved of her peculiar young suitor. When Noyes left New Haven to travel and preach, Abigail renounced the new faith. When he came back to visit, she refused to see him. Noyes carried a torch for Merwin for the rest of his long life. Even at the height of the Oneida Community, when he had more lovers than anyone could be bothered to count, Noyes periodically dispatched missionaries to try to coax his first love back into the fold.

One likely reason Merwin’s family drew her away from Noyes was that by the time he began calling himself a Perfectionist, that designation already had certain unseemly connotations. Perfectionists, it was widely understood, used their self-declared sanctity as a license for sexual adventure.*¹¹ To Noyes, a young man sometimes hampered to the point of paralysis by his moral scruples, such an idea was alarming.

At the start of January 1837, Noyes learned that Abigail Merwin had married another man. Reeling, he wrote a long, speculative letter to his friend and fellow Perfectionist David Harrison.

I will write all that is in my heart on one delicate subject, and you may judge for yourself whether it is expedient to show this letter to others. When the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven [that is, in the millennium] there will be no marriage. Exclusiveness, jealousy, quarreling have no place at the marriage supper of the Lamb….I call a certain woman my wife. She is yours, she is Christ’s, and in him she is the bride of all saints. She is now in the hands of a stranger, and according to my promise to her I rejoice. My claim upon her cuts directly across the marriage covenant of this world, and God knows the end.

David Harrison passed the letter on to Simon Lovett, a Massachusetts Perfectionist notorious for his role in a scandal known as “the Brimfield bundling,” in which two attractive young Perfectionist women were found in Lovett’s bed attempting to demonstrate their collective triumph over sin. Through Lovett, Noyes’s private musings on this “delicate subject” ended up, without a byline, on the front page of the Battle-axe and Weapons of War, a radical Perfectionist newsletter that advocated free love.

Noyes, who never once shied from controversy, immediately claimed authorship of the Battle-axe letter in his own newspaper, The Witness. His tentative belief that monogamy was somehow unchristian—a belief clearly helped into existence by the news that Abigail Merwin was “in the hands of a stranger”—was now public knowledge.*¹² A storm of censure rained down on the Putney believers. Many of Noyes’s followers and subscribers abandoned him. He came to interpret the inadvertent publication of his most private thoughts as a divine kick in the pants—God’s way of forcing him, long before he felt ready, “to defend and ultimately carry out the doctrine of communism in love.” At the time, he was a virgin.

Noyes reflexively buttressed every one of his ideas with scripture. To prop up the concept of “communism in love,” he cited the Gospel of Matthew (22:23–30), wherein a Sadducee (a member of a particular Jewish sect) attempts to stump Jesus with a tricky hypothetical scenario. The Sadducee asks the self-proclaimed Messiah what would happen if a woman, obeying the letter of Mosaic law, were to marry seven brothers in succession, from eldest to youngest, and each man were to die without leaving an heir. Which of the seven would be her husband in the resurrection? Jesus responds by saying that she will not be married to any of them: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.” To Noyes, the upshot of Jesus’s answer to the Sadducee was clear. In the “resurrection state,” marriage will not exist.

Amazingly, this same exact sentence was used by the Shakers to certify their prohibition on sex. Both the Shakers and the Perfectionists sought to live as though they were already “in the resurrection…as the angels of God.” The former sect could not imagine sex without marriage. So for them, no marriage equaled no sex. Noyes, on the other hand, heard nothing in Jesus’s response about sex, only a prohibition on matrimony. In the “resurrection state,” he concluded, sex will be kosher as long as it is not monogamous. This reading seemed obvious to Noyes because, like Fourier, he viewed the “exclusiveness, jealousy, [and] quarreling” intrinsic to monogamy and the “isolated” family as impediments to harmony and universal brotherhood. Such divisive, unchristian feelings could not possibly be part of God’s plan for life in the millennium. Besides, the virginal prophet reasoned, why would one of the best things in life (sex) be banned from heaven on earth? “Whoever has well studied the causes of human maladies,” Noyes wrote, “will be sure that Christ, in undertaking to restore men to Paradise and immortality, will set up his kingdom first of all in the bed-chamber and the nursery.” It is hard to imagine a better testament to the pliancy of sacred texts. The Shakers and Perfectionists looked upon the same sentence in the same translation of the same book; where one group read a commandment to abstinence, the other saw an invitation to erotic bonanza.*¹³ As William Blake put it: “Both read the Bible day and night, / But thou read’st black where I read white.”

—

The year after the Battle-axe controversy, Noyes set aside his dim view of matrimony to propose to a pious Vermonter named Harriet Holton. Holton and Noyes barely knew each other, but she had been electrified by his preaching and had periodically sent him small sums of money to keep The Witness in print. His starkly unromantic proposal addressed her as “sister” and invited Holton to be his spiritual “yoke-fellow.” He added that they could “enter into no engagements with each other which shall limit the range of our affections as they are limited in matrimonial engagements by the fashion of this world.” Apparently this sounded fine to Holton. She consented so quickly that Noyes worried that his fiancée had “imbibed the spirit of Shakerism” and expected a sexless union. She had not; she did not.

Holton’s inheritance allowed Noyes to buy a printing press and a secondhand set of type. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Albany, picking up the new equipment. When they returned to Putney, Noyes began to teach his followers how to compose articles, set type, and operate the press. “If we can raise up an army of effective writers,” he preached, “we shall ere long get ahead of the clergy.”

For several years after his marriage, Noyes continued to philosophize dryly about the virtues of nonmonogamous sexuality, but nothing, as it were, happened. Along with every one of his statements about sexual relations in the “resurrection state,” he reiterated his initial claim that established sexual mores could be breached only after the Kingdom of God was established on earth. Christ may have already come and gone, but the millennium was clearly not yet in full flower. The Second Coming had opened the possibility of spiritual perfection, but the world was not yet perfect.

These caveats did little to stop rumors. The Perfectionists living communally in Putney prized a high level of social intimacy. Within the tight-knit community, tender expressions of Christian love passed frequently between “brothers” and “sisters.” The upright citizens of Putney began to wonder what exactly was going on up at the Noyes farm.

—

George and Mary Cragin, a revivalist couple from New York City, were among the first Perfectionists to join Noyes in Putney. George was a buttoned-up Grahamite who, before his conversion to Perfectionism, had worked as an editor on the Advocate of Moral Reform, a paper that tracked signs of “moral decay” such as the rise of pornography and women working outside the home. The Advocate, which exemplified a certain strain of female-led, teetotaling, nineteenth-century reformism, singled out Noyesian Perfectionism for special abuse, calling it “a refinement of wickedness which puts papacy to the blush.” It was George’s wife, Mary, a schoolteacher with passionate religious feelings, who steered the couple toward Perfectionism. Although a surviving portrait of Mary Cragin shows a dour, large-eared woman with severely parted hair and thin lips, Noyes recalled her as being deeply sensuous. He called her a second Mary Magdalene. “Her spirit,” he wrote, “[was] exceedingly intoxicating—one that will make a man crazy.”

By 1846, Noyes had begun to wonder whether there might be a reciprocal relationship between the coming of God’s kingdom and the abolition of marriage. If free love was going to define life in the millennium, maybe free love would help trigger the millennium.

On a pleasant evening in May, Noyes and Mary Cragin took a stroll on the farm in Putney. At a “lonely place” they sat on a rock to chat. “All the circumstances invited advance in freedom,” Noyes recalled, “and yielding to the impulse upon me I took some personal liberties. The temptation to go further was tremendous. But at this point came serious thoughts. I stopped and revolved in mind as before God what to do. I said to myself, ‘I will not steal.’ After a moment we arose and went toward home. On the way we lingered. But I said, ‘No, I am going home to report what we have done.’ ”

Back at the main house, Noyes and Cragin sat down with their spouses to discuss the incident as a group. After some hesitation, Harriet Noyes and George Cragin, both of whom had already expressed a special spiritual affection for each other in letters, consented to go along with what their spouses had commenced. All four agreed to merge their two marriages into a single union. “The last part of the interview was as amicable and happy as a wedding,” Noyes recalled, “and the consequence was that we gave each other full liberty.”

The practice of what Noyes dubbed “complex marriage” soon spread, first to the Noyes siblings and their spouses and then to a few other central members of the community. They considered it a logical extension of the intense collectivism they had cultivated. They already had communism in the kitchen and the workshop. Now they had it in the bedroom. To the small circle of initiates, Noyes counseled “Bible secretiveness.” They should not lie, but they could withhold the truth.

This fledgling experiment in sexual liberty was hardly a swinging free-for-all. Only two-person heterosexual couplings were permitted. Every liaison had to have the consent of Noyes and all other relevant parties. Secrecy was strictly forbidden, as was monogamy, which the Perfectionists derisively called “special love.” The arrangement was indeed complex.

In the coming decades, as more and more people were wed into the communal marriage, the philosophical and theological underpinnings of complex marriage became more elaborate. The Perfectionists eventually came to identify sex as the holiest of human acts—simultaneously an expression of love for God, a path to transcendence, a medium of spiritual edification, and a means of dissolving the covetousness and isolation that reign in the World.

The Region of Easy Rowing

Group marriage was actually Noyes’s second erotic innovation. Like Ann Lee, who took up her “cross against the flesh” in the wake of several wrenching stillbirths, Noyes began to experiment with family planning after Harriet delivered four premature infants, all of whom died quickly. (They had one surviving child, a son named Theodore.) In 1844, two years before John’s first dalliance with Mary Cragin, he and Harriet began practicing “male continence”—sex in which the man does not climax, within or without.

The genesis of male continence goes back to New Harmony. In 1831, Robert Dale Owen, still resident at his father’s shuttered utopia, wrote an influential pamphlet titled Moral Physiology that created a scandal by distinguishing between sex for pleasure (“amative”) and sex for reproduction (“propagative”). Owen suggested that when pleasure is the main object, people ought to practice coitus interruptus (withdrawal).*¹⁴

Noyes reviewed Owen’s pamphlet approvingly in his own paper. “It is as foolish and cruel,” he believed, “to expend one’s seed on a wife merely for the sake of getting rid of it as it would be to fire a gun at one’s best friend merely for the sake of unloading it.” But unlike Robert Dale Owen, Noyes was too committed to the Bible to endorse “spilling” one’s “vital powers.” Along with coitus interruptus, this ruled out the “French method” (condoms) and masturbation, which Noyes called “the most atrocious robbery of which man can be guilty; a robbery for which God slew Onan.”

Along with Owen’s pamphlet on birth control, Noyes studied Shaker texts on abstinence. He was keen to underscore the doctrinal similarities between the seemingly opposite practices of his community and the Shakers. “The ‘system’ of Male Continence,” he insisted to a skeptical public, “has more real affinity with Shakerism than Owenism. It is based on self-control, as Shakerism is based on self-denial.”

Noyes explained the practical operation of male continence with a vivid analogy:

The situation may be compared to a stream in three conditions, viz., 1, a fall, 2, a course of rapids above the fall, and 3, still water above the rapids. The skillful boatman may choose whether he will remain in the still water, or venture more or less down the rapids, or run his boat over the fall. But there is a point on the verge of the fall where he has no control over his course; and just above that there is a point where he will have to struggle with the current in a way which will give his nerves a severe trial, even though he may escape the fall. If he is willing to learn, experience will teach him the wisdom of confining his excursions to the region of easy rowing, unless he has an object in view that is worth the cost of going over the falls.

Having uncoupled pleasure from procreation, the Perfectionist men and women spent the next few decades collectively refining their skills in the bedroom. Lingering in “the region of easy rowing,” it turned out, greatly extended sex. While the Perfectionist men diligently avoided “the propagative crisis,” the women of the community reportedly enjoyed satisfying orgasms during hour-long bouts of lovemaking. According to one woman’s recollection, the preferred sexual position within the community was with the man beside or behind the woman, so he could pleasure her with his hands. At a time when the subject of female eroticism was entirely taboo, Perfectionist women were encouraged to speak frankly about their likes and dislikes.

Trample Under Foot the Domestic and Pecuniary Fashions of the World

On the evening of June 1, 1847, Noyes announced an important shift in his thinking about how the millennium would begin. “The Kingdom of God,” he told his assembled community, “will be established here not in a formal, dramatic way, but by a process like that which brings the seasonal spring.” As human society approaches perfection, the millennium will gradually blossom. As far as Noyes was concerned, his small community in Putney had already gone a long way toward that end. “We have been able to cut our way through the isolation and selfishness in which the mass of men exist, and have attained a position in which before heaven and earth we trample under foot the domestic and pecuniary fashions of the world. Separate households, property exclusiveness have come to an end with us.” The fact that the Perfectionists had successfully overcome so much of what was wrong with the world—monogamy and private property, in particular—proved that, in a subtle way, the kingdom had already come. “Is not now the time,” Noyes asked, “for us to commence the testimony that the Kingdom of God has come?”

By then, the Perfectionists had developed the habit of voting on almost everything. After Noyes’s sermon, he asked the community to consider an unusual resolution. Therefore be it resolved: “The Kingdom of Heaven has come.” The vote in favor was unanimous. And so it came to pass that the glad millennium foretold by the Hebrew mystics was kicked off American style—by a show of hands. At the precise moment that the vote was taken, a clap of thunder shook the house. The Perfectionists took it as divine affirmation; the millennium had begun.

—

A month later, a Putney woman named Harriet Hall who had been bedridden for eight years with a mysterious ailment sent for Noyes. Hall could not walk and could barely see. The slightest movement caused her great pain. For three hours, Noyes and Mary Cragin prayed and spoke with her about salvation. Enthralled, Hall told Noyes that she would do whatever he commanded. He ordered her to sit up. She did. He told her to stand. She did. Mary Cragin raised the window shade, and for once, the daylight did not hurt Hall’s eyes. News of this miraculous cure—the most compelling of several faith healings attributed to Noyes—spread among New York and New England Perfectionists, helping secure Noyes’s position as the leading man of American Perfectionism.

In the wake of this widely reported cure, the citizens of Putney began turning against the Perfectionists. Matters were made worse when one of Noyes’s brothers-in-law attempted to convert a local fifteen-year-old named Lucinda Lamb—one of “the flowers of the village.” Lamb’s father, who originally consented to her worshipping with the Perfectionists, suddenly changed his mind. Around the same time, a local Methodist minister named Hubbard Eastman began agitating against the community. He wrote a thick volume titled Noyesism Unveiled: A History of the Sect Self-Styled Perfectionists, which identified Noyes as “a hideous monster of iniquity” and called his small community “as corrupt and shameless as THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS.”

Noyes then made a crucial misjudgment. He tried to initiate Daniel Hall, husband of the faith-healed Harriet, into the privileges of complex marriage. Disgusted, Hall rode to Brattleboro to file a complaint with the state’s attorney. A warrant was issued, and on October 26, 1847, Noyes was arrested and charged with having “carnal knowledge” of two women not his wife.

There was a preliminary hearing in the local tavern. After freely admitting to having sex with the women, Noyes was released on a $2,000 bond. Before the actual trial commenced, Larkin Mead, one of John’s non-Perfectionist brothers-in-law, learned that the state intended to prosecute Noyes and several of his male followers to the full extent of the law. Mead also heard disturbing rumors of a plan to drive the Perfectionists from Putney by force. Despite the fact that he had personally paid Noyes’s substantial bond, Mead advised his brother-in-law to jump bail and leave Vermont at once.*¹⁵ Reluctantly, Noyes conceded. Those Perfectionists who were not originally from Putney scattered, too, awaiting counsel from their fugitive prophet.

Oneida

In a shallow, secluded valley at the center of the Burned-over District, a Perfectionist couple named Jonathan and Lorinda Burt lived on a forty-acre woodlot, bounded on three sides by a wide, bell-shaped curve in Oneida Creek. The land was part of a reserve held by the Oneida tribe until 1840, when the state of New York bought it and began selling plots to white settlers. There were a few small farms near the Burts’ place, but it was wild, densely forested country. Along with three other couples, the Burts lived much as the Shakers had during the early years at Niskeyuna. They shared two farmhouses and some old Indian cabins, operated a sawmill, and gathered nightly around the flame of their Perfectionist faith.

When Burt heard that the Putney community had been scattered, he invited Noyes to come stay. Noyes, who had previously met Burt at a Perfectionist conference, visited the land and liked what he saw. Compared with the nosy, puritanical village of Putney, the wilderness of central New York—home to Shakers, Mormons, Millerites, Fourierists, and plenty of Perfectionists—was a heretic’s paradise, a Penn’s Woods for the nineteenth century.

Noyes’s abiding sense of biblical drama was aroused by the thought of leading his people into the wilderness. He sent a letter to George Cragin announcing that he had found the perfect place for their “spiritual phalanx.” “There is some romance,” he wrote, “in beginning our community in the log huts of the Indians.” Over time, Noyes wrote, they could build themselves a Perfectionist “chateau.” Having just jumped bail in Vermont, he probably noted the convenient proximity of the Canadian border.

On the evening of March 1, 1848—while the Icarian avant-garde crossed the Atlantic—the nucleus of the Putney community arrived by train at the Oneida depot. As a heavy snow fell, they traveled the three miles to their new home by sleigh. Other Perfectionists trickled in over the next few months. They pooled their money, bought the land adjacent to Burt’s property, and named their new community the Oneida Association.

Even before the Putney believers showed up, the region around Oneida Lake was a hotbed of Perfectionism. About 40 percent of the subscribers to Noyes’s Witness lived in the Burned-over District, and three-quarters of them lived within thirty miles of Oneida Lake. When these people heard that a Perfectionist community was being started, many were eager to join. A year after Noyes’s arrival, there were a hundred people living on the property. In three years, there were more than two hundred.

The people who came were mostly artisans. Among the first wave were printers, cabinetmakers, tinkers, shoemakers, coopers, bakers, and carpenters. Only a few were farmers. The majority entered the community as families or as couples in their twenties and thirties. New members may have been aware of the scandal in Putney, but most did not know about the doctrine of complex marriage. Whatever drew them to Oneida, it wasn’t libidinous curiosity.*¹⁶

Whereas many of the Owenite and Fourierist communities had been divided over secondary issues such as “Sabbath breaking” and vegetarianism, the Oneida Community was blessed from the outset with a population unified by their strong faith in Noyes’s socioreligious doctrines. While small utopias often suffocate under reams of bylaws, Noyes insisted that the proliferation of written rules—what he called “legalism”—was anathema to Perfectionism. He claimed that the descent of Christianity into “the Apostasy”—the long, dark age between the demise of the primitive church and the birth of his own community—paralleled the rise of a bureaucratic, rule-making religious establishment and the subsequent atrophy of the living inspiration.*¹⁷ He believed that written ordinances inevitably muffle the small voice of inspiration that is the only true authority.

Noyes did not have a monopoly on revelation. The Oneida colonists believed that God could speak through the community as a unified whole, that inspiration—or “afflatus,” as they called it—was often a collective experience. While Noyes generally had the final word on matters of religious doctrine, most major decisions—what type of home to build, which industries to pursue, where to dig the privy—were settled by lively, community-wide debate. Meetings were held daily, and consensus was the constant goal. As a leader, it was Noyes’s habit to appoint lieutenants (both men and women) to oversee practical matters. During the early years at Oneida, John Miller, the husband of Noyes’s sister Charlotte, did much of the daily administration of the community, freeing Noyes to think and write.

By the start of 1849, the Oneida Association owned 160 acres of woods, swamp, and pasture. They set up a shoemaking shop, a smithy, new mills, a farm, and a community store. No wages were paid. Room, board, child care, and education were considered compensation for all the labor performed. The early years were lean. The settlers cleared stone from their fields, built walls, and drained the boggy areas near the creek. Food—at first mostly coarse bread, milk, beans, and potatoes—was limited. During the first summer, dysentery swept through the community.

—

Nineteenth-century American utopianism is often understood as a long, slow conversation between, on the one hand, millenarian sects such as the Shakers and the Rappites and, on the other hand, secular utopians such as Owen, Cabet, and Fourier.*¹⁸ The religious sects—inspired by the Bible’s account of primitive Christianity and the practical demands of rural separatism—created a communal prototype that the secular visionaries blended with Enlightenment-born ideas about rational planning, gender equality, and social progress. At Oneida, where the Perfectionists studied both Fourier and the Old Testament, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction; the utopian socialists helped inspire a community devoted principally to spiritual ends.

Noyes saw a direct connection between the rise of his community and the ebb of American Fourierism. “The Oneida Community owes much to Brook Farm,” he wrote. “Look at the Dates. Brook Farm deceased in October 1847. The Oneida Community commenced in November 1847. It is a simple case of transmigration, or in the latest language, persistence of force.” Later, he called Oneida the “continuation” of Brook Farm. Noyes thought that the utopian socialists had failed for many reasons, but chief among them was their neglect of God. He wrote, “Owen, Ripley, Fourier, [and] Cabet…left God out of their tale and they came to nothing.”

The Fourierist phalanxes had mostly been organized as joint-stock corporations. The Oneida Community, like the Shaker villages and the various Icarias, opted for “communism pure and simple.” Private property was totally abolished. New members sold everything they owned—homes, land, animals—and put the proceeds into a common pot. A record was kept of what everyone contributed, and when a member left, as more than a few did, they were refunded their initial contribution, without interest. The land at Oneida, as well as the livestock, the tools, the linens, and the food, was collectively owned. Even pocket watches belonged to the commonwealth. Unlike at New Harmony and the North American Phalanx, nobody wrote down who ate what. If a woman needed a dress, one was made from the common stock of calico or bought with common cash. When a Perfectionist invented a marketable product, the profits went to the collective. Of course, the most extreme expression of this commitment to radical, all-encompassing collectivism was the sexual communism of complex marriage, in which every adult man in the community was understood to be married to every adult woman.

Brisbane and Ripley claimed that the constraints built into pure communism posed an unacceptable threat to individual liberty. In doing so, they defined freedom in the usual American sense, as the absence of external constraints, what Isaiah Berlin termed “negative liberty.” Noyes thought this conception of freedom was wrongheaded. He called it the freedom of the porcupine—the right of people to stay away from one another. As an alternative to the freedom of the porcupine, Noyes offered “the liberty of communism,” which he defined as the freedom “to approach one another and to love one another.” In a very practical sense, this “liberty of communism” also meant freedom from uncertainty, hunger, and solitude.

Like Ripley, Noyes expected his community to resolve the antithesis between individual liberty and mutual aid. He wrote: “The two great principles of human existence, solidarity on the one side, liberty on the other, are in their nature harmonious, although the forces concerned in them are apparently antagonistic, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces in nature. They are designed to act upon human life in equilibrium….The philosophy of Christ and of reason, teaches that liberty is the result of solidarity; that we are not to seek liberty directly, but to seek first solidarity, and liberty as the fruit of it.”

Noyes used the term Bible Communism to describe every aspect of his philosophy, from the abolition of private property to complex marriage. While the coupling of the words Bible and communism was less jarring before the advent of explicitly “godless” communism, there was already a measure of hostility between socialists and revivalists in the middle nineteenth century.*¹⁹ Noyes found this antipathy baffling. To him, the acquisitive, tooth-and-claw nature of capitalism was patently irreconcilable with the teachings of Jesus and the example of the primitive church. Like every generation of radical Christians, Noyes read the New Testament as a manifesto for upending the existing social order. “When the Spirit of Truth pricked three thousand men to the heart and converted them on the day of Pentecost,” he wrote, “its next effect was to resolve them into one family and introduce Communism of property. Thus the greatest of all Revivals was also the great inauguration of Socialism.”

—

Inspired by Owen’s parallelogram and Fourier’s phalanstery, the Perfectionists decided that some sort of “unitary dwelling” was essential to their plan of living as one unified family. In 1848, on a low knoll at the center of their estate, they built a wooden, hotel-sized building. Noyes personally laid much of the foundation. After considering and rejecting the terms phalanstery and communistery, they decided to call the building “the Mansion House.” It was an odd choice for a band of separatists living in the wilderness, but it perfectly fit the building and the lifestyle that the Perfectionists created for themselves over the coming decades.

Winter came before the Mansion House was finished. The entire community moved into a single room on the second floor. In the center of the space, they installed a stove and a sitting area. The rest of the room was divided into small “bedrooms” with sheets hung from ropes. For decades, the communists recalled the cozy winter they spent in “the tent room” as a halcyon age of communal harmony and intimacy. For outsiders, this months-long slumber party provided the germ for the absurd but persistent rumor that the Perfectionists all slept in a single bed.

The Mansion House was expanded over the next ten years. In 1860, the three-story building was torn down and replaced with a larger, redbrick structure, also called the Mansion House. The Perfectionists remained in a nearly constant state of demolition and construction. Like all the other utopians of the era, they realized that the shape of rooms and halls defines the shape of social relations. They rearranged their estate with such frequency that a local carpenter suggested they put their buildings on casters. This never-ending pursuit of the ideal physical domain reflected the community’s approach to pretty much everything: ceaseless refinement through trial and imagination.

By the 1870s, the Mansion House was huge—a rambling U-shaped complex with slate roofs and a grand, pillared entrance. The building, which enclosed a small grass quad, had two large towers, a cavernous auditorium, and 475 rooms. It looked (and still looks) like the ivied hub of an elite New England college. Most adults slept in their own narrow, cell-like rooms, but every floor had parlors, reading rooms, and libraries, all of which served the community’s architectural maxim that “the balance of inducement should always be toward aggregation and not separation.”*²⁰

The Mansion House.

© Oneida Community Mansion House, Inc. All rights reserved.

A Two-Legged Animal

To the surprise of the Oneida Community’s neighbors, Perfectionist women did much of the carpentry on the first Mansion House. At a time when the male and female spheres of labor were drifting apart, the Perfectionists deliberately mixed things up. Men ironed sheets in the laundry; women hammered iron in the metal shop. Noyes can hardly be counted as a feminist—he claimed nominal allegiance to Saint Paul’s chauvinist statements about man’s natural dominion over woman—but he believed that “worldly” society made too much of the innate differences between the sexes. The idealized Victorian woman was a paradoxical mix of fragility and fertility. In almost every respect, the feminine ideal at Oneida was that Victorian lady’s opposite number. She was supposed to be intellectually assertive, physically robust, sexually frank, and totally indifferent to mothering.

Noyes partly blamed fashion for exaggerating the physical differences between men and women. Women’s dress, he wrote, is “a standing lie [that] proclaims that she is not a two-legged animal but something like a churn, standing on castors!” Not long after the Perfectionists arrived in Oneida, Harriet Skinner (Noyes’s sister), Harriet Noyes, and Mary Cragin gathered to design a less churnlike costume for themselves. The result was a long-sleeved blouse and a matching knee-length skirt worn over loose “pantalets.” They called it “the uniform of a vital society.” After some snickering, all of the women in the community adopted it. This so-called short dress was soon supplemented with elastic sneakers, which, like true utopians, they called “the final shoe.” After a group of Perfectionist women were harassed at Grand Central Terminal, the community began to keep a few traditional dresses on hand for traveling.

Despite a midcentury vogue for elaborate updos, the women at Oneida cut their hair shoulder length or shorter, a style then associated with adolescent girls. While their sisters in the World routinely spent an hour arranging combs, pins, and extensions atop their heads, the women of Oneida boasted that they went directly from bed to the breakfast table. “Any fashion which requires women to devote considerable time to hair-dressing,” they announced in the community paper, “is a degradation and a nuisance.”*²¹ Having freed themselves from the tyranny of girdles, toe-binding boots, and waist-length hair, the Perfectionist women were able to participate fully in the physically active life of the community.

While the community came under constant attack for its economic and sexual communism, nothing seemed to excite as much outrage as the appearance of female Perfectionists. Among outsiders, it was stated as a matter of settled fact that the women of Oneida were ugly. The evidence given for this supposed homeliness says more about the tastes of the day than the relative good looks of the communists. Compared with the tottering, neurasthenic delicacy that was then regarded as the height of feminine beauty, the hardworking, sports-playing women of Oneida were seen as unattractively tan and hale. Uncorseted, they lacked the stiffness of carriage expected of fashionable women.

The women of Oneida claimed that their outdoorsy, teetotaling, childless existence kept them young. “We women of thirty are often mistaken for Misses [because] we are saved from so much care and vexation.” When they read about the new trend of “enameling”—a practice in which the female face was plastered with a rigid layer of putty and then painted over in red and white—they were horrified. “People sneer at our dress, and talk slightingly of our looks, but, alas! They know not what they say. We have no ‘heavers,’ nor ‘plumpers,’ nor ‘false calves,’ nor ‘rouge’; and perhaps we don’t look as well as your city belle who is puffed and padded and painted; but we are genuine from head to foot.”

—

Although the Perfectionists practiced many of the social reforms that were only being discussed elsewhere, they felt surprisingly little kinship with secular reformers, even when those reformers were their neighbors.*²² The year that the community moved to Oneida, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, and a group of progressive female Quakers met at nearby Seneca Falls for the convention that launched the crusade for women’s suffrage. While tracts by the likes of Stanton and Susan B. Anthony circulated in the Mansion House library—and Anthony actually visited the community—the communists insisted that their feminism derived from revelation and their own experimentation, not the “imported ideas” of “worldly reformers.” In the 1860s, a group of community women started an “express service” to convey visitors and packages back and forth between the mansion and the nearby train depot. The venture presented local non-Perfectionists with the jarring sight of “unattended” women in sporty dresses and childlike haircuts loading parcels, wrangling horses, and operating a prosperous enterprise. The community journal described the venture as a triumph for “women’s rights” but put the phrase—a newcomer in the national lexicon—between scare quotes, adding: “ ‘Woman’s Rights,’ is a term we always prefer to quote as borrowed; it is not indigenous in the nomenclature of the Community.”

Like almost all nineteenth-century utopians, the Perfectionists believed that the narrow, superseding loyalties engendered by marriage and the biological family were anathema to progress, particularly female liberation. Owen identified marriage as the main impediment to female equality. Fourier called it “the germ of falsity and immorality.” The Shakers, by deed if not declaration, seemed to agree. Noyes hoped that complex marriage would free women from both matrimony and motherhood, thereby revealing capacities obscured by their traditional status as chattel. Under the Oneida system, he wrote, “women are not men’s slaves, but loosened from the bondage of marriage, are set free to criticize men and express their own tastes and feelings.”

The Infantile Population

Complex marriage did away with the idea that women are the property of their husbands. Male continence freed them, for better or worse, from motherhood. The Perfectionists’ ongoing effort to prevent insemination did not reflect any sort of Malthusian scruples or religious opposition to breeding. “We are not opposed, after the Shaker fashion or even after [Robert Dale] Owen’s fashion, to the increase of the population,” Noyes wrote. “We are opposed to random procreation which is unavoidable in the marriage system.” In fact, male continence was one of the few things at Oneida that lacked an elaborate theological underpinning. The Perfectionists spoke about birth control in familiar terms. It was a matter of health, practical economy, and women’s rights. A community notice from 1858 declared that “child-bearing, when it is undertaken, should be a voluntary affair, one in which the choice of the mother, and the sympathy of all good influences should concur. Our principles accord to woman a just and righteous freedom in this particular, and however strange such an idea may seem now, the time cannot be distant when any other idea or practice will be scorned as essential barbarism.”

The community’s unusual method of birth control was surprisingly effective. Among roughly two hundred sexually busy adults, there was, on average, about one accidental pregnancy each year, a rate that compares favorably with that of modern birth control pills.*²³ Those few men who were unable to master male continence were paired with those women who were, in the poignant euphemism of the day, “past the time of life.” In 1852, the Circular boasted that “the increase of population by birth, in our forty families, for the last four years, has been considerably less than the progeny of Queen Victoria alone.”*²⁴

Until 1869, when the community began its experiment in controlled breeding, most of the children at Oneida were brought into the community when their parents converted. They were raised collectively. Infants were reared and nursed by their biological mothers until fifteen months. From then until they turned twelve, they lived in “the Children’s House,” where specially assigned nurses, teachers, and guardians looked after them. Those babies who were born in the Mansion House, either by accident or by special dispensation, were formally welcomed into the fold with a community-wide naming ceremony. Their biological parents would suggest a name, and then the entire community would approve it in “recognition of the Community sponsorship” of the child.

Parents usually maintained a close relationship with their offspring, but excessive intimacy was discouraged. The sin of demonstrating too much parental attachment was known as “philoprogenitiveness,” and it was considered “as blind a passion as ever [romantic] love was represented to be.” So-called special love, either between lovers or between a parent and a child, was thought to turn the individual away from God and community. For women, motherhood was considered an overwhelming distraction from “self-culture and the appetite for universal improvement.” Of course, many people found these prohibitions painful. Some left because of them. Others welcomed communal loving and communal parenting as a liberation and a means of advancing real gender equality.

Inside the Children’s House, young Perfectionists were actively communized. To foster the “Pentecostal spirit,” their homemade dolls, wagons, and hobbyhorses were held collectively in one room. In community publications, the children are invariably described as a “herd” or “flock.” They sang together, learned their numbers together, and went boating together at the community’s lake house. Adult Perfectionists turned out in big numbers to watch the “weekly ablution of the infantile population.”

As the community prospered, the Children’s House became increasingly deluxe. A large, steam-heated playroom was outfitted with indoor seesaws, balance beams, swings, and a miniaturized wood shop in which a group of boys attempted to build themselves a “flying machine.” During the winter, the children joined the adults in skating on the millpond or sledding on a hill that was specially graded for that purpose. They gave speeches and performances in the auditorium of the Mansion House. On one evening in 1866, for instance, the “small orchestra” performed the Overture of the Spring Whistle, consisting of “fifteen willow whistles, blown in the most violent manner by fifteen ardent little performers.” One community critic noted that, “unlike most musical artists, they soon tired of their own music, and began biting the bark off their own instruments.”

While the Perfectionists’ views on child rearing can sound refreshingly modern (lots of play, no corporal punishment), their pursuit of a perfected collectivism occasionally produced scenes of alarming fanaticism. The children conducted their own sort of self-governance. In 1851, they raised their small hands in support of a series of resolutions denouncing their homemade dolls as a medium of “the mothering spirit”: “This doll-spirit that seduces us from Community spirit in regard to helping the family and that prevents us from being in earnest to get an education is the same spirit that seduces women to allow themselves to be so taken up with their children that they have not time to attend to Christ, and get an education for heaven.” After a discussion about their “idolatrous” toys, the children voted to put their dolls to the flame. The little boys were particularly “loud in their clamors for the great massacre.” Following the vote, a group of nine- and ten-year-old girls stripped their dolls of the bloomer-style outfits they had sewn for them and, one by one, tossed the toys into the woodstove. When the burning was over, “all hands rejoiced in the condemnation.”

Well-Aired and in Rapport with the World

This so-called Doll Revolution took place around the stove of the small satellite branch that the community established in Brooklyn Heights in 1849, just a year after the inauguration of the upstate colony. John and Harriet Noyes, the Cragins, and other core members of the old Putney “family” left the Mansion House to live in two adjacent town houses on Willow Place, just across the East River from Manhattan. Noyes told his converts that the urban residence would afford him “a more quiet place for reflection, and a better opportunity to act upon the Association than a residence directly in it.”

The community in Brooklyn supported itself by manufacturing gold chain. Chain making, which could be done by men, women, and children, was an ideal occupation for the small community. “It is a business,” Noyes wrote, “that can employ all classes, and in coincidence with the coming in of the ‘golden age,’ seems an appropriate introduction of the Association, to the mechanical, manufacturing world.”

After the printing shop at Oneida burned down, the community newspaper—by then a triweekly called the Free Church Circular (later the Circular)—was moved to Brooklyn. By transferring his paper and himself to the nerve center of the American media, Noyes hoped to hasten the spread of Bible Communism.

By the early 1850s, the process that he had set in motion at Oneida—the germination and spread of the millennial social order—seemed to be gaining momentum. Along with the satellite commune in Brooklyn, a group of Perfectionists was living quietly on the old Noyes farm in Putney. A fourth, smaller group shared a house and a chain-making shop in Newark, New Jersey. In 1851, the fifth and largest satellite was established on the Quinnipiac River in Wallingford, Connecticut, near New Haven.

Once in Brooklyn, Noyes quickly established contact with the influential Associationists on the masthead of Greeley’s Tribune. George Ripley, by then resident in Flatbush, and Charles Sears, president of the NAP, came for dinner at Willow Place in July 1850. Ripley, once lean from his labors at Brook Farm, had grown portly. He and Noyes discussed the woeful state of “civilization” and the exemplary communalism of the Apostolic Church. Ripley, who was still mourning the breakup of Brook Farm, told Noyes that the community had been five hundred years ahead of its time. Noyes responded that his colony in Oneida was a thousand years before its time.

For anyone networking on behalf of utopia, the real prize was Horace Greeley. As Noyes well knew, it was the Tribune’s eccentric editor who had transformed American Fourierism from the private obsession of Albert Brisbane and a few progressive intellectuals into an influential national movement. In 1851, Noyes learned that Greeley would be attending the World’s Fair in London and figured that he should be there, too. As he told one follower, the fair would be “a Congress of all nations, and it seemed proper that the Kingdom of God should be represented.” Noyes found out which ship Greeley would be taking to Liverpool and booked himself a cabin directly beneath Greeley’s. The voyage, Noyes told his brother, would afford “a natural and favorable opportunity to get into communication with Greeley. [We] will be shut up together on shipboard for two weeks.”

The crossing was unusually stormy. Greeley, who was continuously seasick, rode out the waves in the anteroom of Noyes’s cabin. The two men discussed everything from Swedenborg to their divergent understandings of the Second Coming. Although they “crossed swords” over the merits of pure communism, Noyes was flattered to learn that Greeley was well acquainted with Bible Communism and the tenets of complex marriage. Ultimately, Noyes’s efforts to convert Greeley were useless. The great editor’s utopian enthusiasm had been badly bruised by the unraveling of the Fourierist movement. While the Tribune was more supportive of the Perfectionists than most papers, Greeley never promoted Bible Communism with any of the vigor he had spent on Fourier’s scheme.

The Oneida Community’s newfound proximity to the New York media establishment yielded useful contacts, but it also brought unwelcome attention. In January 1852, the New York Observer printed the first of several editorials denouncing the “disgusting order of united adulterers.” The paper informed its readers that the “total depravity” of the Perfectionists exceeded “the foulest days and darkest places of Roman Catholic iniquity.” Even the reviled polygamists in Utah, the Observer noted, had the decency to maintain the “distinction of husband and wife.” As usual, the girlish haircuts and sporty costumes of the female Perfectionists—“plainly the germ of bloomerism!”—raised as much alarm as the community’s “concubinage.”

Noyes did not seem to much mind this sort of thing. Except for the early days of “Bible secretiveness” in Putney, he tried to operate his community with total transparency. The Perfectionists sent as much honest information into the world as they could, even mailing a detailed account of their beliefs and practices to their congressional representative, the governor of New York, and various upstate authorities. This commitment to the free flow of information is one of the things that distinguishes Oneida from most separatist enclaves or cults. The information went in both directions. While many religious sects strive to curtail the influence of outside ideas, the Oneida communists actively kept themselves “saturated all the time with worldly influences.” The community subscribed to 140 separate publications, including The Nation, the Tribune, the Evening Post, Harper’s, and even a picture magazine or two. The long reading tables in the Mansion House library were stocked with books representing every possible viewpoint. Noyes wrote that he wanted his community to be “well-aired and in rapport with the world.”*²⁵

The World, however, wasn’t terribly interested in such an open exchange of ideas. Because moral dudgeon plus sex equals hot copy, the Observer’s campaign against the community continued and was picked up by other, lesser papers. Support for the Perfectionists came in the surprising form of Henry James, Sr., one of the richest and best-known literary men in New York. James, who was himself the occasional subject of moralizing editorials in the Observer, made two visits to Willow Place. Despite a tense exchange with Noyes—each man found the other impertinent—he took to the pages of the Tribune to defend the communists against the “flimsy zeal” of their critics. “It appears to me,” James wrote of the Observer’s crusade, “about as unmanly a sight as the sun now shines upon, to see a great prosperous newspaper…gathering together the two wings of its hebdomadal flatulence, ‘secular’ and ‘religious,’ for a doughty descent upon this starveling and harmless field-mouse!”

A Suitable Marine

At the start of the 1850s, “starveling” was only a slight overstatement of the conditions at Oneida. Along with the gold chain business in Brooklyn, the community upstate was selling flour, celery, apples, strawberries, potatoes, shoes, wheel spokes, scuffle hoes, silk thread, and rustic furniture made from twisty, unmilled wood. Despite this diverse array of ventures, the community was barely making ends meet. The Perfectionists were able to raise most of their own food, but the costs of buying land and building the Mansion House were considerable. They needed a reliable stream of income.

Although none of the Perfectionists had much experience with boats, they decided to try shipping. In February 1850, the community bought a sloop called the Rebecca Ford and began transporting limestone down the Hudson River from Kingston, New York, for resale in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Noyes had high hopes for the new business and its role in the coming of the millennium. “If Printing is the most important art as the medium for uttering truth, Navigation properly stands next in importance, as the means of transporting it. With these two arms, a competent and organized Press, and a suitable Marine, truth is furnished for the conquest of the world.”

On a bright, warm day in late July 1851, a group of six Perfectionists, including Mary Cragin and a recent convert named Eliza Allen, boarded the Rebecca Ford in Brooklyn. They sailed around the bottom of Manhattan and tacked north up the Hudson. The beautiful weather and the “mixed company” gave the voyage the feel of a pleasure cruise. When they docked at Kingston, the men loaded blocks of gray limestone into the hull. Cragin and Allen cooked and read aloud from the Bible.

When the ship was full, they started back down the river with the wind behind them. Just north of Hyde Park, Cragin called the men to eat. Francis Long, the youngest Perfectionist on board, took the tiller while the other three men went below for lunch.

While they ate, a sudden gust filled the mainsail, pushing the sloop hard over. The men ran up to the deck to help Francis Long. Mary Cragin and Eliza Allen stayed below. The Rebecca Ford lurched to the side, dislodging the limestone in the hull and pulling the ship farther over. Water rushed in through the portholes and the sloop capsized. The four men, two of whom couldn’t swim, leapt from the deck, clinging to whatever they could find. The crew of a passing schooner plucked them from the water as the Rebecca Ford sank. Cragin and Allen were still in the cabin.

On the floor of the Hudson, the ship righted itself. At low tide, the top few feet of the mast protruded above the river. When Noyes arrived the next evening, he rowed out into the river and hung a lantern from the tip of the mast to keep vigil over the drowned women. After nineteen days, the sloop was raised. Cragin and Allen were buried near Hyde Park.

The incident had a powerful effect on Noyes. Addressing the community, he called the two women martyrs for Bible Communism. “[They have] the North River for a grave, the sloop for a coffin, and their short dresses for uniforms; enough for any soldier.” In death, Mary Cragin replaced Abigail Merwin as the principal idol of Noyes’s romantic devotion. “There is no other woman I loved as I did her,” he wrote. After Cragin’s death, Noyes never again indulged in the type of “special love” that he taught his followers to reject.

—

Noyes had gone to Brooklyn i ntending to spread the Kingdom of God using the same communitarian program attempted by Owen, Fourier, and Cabet—building a prototype colony and then encouraging its replication with propaganda. After the sinking of the Rebecca Ford, with the community’s finances badly strained, Noyes shifted tack. He decided to focus his energy on perfecting Bible Communism in one location. As his son Theodore wrote, he wanted to “see and show how much God can do for man and society on a single spot.” The Oneida Community sold its property in Brooklyn and closed the satellite enclaves in Vermont and New Jersey. The scattered Perfectionists convened in Oneida and, to a lesser extent, Wallingford.

As was his tendency, Noyes interpreted his private trauma as a turning point in human history, a station along the ascent into the millennium. The Oneida Community had already defeated “the domestic and pecuniary fashions of the world.” Following the shipwreck, Noyes aimed higher. “Mrs. Cragin’s death will lead me to overcome death just as Abigail Merwin’s marriage stimulated me to break up the marriage system.”*²⁶

Where Every Dish Is Free to Every Guest

By the 1860s, with three hundred people living at Oneida and Wallingford, the Perfectionists’ struggle against “the marriage system” was going surprisingly well. While moralizing critics described the community as an “orgy” or “brothel” or “harem” or “seraglio” or “whoredom,” the Perfectionists insisted upon their own conservatism. Their erotic delight, they pointed out, came with all the usual pledges and sacrifices of the marriage bed. Any two Oneida lovers, by dint of their membership in the community, were obligated to support each other through sickness and health, to hold all of their wealth in common, and to care for any offspring born of their coupling.*²⁷

During her jailhouse vision in Manchester, Ann Lee came to believe that sex was humanity’s original sin. Noyes had a different theory. He claimed that Adam and Eve’s real offense was shame, as evidenced by their nude dash behind the shrubbery when they heard God coming.*²⁸ “In a holy community,” Noyes wrote, “there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restricted by law, than why eating or drinking should be—and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other.” Sex, as practiced within the community, was understood as a sacrament—“a more perfect symbol of [a union with Christ] than eating bread and drinking wine,” as Noyes put it. Speaking with a group of (presumably blushing) Shakers at Watervliet, Jonathan Burt called the human genitals “the highest instruments of praise and worship in the heavenly world.” The notion that loving other people is a way to express and perfect the love of God is hardly radical; the Perfectionists simply removed the distinction between agape and eros.

Noyes claimed that “making of twain one flesh” is a form of spiritual dialogue, “a medium of magnetic and spiritual interchange.” Every adult in the community was loosely ranked according to a system of “ascending” and “descending fellowship.” To hasten spiritual growth, novices were encouraged to go to bed with those who were more enlightened.*²⁹ In practice, this meant that the young or recently converted slept with older, more experienced Perfectionists. Noyes occupied the top of this pyramid of “ascending fellowship.” For years, he considered it his duty to sexually initiate many of the young women in the community.

It is tempting to interpret this one fact as the true, secret core of the entire Oneida story, to see everything else—Bible Communism, the Kingdom of God, the first-century Advent of Christ, all of it—as a dazzling sideshow to the real business of satisfying a brilliant creep with a hankering for outspoken tomboys and suppressed orgasms. The relationship between Noyes and the women of the community—their seemingly genuine attraction to him, his advanced views on female capacity, his apparent lack of interest in any form of sexual monopoly—thwarts such a simple conclusion. And at Oneida, unlike at so many other sexed-up religious enclaves, the May–December loving went both ways. “Spiritually ascendant” older women erotically baptized teenage boys. Given that the mechanics of male continence were difficult for young men to master, receiving their sexual education from postmenopausal women offered one practical benefit: there could be no risk of an unplanned pregnancy.

Once people had adequate mastery over their orgasms, they enjoyed a good deal of latitude in selecting their own lovers, provided they never showed signs of “exclusive” or “special” love.*³⁰ “The new commandment,” Noyes preached, “is that we love one another, not by pairs, as in the world, but en masse.” Since sex cultivated the spirit, sex with many partners cultivated the broadest spirituality. “Variety is, in the nature of all things, as beautiful and useful in love as in eating and drinking.” If two people seemed overly attached to each other and began to refuse other comers, they would probably face criticism. In extreme cases, one lover might be called away to work in Wallingford.

The usual procedure for initiating a tryst was for the man to make his interest known to a third party, typically an older woman. If both parties were in accord, the man would visit the woman’s room at bedtime for a “social interview.” (In the Perfectionist lexicon, “social” almost always meant sexual.) This system was meant to serve as a check against secrecy and to allow people to gracefully decline an unwanted invitation. Everyone was theoretically free to decline any lover, but in practice, the system was probably subject to the byzantine power dynamics of ascending and descending fellowship. If an attractive young person declined some influential older suitor, he or she might be criticized for excessive attention to another, younger lover.

Fourier spoke of establishing a “sexual minimum” as a form of erotic welfare for the underpleasured. The Perfectionists likewise tried to ensure that nobody’s needs were neglected. When Noyes believed that the young men of the community were overlooking certain ladies, he urged them to be “liberal and diffusive” in their attentions to the other sex. “Let us consider whether we may not do good, get good, and feel good by drawing nearer than we have to certain worthy young ladies whose charms have not yet been fully appreciated, such as L.B.R. and N.” He also reminded them not to forget about their elders. “Let us be heroes in love, and train our hearts to scale the heights above as well as to enjoy the beauties of our own level.” At one point, Noyes considered staging live sex shows for the spiritual edification of those Perfectionists who were too old or infirm to partake in complex marriage.*³¹ The idea never got off the ground.

While these arrangements seem risqué now, they were mind-boggling at the time. Contemporaneous critics could not even bring themselves to describe the system they sought to censure. One national incident, wholly unrelated to Oneida, suffices to convey the semihysterical prudery of the middle nineteenth century. The year that Noyes was converted at Putney, all but one member of President Andrew Jackson’s cabinet resigned, most of them at the insistence of their wives, in protest over the fact that John Eaton, Jackson’s friend and secretary of war, had too hastily married the recently widowed Peggy Timberlake. (There were rumors that Eaton and Timberlake conducted a romance prior to her husband’s death.) The so-called Petticoat Affair fixated the nation for months and brought the federal government to its knees.*³² The year after the scandal, Frances Trollope helped spread the notion that American housewives had taken to draping cloth skirting over the legs of their pianos to conceal the titillating sight of a high-gloss mahogany calf.

Talking Cure

The purpose of the Oneida Children’s House was to raise a generation of enlightened Bible Communists who were untainted by the old thinking and old habits of their parents. Until that generation came of age, the Perfectionists needed to build their paradise with secondhand materials—namely, themselves, ordinary people formed amid the folly of the World. Life inside the Mansion House placed those people under extraordinarily trying circumstances. What could be more volatile than a remote, crowded mansion dedicated to sexual and economic experimentation? Lesser communities have fallen apart over dirty dishes and gardening. How did the Perfectionists—several hundred men and women handicapped by the usual assortment of vices and hang-ups—thrive under such unusual social arrangements?

Part of the answer clearly lies in Noyes’s powerful charisma. There is no limit to what a compelling individual can get people to do once he or she is draped in the mantle of divine inspiration. Many people, even nonbelievers, attested to Noyes’s disarming intelligence and wide-eyed magnetism. Charisma, however, requires proximity (or some technological approximation thereof), and Noyes spent almost half of his time away from the main community. During the early years, he was often in Brooklyn. Later, he spent much of his time at the Wallingford branch, where the community had established a profitable cutlery works.

Another reason for the Perfectionists’ willingness and ability to live under such unusual conditions lies in the nature of the era. For many Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century, the shape of things to come was a question mark. Old ways were crumbling, and nobody could say with much authority what tomorrow would look like. This was especially true in central New York, where the rate of social change was accelerated by immigration, a supercharged economy, and a profusion of new faiths. The indistinct future loosened people’s commitment to the mores of their parents. Reasonable people considered ideas that would sound outrageous at other times.

While Noyes’s personality and the general uncertainty of the era contributed to the community’s success, the biggest reason the Perfectionists were able to maintain communal harmony despite such fraught circumstances was institutional: a form of weekly group therapy that they called “mutual criticism.” At Andover Theological Seminary, Noyes’s only confidants had been a group of earnest young men who called themselves “the Brethren.” Most of them were studying to be missionaries in Africa, the East Indies, and Asia. Among the disappointingly “professional” seminarians, the Brethren came closest to matching John’s revivalist fervor. In a spirit of merciless self-improvement, they periodically sat together in a circle and took turns criticizing one another. Each man would sit silently while his classmates searchingly analyzed his every flaw. At Putney, Noyes initiated a similar practice among his followers, and by the time the community relocated to Oneida, regular sessions of mutual criticism had become a central pillar of Bible Communism.

Converts found the experience uncomfortable at first. It is easy to write off the criticism of a single person, but it is nearly impossible to gainsay a chorus of twenty critics. As the Perfectionists got better at mutual criticism, most of them came to regard it as a vital catharsis and an essential means of maintaining the colony’s delicate social harmony. It functioned like a cross between confession, performance review, and psychoanalysis, but crowdsourced. The fact that everyone had a turn in the hot seat took some of the sting out of the ordeal.*³³ Praise, or “commendatory criticism,” was doled out alongside negative criticism.

In the pursuit of social and individual perfection, no foible was too picayune for the attentions of mutual criticism. One colonist was criticized for being unpoetic, another for reading too little, another for “sauciness of speech.” A man identified in the minutes only as “J” was informed that “his whole manner is sensational. He talks for effect and walks for effect, he flourishes his handkerchief for effect; takes out his letters and watch for effect.” One man was cautioned that he had “masculinity carried to excess. There is not enough woman in him.” A longwinded old Yankee was scolded for his “too frequent mentions of Vermont.” Even the smallest communists took part. A report from 1874 records that “the four-year olds have had a round of criticism, themselves acting as critics and good ones too.”

Rather than addressing some specific error that hurt the community—burning the biscuits, leaving a gate open, ejaculating—mutual criticism tended to focus on some deeper deficiency that was believed to be the true cause of the trouble. When Francis Long, the young man whose inexperience caused the Rebecca Ford to founder, returned to Oneida, he endured a blistering volley of criticism. Rather than discuss his poor performance at the tiller, the community analyzed his “perverse” resistance to kindness, which they identified as a “direct cause” of the tragedy.

In a society with bewilderingly complicated social relations and extremely high standards of conduct, regular sessions of mutual criticism allowed the Perfectionists to police such subjective and contradictory vices as laziness and excessive work, frivolity and self-seriousness. Noyes saw it as a method of governance that combined the best of all other modes. “It is Theocratic, for in recognizing the Truth as King, it recognizes God who is the source of all Truth…It is Aristocratic, in as much as the best critics have the most power. It is Democratic in as much as the privilege of criticism is distributed to all classes, and the highest attainments and skill in it are open to everyone.” Perhaps most important, the regular sessions of mutual criticism allowed the colonists to air the countless minor aggravations that will erode a cooperative colony from within if left to fester.*³⁴

Like Shaker confession, mutual criticism was used as a form of spiritual hygiene. Community members who returned after sojourning in the World were subjected to a vigorous, spirit-scrubbing round of criticism before resuming life in the Mansion House. “It is our spiritual Turkish Bath,” boasted one pamphlet. And since the Perfectionists believed in a one-to-one-to-one correlation between spiritual, psychic, and bodily health, they used the “medicine” of mutual criticism to treat many physical ailments. A communard laid up with a bad back or a sore throat could summon a committee to her bedside. Under a barrage of harsh analysis, the patient would apparently begin to sweat profusely. When the criticism-induced fever broke, the patient would supposedly emerge refreshed and healthy. “One secret of its efficacy,” the Perfectionists claimed, “is that it stops the flow of thought toward the seat of difficulty and so tends to reduce inflammation. At the same time it has a very bracing, invigorating effect.” When an epidemic of croup broke out in the Children’s House, the children were gathered in the schoolroom and instructed to tell one another their faults.

Storming Company

As a collective, spontaneous method of enforcing community norms, mutual criticism dovetailed perfectly with Noyes’s distaste for written rules (“legalism”), allowing the community to respond nimbly to their constantly evolving values and needs. It was this ability to adapt to changing circumstances—“to reduce sail and shift anchor at a moment’s notice,” as Noyes put it—that most distinguished the Perfectionists from the other utopians of the era. Inspired by the scientific advances of their day, Owen and Fourier (and to a lesser extent Cabet) spoke about finding, or thought they had already found, a “social science” with the rigid elegance of a mathematical theorem. They assumed that Truth had to come in the form of a system, something fixed, internally coherent, reliable, and final. Having drawn up their elaborate cities of words, they sometimes failed to look up from the page to face the shifting ambiguities of life. Noyes, believing that “the disasters of Owenism and Fourierism have not been in vain,” intended to profit from that mistake. “It is certainly high time that Socialists…should chasten their confidence in flattering theories, and turn their attention to actual events,” he wrote. Among other benefits of this outlook, the Perfectionists’ ability to “shift anchor” in response to actual events helped them secure the remarkable wealth that they gradually achieved.

Like almost all nineteenth-century utopians, the Bible Communists dreamed of building themselves a new Eden. They arrived in Oneida intending to earn their living in the most Edenic way possible: by growing fruit. “[We] are destined,” wrote one colonist, “to carry fruit cultivation to a development and perfection that the world has no conception of.” During their first year on Jonathan Burt’s land, the Perfectionists planted thousands of apple, cherry, peach, plum, and pear trees. It was a difficult, expensive enterprise, but one they expected to sustain their utopia in perpetuity.

This dream of a re-creating Eden in central New York was short-lived. Neither the community’s soil nor its climate was suited to large-scale fruit cultivation. Surveying the history of other utopian colonies, Noyes concluded that their almost unanimous commitment to horticulture—an understandable impulse at the soot-smudged dawn of the machine age—had more to do with romantic fantasy than economic reality. Without skipping a beat, the Perfectionists cut their blighted saplings for kindling and began looking for a better way to bankroll the Kingdom of God.

Sewell Newhouse, a trapper and blacksmith who migrated from Vermont to the Burned-over District as part of the Yankee exodus in 1820, moved to the community during its first summer with his wife, Eveliza. Before converting to Perfectionism, Newhouse made and sold simple claw traps of his own design to local Iroquois trappers. His traps were lighter and more reliable in cold weather than the German-made models that dominated the market. Noyes asked Newhouse to teach a few young colonists his secret technique for tempering the flat spring that sprang the fast jaws of his traps. In short order, the community established a state-of-the-art trap factory, fitted out with a mechanical roller and power punch driven by Oneida Creek. In the 1850s and 1860s, as Americans poured onto the western frontier, the fur trade boomed. Oneida-brand traps, which ranged from tiny rodent traps to huge moose traps, were the best on the market. Demand was insatiable. While many Americans laughed about William Seward’s scheme to purchase Alaska, the Oneida Community considered sending him a gold-plated bear trap.

Excluding the fact that the mostly vegetarian Perfectionists made their living from mammalian carnage, the business was perfectly suited to the community.*³⁵ Because orders for traps came in fits and starts, the need for labor was erratic. If, for instance, the Hudson’s Bay Company put in a large order for beaver traps, a “trap-making bee” could be announced at the daily community meeting. All nonessential labor would be put on hold and everyone would pile into a horse-drawn omnibus and head for one of their two factories. They would work late into the night, welding chain, assembling traps, and packing crates.

These sorts of labor “bees” were common at every utopian colony of the era, but the Perfectionists raised them to an art. They held bees for every large task—brick making, planting, broom corn harvesting, bag stitching, vegetable picking, and fruit preserving. “Working in storm,” as they called it, made tedious jobs go fast and gave the communists an economic edge over their neighbors. Neither “isolated” householders nor wage-paying bosses could quadruple or halve their workforce from day to day. The Circular regularly trumpeted the efficiencies of the system. Four thousand quarts of strawberries were picked in a single day. A barn was raised in a weekend. A large trap order was filled in one night. One “storming company” was tasked with stitching the bindings of nine hundred religious pamphlets. They ran out of printed matter so quickly that they went looking for other things to sew, turning their needles upon a large heap of flour sacks in need of darning.

Laboring in “mixed company”—especially when combined with breaks for cake or brief bouts of fiddle-accompanied contra dancing—helped give tiresome undertakings a flirtatious, festal atmosphere. Under the influence of Fourier, the Perfectionists spoke about harnessing “social harmonies” to make industry “attractive.” “We have lately found it pleasant and profitable,” they reported in 1855, “to avail ourselves of one of Fourier’s suggestions in marching out to our field services with music….This introduction of music to our field work…chimes in beautifully with the growing spirit of sport and ardor among us.” Taking another suggestion from Fourier, the Perfectionists found that frequent job rotation turned “drudgery into sport” and boosted creativity. A carpenter serving a shift on the cleanup crew invented a new type of mop ringer. A machinist requisitioned to the kitchen built a potato peeler based on the device used in the trap shop for cleaning rust off pieces of iron.

Word of these Fourier-inspired reforms reached the North American Phalanx, prompting some of the leading Associationists to visit Oneida. After being thrown out of France for his role in a botched coup, Victor Considerant came for an extended stay. In Oneida Creek, the Parisian radical fulfilled his dream of catching “an American trout.” After his visit, a portrait of Fourier was hung in the Mansion House.

There is a great deal of symmetry between the theories of Bible Communism and passional attraction. Both Noyes and Fourier preached that human impulse, that age-old burr under the saddle of civic harmony, can be harnessed as the “motor force” of a hypercohesive, hyper-productive social order. More specifically, they both believed that sexual passion can fuel solidarity and material progress. “Amativeness,” Noyes wrote, “is a mighty passion, and whatever is to be done it will do. If God can apply that passion to the public service, the stronger it is the better.” Both men claimed that stifling the free flow of human passion with monogamy, “legalism,” and taboos saps society of energy, creativity, and fraternity.

Even more than the Fourierists, the Oneida communists felt a special kinship with the Shakers. Both the Shakers and the Perfectionists regarded competitive markets and the nuclear family as inherently anti-Christian; both sought to imitate the communism of the primitive church; and both tried to build a distinctive, physical stronghold for the millennium that they believed their respective doctrines would trigger. Relations were particularly friendly between Noyes and Elder Frederick Evans and between the Oneida Community and the four Shaker “families” living at Watervliet. Noyes, who borrowed liberally from the secular utopians, repeatedly identified the United Society of Believers as his single biggest influence. One Shaker elder wrote that the two sects regarded each other as “noble contestants” in the struggle to establish the Kingdom of God on earth.

Level Up to the Highest Standard

Ann Lee and her successors made the United Society rich by sacralizing labor—turning physical work into a medium of worship. Noyes did not think of work in those terms. For him, labor was always a means to other ends. But he did something very similar with the work of “self-culture.” The soul might be perfected through faith and grace, but the perfection of society (that is, the building up of the millennium) would require diligence and time. Along with the collective work of perfecting social relations, each individual communist had to endeavor constantly to make him- or herself worthy of the new millennial dispensation. Studying grammar, practicing the cello, perfecting your sexual technique, or fine-tuning your personality with dose upon dose of mutual criticism: These were acts of faith at Oneida, outward expressions of belief in the dawning Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Perfectionists’ communism—their collectivized child care, laundry, cooking, manufacturing, governance, sex—gave them the time and liberty to explore their full potential as individuals.

Most of the colonists entered the community with scant book learning, but the entire community was soon highly literate, proving their belief that “the tendency in living together is to level up to the highest standard.” Freed from a great deal of domestic obligation (such as parenthood, marriage), the Perfectionists studied chemistry, poetry, geometry, astrology, and philosophy. The library in the Mansion House held almost four thousand volumes, and the reading room was full most evenings. Noyes himself was not a great lover of literature. Science and religion were his subjects. He favored poetry that did what he thought religion ought to—express something spontaneous or ecstatic. William Blake was a particular favorite.

During the winter of 1863, an adult Perfectionist could take his or her pick from among one of two math classes, a lively fifty-member geography seminar, a slew of music courses, or tutorials in Latin, French, and grammar. Math was especially popular. “If anything will arouse persons from their apathy, and awaken their dormant faculties,” noted the Circular, “it is algebra.” One elderly Perfectionist became so absorbed working out an algebraic equation that she missed the meal bell. After everyone else had eaten, she saw a man pulling on his coat and asked if he was skipping dinner. “This caused a general laugh in the room,” reported the community paper, “which recalled our mathematician from her abstraction to this mundane sphere, and to the physical wants of the body.”

Bible Communism in full swing.

© Oneida Community Mansion House, Inc. All rights reserved.

Much of this activity took place in the Community Hall, a grand room at the center of the Mansion House with a large raked stage at one end. It was the closest thing the community had to a church, but it contained no cross or pulpit. With its frescoed walls, mezzanine seating, and heavy red curtains, it looked more like an opera house. At seven thirty each evening, a bell summoned everyone to the hall for the daily community meeting. According to the Circular, these gatherings were “partly social, partly intellectual, partly industrial, and partly religious.” The colonists would begin by discussing practical matters, perhaps a new initiative in the Children’s House or a potential new business scheme. Afterward they might sing a few songs, have a round of waltzing, or read aloud from the Tribune. If Noyes was in residence, he might give a “home talk” on Bible Communism or healthy living.

—

During one of these talks, Noyes explained his evolving view that pleasure was the real purpose of life on earth. “Enjoyment,” he said, was “the very business that [God] set Adam and Eve about, AND NO OTHER.” With money from traps and other light manufacturing rolling in, enjoyment—in a very particular sense of the word—became the business of the Oneida Community, too. In keeping with the “spirit of improvement” that formed the undersong to everything that went on inside the Mansion House, the communists gravitated toward pleasures that required a high degree of cultivation. They formed bands and orchestras; studied Greek to read Homer; learned astronomy for early morning stargazing; and staged elaborate productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet. Staying impressively au courant for a bunch of trap-welding separatists in the hinterland, they mounted a production of H.M.S. Pinafore less than a year after its London premiere, declaring that Gilbert and Sullivan’s depiction of interclass romance and jolly fellowship on the high seas was “a good medium of communism.”

Like the men and women of Brook Farm, Noyes hoped to blur the line between aesthete and laborer. He thought that a refined sense of pleasure and beauty would have practical benefits in the coming millennial utopia. “The love of the beautiful could be made to harmonize with and quicken all kinds of manual industry,” he wrote. “The artist does not need to be an idler, a dreamer, a mere speculator. It is possible to combine the worker and the artist. We have begun that work here.”

Aside from complex marriage, a system designed to strengthen civic bonds by refining and harmonizing private pleasures, the best example of the Oneidans’ distinctive conception of pleasure as both edifying and communizing may have been their enthusiasm for one particular activity: croquet. The Perfectionists were so obsessed that they sometimes swept snow from their specially built “croqueterie” to play in mittens and scarves. Noyes, who instinctively devised a theory about everything that crossed his path, claimed that croquet served a special social function, allowing the natural “moderation” of women to temper the male instinct for “very hard striking of the balls.” He called the sport “a harmonic cooperation with God.”*³⁶

—

The all-encompassing “spirit of improvement” that came to dominate life within the community merged with the Perfectionists’ distinctive notions about health to form the most audacious link in the Noyesian “chain of redemption”: defeating the “death system.” According to scripture, everlasting life, or at least transport from earth to heaven without passing through illness and death, is supposed to be one of the perks of life in the millennium. In the early years, many Perfectionists sincerely believed that as the millennium unfolded, they would somehow secure an actual “victory over death.” Later, this ambition slid into the more modest goal of delaying death and eliminating aging. “The thought occurred to me,” Noyes wrote after a decade in the Mansion House, “whether we could not create an opposite atmosphere—one which would resist and repel the advances of old age, and make it more easy and natural to grow youthful than to grow old and infirm….There is a strong feeling (and it is a worldly imagination) that youth is the bright time of enjoyment; and persons expect after they arrive at a certain age that their enjoyment will decrease—that they will lose their susceptibilities to pleasure. I think this is a false view.” In light of this new thinking, one elderly Perfectionist announced that he did not want to be treated like an old man, insisting that “old age” was “nothing but a habit.” It is hard to imagine a more extreme example of the utopian disregard for the world-as-it-is. Physical decline, the most immutable human experience, is nothing more than “worldly imagination” and “old-fashioned testimony.” Death—like private property, family, and monogamy—is just somebody else’s bad idea.

If Mr. Noyes Takes a Pinch of Snuff, All the Community Sneezes

Having fled Putney for the wilderness isolation of central New York, the Perfectionists experienced something odd: the World came to them. The community had stopped actively promoting spin-off colonies in the late 1850s, but Noyes was still determined, as Albert Brisbane had put it, to make “a trial that would impress the public.” In July 1852, at the height of the Observer-stoked outcry over complex marriage, the communists opened their gates to a skeptical public, inviting people to come in and be impressed. That event, a free “strawberry festival,” was the first of countless subsequent picnics, performances, and concerts, all of which were orchestrated for the pleasure of the World.

The outreach worked. The Perfectionists’ upstate neighbors gradually became their best defense against periodic attacks by crusading politicians and churchmen. When the district attorney in Utica agitated for the community’s expulsion, a prominent local businessman wrote Noyes, promising that “the people in this vicinity will not consent to have you disperse.”

On summer weekends during the 1860s and 1870s, tourists overran the grounds. Around the increasingly luxurious Mansion House, the Perfectionists laid down curving gravel walks, neatly edged flower beds, and wide expanses of close-trimmed lawn. “Few corners of America,” wrote an English visitor, “can compete in loveliness with the swards and gardens lying about the home of the Oneida Family.” On the Fourth of July, as many as fifteen hundred visitors would come to tour the property.

In 1870, a new rail spur gave the community its own depot near the orchard, just a short walk from the Mansion House. The new line shortened the trip from New York City, bringing ever larger crowds. When trains stopped at Oneida, the conductor would half-jokingly call out: “Cars stop for fifteen minutes for stealing fruit.” From the station, visitors were directed to a reception room in the foyer of the Mansion House, where they could buy a dinner ticket or request a tour. To the horror of certain upstate clergymen, even Sunday school classes came to picnic on the communist lawns and mingle with the oversexed heretics. Among the attractions at Oneida, besides the impressive gardens, were live music, well-stocked libraries, and a stereoscope. On the second floor of the mansion, the community “museum” displayed ancient Egyptian relics, an Argentine maté set, a mastodon tooth, a samurai sword, an emu egg, a depiction of a Fourierist phalanstery, and many other exotic curios.

So many tourists came that the community had to print up a list of rules: no smoking in the Mansion House, no graffiti, no hotdog carriage racing on the main circle, no card playing, no fruit stealing, no flower trampling. Since the Perfectionists didn’t drink and were mostly vegetarian, they asked visitors—who were welcome at the midday dinner—to refrain from bringing or requesting alcohol, tobacco, or meat. “Eggs,” a sign in the refectory noted, “can be furnished to those who require animal food.” Along with various religious tracts, visitors could buy, for twenty-five cents, a vegetarian cookbook titled Oneida Community Cooking; or Dinner Without Meat.

The rustic gazebos and croqueterie were beautiful, but the Perfectionists—with their “short dresses,” childish haircuts, and air of sexual transgression—were probably the main attraction. Many visitors were convinced that something sinister lurked beneath the community’s sunny appearance. Some cornered Perfectionist children, asking whether they were as happy as they appeared or if they knew who their parents were. Oneida women grew accustomed to being asked whether their hair had been cut by force. The general notion among outsiders was that the Perfectionists were saucer-eyed rubes and that Noyes was a tyrant. The press compared him with Brigham Young or a practitioner of “Mahometanism.” “If Mr. Noyes takes a pinch of snuff,” went the line, “all the Community sneezes.” Some visitors speculated that the community’s octagonal stone cistern, about thirty feet around and covered with a turf roof, was some sort of dungeon or satanic altar.

A Perfect Perfectionist

As long as people have dreamed of the ideal society, they have populated it with ideal citizens. But who is that citizen? The idealized Shaker was supposed to be an angel of restraint and transcendence, devoid of sex and will—a blissed-out cog in the serene machinery of Zion. By contrast, Owen and Cabet hoped to fill their respective utopias with jolly, virtuous, right-thinking factory workers. They believed that humanity’s disruptive impulses—what Jeremy Bentham called our “mischievous passions”—were nothing more than symptoms of a badly disorganized society. Desire, pride, and personality need not be extirpated, just softened with an overriding sense of fraternity and a calmly calculating rationalism. The ideal citizen of Fourier’s Harmony was a very different sort of person: an impulsive, convivial, pleasure-seeking Übermensch. Fourier, the most humanistic of all utopians, believed that the average person already contains unfathomable potential for productivity, intelligence, and delight. When social and labor relations are properly arranged, he claimed, this potential will gush forth. In Harmony, “there will normally be on earth thirty-seven million poets the equal of Homer, thirty-seven million mathematicians the equal of Newton, thirty-seven million authors of comedies the equal of Molière, and the same number in all other conceivable talents.” (With uncharacteristic modesty, Fourier added, “These are estimates.”)

Despite the Oneida Community’s emphasis on education and self-culture, the Perfectionists did not associate a proliferation of genius with the coming exaltation of the species. While Fourier awaited millions of Homers and Molières, Noyes claimed that his community never “desired to produce a Byron, a Napoleon, or a Michelangelo.” Any system that could “foster abnormal or excessive development in the individual,” he believed, “[could do so only] at the expense of the mass.” At Oneida, the perfection of the individual was inseparable from the perfection of society at large. The stated purpose of the community’s defining institutions—mutual criticism, community of goods, complex marriage—was to simultaneously elevate and knit together “the mass.”

All three of these institutions expressed what Noyes called “the plodding spirit,” that part of human nature that “is willing to learn little by little.” By 1869, after the communists had been plodding toward perfection for three decades, Noyes decided to pick up the pace. He still believed that his community would usher in the millennium, but it was taking longer than expected. At the same time, the revivalist fervor of the early years was cooling, both at Oneida and throughout the wider Republic. To revitalize the community and hasten the perfection of its members, Noyes announced the inauguration of a eugenics program designed to breed an enhanced generation of Bible Communists.

He had been thinking about the “science” of breeding for decades. In 1849, in the “First Annual Report of the Oneida Association,” Noyes wrote: “We believe that the time will come…when scientific combination will be applied to human generation as freely and successfully as it is to that of other animals.” The ability to actually achieve “scientific combination”—as opposed to the “promiscuous scrambling” of the World—was opened by the twin innovations of male continence and complex marriage. In hindsight, Noyes’s hat trick of erotic experiments form a chain. Male continence, first inspired by Harriet Noyes’s birthing traumas, created the possibility of complex marriage. And it was complex marriage, the community’s civically oriented ménage à trois-cent, that made their experiment in controlled breeding possible.

Utopia and eugenics share a long history. Plato’s Republic, the first major Western utopian text, describes a system of selective breeding designed to populate the titular state with the right kinds of citizens. Ever since, controlled breeding has been a regular feature of utopian visions of the future. The specter of state-bred helots has also become one of the most consistent features of modern literary dystopia.

One reason for the timing of the eugenics experiment at Oneida was that the community needed fresh members. Two decades of diligent continence had kept the youth population relatively low. And while there were plenty of applicants from outside, the Perfectionists’ hard-won prosperity made it difficult to sort the true believers from the “thousands [who] are ready to rush in for the loaves and fishes.” To weed out what Noyes called “Owenites, infidels, spiritualists, irresponsible free lovers, and the riffraff of defunct Communities,” the Oneida Community’s admission standards had progressively stiffened. The eugenics program, which Noyes dubbed “stirpiculture,”*³⁷ allowed the Perfectionists to admit members “by another entrance.”

At the same time, interest in selective breeding was growing outside of the community. Mainstream enthusiasm would not peak until the 1880s, but Francis Galton—Darwin’s cousin and the most influential booster of controlled breeding—published Hereditary Genius, the book that introduced the term eugenics, in 1869, the same year stirpiculture commenced at Oneida.

Noyes believed that there are two separate forces at work on the development of the human species. One is the slow, imprecise influence of natural selection, refining the herd, as he put it, “by weeding out its poorest stock.” On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in 1859, setting people on edge throughout Christendom.*³⁸ Noyes immediately folded Darwin’s theory into his own. “The principles of natural selection and the survival of the fittest,” he wrote, “leads right on to the idea of improvement of man by voluntary selection.” During the 1860s and 1870s, Noyes watched the rising antagonism between Christianity and science with dismay. He regarded science as “the true handmaid of faith” and saw no reason why education should erode belief. “I have followed…Darwin into his endless genealogies,” Noyes wrote, “and yet I am as sure now that Christ is king of the world as I was before science began to swell into infidelity.” To the Perfectionists, Darwin’s theory offered a biological analogue to their millenarian utopianism, proving that progress is a natural law—that perfection is the universal telos.*³⁹

Alongside natural selection, the other force that Noyes saw at work on the development of the species was the direct, supernatural interference of God. Noyes read the Old Testament’s genealogies—those endless rosters of begetting—as a record of the Creator’s efforts to mate, cull, and crossbreed humanity in preparation for the millennium. “The Lord himself has exercised the herdsman’s right of selection,” Noyes wrote, “and carried on a course of scientific breeding with reference to the production of a specific result.” After most of the descendants of Adam were “set aside as worthless,” God focused His attention upon Noah, killing off everyone but his family. Ten long generations later, the Lord switched His attention to the bloodlines of Abraham, picking the pious shepherd to father a new race: the Jews. Noyes carefully documented how God employed the husbandry technique of “close culture” (the inbreeding of close relations to isolate and amplify a desired trait) in His effort to breed “the perfect work”—namely, Christ and His apostles.*⁴⁰

While a stallion might be prized for good teeth and a glossy coat, Noyes claimed that God selected men such as Noah and Abraham for their exceptional spiritual sensitivity—their high levels of “inspiration and obedience.”

When the stirpiculture experiment began at Oneida, men and women volunteered singly or in pairs. For a time, selections were made by a six-member committee that included two Yale-educated physicians. Mostly the selections were left up to Noyes and his inner circle. Like breeders of flowers or dogs, the Perfectionists had to choose which traits they were aiming for. While the intelligence and health of the volunteers were taken into account, the main criterion was a highly subjective notion of spiritual inspiration. On the dubious assumption that good sex makes good babies, mutual attraction between volunteers was considered a plus. Practically speaking, the Perfectionists had their ideal target close at hand. “The existence of Noyes,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, “simplified the breeding problem for the Communists, the question as to what sort of men they should strive to breed being settled at once by the desirability of breeding another Noyes.” Not surprisingly, Noyes personally fathered a sixth of all the “stirpicults.” Ultimately, a total of fifty-three women and thirty-eight men were selected. They pledged themselves as “ ‘living sacrifices’ to God and true Communism” and went upstairs in pairs.

Between 1869 and 1879, forty-five “stirpicults” were born.*⁴¹ They were raised and nursed by their biological mothers for nine months and then transferred to the nursery of the Children’s House, where they were cared for by specially selected teachers and generally fussed over by the entire community. The biological parents renounced all rights of parenthood.

In 1891, after the breakup of the community, Anita Newcomb McGee, a final-year medical student at Johns Hopkins who specialized in gynecology, studied the stirpicults for a report in the American Anthropologist. By then, the eldest were twenty-two. McGee found that most of them had been impressive students, with both boys and girls earning scholarships to top universities. With a single exception, all were perfectly healthy. Many were unusually tall. They were highly literate, and when they convened at the Mansion House each summer, they entertained themselves with debate competitions and concerts. With the exception of Noyes and a few other lawyers and clergymen, the volunteer parents had all originally been farmers, laborers, and craftspeople. All but one of the stirpicults (a machinist) pursued nonmanual professions. Among the eldest boys in the group—those for whom a career could reasonably be predicted in 1891—there were medical students, law students, businessmen, a math prodigy, and a successful musician. The eldest girls, in the estimation of Dr. McGee, were also bound for intellectual careers. One was a scholar of Greek at a women’s college; another was studying the new kindergarten system. Of course, much, if not all, of the stirpicults’ success in life can be attributed to their carefully administered upbringing in the Children’s House and the intellectual, self-improving tenor of the community in which they were raised.

Ironically, the stirpicults’ main “failing” was a distinct lack of faith. Assuming that “inspiration” was somehow inheritable, Noyes had set out to raise a generation of spiritually advanced Perfectionists, men and women who would someday lead various Oneida-like communities when the millennium began in earnest. At the time of McGee’s study, however, few of the adult stirpicults were regular churchgoers. Only one still considered himself a Perfectionist. Faith, it seems, cannot be bred.

Exile

So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

—GENESIS 3:24

By the middle 1870s, with stirpiculture in full swing, a recurring throat illness lowered Noyes’s voice to a hoarse whisper. His hearing also began to fade. These were grave handicaps for a man who rejected written rules and led entirely by talking. Noyes had always preached that spiritual perfection would lead to a triumph over disease, if not immortality. As late as 1871, he wrote, “We are so near a second coming, or something like it, that I see no death before me, and by that I mean I see no cessation of my active power.”*⁴² Since he was supposed to be the most spiritually advanced member of the community, Noyes’s waning vitality undermined his prophetic authority. It also dimmed the erotic magnetism that was integral to the soft power with which he held the community together. As with Owen and his multicolored “silent monitors,” Noyes’s authority rested upon his followers’ desire for his warmth and approval. Unlike Owen, Noyes sometimes expressed that warmth and approval in bed—if not personally, then by orchestrating a coveted tryst.

In 1874, James William Towner, a leading member of a small free love community near Cleveland known as the Berlin Heights Society, moved into the Mansion House along with his wife, Cinderella, their three grown children, and seven other members of the collapsed Ohio commune. As a new convert, Towner, a handsome, charismatic lawyer who had lost an eye fighting for the Union army, occupied a fairly low rung on the Oneida Community’s unwritten ladder of ascending fellowship. It was an uncomfortable position for a man with Towner’s self-regard, and he came to resent the top-down regulation of complex marriage. The Berlin Heights Society had had a considerably freer understanding of free love. Towner thought that consenting adults should have total freedom to choose their own partners and that parents should have sole authority over their teenage children’s sex lives.

Two years after Towner’s arrival, Noyes encouraged the community to install Theodore, his eldest and only legitimate son, as president of the community. Theodore, then in his midtwenties, was one of Oneida’s two physicians. He was popular within the community, but everyone knew that he had returned from Yale with a good deal of doubt about his father’s doctrines, if not Christianity altogether.*⁴³ The community approved his promotion to president, but having a skeptic in a position of authority irked true believers and allowed younger Perfectionists who had missed the galvanizing early years to air their own uncertainties about Noyes’s inspiration.

During his brief presidency, Theodore tried to reassert centralized control over complex marriage (things had been getting lax) and led an effective but high-handed effort to streamline the community’s finances. Combined with the quiet agitation of Towner and those who agreed with him, these initiatives created an air of discord that was previously unknown at Oneida. For decades, Noyes had preached that “philoprogenitiveness” (excessive attachment to blood relations) was antithetical to Bible Communism. His own blinkered nepotism seemed to prove the point.*⁴⁴ After eight months, Theodore resigned and his half-deaf father resumed the presidency.

Stirpiculture had been intended to reinvigorate the community with an infusion of fresh vitality—to replace the “the fading word of truth,” as one historian put it, with “ablutions of semen.” Instead, by introducing an elite subclass—the selected parents—into a society devoted to radical equality, the experiment added to the gathering sense of drift and discontent. Combined with Theodore’s effort to tighten control over complex marriage, the breeding program stirred dormant resentments about the sexual hierarchies inside the community. When James Towner began to challenge Noyes’s authority—first in secret gatherings in the tower of the Mansion House, later at meetings of the whole community—he found considerable support, especially among newer members. Unaccustomed to such dissension, Noyes withdrew from the daily operations of the community, spending more and more time in prayerful communion with Saint Paul.

—

As if sensing weakness, critics from outside began to circle. In the early 1870s, a shrill, sex-obsessed strain of conservatism was on the march throughout the country. At the start of 1873, Anthony Comstock, the young founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, rallied Congress to ban “obscene materials” from the mail, including any information about contraception.*⁴⁵ As a uniformed agent of the U.S. Postal Service, Comstock waged war against a broad range of threats to the Christian household: dirty books, suffragettes, family-planning advocates, D. H. Lawrence. Late in his career, he boasted about having pulped 160 tons of literature and having caused fifteen suicides. In a stroke, the passage of the Comstock Act made many of the Oneida Community’s foundational texts illegal if they touched a postage stamp.*⁴⁶

The same upwelling of conservative prudery that bore Comstock aloft emboldened a Presbyterian firebrand named John W. Mears to try to abolish the Oneida Community. In 1873, the year that “Comstockery” became federal law, Mears, a professor at Hamilton College just down the road from Oneida, began a scorched-earth crusade against the community. In sermons, lectures, and editorials, and at public meetings of religious leaders, Mears called for the forcible expulsion of what he dubbed “the utopia of obscenity.” “The people of Illinois could not endure the immorality of the Mormons, but drove them from Nauvoo in 1846, and compelled them to take refuge in the Great Central Basin, a thousand miles from the outskirts of civilization,” Mears fulminated. “Thus polygamy was treated; while the far more corrupt concubinage of the Oneida Community luxuriates at ease in the heart of New York State.”*⁴⁷ Within the community, the avenging minister in his black coat and top hat became a figure of genuine terror. “In the Children’s House,” Noyes’s son Pierrepont recalled, “we learned to hate Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Professor Mears as the great triumvirate of evil.”

Some of the secular press came to the community’s defense, further inflaming Mears and his allies. An illustration on the cover of the magazine Puck depicted a clutch of scowling churchmen gesturing toward the peaceable commune. “Oh, dreadful!” reads the caption. “They dwell in peace and harmony, and have no church scandals. They must be wiped out.”*⁴⁸

In 1879, Mears and a group of ministers met in Syracuse to devise a legal strategy. They proposed adding the phrase persons living in concupiscence and adultery to an existing New York statute against “disorderly persons.” In response, the citizens of Oneida and Madison Counties circulated a petition attesting to the Perfectionists’ piety, industry, and fair dealing. Even the local Shakers came to the community’s defense, calling the marital arrangements at Oneida “vastly purer than some of the most respectable marriages of today.” The booming trade in traps, silk, and cutlery had made the Oneida Community a large and popular employer. The Perfectionists paid high wages and provided their employees with housing, child care, and education. When the legislature in Albany proved unwilling to regulate anything as subjective as “concupiscence,” Mears lowered his sights. Instead of demanding the total destruction of the Oneida Community—and thus the loss of many good jobs—he called for Noyes’s arrest.

The real risk for Noyes was that some disgruntled member of the community would bring charges against him for adultery or having sex with a minor. On June 21, 1879, a headline in the Syracuse Standard declared: “COMMUNIST NOYES TO BE ARRESTED AND LEGAL PROCEEDINGS TO BE TAKEN.” There is no evidence that an arrest was actually imminent, but by the morning of June 23, Noyes was gone. The previous night, without telling anyone except a few close friends, he crept out of the Mansion House in his socks and caught a train for the Ontario side of Niagara Falls, where he stayed with a family of Canadian Perfectionists.

—

With Noyes gone, the fault lines that had been forming within the community spread fast. Some Perfectionists blamed James Towner and his supporters for the sudden departure of their beloved father Noyes. Professor Mears’s zeal was not satisfied by the disappearance of Noyes. He continued to call for legal action against the community. Complex marriage had always required an incredibly high level of solidarity and equanimity to function smoothly. Under the strain of Noyes’s exile and Mears’s attacks, it began to fall apart. Nobody knew what should replace it.

Noyes’s view was that for the community to continue to enjoy the “social variety” of free love without the religious superstructure of ascending and descending fellowship would be “to go below” the already low plane of “worldly morality.” Some Perfectionists agreed that the only suitable alternative to complex marriage was Shaker-style celibacy. After all, it was the egotism and possessiveness of monogamy that they had initially sought to overcome. Others, especially younger communists and those anxious to legitimize the children who had been born at the community, were keen to give one-man-one-woman matrimony a try. From Canada, where Noyes and a group of loyal believers were living in a large stone cottage by Niagara Falls, he reminded his followers of their long history of “shifting anchor” when circumstances impinged upon theory. He agreed to support whatever they decided but suggested that the Perfectionists follow the position of Saint Paul, “which allows marriage but prefers celibacy.”

On a hot afternoon in late August 1879, the Perfectionists gathered in the Community Hall. They voted unanimously to conclude their thirty-three-year experiment in free love. To some, the decision was as wrenching and disorienting as any divorce. The communists gave themselves two days to make “sexual ‘good-byes.’ ”

—

The end of complex marriage accelerated the unwinding of the other distinctive institutions of Bible Communism. Children started sleeping over in their mothers’ rooms. Young women let their hair grow. Some made themselves long dresses. Twenty-five couples who had been married before joining the community were formally reunited. Other pairs, often those who had produced a child, got married for the first time. Within four months of the vote to end complex marriage, twenty couples were wed on the stage of the Community Hall. James Towner presided over many of the ceremonies. Professor Mears demanded to see the marriage certificates.

For some Perfectionists, the scramble to couple up was like a painful game of musical chairs. For three decades, they had sustained meaningful sexual and romantic relationships with many different lovers. Years of collective child rearing and stirpiculture made things even more confusing. A young mother might have had a passionate long-standing romance with one man but have a child by another. “Our relations are no longer ‘complex,’ ” one woman wrote to a friend, “but they are dreadfully complicated.”

—

Noyes’s old claim that sexual communism propped up economic communism proved correct. In August 1880, a year after the first monogamous marriage was conducted in the Community Hall, the communists voted to “divide and reorganize,” turning themselves into shareholders of a profitable corporation. At midnight on the last day of 1880, after a few months of haggling over how to distribute stock, the new arrangements went into effect. Suffixed with that most holy trinity of the American alphabet, the sacred Oneida Community became the earthly Oneida Community, Ltd.

Six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock was divvied up among the 225 remaining members. Older Perfectionists could opt for a guarantee of health care and comfortable living in the Mansion House instead of a payout. A trust was set aside for the education of all the children. Some members moved out of the mansion. Others remained, paying a modest rent on the rooms they had occupied for years. Eighty-four of the 109 adults who originally founded the community on Jonathan Burt’s land remained in the Mansion House until the end of their lives. Anyone who wanted a job with the newly formed corporation got one. For the first time, the Perfectionists received wages for their labor. Some of them had never once handled cash.

Like Adam and Eve looking down to discover that they were nude, some shareholders of the newly formed Oneida corporation were suddenly ashamed of their participation in the country’s most famous sex experiment. Reams of community documents were burned.

—

By the time of the breakup, the community was effectively divided into two camps, those supporting Noyes and those who had rallied behind James Towner. In the final settlement, the pro-Noyes folks, including almost all of the founding members, constituted a strong majority. They inherited most of the stock and therefore retained control of the Oneida corporation and its considerable assets.*⁴⁹

Towner and thirty-five of his supporters left Oneida for southern California, settling near the village of Santa Ana. There, the small band of free-loving communists had the odd distinction of helping to found the conservative utopia of Orange County. Towner chaired the committee that set up the county government and served as Orange County’s first superior court judge. Although the Townerites continued to receive dividends on their Oneida stock, they asked for their financial statements to be mailed west in plain, unmarked envelopes.

—

On April 13, 1886, John Humphrey Noyes—the man who taught that community is sacred, pleasure is wisdom, and paradise is ours to build—died in his stone cottage above the thundering Horseshoe Falls. He was seventy-five. Two days later, on a green, early spring afternoon, his body was carried across the border and buried in the shady hillside graveyard behind the Mansion House.

Not long before he died, Noyes reflected on his effort to build an earthly paradise. “We made a raid into an unknown country, charted it and returned without the loss of a man, woman or child,” he wrote. Exiled from that unknown country, the surviving Perfectionists began a slow, disorienting journey back into the foreign land that they had always called the World.

---

*¹ By way of comparison, the fact that Tambora’s eruption was heard clearly on Sumatra is equivalent to the citizens of Lincoln, Nebraska, hearing a noise made in New York City.

*² Over the course of the 1820s, the populations of those three cities increased by 183 percent, 314 percent, and 512 percent, respectively.

*³ At the time, nobody would have called western New York “the East.” It was still the frontier.

*⁴ The geographic boundaries of the Burned-over District are debatable. Whitney Cross, the region’s most celebrated chronicler, defined the district as all of New York west of the Catskills and Adirondacks. As far as religious excitement goes, the far west of the state was certainly the most active area. When other social and communitarian experiments are taken into account, the relevant area expands to include the whole middle swath of New York.

*⁵ Daniel is an Old Testament book of prophecy written in Aramaic that purports to describe the visions of a Jew named Daniel during his captivity in Babylon. It is now widely believed to have been written four centuries after the events it describes. In his visions, Daniel sees the resurrection of the just and the establishment of God’s Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

*⁶ Augustine, with his account of humanity as a lusty, prideful race, irrevocably corrupted by the Fall, deserves most of the credit for lodging the anti-Perfectionist position into orthodox Christianity. Calvin, with his doctrine of “total depravity,” hammered the point home.

*⁷ To limit confusion, I’ll use capital P “Perfectionism” to describe the specific Christian dogma that endorses the possibility of living without sin. Lowercase p “perfectionism” will describe the broader, secular notion of individual or social perfectibility.

*⁸ John Rawls, who was no fan of this sort of thinking, concisely defines perfectionism as “the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture.”

*⁹ In the coming decades, his followers would celebrate February 20 as a sort of spiritual solstice: “the High Tide of the Spirit.” August 20, the day furthest on the calendar, was considered a dangerous time: “the climax of the flesh.”

*¹⁰ The technical terms for these two views are “premillennialism” (Christ will come before the millennium) and “postmillennialism” (Christ will come after the millennium). Premillennialists generally believe that paradise will arrive as a big, cataclysmic event. Postmillennialists incline toward the view that the millennium will be established gradually through the work of living Christians.

*¹¹ A concern that has always hovered around the theology of Perfectionism is whether being “without sin” means I am perfect so I do not desire anything sinful or I am perfect so no matter what I do it is not a sin. The idea that divine grace comes with amnesty from moral statutes is known as “antinomianism,” the general notion being “to the pure all things are pure.”

*¹² At the time, Noyes did not admit the link between his heartache and this shift in his theology, but in 1851, he acknowledged that “Abigail Merwin’s marriage stimulated me to break up the marriage system.”

*¹³ The Latter-day Saints, who found scriptural support for polygamy in the lives of the Hebrew patriarchs, have yet a third interpretation of Jesus’s exchange with the Sadducee. Based on a revelation that came to Joseph Smith at Nauvoo, they claim that most marriages are only “for time” (at death do they part), but marriages “sealed” in a Mormon temple last “for time and all eternity.” (Doctrine and Covenants 132:15–18)

*¹⁴ The publication of Robert Dale Owen’s treatise on “the population question” is still considered a watershed moment in the history of family planning. Owen père, who had been greatly interested in Malthus and the specter of overpopulation, later helped introduce the vaginal sponge in England.

*¹⁵ Mead, the lawyer with whom Noyes apprenticed in his early twenties, was married to Mary Noyes, one of the siblings who never accepted John as her “spiritual father.” The Meads maintained cordial relations with John, but they were generally regarded as the respectable branch of the family. Their son Larkin Goldsmith Mead was a highly celebrated sculptor; he designed Lincoln’s tomb. His brother William was an influential architect—the middle partner in the famous firm of McKim, Mead & White. Their sister Elinor married the critic William Dean Howells.

*¹⁶ In later years, when the community’s sexual doctrines were well publicized, the Perfectionists went to great lengths to weed out applicants drawn chiefly by the community’s “social privileges.” They did not always succeed.

*¹⁷ Noyes found scriptural sanction for this idea in the fact that Saint Paul, in his effort to institutionalize Christianity, basically cleared the books of many Jewish laws. Of course, Paul was also a great font of written, institutional theology.

*¹⁸ Secular, not atheistic. None of these theorists denied the existence of God, and except for Owen, they all identified themselves as Christians. Their theories are secular because their dominant preoccupation was social reform, not salvation or Apocalypse.

*¹⁹ This early antagonism was not restricted to the United States or Protestantism. In 1846, while Noyes was introducing Bible Communism in Putney, Pope Pius IX issued a papal syllabus denouncing “that infamous doctrine of so-called Communism which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, property, and possessions of all men, and even society itself.”

*²⁰ In 1870, for the two hundred adults living in the Mansion House, there were 169 separate beds, usually 1 bed per room. When a bed was shared for the night, it was generally by two women or two men. Noyes believed that men and women should not slumber together. “Their coming together should not be to sleep but to edify and enjoy.”

*²¹ The fashion for short women’s hair at Oneida put Noyes’s reforming instincts at odds with his beloved Saint Paul. In his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 11:15–16), Paul wrote that it is “a glory” for women to have long hair (and a “shame” for men). As always, Noyes found a work-around. Paul’s object, he claimed, “is not ornament but a covering.” Since, according to the then popular “science” of phrenology, the libido is housed in the back of the head, Noyes claimed that the Victorian updo was actually less modest than the “down in the neck” style that the Perfectionist women wore.

*²² By contrast, Frederick Evans, the New Harmonian turned Shaker elder, was perfectly happy to strike up alliances with “worldly” progressives on issues such as socialism, women’s rights, abolitionism, animal cruelty, and nonviolence.

*²³ Outside critics claimed that the practice of male continence would produce sterile men and physically stunted women. One visiting obstetrician worried about the consequences of depriving so many women of “the sedative and relaxing seminal fluid.” To refute these sorts of pseudoscientific claims, the Perfectionists kept exacting health records. In 1877, Theodore Noyes, by then a Yale-educated physician, invited a gynecologist to examine the women of the community for an article in the American Journal of Obstetrics. The doctor was surprised to find that the women of the community were exceptionally healthy. He did note two interesting anomalies. Fifty-seven percent of the women who grew up at Oneida began menstruating a full two years earlier than their peers in the surrounding area, and the Perfectionist women were, on average, significantly bustier than other American women.

*²⁴ The monarch whose fecundity and virtue named the era had nine children.

*²⁵ Regarding this insistence on transparency, even the Observer had something nice to say: “The Oneida Associationists are honorably contrasted with the Fourierists of this city, who refuse to be held responsible for the consequences to which their doctrines inevitably leads.” So according to the Observer’s loose hierarchy of turpitude, Mormons ranked below Catholics but above Perfectionists, while Fourierists (some of whom happened to staff the Observer’s chief rival across town) were at the very bottom.

*²⁶ In Genesis (3:22), after Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God hustles them out of Paradise, “lest [Adam] put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” By restoring humanity to its sinless, pre-Fall condition, Noyes expected to taste the fruit of that second tree.

*²⁷ The usual term for what went on at Oneida was and is “free love.” The Perfectionists claimed to have introduced that phrase into circulation, and Noyes used it for many years, including in the Oneida Community’s first official “Theocratic Platform.” Later, the community disavowed the term to underscore the distinction between complex marriage and other, freer forms of free love. While the Oneida communists tried to shake off the term free love, non-Noyesian Perfectionists, notably the acolytes of Charles Grandison Finney at Oberlin, started dropping the designation Perfectionist owing to its association with the community in Oneida.

*²⁸ After “Where are you?” Jehovah’s second, angry post-apple question is: “Who told thee that thou wast naked?”

*²⁹ The idea that wisdom or virtue is somehow sexually transmitted—usually from the old and wise to the young and nubile—is not unique to Oneida. The most obvious analogue is the paiderastia of ancient Athens.

*³⁰ Same-sex couplings were not discussed, let alone sanctioned. However, it does seem likely that a community that blurred rigid Victorian gender norms and offered a form of family life without heterosexual matrimony held a certain appeal for lesbians and gay men.

*³¹ Fourier had proposed the establishment of “museum orgies” to refine the erotic sensibility of the general population.

*³² The scandal also had a lasting effect on the Republic. Because the widower Martin Van Buren lacked a moralizing wife, he was free to join President Jackson in his lonely support of the scandal-plagued Eatons, thus securing his place as Jackson’s anointed successor.

*³³ Only Noyes was exempt from mutual criticism. He bore the brunt of the abundant, unorganized criticism directed at the community from without and decided that that was “whipping enough to keep one man sober.” He did say that he would gladly submit to criticism if and when it was offered by Christ or one of His apostles, preferably Paul.

*³⁴ In a contemporaneous report on the community, The New York Times offered a more cynical (and silly) account of mutual criticism’s role as “the real secret of the prolonged life of the Oneida Community.” The Times suggested that because everyone was periodically abused with public censure, nobody was willing to leave the community until they could exact revenge (that is, by criticizing their erstwhile critics). The desire to “get square,” the Times claimed, kept the communards locked into a bitter seesaw of retribution. “That Noyes should have recognized the fact that he could bind his followers together by the bond of mutual hate stamps him as a man of real, if perverted, genius.”

*³⁵ One Oneidan, clearly channeling Fourier, claimed that vermin were a sign of an unhealthy globe and that the Perfectionists were right to hasten their extinction.

*³⁶ There was a certain logic to the community’s passion for croquet. The game, which came to the United States from England in the 1860s, sparked a minor sexual revolution. The genteel sport was accepted as a respectable coed activity, making it pretty much the only game that men and women could play together in public. For a few years, city parks and country lawns throughout the Republic were overrun with hoops, mallets, and flirting singles. Even the Shakers took up the sport.

*³⁷ From the Latin sterpes, meaning “race,” and culture, as in “cultivation,” like horticulture.

*³⁸ Writing in the Tribune, the sensible Reverend Ripley gave Darwin one of his few early raves in the American press.

*³⁹ Of course, this perceived analogy springs from a misreading of On the Origin of Species. Like the social Darwinists, the Perfectionists imagined moral imperatives between the lines of a descriptive science. Darwin merely claims that natural selection fits organisms to the shifting particulars of their environment, not that finches are approaching some perfected state of finch-ness.

*⁴⁰ Noyes wrote a genealogy showing the frequent coupling of blood relations among Abraham’s progeny. Abraham and his wife, Sarah, for instance, had the same father. Likewise, the union of Lot and one of his daughters produced Moab, who was supposedly an ancestor of Jesus. Although Noyes theoretically favored inbreeding, eventually fathering a son with his niece Helen, he made a rare concession to popular sentiment and decided that breaking the taboo against sibling sex—what he called “the last citadel of social falsehood”—would be too much for the benighted American public of the 1870s. Sanctified incest would have to wait.

*⁴¹ There were more pregnancies, but some did not come to term, and some that did come to term died in infancy. The stated goal of the experiment was quality, not quantity. The high rate of insemination among volunteers laid to rest worries about the effects of male continence on their reproductive organs. The experiment’s rate of infant mortality was less than a third of the rate in the country at large (based on the 1870 census).

*⁴² Should his own physical existence somehow come to an end, Noyes claimed that he would join Christ and His apostles to lead the Oneida Community from the great beyond.

*⁴³ Theodore’s skepticism did not extend to the Spiritualist movement, about which he was the community’s leading enthusiast. When the Spiritualist craze swept through the Burned-over District and then the country in general, Theodore began leading séances in the Mansion House. The elder Noyes mostly discouraged Spiritualism among followers. He had no doubts about the existence of spirits or their ability to communicate through mediums, but he felt that just because someone is dead doesn’t mean they have anything intelligent or useful to say.

*⁴⁴ Noyes’s nepotism did square with his belief that spiritual “inspiration” was somehow hereditary.

*⁴⁵ If a text Comstock deemed obscene couldn’t be found in the mail, he would write to the author under a pseudonym requesting a copy and then prosecute.

*⁴⁶ Even the most oblique description of male continence violated federal law because it was “a means of keeping unwanted children from being born.” Even well into the twentieth century, historians had difficulty writing freely about the Oneida Community.

*⁴⁷ In a dismally familiar bit of reasoning, Mears claimed that if complex marriage was tolerated, bestiality would be the next logical step.

*⁴⁸ Other papers sided with Mears. The author of an editorial in The Israelite, a Jewish weekly from Ohio, wished that it “were within [our] power to wipe from the face of existence this cankerous worm that is gnawing into our social system….” Ironically, the classifieds section of The Israelite offered a coupon for a 50 percent discount on “Oneida’s finest stainless, stoneware and cutlery.”

*⁴⁹ In 1894, Pierrepont Noyes, one of the stirpicults fathered by John Humphrey Noyes, assumed the directorship of Oneida Ltd., staffing it with other stirpicults and building it into the most successful cutlery maker in the United States. Sherrill, the company town that grew up just north of the Mansion House, was imbued with many of the Oneida Community’s old progressive and egalitarian values.