Dissertation Chapter 1, Introduction, Overview & Methodology

Chapter 1: Introduction, Overview, and Methodology

This chapter will present the authors’ rational for examining utopian communities and for studying newspapers within these communities. It will provide a cursory overview of the history of utopian thought and practice, as well as a brief discussion of the role of newspapers in society. It will articulate the significance of the studies, and finally, it will describe the methodology used in the research. We acknowledge that this structure departs from the traditional, but we believe it enhances the readability of the studies. Presenting the information in this manner provides the reader with the background necessary to appreciate the story of the two communities and their newspapers beginning with Chapter 2 of each study. The reader will observe that Chapter 1 may be somewhat lengthy; it is hoped that the enhanced readability will make up for the additional length and the departure from tradition.
Rationale
Common Understandings
According to philosopher/educator John Dewey (1916/1966), adhering to common values and ways of behaving is an important part of belonging to and surviving in a community:
There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common. What they must have in common in order to form a community or society are aims, beliefs, aspirations, knowledge – a common understanding – like-mindedness as the sociologists say. Such things cannot be passed physically from one to another, like bricks; . . . (p. 4)
If not like bricks, then how do members of a community pass their “common understanding” – their aims, beliefs, aspirations, and knowledge – from one to another? According to Dewey, “Beings who are born not only unaware of, but quite indifferent to, the aims and habits of the social group have to be rendered cognizant of them and actively interested. Education, and education alone, spans the gap” (p. 3). Generally, anthropologists agree with Dewey that the transference of values is a primary function of education within a society:
Through education individuals are given instruction in beliefs, ways of behaving, and the means of producing things according to the cultural traditions of their society. People are not simply taught history, reading, or weaving; rather, they are given a distinct view about these things or a specific way to perform tasks . . . This holds true not only for how material is presented, but also for what is left out. (Howard, 1993, p. 218)
In its role as transmitter of values, education commonly reinforces cultural norms, and, in doing so, it helps create cohesion by maintaining the status quo. Education can also go beyond reflecting and reinforcing values; it can introduce new values and promote social change as a result. Examining how this educative communication occurs within communities offers a challenge to researchers because communities are living organisms, continually evolving and apt to change under scrutiny. Historic communities, however, bounded by time and place, can provide more suitable environments in which to study how the sharing of common understandings; that is, core values, occurs within communities.
Utopian Studies
Utopian experiments may be analogous to cultural Darwinism; that is, that which first appears in a small segment of a population and is found to have merit eventually evolves into the standard for the larger community. In his Study of Utopias, Mumford (1922) pointed out that without the utopians, humankind would likely still live in caves. In fact, utopian communities have frequently functioned as the pilot whales of our culture. As mentioned in the Preface, Stubblefield and Keane (1994) observed that reformers, in their attempts to “extend the notion of individual perfectibility to one of communal perfectibility” (p. 73) planned utopian communities with the intent of creating models that the rest of society could learn from and emulate. Decades before abolition, women’s equality, or workers’ rights rose to the forefront of the national conscience, utopians such as Robert Owen, Frances Wright, and the members of the Northampton Association, were instrumental in promoting labor organizations and working for Civil Rights. Fifty to 60 years before the 2000 Presidential election campaign included debate on environmental issues, utopians were environmental activists and back-to-the-landers.
It is, therefore, beneficial to study the history of such peoples and the communities they founded in order to discover how they thought and why, and how they sustained and perpetuated their beliefs and values; that is, their common understandings.
Overview of Utopian Thought and Practice in the Western World
This overview provides a brief glimpse into the rich history of utopian thought and practice that ultimately gave birth to the two communities examined in depth in these collaborative studies. In particular, the overview serves to set the communities of New Harmony, Indiana and the Colorado Cooperative Colony into the context of utopian experiments within the expansion of the American West, one pre-Civil War and the other post Civil War.
The Birth of Utopian Thought
A current of utopian thought and practice has flowed throughout the entire history of Western civilization. It has sparked improvements, energized reforms, and ultimately changed society. The term utopia, which literally means nowhere, was coined in 1515 by English author, statesman and scholar Thomas More who combined topos, meaning nowhere, with ou, meaning place (Herder in More, 1516/1997, p. iii). He gave the name to an imaginary island society he created whose inhabitants owned all goods in common and enjoyed religious freedom. Although More coined the term in the 16th century, utopian thought reaches back to the ancient Greeks, to Plato, who described his version of the perfect society in The Republic. Written in 400 BC, Plato’s Republic provides the earliest known written description of a utopian society. It included the belief that the State could maintain its perfection only if it controlled the education of the youth, a belief shared by many utopian philosophers who followed. These included Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch, who wrote Life of Lycurgus in 100 BC; St. Augustine, who wrote The City of God in 426 AD; and even the writers of the Bible, who, it could be said, “transplanted the idea of the perfect society to the sky and called it the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mumford, 1922, p. 59).
After Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1516, other authors continued to provide visions of the perfect society, most of which provided a welcome contrast to the political disarray of Christian Europe in the 16th century. These included German scholar and humanist Johann Andreae’s Christianopolis in 1619; Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in 1622; and Englishman James Harrington’s Oceana in 1656. Oceana centered on the idea of the sovereignty of the people, provided for elected representatives in a double-chambered Republican government, and is said to have influenced many of the constitutions of the American colonies (Berneri, 1950).
The old worlds of ancient Greece and medieval Europe produced the seeds of utopian thought, but it was in the New World where the utopian movement came to full flower. With the birth of America, herself a Grand Experiment, utopias that had heretofore existed only on paper or in philosophers’ heads, at long last came to be attempted in reality.
Sectarian Colonies in Colonial America
Beginning with the landing of the Pilgrims and continuing for the next two centuries, utopian experiments in the United States typically were of the sectarian type, founded by religious groups seeking a heaven on earth. The earliest mention of a utopian settlement in the New World was a Dutch Mennonite colony founded in 1663 at the mouth of the Hoorn Kill on the Delaware River at what is now Lewes, Sussox County, Delaware. This community was followed by others in the 1600s, including the Labadists who settled at Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, in 1668; and a group of German Pietists, Das Weib in der Wuste, or the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, who settled in German Town, Pennsylvania, in 1694. The 1700s witnessed a proliferation of sectarian colonies, including the Ephrata Colony founded in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1732; the Moravians, who settled in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1774; and the Shakers, who arrived in America from England in 1774 (Berneri, 1950; Bestor, 1950; Fogarty, 1972).
One community, established in 1785 by George Rapp, bears special significance to these studies. After initially settling in Pennsylvania, the Rappites purchased 30,000 acres along the Wabash River in Indiana where, in just seven years, they created the thriving community of Harmonie, replete with modularly-constructed homes, communal buildings, a tannery, a distillery, a cotton manufactory, and abundant orchards. An industrious group, the Rappites sold their products world-wide, and, in 1825, they decided to return to Pennsylvania and the greater access to world markets that it provided. At approximately the same time that Father Rapp was searching for someone to purchase the 30,000 acre property in Indiana, Scotsman Robert Owen was looking for property to purchase in America. Owen had successfully reformed a squalid factory town in Scotland based on his principle that character is formed for people, not by them, and he wanted to repeat his success in America. He purchased the property from the Rappites and immediately began inviting people to move to New Harmony. His attempts to create a utopian colony were chronicled in a community newspaper, the New Harmony Gazette, which is the focus of Chapters 2—6 of A Study of the New Harmony Gazette and Its Attempts to Establish or Reinforce Community Core Values in the Community of New Harmony, Indiana, from 1825 to 1827.
Non-sectarian Communities, Pre-Civil War America
The aftermath of the French Revolution, the War of 1812, and other social upheavals surrounding the turn of the century gave rise to a different kind of utopian experiment during the first half of the 1800’s. The first communities based on other than religious ideals began to emerge as socialists, abolitionists, reformers, and Transcendentalists all tried their hands at creating perfect communities based on ideas of equality, suffrage, and education. Notable among these experiments included Nashoba, Tennessee, founded by Frances Wright in 1825 as an attempt to prove that free Black labor was more profitable than slavery. A fan of Robert Owen and his philosophies, Wright assisted Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, with the publication of the New Harmony Gazette, later named the New Harmony and Nashoba Gazette (Bestor, 1973, p. 261). Wright’s alliance with the Owens and their community at New Harmony, Indiana, is discussed in greater detail in the New Harmony study.
The Oneida Perfectionists were another nonsectarian community founded in the first half of the 1800s. Established in New York by John Humphrey Noyes in 1841, the Oneida Colony also published a newspaper, The Circular, which chronicled the history of the colony. Renaming The Circular in 1867 to The American Socialist, reflected a change in the Oneida community that paralleled a trend among post-Civil War utopian colonies throughout the country as a whole.
Created in 1842 and owned by shareholders, the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (NAEI) was dedicated to the principle of abolition, which it supported in member William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator. The first half of the 19th century saw the creation of many other nonsectarian colonies, including the Transcendentalist communities of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, founded in Massachusetts in 1841 and 1844, as well as numerous Fourierist phalanxes. The writings of French socialist and reformer Charles Fourier sparked the formation of over forty utopian communities in the 1840s, the longest lived of which was the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, and the most famous of which was the former Transcendentalist community of Brook Farm. The Fourierist movement claimed its own newspaper, the Harbinger. Also the official publication of Brook Farm, the Harbinger reported on many communitarian experiments, Fourierist and others, around the country (Bestor, 1950). Fifty years after Fourier, the novel, Looking Backward 2000-1887, by Edward Bellamy, reflected many of Fourier’s ideas for structuring communities along socialistic lines.
Socialistic Communities in Post-Civil War America
Several forces converged following the Civil War that served to rekindle colonization efforts, which had dropped off during the war. Due to industrialization, Eastern cities were becoming increasingly overcrowded. America’s West beckoned with its wide-open spaces, its clean air and water, and its need for people unafraid of hard work to tame it. Legislation such as the Desert Land Act made it more affordable, and the newly completed transcontinental railroad made it more accessible. The need to irrigate the land required combined effort, which made cooperative and socialistic ventures especially appealing. Some religious colonies continued to find root in America’s arid West after the Civil War; most notable among these were the Mormons, whose cooperative efforts in Utah were so successful that they served as a model to others. Many post-Civil War colonization experiments, however, tended to be based on economic and political ideals, rather than on religion. Though sectarian and nonsectarian communities may have disagreed on some matters of philosophy, many of them shared a deep commitment to the ideal of cooperation—that by pooling their resources and their talents and by working together, they would succeed. Many colonies founded after the Civil War followed the ideas inherent in cooperationism and in socialism and organized as joint stock ventures. One of these, the Colorado Cooperative Colony, founded in Colorado in 1894, is explored at length in chapters 3 – 6 of A Study of the Altrurian Newspaper and Its Attempts to Establish or Reinforce Community Core Values in the Cooperative Colony Established by the Colorado Cooperative Company at Nucla, Colorado, from 1895 to 1901.
Conclusion
The seeds of utopian thought that began in ancient Greece were carried in fictional writings throughout Europe, sailed across the ocean with persons seeking freedom from persecution, and took root in the New World, where some colonies organized around the philosophies of various charismatic leaders, others around religious beliefs, and still others organized around political or economic ideals. (Appendix A highlights some of the major American utopian experiments, their structures and their organizing principles.) The utopian movement did not cease with the advent of the 20th century, and in fact, continues yet today. The history of utopian thought and practice provides fascinating reading, and persons desiring more information about utopian history should consult some of the excellent resources on this topic, most notably Arthur Bestor’s (1973) Backwoods Utopias, Robert Fogarty’s (1972) American Utopianism, Mary Louise Berneri’s (1950) Journey Through Utopia, Christian Clark’s (1995) The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association, Cynthia Eckhart’s (1984) Fanny Wright, Rebel in America, Mark Holloway’s (1951) Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880, Lewis Mumford’s (1922) The Story of Utopias, Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s (1972) Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective, or George Lockwood’s (1905/1971) The New Harmony Movement.
The observation that many nonsectarian utopian communities published newspapers led to an exploration of the role of newspapers within society, the focus of the next section of this chapter.
Newspapers
Congress shall make no laws . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press . . .
(Bill of Rights)
Background
With ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 and its guarantee of freedom of the press, America’s newspapers began to assume a more central role in national affairs. In the hundred years that followed, newspapers not only chronicled occurrences, but many of their editors and reporters helped shape significant events in the developing nation. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune in 1841, supported and fought for the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad, helped found the Greeley Colony in Colorado in 1870, and ran for President on the Liberal Republican Party ticket in 1872. Poet William Cullen Bryant edited the Evening Post in New York City from 1829 until his death in 1878. Police reporter for the New York Times and the New York Evening Sun, Jacob Riis contributed to the reform movement at the turn of the century by illuminating the deplorable conditions of urban tenement housing through his writing and his photographs, which he compiled in How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. Appeal to Reason editor Justin Wayland founded the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee in the 1890s. Mark Twain helped create the mythology of the West both as a writer for such papers as The Morning Call in San Francisco and the Saturday Press in New York, and as editor of Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise. Before authoring the silver plank of the Democratic platform, which led to his running for United States President in the 1896 Presidential campaign, William Jennings Bryan edited the Omaha World-Herald.
The Industrial Revolution allowed newspapers to keep pace with Westward expansion. Until America was able to produce wood pulp paper in its own mills at nominal cost, newspapers were made from cloth rags. A growing demand for newspapers expanded the raghandling industry, which contributed to the spread of disease among the workers who sorted the soiled and bacteria-ridden rags. Early newspapers frequently advertised for rags, including the first issue of the Deseret News that offered to accept rags and food as tithing. Egyptian mummies were imported by the thousands for the 30 plus yards of fine linen in which they were wrapped (Karolevitz, 1985). In the 1880s the United States finally began to manufacture newsprint from wood pulp. This, along with advances in technology made earlier in the century, such as the all-metal printing press of 1820, the invention of the Remington typewriter in 1874, and Mergenthaler’s line of type machine in 1886, allowed newspapers to be printed in large volume, making the newspaper the first true mass medium.
As the country pushed westward, so did the newspaper. “Wherever there was even the slightest concentration of people, a printing press invariably turned up, too. It gave the mining camp, the boomer town and the frontier military post an aura of permanence and respectability” (Karolevitz, 1985, p. 43). One method settlers used to prove they had satisfied all requirements of the Homestead Act of 1862, was to advertise in five consecutive issues of the newspaper nearest their land claim. These “proof ads,” as they were called, could cost the homesteader from $5.00 to $6.50 each, and they helped keep some frontier newspapers in business (Karolevitz, 1985). Through newspaper accounts, the entire country followed the building of the transcontinental railroad. As the railroad pushed ahead, towns were platted along the tracks. The appearance of a new town along the railroad tracks frequently accompanied the appearance of a new newspaper, which sang the praises of the town and publicized opportunities to acquire Western lands, which, in turn, attracted more settlers. Railroad companies published their own newspapers, such as The Transcontinental on Union Pacific’s Pullman Hotel Express that ran between Omaha and the west coast.
Role of Newspapers in Society
Nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought
into a thousand minds at the same moment.
(Tocqueville, 1835/1981, p. 409)
During his 1831 tour of the United states, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville (1835/1981) observed that a symbiotic relationship existed between democracy and newspapers in 19th century America, due, in part, to the accessibility of information that newspapers offered everyone. This access to information, once enjoyed only by a small circle of the informed—and consequently powerful—not only expanded the power of the informed to anyone who could read, or who would be read to, but it also served to transmit a common core of values: “Thus, the merely literate readers of newspapers, while being offered the advantages not only of public information but also of exposure to a richer cultural world than they had previously known, were being drawn into a system of shared values . . .” (Clark, 1991, p. 367).
Newspapers of the 18th and 19th centuries functioned differently in society from newspapers of today. To begin with, they contained very little of what we would call news. While modern newspapers claim to strive for a certain objectivity, this was not the case one and two hundred years ago when it was common for newspapers to align themselves with a particular candidate, cause, or political party: “Because of their party affiliation, most journals presented plainly partisan accounts of the political life of both nation and state, accounts often copied from ‘official’ party organs in the national and state capitals” (Russo, 1980, p. 19). The content of these early papers consisted primarily of what we call editorials today, with the authors’ opinions frequently indistinguishable from factual information. In the 1780s, before ratification of the Bill of Rights, newspapers were used to disseminate the “correct principles” of the Federalist-controlled government (Nord, 1991, p. 397). Following the Federalists, Thomas Jefferson believed passionately in the freedom of the press, but he also understood its power, and he used the press to propagate the republican message throughout the land (Nord, p. 398). By the beginning of the 19th century, America had burst the seams of the original 13 colonies, and the proliferation of newspapers reflected the diversity of special interests, opinions, geography, and cultures that characterized the country.
With only four pages, the early newspapers differed from modern newspapers in size, as well. Until around 1900, when daily newspapers of twelve or sixteen pages began to appear in the cities, the four-page weekly was the most common format in the nation (Baldesty, 1991). Before the 20th century, newspapers viewed their readers as voters, and newspaper content, which consisted of lengthy (some would say long-winded) essays supporting or criticizing a philosophy, political cause, or some pending legislation, reflected this view.
As their size increased, so did their cost, and newspapers began to include more advertising, which resulted in a significant change of perception: newspapers began viewing their readers not as voters, but as consumers. The number of pages, layout, amount of advertising, and greater emphasis on reporting, rather than on editorializing, reflected this different view. Newspapers began to hire reporters to travel from the newspaper printing offices to gather news on site, a position that had been unknown and unnecessary in the smaller and unabashedly editorial style papers (Baldesty, 1991). This evolution necessitated that newspapers begin distancing themselves from governmental and from corporate entities, a change that ushered in the role of newspapers as watchdogs. By the beginning of the 20th century, it became more common to see city newspapers presenting news based on facts, rather than producing the political essays that had characterized newspapers until this time (Baldesty, 1991).
Role of Newspapers in Communities
The 1800s experienced phenomenal growth in the numbers of newspapers in the United States, from approximately 400 in 1810 (Nord, 1991, p. 403) to over 11,000 in 1850 (Barber, 1999). Most of the 11,000 newspapers were published in small towns and villages (Russo, 1980, p. 6), and most of those country newspapers shared some similarities, including [usually] a four-page format with three or four columns per page, weekly publication, highly editorialized content, and, after 1860 (Russo, p. 5), one or more columns dealing with the activities of clubs and social gatherings. In 1860, the editor of the Michigan Expositor described the typical newspaper of the time and its educative role in the community:
[More] than men often stop to think, is the Newspaper of today an Educator of the people—Penetrating every corner of the land, found in every home, no matter how remote or how lowly, telling its tale of doings, for good or ill, transpiring in this busy world of ours, having now a poem and now a gem of literature, expressing decided opinions upon current events with all the freedom and assurance of private conversation and every word read and pondered by meditative old age, shrewd middle age, inexperienced youth, and impressible childhood, it is impossible that it should wield an influence such as no other agency can. . . . It forms the habit of thinking and believing, it cultivates the taste. . . . (in Russo, p. 1)
The role of newspapers in small communities was similar to the role of newspapers within society at large; that is, as instruments of education, as well as instruments of propaganda. And, while newspapers may have contributed to coalescing some common understandings on a national level, this was a role they could and did play to a much greater degree in smaller communities. When investigating how individuals’ community ties are related to their use of newspapers, researchers have found that newspapers help create, reinforce, and extend feelings of interdependence among members of a community; they help create a sense of identity with the people and institutions of a community; and they help newcomers integrate into a community. In short, by helping individuals develop a sense of identity within the community context, newspapers can help unify communities (Stamm, Fontini, & Campbell, 1983).
Some of the 11,000 newspapers in the second half of the 19th century were published within sectarian communities. Missionaries published newspapers in several languages for their parishioners from Wisconsin to the island of Maui, such as Reverend Jotham Meeker who printed the Shawnee Sun in the Shawnee orthography, which he developed. Predating John Dewey’s philosophy of actively engaging students, many tribal schools taught their students to set type and to produce their own newspapers, such as the Cherokee Rosebud, published by the Park Hill Female Seminary students in 1848 (Karolevitz, 1985). These sectarian communities, by their very nature, were unified by fundamental religious beliefs. Nonsectarian communities, on the other hand, often organized around political ideals that encouraged freedom of thought and diversity of opinion. In the absence of a rigid core of values based upon religious beliefs, nonsectarian communities needed some tool to reinforce and transmit their values.
We have observed that many nonsectarian “utopian” communities of the 1800s published their own newspapers. We surmised that the newspaper in such communities may have assumed greater importance than heretofore recognized. It is for this reason that we decided to examine and to analyze newspapers within two selected utopian communities with the expectation that doing so may reveal something about the role these newspapers played in attempting to influence the communities’ core values.
Significance of Study
Understanding what conditions are necessary for people to live together harmoniously has perplexed and inspired humankind since the beginning of time. It is a philosophical question for which we still have few definitive answers, and studying communities that have consciously attempted to do this is of academic and historical value. Because “Journalism is an expression of public life” (Shaffer, 1999), studying the newspapers of such communities can perhaps provide a lens through which these courageous endeavors may be viewed. Some media scholars contend that journalism is essentially invisible in American historiography and ask, “Why can we still write American history without American journalism?” (Schudson, 1991, p. 425). Their question indicates that few studies have dealt directly with newspapers as a “social function of building solidarity and reaffirming common values within a community” (Schudson, p. 426). These scholars imply that such studies may lead to greater understanding of the role that communication has played in our national past, claiming, “The stories we tell ourselves and circulate among ourselves serve as reminders of who we are and what we’re about, and that these stories, this culture, as a system of reminders, make a very big difference in what we do with and in our lives” (Schudson, p. 427).
A search for scholarly studies dealing with newspapers within utopian communities turned up numerous articles and research studies dealing with a wide variety of elements within utopian societies, but not one that addressed the newspaper. While several works were found that referenced newspapers within utopian communities, such as one dissertation on the history of theater in New Harmony (Sajko, 1993), none was found that focused on the newspaper itself. Perusal of a comprehensive list of Master’s theses and Doctoral dissertations listed on “Utopus Discovered,” a Colorado College website dedicated to utopian research, as well as review of all journals of both the National Historic Communal Societies Association and the Society for Utopian Studies validated this finding. If such studies exist, they are rare and difficult to find, making these two studies of newspapers within utopian communities one (two) of a kind. As these two studies focus on the newspaper and its attempts to influence values within utopian communities, they will contribute to media studies, as well as to the body of utopian research, which has rarely focused on newspapers. In addition, each study holds special significance to the respective communities whose newspapers were examined. For example, until Pamela’s contact with them, the Colorado Ditch Company, which evolved from the original Colorado Co-operative Company, was not aware that microfilm copies of The Altrurian newspaper existed. The current ditch company continues to house all the original company minutes, into which are pasted occasional newspaper clippings (T. Morgan, personal communication, February 4, 2001); the company is only now aware that these clippings came from the Colorado Cooperative Company’s official newspaper, The Altrurian.
Special Significance of the New Harmony Study
Many books, academic papers, and articles have been written about the Owenite colony at New Harmony, Indiana. Many of the books contain fine histories of the events surrounding the New Harmony experiment, but only one book—Lockwood’s (1905/1971) The New Harmony Movement—relied on articles from the New Harmony Gazette to lend authenticity to the sequence and scope of events that took place in the colony. The only other mention of the newspaper as more than an aside was in a dissertation that chronicled the history of theater in New Harmony from 1827 through 1913 (Sajko, 1993). That study used the newspaper for articles and advertisements that publicized the local theater troupe. As far as can be determined, this study is the only one to deal with the newspaper as a shaper of events. The process of categorizing articles that explained, shaped, or defended the values articulated in the Owenite Constitution, led to an understanding of how the New Harmony Gazette assumed a role within the community as reformer, rather than as reporter. By showing how the newspaper was used as a vehicle for promoting cohesion within the community, this study contributes to the body of knowledge within education, utopian studies and journalism.
Special Significance of the Altrurian Study
Three previous histories of the Colorado Cooperative Colony (CCC) referenced The Altrurian newspaper, but none focused on it. Croke’s (n.d.) study, “A History of the Colorado Co-operative Colony, and the Town of Nucla,” was based primarily on articles published in the Montrose Enterprise and the Montrose Press, but two years worth (1899 and 1900) of these newspapers were not available (p. 36). Ellen Zatterstrom Peterson moved to the Colorado Cooperative Colony in 1900, when she was 12. This was six years after it had incorporated. Her history of the Colony, Spell of the Tabeguache (1957), supplemented her personal remembrances with occasional articles from The Altrurian newspaper, as well as, apparently (though she does not verify this) with minutes of company meetings. Templeton’s (1988) history The Visionaries:First and Second Generation Pioneers of the Pinon, Ute and Nucla Areas, provides a compilation of first or second-hand remembrances from 21 people who lived at Ute or Pinon before moving to Tabeguache Park. Chapter 2, “Early Day Altrurians” consists of excerpts from the four [emphasis mine] Altrurians on file at the museum in Naturita. In describing what happened to one newspaper, the following excerpt from this chapter suggests why the museum does not have the other 131 issues of The Altrurian:
This paper was rescued from Aunt Mina Brooks’ shed shortly after her death by her great-nephew, Dan Cooper and his wife Cherri. The center of this paper has been eaten away by mice so where you see . . ., it means this part of the paper is gone. (p. 23)
A search for copies of The Altrurian resulted in the discovery of two microfilm editions, one at the State Historical Society of Colorado in Denver, and the other at the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka. The Kansas edition contains 124 of the 135 issues published, while the Colorado edition contains 85 issues. Fortunately, the Colorado record contains all but three of the issues missing from the Kansas record, so, between the two, 132 of the 135 total issues printed are now available to the community. Because the existence of these microfilms was unknown to the former authors, this study is most probably the only one to be based on what is essentially the entire record of The Altrurian newspaper.
As noted above, this research has already been of some assistance to the Colorado Ditch Company who was previously unaware that microfilm editions of The Altrurian existed. According to the current secretary, the Colorado Ditch Company, which evolved from the original Colorado Co-operative Company, recently had to prove that its water rights preceded a coal company’s claims to mineral rights in the same area (T. Morgan, personal communication, February 4, 2001). A glance at any one of several early editions of The Altrurian could possibly have provided the evidence they needed to prove that the ditch company’s rights to water superceded the coal company’s claim to mineral rights, proof that was eventually supplied only after lengthy and involved research. The local historical association has now secured at least one microfilm edition of The Altrurian (M. Templeton, personal communication, August 23, 2001).
Statement of the Problem
Historical utopian communities frequently intended to serve as models for other communities, or for society at large, an intent that necessitated they have some method for sharing their common understandings, their values. We wondered what role a community newspaper might play in conveying these values, particularly within nonsectarian communities that lacked the strong religious beliefs that formed the core of the sectarian communities. To determine this, we undertook the study of newspapers in two separate nonsectarian communities. Both communities shared similar political ideals; (i.e. cooperationism), and both published newspapers. We wanted to know what role these newspapers played in establishing or reinforcing core values within the communities. The problem we investigated was how the New Harmony Gazette and The Altrurian newspapers may have attempted to influence the values of the utopian communities of New Harmony, Indiana, and the Colorado Cooperative Colony.
Methodology
Qualitative methodology was selected because of the how question posed in this research; i.e. How did the newspapers attempt to influence the values of the communities? and because of the researchers’ desire to use a narrative style to tell the histories of the two communities and their newspapers. Historical studies share with case studies a focus on specific individuals or social movements, with case studies further characterized as being bounded by time and place. Because these two studies of community newspapers are historical in nature and are bounded by time and place, they assume the general form of historical case studies. Characteristic of qualitative research, these studies, on occasion, insinuate the researcher’s voice and employ the first person pronoun.
Data Collection and Analysis
As their primary data, these studies used the entire collection of The New Harmony Gazette, published in New Harmony, Indiana from 1825 to 1827, and The Altrurian, published in Denver, Pinon, and Naturita, Colorado from 1895 to 1901. Because of the historical nature of the research, we examined dissertations of historical subjects and found that the format was different for every one. Some began with a one-page introduction and then proceeded into a narrative, while others could best be described as extended reviews of literature, which led us to conclude that reports of historical research do not have a standard format. Gall, Borg, and Gall (1996) confirmed this conclusion, observing that researchers’ interpretations of the data preside over standardized format in dissertations of historical subjects. Although this lack of guidance can be disconcerting, it can also allow a researcher to be creative and to borrow elements from various scholarly approaches. Steps for conducting qualitative research in general, and for historical research in particular, provided a general guideline, though not a standard format, for these studies. These steps typically include identifying a problem, gathering relevant information, possibly forming a hypothesis to explain relationships between relevant factors, verifying sources, organizing the information, and finally recording conclusions in a meaningful narrative (Busha & Harta, 1980).
Because these studies concern analysis of newspaper articles, we further consulted researchers in mass communications to gain insight into traditional and acceptable methods employed in this field. Smith (1988) cautioned that, because qualitative data in mass communications are often narrative and linguistic, they frequently do not lend themselves to standard statistical analysis; she recommended that researchers dealing with this type of data present their informed judgments of the magnitude and intensity of repetitive themes identified through a process of content analysis (p. 261). Content analysis was recommended to provide a systematic and verifiable description of the content of the newspaper articles and to produce logically valid and replicable inferences about them. Smith (1988) described two different methods of developing categories for content analysis, the theory-to-data method, and the data-to-theory method. The theory-to-data method begins with pre-formulated categories; it is appropriately used when researchers desire to test a predetermined category system. The data-to-theory method, on the other hand, begins with no pre-determined categories, but instead allows categories to emerge naturally from narrative content. Smith suggested this method should be used when no appropriate category systems already exist and when researchers wish to develop rather than to test category systems (p. 267).
Because appropriate category systems did not currently exist for the two newspapers investigated herein, and because it was the intent of these studies to develop theoretical categories rather than to test them, the data-to-theory method was used, which allowed categories to develop naturally from the narrative content. In addition, the analysis incorporates the researchers’ informed judgments of the importance of specific themes identified in the newspapers.
Reader Reliability
Regardless of whether categories for content analysis are predetermined or are generated during observation, “all content analysts should employ independent raters or judges to sort narrative data into related categories ” (Smith, 1988, p. 267). The use of independent readers not only provides a check on the researchers’ inherent biases, but it also lends validity and reliability to the categorization process. One advantage of this collaborative research is that each researcher was able to serve as an informed secondary reader for the other. While there appears to be some disagreement about how to measure and report inter-reader reliability, researchers concur that the percentage of agreement among all readers should be reported (Smith, 1988; Stempel, 1981, Boyatzis, 1988). Chapter 5 of each study discusses in greater detail the methods used to measure and to report reader reliability.
Ethical Considerations
Establishing Trustworthiness.
One issue related to trustworthiness in qualitative research concerns the credibility of the information. To improve the probability that findings and interpretations will be found credible, researchers employ triangulation, which requires validation of each piece of information with at least one or two other sources. Triangulation can also be accomplished by using different investigators (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). In these studies triangulation was provided both through use of multiple sources, as well as with the use of different investigators; (i.e. independent readers). While the newspapers themselves provided the major source of data, this information was supplemented with and compared to other available historical documents. These included, for the study of the New Harmony Gazette, autobiographies, local histories, journals, and letters. The study of The Altrurian used minutes of meetings and articles from other newspapers.
Researcher Subjectivity.
As with any qualitative or historical research, researcher subjectivity posed a potential weakness to these studies. Researchers must become aware of their own values, beliefs, and interests in order not to be blinded by their personal biases (Gall et al. 1996). Biases and beliefs of the researchers are necessarily reflected in what is included, what is excluded, and in the patterns identified during the process of synthesizing the information into meaningful thematic units. Being aware of personal biases allows a researcher to report them so that readers can judge for themselves their potential impact on the researcher’s findings (Smith, 1988). Awareness of researchers’ values, beliefs, and interests was crucial to maintaining credibility of this research, and is discussed further in Chapter 5 of each study. The presence of two researchers working together helped check one another and forced examination of personal values, beliefs, and interests throughout the research process. The use of independent readers also served as a check on researcher bias.
Biases Inherent in Archival Records.
Newspapers are similar to actuarial records, votes, and city budgets in that they provide ongoing records of a society that are produced periodically and paid for by someone other than the researcher, and so are defined as a type of archival source (Webb, Campbell, Schwarz, & Sechrest, 1984). The use of such archival records is subject to at least two major sources of bias—selective deposit and selective survival. Selective deposit is concerned with which archives have been selected for preservation, while selective survival is concerned with which have survived over time (Webb et al., 1984). Because the newspapers selected for these studies have been preserved on microfiche (The New Harmony Gazette) and microfilm (The Altrurian), and all issues of each newspaper are available in their entirety (except for three issues of The Altrurian), neither of these sources of bias posed a threat to these studies; that is, all issues were selected for preservation and (nearly) all issues survive.
Participants.
Ethical issues must be considered when doing any kind of research that involves live human beings either directly or indirectly. Because these research studies dealt with historical documents, it was not anticipated they would pose any risk to the people who participated in the events studied. Both of these studies were submitted to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at University of Wyoming, and both were granted approval by that board. Copies of the approvals are included in Appendix B.
Conclusion to Methodology
A narrative/descriptive approach was used for these collaborative historical studies. Some of the evidence was obtained through the use of content analysis, the categories for which were not predetermined, but were allowed to evolve naturally from narrative content. The categories that evolved, along with the other evidence collected, was compared to the communities’ values, as stated in their founding charters, in order to determine how the newspapers attempted to influence the values of the communities.
Borrowing from the disciplines of history and mass communications, these studies used a narrative approach in their explanations of the evidence examined.
Definitions
The term community has been the subject of much analysis and many definitions. To distinguish community from mere association, political scientist Jack Crittenden (1989) identified four criteria for community that help to define the types of communities discussed in these studies. According to Crittenden, a community must be the sharing of a total way of life, not merely a sharing of interests or associating as a means to an end; a community consists of face-to-face relationships that spawn concern for the well-being of all members; and the relationships, obligations, mores, and traditions of a community are not simply important to members, but in fact define the members. For the purposes of this paper, community is defined as a specific group of people who feel a sense of identity, cohesion, and belonging that inspires commitment to the group, and who have come together to attain a shared purpose of importance.
In the context of these studies, the term utopian or utopian community is used interchangeably with intentional community, planned community, and ideal community to represent various conscious and planned attempts to alter the environment, or in some other manner create the conditions necessary to improve life for a select group of people. The term “utopian” should not be interpreted to represent the structure, the success, or failure of such a community.
The term communal, as in communal living or communal societies, as well as the term communitarian are used to refer to utopian communities that incorporate ideas of cooperation and non-competitiveness within their structures. Utopian ideas and communalism are not necessarily synonymous with each other; however, they do share some common features in that, while it is possible to advocate utopian ideas without being a communalist, few, if any, communal, or communitarian societies have existed that did not have utopian overtones (Whisenhunt, 1983).
Although it could justifiably be argued that all the utopian communities discussed in this paper are sectarian, sectarian is herein distinguished from nonsectarian using Webster’s (1988) definition of sect as “a dissenting or schismatic religious body; esp. one regarded as extreme or heretical,” (p. 1061). In these studies, the term sectarian refers to religious communities, and the term nonsectarian refers to communities that are not overtly or specifically religious in nature.
Chapter Summary
Chapter 1 presented the rationale for examining newspapers within utopian communities. It began by suggesting that members of a group must possess common understandings in order to comprise a community, and it is through education that these common understandings, or core values, are transferred from one member to another. The review of utopian thought and practice confirmed that historic utopian communities may provide viable environments in which to study how such a transference of values can occur. The short discussion of the role of newspapers in communities led to the implication that newspapers may play a greater role in this process than previously recognized, particularly in nonsectarian communities. Also provided in Chapter 1 was the significance of these studies, which includes filling in gaps in the historical record, expanding the body of utopian research to include a focus on newspapers, as well as expanding media studies by providing a view of newspapers as a social function for strengthening community cohesion and reaffirming common values within communities. Chapter 1 stated the problem investigated in these studies as that of determining how the New Harmony Gazette and The Altrurian newspapers may have attempted to influence the values of New Harmony, Indiana, and the Colorado Co-operative Colony. It described the methodology as assuming the form of historical case studies, using a data-to-theory approach to collect and analyze the data. It discussed ethical considerations inherent in qualitative research and acknowledged possible sources of bias. As all the above considerations applied to both studies, Chapter 1 was co-authored. Beginning with Chapter 2, however, the authors diverge to present the stories of their respective communities, beginning with the social and historical context of each.