The peculiar combination of qualities that we find in Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen is something characteristic of the time. Their counterpart in literature proper is Owen’s friend, Shelley. All were distinguished by lives of a pure and philosophical eccentricity; by a rarefied rhetoric which today seems inspired; and by fundamental social insights which were to remain of the highest value.
We have seen in such later French historians as Michelet, Renan and Taine, how this rhetoric was to grow more gaudy and to solidify in hypostasized abstractions. The industrial-commercial system whose tendencies had seemed to the earlier prophets so obviously inhuman and unpractical that it would be quite easy to check and divert them, was coming to take up the whole space, and absorbing and demoralizing critics, The future was no longer a free expanse which men like Fourier and Owen could assume as a field for innovation. The bourgeoisie were there to stay, and the typical social critic was the much-respected professor to whom the insights of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen were as alien as their fantastic behavior. If he was a brilliant professor, he was able to edify his audience by flourishing capitalized ideals such as Taine’s Conscience and Honor. Insisting more and more on individual liberty, these thinkers became less and less bold. It is curious to compare, for example, the personal recklessness of Saint-Simon, who believed that the rights of the individual should be limited in the interests of the community, with the personal timidity of Taine, who insisted that individual Conscience and the private operation of industry should be free from interference by the State.
The failure of the doctrines of Saint-Simon in the hands of his disciples after his death is interesting in this connection. Saint-Simon had, as I have said, come to believe that the new society could never be brought into being without the help of a new religion; and he had asserted that he spoke “in the name of God.” One of his disciples, Olinde Rodriques, a young Jew who had been present at Saint-Simon’s deathbed and who had received his last words on religion, assumed the role of consecrated apostle, and there grew up a Saint-Simonist cult.
It was not, however, Rodriques, but a French engineer, Prosper Enfantin, who eventually became the leader of this cult. The Saint-Simonists in 1825, the year of Saint-Simon’s death, began by publishing a paper which aimed to recruit the working class to a program of collectivism, internationalism and the abolition of private property and tariffs; the idea of the enslavement and exploitation of the working class by the owning class appears already fully developed in their writings. But gradually Enfantin became persuaded to consider himself a Messiah, and he and another of the disciples became the “Fathers” of the Saint-Simonist “Family.” One morning at half past six, before Enfantin was out of bed, he was visited by a man named d’Eichthal, a member of the brotherhood and also a Jew. D’Eichthal was in a state of extreme exaltation; he had been to communion at Notre Dame the day before, and there it had been suddenly revealed to him that “Jesus lives in Enfantin,” and that Enfantin was one of a holy couple, the Son and Daughter of God, who were to convey a new gospel to humanity. Enfantin at first was cautious: until the appearance of the female Messiah, he told d’Eichthal, he could not name himself nor could he be named, and in the meantime he begged his apostle to let him go back to sleep. D’Eichthal accordingly left him, but almost immediately returned, got Enfantin up again, and insisted that the hour had struck, the Enfantin must proclaim himself the Son of God. Enfantin now arose, put on his stockings in silence and announced, “Homo sum!”
Thereafter Enfantin was known as “Christ” and “Pope.” The Saint-Simonists adopted special costumes and elaborated religious rites. Enfantin grew a beard in evident imitation of Jesus and displayed the title “Le Père” embroidered on his shirt across his chest.
In Paris the Saint-Simonists were persecuted by the authorities, who closed their meeting hall. Enfantin took forty disciples and retreated to Ménilmontant, just outside the city, where he established a sort of monastery. They wore red, white and violet costumes and did all their own work. “When the proletariat presses our hands,” they said, “they will feel that they are calloused like their own. We are inoculating ourselves with the proletarian nature.”
But charges were now brought against them—it was the reign of Louis-Philippe—of preaching doctrines dangerous to public morality. Le Père Enfantin was made to serve a short sentence in jail, which broke his morale as a Messiah. He did not have the true fanatic’s capacity, the capacity of Mrs. Eddy or Joseph Smith, for deceiving himself and others: he had kept waiting for the female Messiah, who should finally make the world believe in him and who should make him believe in himself. And now he returned to his trade, to the practical field of engineering. Saint-Simon had been strongly convinced of the future importance of engineering and had included the engineers among the groups who were to be entrusted with the supreme control of society. At the time of his visit to America, he had made an effort to interest the Mexican viceroy in the project of cutting a canal at Panama. And now Enfantin, during a trip to Egypt, did his best to promote what appeared to him the equally sound idea of cutting a canal at Suez—a service for which, when the canal was undertaken, he got scant recognition from de Lesseps. Finally he became a director of the Paris and Lyons railroad and played the leading role in its consolidation, in 1852, as the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée.
In Prosper Enfantin, therefore, the gospel of Saint-Simon had produced one of the most bizarre, one of the most apparently incoherent, careers in history. Beginning as the Son of God, he had ended as a fairly able railroad director. Yet Enfantin’s religion and his railroads were both justified by the teaching of Saint-Simon: for the new rapid transportation was a means of bringing people together, and a merger was a step toward unification. But the difficulty for Enfantin was that, on the one hand, he was much too hard-headed, too rational, too French, to dissociate himself from society and to identify himself with God, as the saint does; and that, on the other hand, as things were going, there seemed to be no way for the practical engineer, the manipulator of railroad combinations, to connect his activities with the religion of humanity.
None of these political idealists understood the real mechanics of social change nor could they foresee the inevitable development of the system which they so much detested. They could only devise imaginary systems as antithetical to the real one as possible and attempt to construct models of these, assuming that the example would be contagious. This was what the word socialism meant when it first began to be current in France and England about 1835.
But it was the United States, with its new social optimism and its enormous unoccupied spaces, which was to become the great nursery for these experiments. The split between the working and the owning classes, with the resultant organization of labor, was already quite marked in the American republic by 1825; the immigrants from feudalism and famine in Europe were finding in the crowded American cities new misery and new hard masters. And the socialist movement both relieved the congestion and revived the disillusioned political thinkers.
We have seen that Robert Owen came to America in 1824 and started an Owenite movement: there were at least a dozen Owenite communities; and Albert Brisbane, who had brought Fourierism back from Paris and had been given a rostrum by Horace Greeley in The New York Tribune, propagandized for it in the 1840’s with such success that more than forty groups went out to build Fourierist phalansteries (which included Brook Farm in its second phase). This movement, which arose at the same time as the great tide of religious revivalism and which was entangled at various points with Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, Perfectionism and Spiritualism, persisted through the early fifties until the agitation for free farms in the West, culminating in the Homestead Act of 1863, diverted the attention of the dissatisfied from labor organization and socialism. It is hard to arrive at any precise estimate of the number of these communities, but there are records of at least a hundred and seventy-eight, including the religious communities practising communism, ranging in membership from fifteen to nine hundred; and Morris Hillquit, in his History of American Socialism, seems to believe there were many more, involving altogether “hundreds of thousands of members.” The Owenite and Fourierist communities alone are supposed to have occupied some fifty thousand acres. There were communities entirely Yankee and communities, like the French Icarians and the German religious groups, made up entirely of immigrants. There were sectarian communities, communities merely Christian and communities full of Deists and unbelievers. There were communities that practised complete chastity and communities that practised “free love”; communities that went in for vegetarianism. Some aimed at pure communism of property and profit, and some—notably the Fourierist phalanxes—were organized as joint stock companies. Some, entirely discarding money, lived by barter with the outside world; some by building up industries and driving a good bargain. One follower of Owen, a Scotch woman, Frances Wright, founded a community on the Wolf River in Tennessee, which was intended to solve the Negro problem: it was partly made up of slaves whom she had begged or bought from their masters and whom the white members were to educate and set free.
One odd and very American development was actually an anti-communist community. A man named Josiah Warren, who had taken part in the Owenite community at New Harmony and who had come to the conclusion that its failure had been due to the idea of “combination” itself, evolved a doctrine of Individual Sovereignty and a program for Equitable Commerce. He first wandered about Ohio and Indiana, opening up a succession of “Time Stores,” in which the customer paid in cash the wholesale cost of his purchase, plus a small percentage for the upkeep of the store, but paid with a “Labor note” for the amount of time consumed by Mr. Warren in the transaction. He handed this idea on to Robert Owen, who tried a large-scale labor exchange in London. Later on, Warren founded on Long Island the village of Modern Times, which was to give scope to Individual Sovereignty in property, occupation and taste. There were to be, as Warren announced, “no organization, no delegated power, no constitutions, no laws or by-laws,” no “rules or regulations but such as each individual makes for himself and his own business; no officers, no prophets nor priests.” If they had meetings, it was not for the purpose of agreeing on common plans, but merely “for friendly conversation,” for music, for dancing or for “some other pleasant pastime.” “Not even a single lecture upon the principles upon which we were acting” had ever “been given on the premises. It was not necessary; for, as a lady remarked, ‘the subject once stated and understood, there is nothing left to talk about: all is action after that.’ ” The village of Modern Times in turn proliferated Henry Edger, who became one of the ten apostles appointed by Auguste Comte, a disciple of Saint-Simon, to preach the scientific religion which he called Positivism and who later attempted a Comtist community; a man named Stephen Pearl Andrews, who developed a system of “Universology” and an intellectual and spiritual hierarchy called the “Pantarchy;” and a Dr. Thomas L. Nichols, who published an “Esoteric Anthropology,” inaugurated the Free Love movement by bringing out a list of the names of persons, scattered all over the United States, who were looking for and wished to become “affinities,” and ended up as a Roman Catholic.
“Seating myself in the venerable orchard,” said a visitor to the Trumbull Phalanx in Trumbull County, Ohio, in the August of 1844, “with the temporary dwellings on the opposite side, the joiners at their benches in their open shops under the green boughs, and hearing on every side the sound of industry, the roll of wheels in the mills, and many voices, I could not help exclaiming mentally: Indeed my eyes see men making haste to free the slave of all names, nations and tongues, and my ears hear them driving, thick and fast, nails into the coffin of despotism. I can but look on the establishment of this Phalanx as a step of as much importance as any which secured our political independence; and much greater than that which gained the Magna Charta, the foundation of English liberty.”
With their saw mills and grist mills and flour mills and their expanses of untried acres, with their communal dormitories and dining halls, they achieved some genuinely stimulating, harmonious and productive years, but more quarreling and impoverished failures. A very few of these communities lasted longer than a decade, but a great many never completed two years. They had against them sources of dissension within and pressure of public opinion from without, incapacity of lower-class groups to live up to socialist ideals and incapacity of upper-class groups to adapt themselves to manual labor. And all kinds of calamities befell them: fires and typhoid epidemics. A creek would overflow on swampy ground and they would all come down with fever and ague. They would be baffled by land which they had had the bad judgment to buy while it was under snow. They would start off with inadequate equipment or insufficient supplies and never be able to make them go round; or with debts that would get heavier and heavier and finally drag them down. They would find themselves in legal difficulties in connection with their titles to land; they would be unbusinesslike and make messes of their accounts. They would be disrupted by the bigotries of the religious and by jealousies among the women. They would suffer, as was said by a member of the Marlboro Association in Ohio, from “lack of faith in those who had the funds and lack of funds in those who had the faith”; and from “accepting the needy, the disabled and the sick.” They would end up in acrimonious lawsuits brought by members against the association; or in the event of their actually having been able to increase the value of their property, there would be members unable to resist the temptation to speculate and sell the community out.
The story of the Icarians is a longer one. Etienne Cabet was a cooper’s son, to whom the French Revolution had opened the career of a lawyer and political figure. His loyalty to the revolutionary principles made him conspicuous and extremely uncomfortable to the Bourbon Restoration and to Louis-Philippe alike; and as he found himself consigned to remote posts, persecuted for his opposition in the Chamber and finally given his choice between imprisonment and exile, he was driven farther and farther toward the extreme Left, which was still represented by the old Buonarotti, the great-nephew of Michael Angelo who had been a companion-in-arms of Babeuf. During his exile in England, Cabet composed a novel called Voyage en Icarie, which described a utopia on a communist island, where the inhabitants enjoyed a progressive income tax, abolition of the right of inheritance, state regulation of wages, national workshops, public education, the eugenic control of marriage and a single newspaper controlled by the government.
The effect of this romance on the French working class during the reign of Louis-Philippe was so immense that by 1847 Cabet had acquired a following variously estimated at from two to four hundred thousand. These disciples were eager to put Icarianism into practice; and Cabet published a manifesto: “Allons en Icarie!” Icaria was to be in America: Cabet had become convinced that Europe was now past mending even by a general revolution. He had consulted Robert Owen, who had recommended the state of Texas, then just admitted to the Union and in need of population; and Cabet signed a contract with an American company for, as he supposed, a million acres. When the first band of sixty-nine Icarians signed on the pier at Le Havre, just before sailing, “social contracts” which pledged them to communism, Cabet announced that “in view of men like those in the advance guard,” he could not “doubt the regeneration of the human race.” But when the Icarians got to New Orleans, in March, 1848, they discovered that they had been swindled by the Americans: that their domain, instead of touching the Red River, was located two hundred and fifty miles inland in the midst of an untraveled wilderness, and that they were able to claim only ten thousand acres, and those scattered instead of all in one piece. They got there, however, by ox-teams. Everybody came down with malaria, and the doctor went insane.
Cabet and other immigrants later joined them, and, after terrible sufferings and labors, they established themselves successfully at Nauvoo, Illinois, which had recently, been abandoned by the Mormons (themselves in their Utah phase, up to the death of Brigham Young, an example of a successful coöperative community).
But though the Icarians did not dissolve until almost the end of the century, their moments of prosperity were modest and few. With all their efforts they seemed never to get ahead; they were dependent on money sent them from France, and after the 1848 Revolution, with its promise of national workshops, the enthusiasm for Icarianism declined—so that they were always dragging heavy debts. They cultivated the land in a small way, tried to produce everything they needed. It seems to have taken them decades to learn English. They were always holding political meetings at which they would deliver interminable French speeches. And they were repeatedly torn and split by dissensions. What was primarily at issue in these dissensions was the conflict between the instincts of the American pioneer and the principles of the French doctrinaire. Cabet, with his typically eighteenth-century mind, had worked out what he considered a perfect system which would be sure to recommend itself to people because it would be sure to make them happy. The utopia contemplated in his novel had had a president and a parliamentary system that derived from the French Revolutionary Convention and the American Constitution; but, once established in the actual community, he felt compelled to impose himself as a dictator. And he seems to have had none of the real spiritual superiority of a Robert Owen or a Noyes. He was the most bourgeois of the communist leaders. He had no real imagination for the possibilities of either agriculture or industry; and, always trimming the community down to the most cautious scale of small French economy, he forbade them tobacco and whisky, supervised their private affairs, and sapped the morale of the members by setting them to spy on one another. He finally became such a tyrant that they sang the Marseillaise outside his windows, and defied him in open meeting: “Have we traveled three thousand miles not to be free?” In 1856, a majority overruled him and drove him out, and the old man died immediately afterwards in St. Louis.
A second Icarian revolution cut the other way. The younger members, excited by the Workers’ International and the Paris Commune of 1871, rebelled against the older elements, who had subsided into practical American farmers. They demanded equal political rights for women and the communization of the little private gardens which had become one of the principal pleasures of the old people’s meager lives. Another secession took place, which ended in California and petered out. The old Icarians—there were only a handful left—liquidated themselves in 1895. They were just like everybody else now, they said.
But by far the most successful of these experiments was the Oneida Community in New York State, which lasted for thirty-two years, from 1847 to 1879, on its original collectivist basis; and its leader, John Humphrey Noyes, was by far the most remarkable figure produced by the movement in America.
He came from Brattleboro, Vermont (he was born in 1811), from a family of some political distinction, and studied for the ministry at Yale, but began early to profess a heresy known as Perfectionism. According to the doctrine of the Perfectionists, it was not necessary to die to be saved: one could rid oneself of sin in this world. But a visit to New York City, where he had never before been, threw the young Noyes into a state of panic: he felt that the temptations of the flesh were dragging him down to the threshold of Hell, and, unable to sleep at night, he would walk the streets and go into the brothels and preach present salvation to the inmates. Unlike the other socialists of his epoch (Joseph Smith is his religious counterpart), he was profoundly concerned with sex, and in the community which he afterwards founded developed a technique of love-making which, in eliminating the danger of children, put love on a new communal basis. In some cases irregular children came also to be permitted. Beginning with the members of his own family, Noyes exerted so powerful an influence over his followers and exercised so strict a discipline over himself that he was able to control these difficult situations and actually succeeded to his own satisfaction and to that of those respectable Vermonters in dissociating the idea of sexual enjoyment from the idea of Hell and sin, and so accommodating it among the elements of the state of salvation on earth,
Noyes, who was a man of real intellectual ability, carefully studied the other communities with the purpose of profiting by their experience, and wrote a valuable book about them, A History of American Socialisms. He came to the conclusion that their failures and their various degrees of success were traceable to definite factors. He perfectly saw the absurdity of a system like that of Fourier, which adopted certain abstract principles and then deduced from them an ideal community which could be put together in a vacuum and which would then begin to work automatically. In the first place, it was important to start out with members who knew and trusted one another. Then it was important not to go too far away from the big centers and not to depend too much on land, which was much harder to get an income out of than industry. Then it was very important for the master mind to live in and lead the community himself: it was Noyes’s opinion that “a prohibitory duty” should be put on “the importation of socialistic theories, that have not been worked out, as well as written out, by the inventors themselves. It is certainly cruel to set vast numbers of simple people agog with utopian projects that will cost them their all, while the inventors and promulgators do nothing but write and talk.” But, most fundamental of all, neither socialism nor religion by itself was enough to make a successful community: you had to have both together; and you had to have an inspiration—what Noyes called an “afflatus”—strong enough to decompose the old family unit and to reassemble the members in the new organism, the new home, of the community. He believed that the most important practical example had been set by the religious communities of the Shakers, who had first settled at Watervliet, New York, in 1776, who had lasted and prospered through the whole nineteenth century, while, as Horace Greeley pointed out, “hundreds of banks and factories, and thousands of mercantile concerns, managed by shrewd, strong men, have gone into bankruptcy and perished,” and who, as I learn from a newspaper as I write, can still muster, out of their maximum of nearly five thousand, six old men and one old woman. Noyes considered that the validity of the Shaker movement had been due to the fact that, like Mormonism and Christianity, it had been able to produce a second great leader to rescue it from the period of confusion after the death of its first leader, Mother Ann.
And he endeavored to realize these conditions in the case of the Oneida Community by taking full responsibility for everything himself, by developing a highly profitable steel-trap factory and other successful industries (one of which, Community Plate, still survives), and by keeping up the afflatus of the religious end. He was actually able in a late phase of the community (between 1869 and 1879) to put into practice a breeding system which he called “stirpiculture” and which involved the picking of mates and the prohibition of unions by a board of supervisors, in the interests of the production of better children; and Noyes himself, though already in his sixties, became the father of nine. But he failed in the last of his conditions for success: he was not able to find a Brigham Young. As he grew old, the Oneida Community, with its dangerous stresses and strains, began to get out of hand; the parsons raised an outcry against it; and it was obliged to give up Complex Marriage. Eventually, after Noyes had had to leave it as a result of the dissensions that had arisen, it relapsed into individual ownership.
It is significant that Noyes, who had thought more deeply and who had achieved a more remarkable success than any other of the early socialist leaders, should have been unable to find any hope for the future save in the very unrealistic notion that the requisite combination of socialism and religion might be made universally to prevail by the conversion of the “local churches” to communism.
Only a few weeks before I write, I read in my local paper of the destruction of a part of the “phalanstery” put up near Red Bank, New Jersey, by the longest-lived of the Fourierist communities, the North American Phalanx, which adhered to its Fourierist form from 1843 to 1855. Here descendants of the original members still live on alone in the ragged New Jersey woodland in the same old long-galleried building, unpainted and gray now for decades but constructed with a certain grandeur according to Fourier’s specifications and so quaintly unassignable to the categories of either mansion, barracks or hotel; here they still put up tomatoes in the old factory, which, according to Fourier’s provision, is removed at some distance from the phalanstery and concealed by an avenue of trees. Here, in the middle years of the last century, came Greeley, Dana, Channing and Margaret Fuller. Here the faithful from Brook Farm ultimately migrated; and here found refuge the political exiles from France. Here died George Arnold, the poet, who, brought up in the Fourierist community and having watched it go to pieces in his teens, would return to the old refuge at intervals to write, among the honeysuckle or the crickets, his poems of epicurean loafing or elegiac resignation; and here was born Alexander Woollcott, who learned here whatever it is in him that compels him to throw up his radio engagement rather than refrain from criticism of the Nazis.
Here in the great wing, which had been growing unsafe and which has just been pulled down, was the communal hall where they ate, where they listened to lectures and concerts, and where they held banquets and balls; where the women both waited on table and danced, and where they were proud to appear in skirts that reached only to the knees and with trousers like men’s underneath. Here was the center of that pastoral little world through which, as one of the Fourierists said, they had been “desirous of escaping from the present hollow-hearted state of civilized society, in which fraud and heartless competition grind the more nobel-minded of our citizens to the dust”; where they had hoped to lead the way for their age, through their resolute stand and pure example, toward an ideal of firm human fellowship, of planned production, happy labor, high culture—all those things from which the life of society seemed so strangely to be heading away.