Is Utopia Dead?

The concept of “utopia” has essentially disappeared from the American vocabulary.  Amidst all the 2024 electoral clamor and Donald Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again,” no candidate – including the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders — invoked the notion of utopia to suggest a better tomorrow.  (Another democratic socialist, New York’s current mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, hints at it.)  If recalled at all, utopia is remembered as a nostalgic expression of the hippie communes that flourished during the counterculture, free-love era of the 1960s and ‘70s.

During that tumultuous period, dozens of communes existed throughout the country.  They included secular groups like the Sheep Ridge Ranch (aka Wheeler’s Ranch), Hog Farm, Total Loss Farm, Drop City, Black Bear Ranch, Trans-Love Energies, Morning Star Ranch, New Buffalo and Libre.  They also included religious communes like the Brotherhood of the Spirit, Shiloh, Jesus People USA and Divine Light Mission.

Today, the last vestiges of earlier secular utopian movement hang on as isolated communes in rural and urban settings.  Twin Oaks Community, founded in 1967 in Virginia, lives on with 100 members as does the Farm, founded in 1971 in southern Tennessee, with 150 members.  In urban areas, Ganas (Staten Island, NY) and the Jesus People USA (Chicago, IL) survive.  Don’t forget, religious communities like the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites that have long persevered with their millennial beliefs.

For a half-century between 1820s and 1870s, a utopian movement involving an estimated 100,000 people flourished throughout the country.  These radicals proclaimed in word and – most threatening – in deed a new era of possibility, one based on communitarian property relations, equal gender relations, free education, an appreciation of the land and unconventional sexual relations. The movement, whether embracing religious or secular values, challenged social norms and was assailed by religious leaders, politicians and the press.  It marked one of the first of America’s long history of “culture wars.”

Chris Jennings, in Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (2016), provides great insight into this remarkable episode of American history.  He focuses on five of the nearly three-dozen utopian communities that flourished during the mid-19^th century — the Shakers, New Harmony, Phalanxes, Icaria and Oneida.  His profiles invoke a very different — almost unimaginable — period of American life than we live today.

The utopian movement grew out of what was known as the Second Awakening or the Great Revival, an early-19^th century religiously inspired millennial movement that sought to replace austere Calvinist dogma with evangelical spiritual renewal.  It began in upstate New York in what was known as the “burned over” district — named for its religious fever — and spread rapidly throughout the westward-expanding country, especially into rural America.  It spawned the Mormons (followers of Joseph Smith), the Millerites (followers of William Miller), the Seventh-day Adventists (followers of Ellen White) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (followers of Charles Tae Russell) as well as the Shaker and Oneida communities.  The spirit of renewal contributed not only to the utopian movement, but the temperance movement of the 1820s, the abolitionist movement of the ‘30s and the feminist movement of the ‘40s.

But what is utopia?  The notion of a better or “perfect” society, if not heaven on earth, is as old as Western society.  The Old Testament’s Book of Genesis invokes the Garden of Eden and Plato’s The Republic envisions an ideal society.  However, the modern concept of utopia is rooted in Thomas More’s classic tale, Utopia, originally published five centuries ago, in 1516.  Jennings notes that the term “utopia” is a pun meaning “Goodplace” and “Notaplace.”  He observes, “More’s Utopia created a template for an entire literary genre, that meters-long shelf of books describing life in the perfect society.”

The Shakers, formally the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, began in northern England in the 1760s as a breakaway sect of Quakers.  Because of their loud singing, shouting, marching, twitching and

herky-jerky dancing, they were referred to as Shaking Quakers.  In 1774, eight Shakers under the leadership of Ann Lee sailed to the U.S. and, after much initial travail, settled in upstate New York.

“Mother” Lee preached the second coming of Christ, divine revelation and ecstatic celibacy, beliefs shared by other millenarians.  She insisted that humanity’s first great sin was when Adam and Eve mated, calling sex the “root and foundation of human depravity.”  At its height, there were more then 20 Shaker communities with more than 6,000 believers.  Shaker communities were hierarchical organized but based on a communitarian lifestyle with women and men sharing authority, thus reflecting their belief that God was both female and male. Most remarkable, there is still one active Shaker village still operating – Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community — in Maine.

The Mormons were born out of New York’s burned-out district and, facing enormous persecution, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has become an established religion; Mitt Romney, a Mormon, ran for president in 2008 and 2012.

New Harmony was a secular community founded and led by a successful business visionary, Robert Owen.  After making a small fortune as a progressive – if authoritarian — industrialist in Scotland, he decided to start a utopian community in the U.S.  He founded New Harmony in 1825, having acquired the lands of a millenarian sect, the Harmony Society or the Rappites (founded by Frederick Rapp) in Harmonie, IN.  Owen railed against the “trinity of evils” — private property, irrational religion and unequal marriage – and promoted progressive experiments in education, communal living and science.

However, while championing communitarian property relations and gender equality, he was a paternalistic overseer, enforcing curfews, house inspections and fines for drunkenness and illegitimate children.  During its brief existence, New Harmony attracted numerous artisans and mechanics but few farmers.  The issue of slavery split the community, with Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, Francis Wright and her sister, Camilla, opposed slavery.  Faced with financial difficulties and challenges to Owen’s authority, the colony broke up over the issue of slavery in 1827.

Robert Dale Owen and the Wright sisters not simply argued against slavery, but left New Harmony to found a new – and racially and politically more radical – utopian community, Nasboba, in rural Tennessee.

Charles Fourier, as Jennings notes, “instigated the most popular utopian movement in American history ….”   This French intellectual and clerk was a staunch defender of sexual freedom and women’s right, insisting, “Extension of the rights of women is the basic principle of social progress.”  He never visited the States, but his utopian vision, outlined in The Theory of Four Movements (1808), contributed to the establishment of more than 30 “associations” – known as “phalanxes” — throughout the country during the period of 1843 to ‘48.

Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, MA, founded by Nathaniel Hawthorn, and the North American Phalanx in Red Bank, NJ, with Horace Greeley, were the most renown Fourier communities.  The Red Bank commune was home to about 120 to 150 people and included the “Phalanxery,” a 150-foot-long structure that contained living accommodations, a communal kitchen and a dining room that was also used for dancing, theatrical performances and lectures.  However, none of the phalanxes fulfilled Fourier ideal model consisting of 1,600 people of all genders, ages and economic status.

Icaria was the brainchild of another radical French thinker, Etienne Cabet, who in 1839 published a novel, Voyage en Icarie, outlining his views.  He championed the abolition of private property, communal meals, equal education and ostensible equality of men and women (although women did not have the vote).  As Jennings states, “In Icaria, there are no domestic servants, cops, informants, middlemen, soldiers, gunsmiths, or bankers.”  Between 1848 and 1898, nearly 2,000 French communards (about 500 at any one time) established Icaria communities in Texas, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa and California.  The most famous community was in Nauvoo, IL, the site previously owned by Mormons before they relocated to Utah.

Oneida was founded 1848 in upstate New York by 87 Christian “Perfectionists,” led by John Humphrey Noyes, and flourished until 1880.  It spawned a half-dozen communities in Connecticut, New Jersey and Vermont and, by ‘78, claimed 306 members.  Its core belief was that the community was a family and that members shared their property, work and love.  They sought to separate pleasure from procreation through “complex marriage,” male continence and a form of group therapy dubbed “mutual criticism.”  They practiced an early form of eugenics, what Noyes referred to as a “science” of breeding dubbed “stirpiculture.”  In marked difference to the ’60 sexual revolution, complex marriage was a social practice in which older women and men acted as sexual “mentors” to younger community members.

The younger Owen co-founded Nashoba with Frances and Camilla Wright. As Jennings notes, “During its brief existence (1825-1828), the Nashoba Community embraced every single American bugaboo of the day: communism, atheism, feminism, abolitionism, free love, divorce, and interracial sex. The women were even reported to wear pants.  [Frances] Wright’s talent for inflaming conservative sensibilities was remarkable.”

Frances Wright is too often forgotten.  Born in Scotland in 1795, she was a respected author, on a first-name basis with John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  In 1821, while in Paris, she met the Marquis de Lafayette and worked with him supporting a number of independence movements.  In ’22, she published A Few Days in Athens, a fictionalized work on the philosophy of Epicurus; it drew praise from Thomas Jefferson who wrote that it was a “treat to me of the highest order.”

Wright met and regularly corresponded with Jefferson, strongly challenging him over his acceptance of slavery.  In 1825, she accompanied Lafayette in his legendary return to America; some suggest they had a sexual affair.  She is credited with being the first American woman to edit a journal, initially the Harmony Gazette that, after relocating to New York, became The Free Enquirer, as well as being the first woman to give a public speech, the 1828 keynote address at Cincinnati’s July 4^th celebration.

Nashoba was a mixed community of women and men, married and unmarried, black and white, free and slave, adult and child. It was a historically unprecedented attempt to remake civil society.  It was doomed to failure by the forces of its inherent and irreconcilable contradictions as well as by the material conditions under which it operated.  From all accounts, it seemed to have been a miserable place, with only a handful of poorly constructed and furnished houses, a well for water and ill-tended gardens and domesticated animals.  Upon its collapse, Wright freed Nashoba’s slaves in Haiti.

In 1830, Wright, along with Robert Dale Owen, opened the Hall of Science in the converted Ebenezer Baptist Church at 859 Broome Street.

Every Sunday and sometimes during the week, it hosted lectures and debates (admission was 10¢) where hundreds regularly attended.  “My friends,” she told an audience, “I am no Christian, in the sense usually attached to the word.”  Walt Whitman attended her lectures and, looking back at his youth, he fondly recalled her: “I never felt so glowingly toward any other woman. … She possessed herself of me body and soul.”

And what of utopia today – and tomorrow?

The utopian communities of the 19^th century remind 21^st century people that another America was envisioned.  America’s utopians flourished during a critical moment in U.S. history, one driven by early industrialization and ever-growing cities.  However, the deepening tensions between free and slave, North and South, culminated in the Civil War.  The nation’s postwar unification — symbolized by the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 – redefined possibility and contributed to the eclipse of the utopian movement.

The utopians of the 19^th century were – likely like 21^st communitarians are — well-meaning if doomed adventurers who established communities based on values that challenged the nation’s dominant moral order of wealth and hierarchy.  These communitarians sought to realize a new social environment that – they hoped – would make people more human, more equal.  To achieve this utopian goal, they invoked pleasure and good fellowship based on non-hierarchical and non-exploitative interpersonal relations, popular education and (sometimes) unconventional notions of sex.

Now, nearly two centuries after the great utopian experiment, is a new utopia possible? Many of the cultural values that the earlier utopian communities promoted – like civil rights, women’s equality and gay marriage — have become part of the new normal.  But one can only ask: Is something else, something better, possible?

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