UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES

In 1663 a small group of Dutch Mennonites settled near what is now Lewes, Delaware, to form a community based on their religious principles. Although the English destroyed the settlement a year later, it marked the beginning of a communitarian tradition in North America that stretches forward to the urban collectives and rural communes of the late twentieth century. Over that long span of time, communitarian societies have differed greatly in ideology and structure (the Dutch Mennonites would be horrified at their 1960s descendants), and perhaps not all have been consistently utopian in the strict sense of trying to implement a plan for a perfect society on earth. Utopian communitarianism, however, appears to have stronger roots in the United States than in Western Europe, at least in terms of putting ideology into practice. That collective vision may seem out of place in a nation valuing individualism; but the persistence of the communities reveals much about deep currents in American culture, particularly about how men and women have imagined social change and their role in it.

Utopia-building proceeded in waves. Between 1663 and the Revolution approximately twenty communities were constructed by religious groups, mostly German. The great success story, however, was a sect, the Shakers, founded by an Englishwoman, Mother Ann Lee, and established in North America in 1774. By the 1840s it had approximately six thousand members scattered in various communities. From the time of the Shakers to that of the present-day Hutterite Brethren, whose numbers reached seventeen thousand in 1970, religiously based utopian communities have been the largest in scale and most long-lived. Indeed, the Mormon Church had aspects of a communitarian society in its early years and drew upon the same mixture of utopianism and revivalistic religion that drove men and women into the Shakers and other utopian ventures in the pre-Civil War decades. In that respect, the Mormons, not the Shakers (who are near extinction), stand as the most enduring monument to antebellum religious communitarianism.

Utopianism took a different turn in 1824 with the arrival of a British visionary, Robert Owen, whose ideology was secular and promised to transform property and labor relationships. He embodied his ideas in New Harmony, Indiana, on land sold by a German communitarian group (which moved to Pennsylvania and long outlasted Owen's experiment). Although Owen's initial settlement failed dismally, his ideas paved the way for a new outburst of secular communitarianism in the 1840s, this time drawing on the writings of another European, the Frenchman Charles Fourier. Like Owen, Fourier foresaw a harmonious world in which men and women would realize their true natures in communities of approximately twenty-five hundred people. The utopias he influenced—most notably Brook Farm in Massachusetts and the North American Phalanx in Red Bank, New Jersey—were neither as large nor as perfect as he anticipated, but his work, along with Owen's, helps explain a proliferation of utopian ventures in the pre-Civil War years. Over ninety appeared between 1800 and 1850, many religious in origin but a significant number rooted in secular ideologies as well.

Much of the utopian fervor had passed by 1850, but there was a renewal of interest in communitarian projects after the Civil War, particularly between the late 1870s and the mid-1890s, when another hundred or so communitarian ventures appeared. Interest declined again toward the end of the century, perhaps because of a depression in the 1890s, perhaps because it was difficult to believe that small-scale communities could be a model for humankind in the age of giant corporations, and perhaps because competing secular ideologies, like socialism, promised progress through political struggle rather than withdrawal from mainstream society.

Americans, nevertheless, continued to build utopian communities on into the twentieth century; they ranged from coast to coast and from the South to the North. The new century brought an even greater proliferation of secular ones. Some were based on pseudoscientific doctrines, exemplified by Estero, which was founded in Florida in 1900 on the ideas of Cyrus R. Teed, who believed that, despite appearances, the earth is a hollow sphere with the sun in the center.

The next great wave of utopian communities, far surpassing the first, came in a brief span of years, from 1965 to roughly 1973. During that period, perhaps as many as two thousand communes appeared, with a membership of 250,000 or more. Many of these were little more than a half-dozen or so people in unconventional living arrangements. Others were larger, serious attempts to find alternative ways of life in an America then waging war in Vietnam and torn apart with racial strife. The majority were rural, but urban collectives and communes also existed. Clearly a part of the counterculture of the 1960s, these utopian communities sometimes emphasized a relatively new element: the notion of collective living as a form of self-fulfillment and personal growth, even therapy. Earlier utopias usually stressed collective goals and transcendent ideologies. The number of utopian communities had declined by the mid-1970s. Prosperity had made them possible, even though, in the minds of many members, they stood as critiques of a materialistic society run amok. In the end, they were victims of disillusion and economic distress.

Explaining the communitarian impulse is no easy matter, given the diversity of forms it has taken. To some extent, communitarian societies have existed in America because it has been relatively easy for them to do so in a generally tolerant, prosperous nation with abundant land. Those factors, however, better explain the persistence of utopian societies than the fluctuations in their attractiveness. A key to understanding their appeal may lie in the fact that the greatest peaks of communitarian activity correspond to periods of religious and social ferment. The Shakers grew in the wake of religious revivalism; secular communities before the Civil War were part of a heady mix of reform activity; and the most recent outburst of utopian societies coincided with the student activism of the 1960s. Communitarianism has been both a product and a critique of these larger movements. It partook of their sense that the world could—and should—be transformed; but it promised to do so by constructing a model society rather than engaging in direct political or social action of the sort swirling around it.

In many ways, utopians were less radical than they seemed. Frequently, they envisioned either a nonviolent revolution or the more limited goal of personal salvation. But they often drew upon values, impulses, and tensions thoroughly embedded in American culture. Their rhetoric, and the communities they built, for example, expressed such traditional views as a belief that America might lead the way in redemption of humankind; a sense that change begins with individuals and small groups rather than with institutions; a conviction that it is better to act than merely to theorize; and a deeply seated hope that an orderly society can rest on voluntary action rather than coercion.

In addition to the political and social implications, utopianism has offered psychological satisfactions. For some, it promised alternatives to confining social roles, even before the hippie communes in the 1960s preached sexual and psychic liberation. Some nineteenth-century utopias, for instance, liberated women from the restrictions of normal family life by granting them positions of leadership (most notably among the Shakers) and unconventional choices concerning reproduction in celibate and "free love" communes. In spite of many unorthodox practices, however, one of the strongest appeals of utopian societies has been their attempt to answer a classic American question—how to find individual fulfillment and yet be part of a community.

One of the ironies of utopian communities—and a source of their recurring strength —is that of all forms of social action, they most starkly present an all-encompassing alternative to the way things are; yet they do so by withdrawing from, rather than directly confronting, the social order. Theirs is a peaceful revolution and, increasingly in the twentieth century, a personal one. Their power lies in their ability to stand as an alternative to America as it is while moving to the larger rhythms of society and, in often unperceived ways, mirroring some of its fundamental values.

Mark Halloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880 (1966); Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (1972).

Ronald G. Walters

See also Mormons; Shakers.