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.