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.
