Remarque’s World War I

 

     Like certain other novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, Erich Martia Remarque’s All Quiet in the Western Front attracts the interest of people interested in history rather than in literature.  Though its author saw only about six weeks of service in WWI before he was invalided out, he must have kept a detailed journal.  Like Mauldin’s Willie and Joe cartoons during WWII and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead a few years later [1], his emphasis is on the physical demands on the infantrymen.  His writing style is undistinguished and the narrative reads like straightforward reportage with very little rhetorical elaboration, but that is precisely the point.  This is testimony more than art and the voice, that of Paul Bäumer, an average infantryman, neither a poet nor an aesthete, seems utterly convincing.  The nationalism that inspired his enlistment vanishes in combat, leaving him with overwhelming exhaustion and alienation.

     The experience of trench warfare is such strong stuff that figures of speech would only be distracting.  Ideology is equally irrelevant.  The book contains no recognition of the issues that led to conflict, no praise of the Kaiser, no propaganda against the French or English [2].  The intensity of life on the front lines obliged combatants on both sides to pause their patriotism and look directly at the dreadful face of war.  Without partisanship, with only the most basic, almost instinctive, humanism, the book found readers in many countries and was translated into twenty-two languages within eighteen months of its original German edition. 

     All Quiet in the Western Front also inspired cinematic adaptations, notably Lewis Milestone’s Academy Award-winning 1930 version [3].  During this era, anti=war sentiments were sufficiently widespread to make box office.  Les Croix de bois, a film of a book by French veteran Roland Dorgelès directed by Raymond Bernard was released in 1932.  Other soldiers’ memoirs, such as Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916), Siegfried Sassoon’s The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (1928), and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), impressed many with the sordid horror of modern war.

      Both film and book of All Quiet on the Western Front were in accord with the Zeitgeist.  With the use of trench warfare, aerial bombardment, poison gas, and other innovations, the old codes of gallantry and valor became untenable to many.  The Great War, called by H. G. Wells “the war that will end war” proved so horrific that many vowed never to fight again.  The League of Nations was founded, albeit without American participation (despite Wilson’s role in its design for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize) and in 1928 the US signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact whose signatories promised to forgo armed conflict altogether.  Upper-class British youth endorsed to Oxford Pledge “never to fight for King or Country” and many thousands of their working-class brothers joined them.  American students in an effort organized by the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the National Student League organized a walkout to promote their version of the oath in which twenty-five thousand students participated.  Of course, with the threat of fascism and the outbreak of WWII the Kellogg-Briand Pact meant nothing and virtually all the British and American pacificists joined the war effort. 

     Milestone’s film version, over two hours long, was startling in its realism.  Milestone proved a significant director, making such memorable films as The Front Page, Rain, Mutiny on the Bounty, yet he was the ideal studio contract director, capable of every genre and without a distracting distinctive style of his own.  Remnants of early cinematic experimentation are evident in some sequences such as the early montage of the students’ faces, crazy with military enthusiasm, and the final lyrical image of Paul reaching for a butterfly (an image absent from the book) but for the most part the direction is unobtrusive, allowing the terrible mayhem of battle to register with full force on the viewer [4].

     The apolitical pacifism of the novel survives into the movie, notably when the weary trench fighters wonder about the origin  of such a monstrous thing as war and to conclude that the leaders of the belligerent nations should slug it out in  a battle royal to decide the victor rather than subjecting millions of recruits who have no motive and no desire to fight to senseless violence.      

     Their suffering was so prolonged and intense that many were permanently damaged, diagnosed with shell shock (or, in less serious cases, “effort syndrome” or “soldier’s heart”), a disability little recognized in previous conflicts.  Though his hero and Paul’s fellow students with whom he enlisted did not survive the war, Remarque’s prefatory note suggests that his primary aim was to account for the devastating psychic toll of combat on survivors.

 

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.

 

     After suffering life on the front lines, Paul feels alienated from his home town, distanced even from his mother who cannot understand what he has endured (his father is even more  oblivious).  Mental stability upon entering war is no protection against serious breakdowns resulting from combat.  In the U.K. over a hundred and  fifty thousand WWI soldiers eventually received psychological disability pensions.  The film, however, makes it clear that another cohort of young men is prepared to ignore his witness and to continue to parrot the old lie, familiar to students from Horace, that it is “sweet and comely” to die for one’s country [5]. 

     Remarque’s novel rang true not only to his comrades-in-arms who had similarly suffered on both sides, but to their families and friends.  The futility of war was particularly obvious in the case of WWI, the origin of which was often explained as a combination of “entangling alliances,” imperialist rivalries, and the profit motives of munition makers, causes unlikely to appeal to the ordinary citizen [6].  As compelling as pacifist arguments may be, humanity has never been without war.  Once WWI had been declared the socialist parties of Europe supported their governments in spite of the obvious negative effects on workers, while in the United State Eugene Debs was jailed for voicing his opposition [7].  The popularity of Remarque’s novel and the film adaptation indicates that his representation of the voice of an average infantryman resonated with others, and the damage to fighters his book detailed was recognizable to many, both veterans and non-veterans.  With our experience in Vietnam the same social harm is now only too familiar to Americans, yet there can be no doubt that our governments will precipitate the same disastrous suffering again and again in the future.  The thought of the harrowing accounts of veterans yet to serve, yet to suffer, yet to be damaged is disturbing, yet without the testimony of ordinary front-line combatants like Remarque the lies of governments would go unchallenged. 

 

 

 

 

 1.  Mailer, like Remarque, told compelling stories about the soldiers’ suffering, though neither had as much combat experience as many of their comrades.

2.  Andrew Sarris had it right when he said that Milestone “is almost the classic example of the uncommitted director.”

3.  A sequel to the film, The Road Back (1937), was directed by the maker of Frankenstein, James Whale.  This in turn influenced Howard Hawks’ The Road to Glory (1936).  During WWII Milestone made pro-war films such as The Edge of Darkness (1943) and North Star (1943), the latter written by Lillian Hellman with music by Aaron Copland, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and cinematography by James Wong Howe.)

4.  Milestone, an immigrant from Bessarabia, now Moldova, born Leib Milstein, shed the avant-garde techniques of early Soviet cinematography more rapidly than his fellow director Rouben Mamoulian, who had been born in Georgia. 

5.  The same passage, of course, which Wilfred Owen used in titling his unforgettable “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

6.  WWII, of course, had a more compelling case to make with the need to contain exceedingly brutal German and Japanese expansionism.

7.  In the 1920 presidential election, while still imprisoned, Eugene Debs received close to a million votes, the highest total yet achieved by any American socialist candidate.

Every Reader’s Raleigh

 

   

     The story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s laying down his coat for Queen Elizabeth to cross a puddle was not recorded until eighty years after his death but it signifies his courtly style at a time when members of the ruling class were expected to display both politesse and aesthetic refinement as well as political discernment and military valor.  Like others of his age, he was only by the way a poet.  An active courtier, he endured military service and hazardous voyages of exploration in service to the crown, though his public role under powerful and jealous rulers led him to be imprisoned for several months by Elizabeth and later for thirteen years by James I who ultimately beheaded him.   As a diplomat and a military man, he held influential positions that enabled him to reinforce British rule over Ireland, defend England against Spain, and develop colonies in North America.

     His adventures on behalf of his country are recorded in part in his The Discovery of Guiana, which mixed reportage of his experiences in  the New World with fanciful tales of natives with faces in their chests (highlighted by depiction in the book’s frontispiece) as well as of the gold-rich city of El Dorado.  With the involuntary leisure of his imprisonment he also began a compendious History of the World, admired yet as a monument of English prose if not of historiography. 

      Much of his poetry is written in the comparatively conversational mode called the plain style, eschewing elaborate conceits and dense classical allusions to create the impression of sincerity and passion.  This relatively realistic vision is illustrated by Raleigh’s response to Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” a seduction poem in which the man offers his beloved endless “pleasures” and “delights” might she only “live with me, and be my love.”  Raleigh’s canny lady is well aware that love is not always such an unmixed blessing.   

 

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

 

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb,

The rest complains of cares to come.

 

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields,

To wayward winter reckoning yields,

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

 

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:

In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

 

Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,

The Coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

 

But could youth last, and love still breed,

Had joys no date, nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee, and be thy love.

 

Each of the blandishments so invitingly catalogued by Marlowe is questioned.  A “honey tongue” may conceal a “heart of gall.”  Material objects are all subject to dessication or rot, people grow old and love fades, time changes all things.  The sole classical reference here is more like a hand grenade than a decorative posy.  Philomel was raped and then suffered her tongue being cut out to prevent her disclosing the crime, a horrific example of sexual violence here concealed in an allusion.

     Raleigh’s sober realism coexists with the most fanciful figures of speech.  Raleigh’s “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk” constructs a fine filigree of imagination idealizing the beloved only to dismiss that pleasing illusion. 

 

Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk

 

Nature, that washed her hands in milk,

And had forgot to dry them,

Instead of earth took snow and silk,

At love’s request to try them,

If she a mistress could compose

To please love’s fancy out of those.

 

Her eyes he would should be of light,

A violet breath, and lips of jelly;

Her hair not black, nor overbright,

And of the softest down her belly;

As for her inside he’d have it

Only of wantonness and wit.

 

At love’s entreaty such a one

Nature made, but with her beauty

She hath framed a heart of stone;

So as love, by ill destiny,

Must die for her whom nature gave him,

Because her darling would not save him.

 

But time (which nature doth despise,

And rudely gives her love the lie,

Makes hope a fool, and sorrow wise)

His hands do neither wash nor dry;

But being made of steel and rust,

Turns snow and silk and milk to dust.

 

The light, the belly, lips, and breath,

He dims, discolors, and destroys;

With those he feeds but fills not death,

Which sometimes were the food of joys.

Yea, time doth dull each lively wit,

And dries all wantonness with it.

 

Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandered all our ways

Shuts up the story of our days.

 

 

     Whereas Adam and Eve were made from earth, the beloved cannot be so common; she, the poet says, is composed of finer things: milk, snow, and silk.  She has eyes of light, a floral breath, and lips of jelly!  Yet this perfect creature refuses her devoted lover, having “a heart of stone.”  Her loss thereby is evident as time turns all her charms in the end  to dust.  Her physical charms and her “wanton” spirit cannot last, since decline comes to all and death and everyone’s story ends with the same lamentable conclusion.  The ubi sunt (‘where has gone  . . .”} theme is here allied with the advice to “seize the day” (carpe diem), advising lovers to make the most of their youth since it will soon vanish. 

     The same ironic realism is apparent in “The Lie,” denouncing what Kenneth Rexroth called the Social Lie, the set of assumptions that ratifies social order, each element of which Raleigh disputes. 

 

The Lie

 

 Go, Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless errand;

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court, it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church, it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If church and court reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates, they live

Acting by others' action;

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition,

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they once reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending.

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honour how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favour how it falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in overwiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and schools reply,

Give arts and schools the lie.

 

Tell faith it's fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity

And virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing—

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing—

Stab at thee he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.       

 

     Relentlessly in stanza after stanza Raleigh exposes the pretensions of the world.  At his trial Socrates denounced his accusers declaring that proximity to death brings prophetic power, and Raleigh dares likewise to turn accuser before his execution with the honesty that nearness to the grave lends.  The court’s glamor, he says, is specious, and the power of rulers depends upon “factions,” while the nobles are themselves hateful and self-interested.  Raleigh then moves toward a more general cynicism, declaring zeal to be hollow and all love merely lust.  The flesh is ashes and everyone is moving steadily toward the grave.  Intelligence, he says, is only ingenuity and science arrogance, charity is phony, and law nothing but wrangling.  Academics even want “soundness” and depend only on “seeming.”  Both faith and morality have “fled.”  Even  his own mantic denunciations are only in the end “blabbing,” though to let the cat out of the bag, to admit mankind’s hypocrisy, is a capital offense.

    Though the poem is utterly cynical, it concludes on a defiantly positive note, declaring “no stab the soul can kill.”  The reader may well suspect that Raleigh had more in mind his preservation of dignified equanimity rather than Christian salvation.  He had asked that his beheading be public and he impressed onlookers calling the ax “sharp medicine” and, when executioner hesitated, saying “What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!”  His reputation was such that one of his judges later said, “The justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of the honourable Sir Walter Raleigh.”

     Skilled as he was at satire and ironic realism. Raleigh was also capable of spinning courtly sentiments, elegant if not exactly aureate, even making specific reference to Petrarch.   

 

A Vision upon the Fairy Queen

 

Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,

Within the Temple, where the vestall flame

Was wont to burne; and passing by that way,

To see that buried dust of living fame,

Whose tombe faire love and fairer vertue kept;

 

All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:

At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept;

And from thenceforth, those graces were not seene,

For they this Queene attended: in whose steed

Oblivion laid him downe on Lauras herse:

Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,

And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse,

Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,

And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

 

 

 

     Here Raleigh applauds his friend Edmund Spenser for his monumental allegorical epic The Faery Queene.  Raleigh’s witty compliment is based on  the conceit that Spenser’s queen, representing Elizabeth I, has beauty and virtues that put Petrarch’s lover Laura in the shade.  The Italian poet breaks into tears when the arrival of the living queen so outshines the earlier lady that Laura is cast into “oblivion.”  This substitution of one female ideal with another disturbs even buried ghosts, including that of Homer as obsolete poetic practices and the women praised by earlier poets are displaced by the new queen. This ingenuity and literary shop-talk befits the poem’s place in the introductory material to an edition  of The Faery Queen where it is accompanied by a lengthy letter from Raleigh to Spenser commending and commenting on the method of his friend’s vast poem.

     Raleigh’s life story is the history of his age in courtly rivalries, Realpolitik among nations, and colonial expansion.  His poetry likewise is part of the fabric of his times, representing a late development of courtly love influenced by Italian poets, but with a distinctively British tone of realism and irony that makes many of his pieces appeal to the contemporary reader.   

The Life and Death of American Communes

  

This survey is not meant to be comprehensive – other references exist for that.  Here enough data are presented to suggest the rich and varied history of American communes, to venture a few generalizations, and to pose some questions. 

 

     Nearly every imagined utopia includes social ownership of the means of production.  Yet attempts to put this appealing idea into practice have foundered.  Small voluntary groups, intentional communities for whom communism in the sense of sharing important assets is an ideal, have espoused lofty goals, but they have often been unstable, with many lasting only a few years.  The exceptional cases with greater longevity are often those with a religious or other authoritarian base.  Meanwhile, many countries that call themselves communist have only replicated the class stratification inherent in capitalism while eliminating democracy in order to maintain the power of the new ruling class.   

     In spite of a history of failure, communes have significant inherent advantages.  The substantial savings that result from the sharing of expenses would surely make collectivism far more common, were it not for the clash of egos, the tendency toward hierarchy, and the rapacious greed that reinforce individualistic systems.  Replacing competitive rivalry with the secure support of a cohesive community could be a powerful inducement to communal living, but such promise has rarely materialized, as many groups have bickered and splintered early on.  This instability has been heightened by the fact that unconventional living arrangements have been always so marginal in America that many participants willing to experiment have been religiously obsessed, eccentric, or artistic, not perhaps the most representative, steady, or industrious of citizens.

     America experienced a great flowering of communes in the nineteenth century, most of which lasted only a short time.  Their inspiration came for the most part from three sources: the Bible, utopian socialists, and humanistic philosophies seeking to free people from concerns about supporting themselves in order that they might devote themselves to aesthetic or intellectual interests.  

     Though ignored by most Christians, the Biblical basis for communism is explicit.  Acts 4: 32 declares that early believers retained no private property, “but they had all things common” with the result that none lacked for anything as “distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 4:34).  Over the centuries small groups have tried to realize this principle in practice including religious houses such as monasteries which present a highly disciplined model of communal life.  In nineteenth-century America such groups included the True Inspirationists of Amana, the Oneida Perfectionists, the Shakers, the Separatists of Zoar, and many others. 

     The Amana Colonies in Iowa were among the most successful American communes.  Founded in 1855 by German immigrants of the radical pietist sect, the Community of True Inspiration, which believed they had modern prophets in their midst, the group prospered for almost eighty years.  Nineteenth century observers noted that their villages had no unemployment, no poverty, no crime, and sufficient resources to provide employment to their neighbors as well as charity to poor outsiders who happened to pass through.  Residents of Amana held all the land and buildings in common; they ate in great dining halls and were governed by a council of elders.  With the Great Change, completed in 1932, Amana was reformed as a joint-stock company with each resident receiving shares.  No new prophets had emerged for a half century by that time, and many of the originally severe principles such as the group’s hostility to marriage and children, had relaxed.  Their use of German had been a factor both uniting the residents and separating them from their neighbors until Harding’s Language Proclamation, a reflection of WWI xenophobia, forbade their use of it in the public sphere.  Meanwhile, automobiles, radio, and movies were eroding the colonies’ isolation.  As long as the residents were unanimous in their world-view, they worked together in  harmony; but when dissent became possible, their cooperation weakened and dissolved [1].  Thus the history of the Amana Colonies illustrates both the factors that can sustain a commune and the dissolution likely to follow the loss of a shared focus. 

     Another nineteenth century religiously based commune was Oneida, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 and lasting until 1881.  Residents were Christian perfectionists, that is, they believed that Christ had returned in 70 C.E. with the destruction of the temple and that a Christian could find perfection in this world, not just in the next.  The group practiced group marriage – Noyes is the first user of the term “free love” [2] -- as well as common ownership of the means of production, and farmed in addition to manufacturing a variety of products so successfully that at one point they employed hundreds of outsiders and spawned four new communities [3].   The community declined when Noyes sickened and died, and his agnostic son  proved an unsatisfactory replacement.  Even with their transgressive sexual practices, the people of Oneida managed to flourish for a generation but only as long as their strong leader was at the helm. 

     The Shakers, or United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, as they called themselves, believed that Christ’s second coming would be heralded by a woman and they regarded their leader Ann Lee as a "manifestation of Divine light."  Though she died, by the end of the eighteenth century the group had adopted new leaders who announced by 1793 that property was to be held in common among them.  Though they required celibacy of all, they increased in numbers, eventually founding eighteen sizable communities with numerous smaller offshoots.  They sold highly-regarded wooden furniture as well as herbs, brushes and brooms, and were highly successful pioneers in selling garden seeds.  Like other religiously motivated communes, the coming of the twentieth century found their spiritual energy waning, while the requirement of celibacy meant they could gain new members only though conversion or the adoption of orphans.  Today three Shakers remain at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, one of whom was only recently accepted.

     The community of Zoar in Ohio was established by pietist immigrants from  Germany who in 1819 established a system of collective ownership of the means of production.  Benefiting from a profitable land sale to the Ohio and Erie Canal, they gained a solid financial base and ultimately owned over ten thousand acres of land.  They expanded into small industry, building an iron forge, a sawmill, woolen and cotton mills, and even operating as an area bank where outsiders could deposit money or secure loans.  They were democratic, electing leaders by popular vote by both men and women, though most looked to their charismatic leader Michael Bimeler for guidance.  After his death the community in 1853 seemed to lose much of its energy, though they remained communal until 1898.

     Among the many other religious groups that established communes in  the nineteenth century was yet another pietist group from Germany, the Hutterites who came to the United States  and settled mostly in Montana, South Dakota, and Canada in the 1870s.  They currently have fifteen communities supported primarily by agriculture. 

     Christian mystic Wilhelm Keil founded Bethel in Missouri in 1844.  By 1855 they had 650 acres of farmland and a distillery whose products were in demand among their neighbors.  Eighteen years earlier Keil had led a group from Bethel west in covered wagons to Oregon where they established the Aurora community in 1855.  Both endured past Keil’s death in 1877 until 1883 when collective ownership ceased and the assets were distributed. 

     In 1805 Johann Georg Rapp, a theosophist and Swedenborgian established the Harmony Society with four hundred followers who had left the Lutheran Church and supported themselves with both agriculture and manufacturing, growing in their several locations to over eight hundred members before a third of their members broke away in 1832 including many younger members who objected to Rapp’s recommendation of celibacy.  The group finally dissolved in 1905. 

     Adin Ballou, an early advocate of Christian socialism and anarchism established the Hopedale Community in Massachusetts which lasted from 1843 until 1857.  Though religious in its orientation, this group was more broadly political than many, advocating anarchism, temperance, abolitionism and women's rights, as well as spiritualism.

     Many more thoroughly secular communes were founded as well.  While Christians found a clear Biblical mandate for communism, non-religious thinkers also provided a range of  ideological bases.  During the Renaissance Montaigne had developed the notion of the bon sauvage and in the eighteenth century Rousseau speculated that competitive greed had produced all human suffering [4].  In the nineteenth century some pioneers in the new study of anthropology concluded that early peoples had long lived under a communist system.  The most significant proponent of this view was Frederick Engels [5] whose The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State outlined a fall, resembling that of Adam and Eve in Christianity, from a peaceful state of mutual support and protection to the rapacious and competitive greed of the slave, feudal, and capitalist systems that followed.  In this context a number of what Marx would call utopian socialists – Owen, Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Bellamy –  set forth plans for creating communist societies not through revolution, but by voluntary associations whose superiority would eventually convince all to participate.  Well over a hundred such “intentional communities” were founded during the nineteenth century in the United States [6].

     Robert Owen, a British textile manufacturer who became a leading early advocate of socialist cooperatives, came to the United States in 1824 and purchased the failing Rappite establishment at Harmony, Indiana.  Owens possessed sufficient resources and prestige that he addressed the American president and congress the following year, declaring that his cooperative system would signal "a new empire of peace and good will to man" leading to "that state of virtue, intelligence, enjoyment, and happiness,...which has been foretold by the sages of past times," fulfilling thereby the destiny of the human race [7].  A good number of Owenite communities were launched in the following decade including Washoba (1825-1829), founded by Fanny Wright for emancipated slaves to earn money with the eventual view of going to Haiti or back to Africa while being managed by white trustees.  The group in Kendal, Ohio, lasted a similar period, while perhaps a dozen others survived for shorter periods.  

   In the early 1840s American disciples of Fourier, in a movement supported by a national organization, the American Union of Associationists and by Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New-York Tribune, launched more than thirty communes, called phalanxes, though most lasted only a few years.  Perhaps the most successful of these projects  was the Wisconsin Phalanx at Ceresco founded by Warren Chase which functioned from 1844-1850, though adherents continued to advocate controversial ideas such as religious free thought and free love until they were attacked by an irate mob.  A noteworthy later Fourierist community was Silkville, Kansas, established in 1869 by Ernest de Boissière and lasting until his return to France in 1892. 

     Among the more successful non-religious communes were those of the Icarians whose ideology was based on Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie.  In 1848 a group of his followers whose socialism had much in common with that of Robert Owen embarked to establish a colony in  the United States.  They established a number of communities in five states and experienced factional splits over the years, but some of their settlements lasted for considerable periods: forty-six years in Corning, Iowa; eighteen in New Icaria, Iowa; eleven in Nauvoo.  In that location by 1878 there  were reportedly eighty-three residents who adequately supported themselves with agricultural operations.  A visitor describes them as “free from material embarrassment” and standing upon a “solid basis,” [8] while operating under a pure democracy in which decisions are made by the voting. 

     Admirers of Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backwards established the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth and a journal called Industrial Freedom to further their egalitarian goals.  Their Equality colony in Skagit County, Washington lasted from 1897 until 1907 when factional disputes resulted in violence.  Four other colonies had been established in  the Puget Sound region including one at Burley, Washington in 1898 which endured until 1912. 

     Other secular utopian organizations included several anarchist communities such as that at Home, Washington (founded in 1898 by George H. Allen, Oliver A. Verity, and B. F. O'Dell) which changed to private ownership in 1909 following attacks and internal dissension over both political and moral grounds.  The Socialist Community of Modern Times, founded by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews, in Brentwood, New York survived from 1851 until 1864.

     A les well-defined third group of communards might be called counter-cultural, like the hip movement of the 1960s.  The most celebrated is certainly Brook Farm which attracted some of the greatest writers in America for a time.  Founded by George and Sophia Ripley in 1841 with “transcendentalist ideals,” the community was supported by a farm as well as a school that drew tuition-paying students.  At various times Brook Farm boasted Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker among its residents.  A similar group under the leadership of Amos Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane started the Fruitlands Commune in 1843, but that venture lasted only seven months.  The Ruskin Colony in Tennessee (1894-1901) was founded by Julius Augustus Wayland.  Among its ventures was a traveling band before the group dissolved amid disputes over free love and financial stress.

     Many of the trends evident in this nineteenth century history persist through the twentieth. Religious motivations continue to be prominent in several of the most viable communities.  A twentieth century German Christian sect, the Bruderhof, was founded in 1920 by Eberhard Arnold.  Though its own origins are associated with university youth and their movement of the 1920s exemplified by the Wandervögel, the Bruderhof long sought to unite with the Hutterites, several times attempting a merger only to split again.  Today the Bruderhof has twenty-four communities and operates a number of thriving businesses, among the most successful being the manufacture of toys and a charter jet service used by businessmen and celebrities.

     The Children of God (now The Family International) was founded in 1968 by David Berg, also called “King,” “The Last End-time Prophet", and "Moses,” is a cult that combines evangelical Christianity with the trappings of the hip youth movement and hypersexuality.  Many members of he public came into contact with a child of God when she approached him on the street to invite him to her commune in an authorized practice called “flirty fishing.”  The group's activities persist today in spite of decades of allegations of physical and sexual abuse.

     Other twentieth century Christian communes were founded by Dorothy Day’s anarchist Catholic Worker movement, whose members live communally and operate a number of collective farms while performing charitable works and advocating pacifism and social justice.   

     Two of the most long-lasting American religion-based communes practiced forms of Hinduism.  Lama was begun by Robert and Barbara Durkee and Jonathan Altman under the spiritual direction of Baba Ram Dass, formerly Timothy Leary’s colleague Richard Alpert, who had become a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, a devotee of Hanuman, though the present approach to spiritual practice at Lama is eclectic.  The commune is off-grid and derives its income from both agriculture and summer programs for outsiders.  

     The Krishna Consciousness group under the leadership of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada founded New Vrindaban in West Virginia in 1968 which has managed to continue operations in spite of serious scandals including fraud and murder by cult leaders.    

     Among the very few twentieth century communes with a political ideology was Jersey Homesteads, a Jewish collective farm developed by Benjamin Brown who also started a similar group in Utah.  Meant to resettle unemployed garment workers, Jersey Homesteads aimed to have both agricultural and manufacturing arms.  In spite of support from Albert Einstein and Ben Shahn who painted a mural for the school.  Opposed by the garment workers’ union but supported by the Roosevelt administration, the project lasted from 1936-1940. 

   Among the most successful communes without a well-defined ideology, The Farm was founded by Stephen Gaskin in Tennessee in 1971 with a hundred followers.  Though in the active management of the commune Gaskin was advised by  a Council of Elders and later a Board of Directors, he remained a commanding influence until his death in 2014.

     The East Wind Community was established in 1974 in the Missouri Ozarks by people interested in  the ideas of behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner.  They continue today to support themselves through a number of enterprises, including the sale of sandals, nut, butters, and hammocks. 

     Drop City was an early commune of the second “hip” wave.  Established in 1960 by four students as a venue for avant-garde art to which all were welcome, the location became known primarily for the buildings constructed of junked cars.  They never had any plan for an economic base, and the policy declaring the commune "forever free and open to all people" attracted many transients.  Drop City’s public face reached a peak in June of 1967 when crowds attended a Festival of Joy on the site, leaving founder Gene Bernofsky so disgruntled he remained in his dwelling and departed never to return at the event’s conclusion, though he later said that he had expected to spend his life there.  The other original members left during the next two years, abandoning the property to whoever wished to stop off there.  By 1973 the location was virtually unoccupied, though it was not until 1979 that the land was sold. 

     Another arts-oriented “liberated zone” was Druid Heights in Marin County founded in 1954  by anarchist lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow.  Alan Watts, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder spent time there before the land was acquired by the National Park Service in 1977.

     Slab City was initiated by squatters on an abandoned army base in southern California where several large-scale art installations were created.  Today the spot has become an off-grid rv park where many live – thousands during the summer -- simply to avoid rent.   

     The New Buffalo commune was founded by poets Max Finstein and Rick Klein in 1967.  Residents kept some livestock and grew crops, living in tepees and adobe huts, but never achieved anything close to self-sufficiency.  Though Finstein left after just over a year to found The Reality Construction Company, those whom remained persisted in the location until the early seventies and the land remained collective until 1982 when Rick Klein assumed ownership.  In 1990 the New Buffalo Bed & Breakfast, called “the Far-Out Inn” by the Los Angeles Times, opened.

     Communism has several powerful advantages over private ownership.  Cooperation is surely a key to the enormous success of homo sapiens.  In prehistoric times for hunter-gatherers sharing was the rule.  In economies based on farming and manufacturing, collective ownership of the means of production leads to production based on people’s needs rather than profit.  Living collectively is significantly more efficient than each family unit looking after its own dining and housing.  Further, one might expect a strong emotional advantage in the entire community’s striving for mutual support rather than competitive rivalry.

     Yet communes have typically failed to thrive.  From the histories of the chief attempts in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, certain significant factors emerge.  The anomalous position of such groups surrounded by a free enterprise economy multiplies their challenges, though this disadvantage is difficult to quantify.  “Forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old,” in the language of the Preamble to the  I. W. W. constitution, presents problems in  a capitalist environment.  The business relations of communal societies required their dealing with profit-oriented railroads, wholesalers, shippers, and meatpackers, and, just as small farmers have always been at the mercy of banks and corporations in spite of owning their own means of production, isolated groups have few resources to compete with corporations many times their size possessing immense wealth and political influence.

     The pressures of operating within a non-socialist, indeed, often an anti-socialist country were not financial alone.  In a land where private property is to many a divinely-protected meant that the collective alternative had little appeal for many Americans whom perceived it as “foreign,” “un-American.”  This suspicion was bolstered by the fact that, for instance, many of the religious communards of the nineteenth century were German immigrants and an outsize proportion of Communist Party membership during the ‘thirties was Jewish.

   A major challenge for intentional communities is always attracting and retaining residents.  During the nineteenth century, for many Americans even sustainable subsistence farming was an aspiration and the promise of regular meals attractive.  Similarly, in the twentieth century, though hip communes drew many college-educated youth, they were also an alternative for homeless people, runaways and the addicted.  The more prosperous communes provided a secure material base, often accompanied by high-sounding religious or social ideals, yet once other options became more viable, the appeal of collective farms suffered.  Young people who wished to make their fortune or even simply to live in a big city were drawn away by the many options available in contemporary society.

     What might substitute for an authoritarian leader or a dogmatic religious belief system?  Counter-cultural enthusiasm or commitment to revolutionary ideals has not generally proven an adequate motivator.  Particularly in contemporary American culture in which affluence is the principal marker of prestige and having more than one’s neighbor is perceived as success, egalitarian systems have much to overcome.  Love for one’s partner and one’s family is considered desirable, but we have little experience with a genuine active love of community.  Even social support for the ill, needy, and aged is controversial and true economic democracy has never been considered a goal even by politicians labeled liberal.  Yet a utopia that realizes the slogan “one for all, all for one” has been conceivable to some in every generation, including a few who have been willing to try to build such a system, pioneers who may be honored if a future time ever learns better than our own to place cooperation before competition.  The positive bonds that would then join people together as members of a single family, brothers and sisters who share common interests and can best work in unison to achieve the happiness of all would then replace the waste inevitable with profit, exploitation, and internecine rivalry.  In the end Proudhon was correct in maintaining that property is theft [9], but the crime of stealing the labor of others is unlikely to be even recognized, mush less halted, in any future foreseeable from here. 

        

 

 

 

 

1.  The familiar Amana appliance brand was established in  the colonies shortly after their conversion to a capitalist corporation. 

2.  Noyes also advocated what he called “male continence,” avoiding ejaculation and pursued eugenic schemes.

3.  The Oneida silverware brand originated in the commune, but, like the case of Amana refrigerators, nation-wide commercial success occurred after the group became a corporation.   The other Noyesian communes were in Wallingford, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; and Putney and Cambridge, Vermont.

4.  In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.  Engels had drawn on the work of Lewis Henry Morgan who said in The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois that the native Americans “carried the principle of ‘living in common to its full extent. Whatever was taken in the chase, or raised in the fields, or gathered in its natural state by any member of the united families, enured to the benefit of all, for their stores of every description were common. They had regular hours for cooking through the whole establishment, and whatever was prepared was free to all.” (p. 318)  Kropotkin regarded early societies as anarchist rather than communist.   See his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which uses the example of the San people of southern Africa as evidence.

5.  For Montaigne, see especially his essay “On the Cannibals.”  For Rousseau, his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.  The “noble savage” idea is influential in Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe as well as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in America.  Even Pope found that the native Americans lacked “the Christians thirst for gold” (“An Essay on Man”). 

6.  The classic study of such communes, written by a long-time resident at Oneida who personally visited most of the sites abut which he writes is William Alfred Hinds’ American Communities (1878).  The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875) by Charles Nordhoff and John Humphrey Noyes’ History of American Socialisms (1870) are also valuable sources.  More modern references include Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880 (1951).  For the twentieth century the best references are Timothy Miller Communes in America, 1975-2000 (2019) and Yaakov Oved Two Hundred Years of American Communes (1988).  The Foundation for Intentional Communities maintains a global list of collective organizations, including communes, coops, cohousing arrangements, and others.

7. William Alfred Hinds, American Communities, p. 67.

8.  Oakley C. Johnson, ed., Robert Owen in the United States (New York, 1970), p. 51.

9.  From his What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), published in (1840).  Proudhon was, of course, referring to the means of production, not to personal property such as clothes or books.